May 2008 Archives

Oftentimes teachers complain of having to compete with the hurlyburly of iPod's, cell phones, video games and the internet for the attention of their young students. One wonders what effect this hyper-accelerated digital media universe has on those delicate nervous systems. Even to us grown-ups the daily multi-tasking is enough to induce cognitive vertigo. What better way to lengthen attention spans and promote general well-being in children than yoga? In 2002, Tara Guber, a former schoolteacher and the wife of Hollywood super-producer Peter Guber, asked an Aspen, Colorado public elementary school if she could implement her "Yoga Ed" program into their curriculum. Christian fundamentalists had a serious problem with this clear violation of church-state separation. The solution? Take out the mention of Hindu deities and the Sanskrit, which was already above the heads of the kids anyway. It worked.

"I stripped every piece of anything that anyone could vaguely construe as spiritual or religious out of the program," Guber told MSNBC. And by the beginning of 2007, over 100 schools in 26 states adopted Guber's 36-week program for public schools. And it's spreading. At elementary schools in places like Chamberlain, S.D and Seattle, WA, variations of the K-8 yoga curriculum are on the rise. And in San Francisco, in a school in the heart of a housing project, yoga programs are flourishing. And in the fast-moving Baltimore in 2006, the non-profit Baltimore Yoga for Youth was founded by Anjali Sunita "in order to introduce a series of Hatha yoga workshops for inner city school students and teachers as tools for developing inner calmness, mental clarity, and much needed stress relief." Glory be!

The Mona Shores Public Schools in Michigan have also incorporated yoga into the K-8 special education. From the Muskegon Journal:

"Many of the students -- who range in abilities from cognitively, physically and emotionally impaired -- live with limitations such as poor muscle tone, rigidity in posture or poor balance.

"But after using yoga movements, they have experienced a greater range of motion, increased physical strength and better general mobility, according to students, their parents and teachers.

"Teachers also found the usually 'chatty' students became 'centered' and focused during the hour-long exercises. They developed social skills by leading class and helping their peers with moves."

But my favorite story of a teacher using yoga methods in a K-8 school setting is Thoughts on Yoga From A Substitute Teacher in the Chicago Public Schools by Anna Poplawska. Anyone wondering about the motives of yoga enthusiasts in elementary schools should check that out.

This PBS episode is part of an extended series hosted by Paula Zahn examining the issue of retirement in the U.S. If you don't know how much is in your 401(k) and are perplexed by financial jargon like "defined contribution plans" and "asset allocation decisions," this show might be one to watch.

[image: The Retirement Revolution]

Take a close look at the photo to your right. These people could well be terrorists. After all, they're vegan.

Think I'm crazy? Talk to the Minneapolis Police Department.

In preparation for the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis in September, the FBI has teamed up with local law enforcement to infiltrate and spy on potential terrorist meetings -- namely, vegan potluck dinners.

What?

Yes, according to the FBI, vegan potlucks are hotbeds of threatening activity, where dissidents will gather and plot their attacks. So FBI and police officials are recruiting moles to hit up these nefarious, PETA-friendly meetings and keep an ear out for any suspicious planning. One young man, Paul Carroll, a University of Minnesota sophomore who was recently arrested for spraypainting an elevator's interior, was even offered money to pose as a sympathizer of the liberal -- a.k.a. "terrorist" -- cause. He declined.

But it wouldn't be hard for Carroll to convince the vegans. He's tall, skinny, and has wavy hair. With such a look, if this were the 1970s, he would clearly be one of the Weathermen. Come to think of it, I should probably report the man who makes my falafel sandwiches to Homeland Security. He's got brown skin. And while I'm at it, the entire population of my Brooklyn neighborhood, where at least one block of tofu sits in every refrigerator.

As the billboards across the Dakotas and Wyoming proudly demand, "Eat Beef Today, Damnit!" Because if you don't, the terrorists have won.

The bottom line: Don't Almost Give.

[image: Homeless Man PSA]

"It is the last great wilderness of its kind, a rare and precious haven for some of Earth's most indestructible creatures. Covering more than half-a-million square miles of Chile and Argentina, this wild place is known as Patagonia. At its crown tip is a grand island, Tierra del Fuego, a land as harsh as it is beautiful. This film tracks several species that call this extreme environment home. But the guanaco, condor and Magellanic penguin who share this spectacular space with orcas, parrots and elephant seals are facing increasing pressure from humans. The program details how new conservation models may save them and preserve the wilderness at the bottom of the world."

The next time you button up your Patagonia fleece made out of recycled bottles, you'll know a little more about the inspiration for this great socially-responsible company.

[image: Eden at the End of the World]

Do you know that 2008 is a record year for tornadoes? If you go to NOAA's page on Annual Tornado Trends, the graphs are literally off the charts. Which means that professional and amateur storm chasers have had a bumper crop of videos.

The first one here is raw footage of the funnel that Hit Parkersburg, Iowa :

Here's a longer report from a group of storm charsers :

Here's a video trying to make sense of what's left right after touchdown:

And here's another one witnessing the ruin the day after:

Traditional journalism would have demanded the witness to this tragedy to create a narrative around the event. What I love about pro-amateur and citizen journalism is that the absence of the interpretation and narrative is what makes these videos more powerful and compelling.

I took this image in January, a day before the South Carolina Democratic primary. As a twenty-something, this is the first time I've seen people actually get excited about politics.

When I was in South Carolina, there was this undeniable energy - volunteers on every street corner, students parading through campus yelling for people to vote - that I had never seen before. The feeling was, and I think still is, that with the race so tight, individual votes actually count for something.

I spent the entire weekend of the primary trying to capture the excitement. I got this intense adrenaline rush when I finally snapped this image.

The Park Slope Food Co-Op, one of the nation's oldest such community-based groceries, recently banned bottled water from its shelves, a move the majority of the store's 12,000 members supported due to the growing controversies that surround what was once on a par with polo shirts and car phones as a status symbol of the yuppie class. No more, at least in this earnest, tony enclave in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, where bottled water is consumed in massive quantities, a movement is afoot to process raw sewage into tap water, England recently banned bottled water from all of its government meetings, and in March, Scotland announced that the whole country would ban bottled water altogether.

So how did such a massive trend that began back in the 1980s with Perrier and Evian -- three-syllable words that quickly became synonymous with privilege and leisure -- and evolved through the likes of Poland Spring, Desani, and Fiji, become the latest target in our push for a greener world?

Elizabeth Royte, an author and journalist, has just published a book explaining just that. Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It tracks the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to the supermarkets. And like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, the book lays bare some of the industry's dark secrets that might just turn you off the stuff for good.

To read an excerpt of Royte's book, visit this entry on AlterNet.

The Bush administration's policies towards Latin America have contributed to the dramatic populist shift in the region since he took office. Bolstering governments of the region against the spread of the leftist menace as the Bush team did in its early years appears, in retrospect, stale, a holdover strategy from the Reagan administration. The chaotic reception President Bush received, for example, at the 4th Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 2004 was a pivotal moment in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations.

But we have the benefits of hindsight. In defense of the President, post-September 11th the eyes of the administration were almost entirely focused on the Middle East and its immediate surrounds. And although the 43rd President revisited the Latin American relationship early last year, the damage, in the intervening years, had already been done.

The pendulum swings. Signaling a seismic shift in American foreign policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean in a possible Obama administration, the junior Senator from Illinois today emphasized a "New Alliance of the Americas" in a speech in Miami. Challenging the present course in hemispheric strategy, the Senator curiously invoked the common "colonial" narrative of American history and tied it to the similar legacies of Latin America and the Caribbean. The speech was particularly bold. No foreign policy conversation on U.S.-Latin American affairs can exclude mention of Hugo Chavez, the proverbial 800-lb gorilla in the hemisphere. Invoking a common colonial history in Miami was a statement of hemispheric solidarity, suggesting Obama's own unique biography and aimed at distancing Latin American governments from the orbit of Venezuelan influence. Probably no other American politician could have carried off such a statement other than the Hawaiian-born son of a Kenyan immigrant and a single mother from Kansas.

Drawing on his own experiences as the child of an immigrant, Senator Obama told the crowd:

"Miami's promise of liberty and opportunity has drawn generations of immigrants to these shores, sometimes with nothing more than the clothes on their back. It was a similar hope that drew my own father across an ocean, in search of the same promise that our dreams need not be deferred because of who we are, what we look like, or where we come from.

"Here, in Miami, that promise can join people together. We take common pride in a vibrant and diverse democracy, and a hard-earned prosperity. We find common pleasure in the crack of the bat, in the rhythms of our music, and the ease of voices shifting from Spanish or Creole or Portuguese to English."

Earlier in the week, Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was in Little Havana. There, too, the subject was U.S. Latin American and Caribbean relations. Using a Cuban folklorico band as warm up, the Senator from Arizona reiterated his opposition to the Castro government and affirmed the 46-year-long trade embargo. Cuba's ailing former leader Fidel Castro, in his regular "Reflections of Fidel" column published in Communist Party newspaper Granma, attacked McCain and the President. ABC News Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper neatly summed up this little bit of political theater in the headline to Political Punch, "Castro Attacks McCain, No Doubt to McCain's Delight." Charmed, I'm sure.

Mary Catherine Hamelin shares an uplifting photo (pun intended) from her volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity in Los Angeles

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman provides evidence that meat-eaters might be harming the environment

Kenneth Cole employee Evan Greenberg applauds the environmental efforts of the Dave Matthews Band

Rebecca Haag comments on the significance of the upcoming AIDS Walk Boston event

Liza Sabater engages readers in a debate about "diff-able" athletes competing in the Summer Olympics and speculates about the real reason for the global food crisis

Grassroots organizer David Burstein explains how he is mobilizing the youth vote in 2008

The hyper-fit David Alm provides an update on how runners are making the world a better place

At the end of 2007, the BioTruck team, led by Andy Pag, completed the first ever carbon-negative driving expedition across the Sahara Desert to Timbuktu in Mali, West Africa. The Expedition set off from the UK on the 26th of November and arrived in Timbuktu on the 26th of December 2007. The Expedition helped to raise awareness of the value of different carbon reducing measures, and was powered entirely on a unique biodiesel fuel made from waste chocolate! Needless to say, the four-week trip was eventful - filled with run-ins with customs agents, a near shoot-out with Al-Qaeda, daily repairs and unexpected sandstorms. Below, Andy recounts his motivation for the trip and shares his insights on using biofuel as an alternative fuel:

Over the last 12 years I've run expeditions all over the world and the I've always felt there's a hypocrisy about traveling to see the world's most beautiful landscapes in a car burning fossil fuels. In the back of my mind, I always wanted to do an expedition that was carbon neutral and in the end what we achieved was carbon negative. I think it's a great example of how people's behavior changes. Even though there was a will to do something, I only managed to change my behavior when I found a solution that was practical and didn't mean sacrificing doing what I love.

To make biodiesel from chocolate you first have to extract the cocoa butter, then you are left with the sugar which you distill to make alcohol and then you mix it with the liquid cocoa butter using caustic soda as a catalyst. It's not really practical to do it with chocolate in your garden shed, but making biodiesel with waste cooking oil is perfectly possible. You can buy machines that will do it and produce biodiesel that is so good, you don't have to convert your car to run on it. Here in the UK, a gallon of Diesel costs about US$9 so there's a big movement of diesel home-brewers.

I was surprised how positive people's response was to the Biofuel Pledge on our site, and how international. It's really great to see. It comes back to what I said before about how people get to a point where they will change their behavior when they see there is another way that is practical for them. The problem with biofuels is that the stuff that's made on an industrial scale tends to have a poor environmental impact. There are farmers in Indonesia cutting down rainforests to grow biodiesel crops, and that makes fuel which has a worse carbon footprint than fossil diesel. So, understandably, people have been put off. Biofuels only work when they are made from waste materials (like the surreal example of chocolate in our case) but in practice there isn't enough waste material to supply our globe's fuel thirst. Nonetheless, there are some really exciting new technologies emerging that allow us to use all sorts of weird waste projects, and also new "second generation" crops that can produce 1000 times the oil yields of the palm oil they are growing in South East Asia.

During our expedition, we hit this amazing sandstorm. I've been in a few before, but this went on for days and overnight there was the most amazing lightning storm in the pitch black of the desert. Really eerie, it was like the air was electric. We had loads of grief at all the borders, so the day we crossed the last one into Mali was a good day too. While we waited at the border, I managed to get the stereo in the truck working and we bought a load of Malian music tapes from a local guy. Thundering down the road to Ali Farka Toure's mellow blues and waving at the kids in the villages was a great feeling.

Our next trip is going to be the first-ever biofuel flying expedition to Outer Mongolia. It's going to be brilliant, I can't wait. We're using a fuel with is made by reconfiguring the molecular structure of garbage into fuel molecules. It can even be used to make aviation fuel, so we are also taking powered Paragliders (like a motorized parachute) with us on the drive to Outer Mongolia. It's early days but this technology could be the dawn on low-carbon passenger flights. Can you imagine how earth shattering that would be if we can make a fuel that cuts emissions from aircraft by 90%! The truck we are taking will be loaded with eco-gadgets too -- solar panels, a wood stove, tires that cut fuel consumption, even a composting toilet, so our life on the road is going to be low carbon as well as the fuel. We are looking for a title sponsor at the moment and companies can get in touch via the website, especially if they have some wacky gadgets that might help us cut our emissions in the biotruck.

As far as role models, I don't think it's a very healthy idea to put people on a pedestal, there's greatness in everyone of us, even the guy that spilled coffee over me this morning on the way into work, and equally even our heroes are fallible. I admire anyone that has the courage to instigate positive change, without compromising their goal, whether it's on the scale that Mandela achieved or the kid that puts his hand up in class to tell the teacher they made a mistake.

At the moment I'm reading about Marco Polo, who arguably set us on the road to globalization, and also Lindbergh who flew the first the trans-Atlantic flight and again leapfrogged us towards the globalized world we now live in. I wonder how they felt as they took the first steps on their epic journeys, before they'd made the transition from dreamers to iconic achievers who changed our world.

Morehouse College in Atlanta is an elite, all-male, historically black college. Sure, some whites have attended the school over its 141 years, but like Howard University, the vast majority of its student body is black.

But this year, Morehouse closed the academic calendar with a bold social statement, apropos of the times and, especially, Barack Obama's deeply held belief in a post-racial world. The college named its first-ever white valedictorian.

Joshua Packwood, the honored 22-year-old, holds a 4.0 GPA, received a Rhodes scholarship, and most significantly, once turned down a scholarship to Columbia University to attend Morehouse.

The news wasn't universally applauded, though. One junior commented, "I support him and his mission to be successful in life. I just kind of wish he had done it at a different institution."

Isn't this as important in the move towards racial justice as when historically white colleges began admitting, graduating, and honoring black students?

On June 1st, 1986, 4,000 people came together at an event called "From All Walks of Life", a fundraising walk to support the services of AIDS Action Committee. Twenty-two years ago, the AIDS epidemic was in its infancy, and a diagnosis of HIV was a death sentence. Many of us lost loved ones, friends and co-workers to an illness we knew very little about.

Today, that event is known as AIDS Walk Boston. Since the beginning, over 200,000 people have participated in AIDS Walk Boston, raising over $30 million total for the programs and services of AIDS Action Committee. The Walk brings together approximately 15,000 community members each year for a common cause: to remember those we have lost to HIV/AIDS, support those who are living with this disease and stop the epidemic.

The AIDS Walk sends a clear message to the community that much more work still needs to be done. Unfortunately, we won't be celebrating the end of the epidemic - not yet - but we will rejoice that people still continue to care, still show up to walk in solidarity and still give generously to our cause.

Please join us at AIDS Walk Boston on Sunday, June 1st. By participating, you're joining a movement that's taking steps to help raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, prevent the spread of the epidemic in our community, support over 25,000 individuals in Massachusetts that are living with HIV/AIDS, remember all those who have been lost to this terrible epidemic and raise funds to benefit the programs and services of AIDS Action Committee. One walker reflects on the Walk, "when you see all those people gathered together for a common cause and everyone is hugging each other, sure, there is sadness, but it is also a really wonderful and rewarding experience."

(1) Change your search engine of choice from Google to a charity-friendly search engine like SearchKindly.org or GoodSearch.com - These sites donate all or a portion of their advertising revenues to charitable causes.

(2) Spend some time clicking on donation web sites like TheHungerSite.com - Each click on one of these sites results in sponsors donating money for food to the hungry. These sites typically also feature online stores that donate as much as 30% of their sales to charity.

(3) Spend some time online playing games or giving virtual gifts - FreeRice.com is a vocabulary game in which each question answered correctly results in grains of rice being donated to charity. The (Lil) Green Patch, a Facebook application that indirectly raises money to save rainforests through advertising revenue, has been installed more than three million times and has nearly 500,000 active users.

(4) Donate miles to charities' frequent flier accounts - If you have "orphan" miles from an airline that you rarely fly, why not contribute them to a charity of your choice?

Taking the big picture view, it's exciting to see the ways that charitable organizations are embracing the Web and appealing to a whole new class of donors online. In most cases, these new online donors are much younger (and much less wealthy) than the traditional donor -- but are making much more of an immediate impact for causes that matter.

[image: FreeRice.com]

The band has been working with environmental group, Reverb, in an attempt to reduce the tour's carbon footprint. According to DMB bassist Stefan Lessard, "We had two main goals with the greening of this tour, shrink our environmental footprint as much as possible, and bring a message to our fans that we all can do something good for the environment and have fun doing it."

The following initiatives have been put in place:

• Using B20 Biodiesel (20% Biodiesel, 80% petroleum diesel) in all tour buses and trucks
• Neutralizing CO2 emissions from venue energy use, hotels, flights, and touring vehicles
• Reducing and recycling plastic, aluminum, paper and cardboard waste backstage
• Sustainable supplies and goods such as biodegradable and reusable catering products and local and organic food
• Eco-friendly organic cotton and bamboo merchandise for fans
• Inviting scores of local and national environmental groups to be a part of the Eco-Village to educate and engage fans

This project will undoubtedly be effective, but it's only half of the story. All of us attending a show at our favorite outdoor venue need to do our part as well. Of course I'm not expecting any type of Biodiesel fuels, but easy things, like carpooling or using public transportation. "What would you say?"

It seems our president is keen on leaving office while leaving people wagging their tongues all around the world. The latest salvo in the battle between Bush and US diplomacy, were his comments about the food crisis :

Speaking to employees at a high-tech firm in St. Louis recently, Bush noted that much of the developing world was prospering and that U.S. businesses could benefit. As an example, he cited India, where the "middle class is larger than our entire population."

But "when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food," he said. "And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up."

Overnight, Indians reacted with outrage at what they saw as a suggestion that they were to blame for inflation. Politicians lashed out at Bush. Newspapers excoriated him.

"India is not a net food importer. It is a food exporter. The assumption that prices are increasing because of a changed India is completely erroneous," said Manish Tewari, a spokesman for the ruling Congress party.

Let's take a moment to ponder this. The food crisis in India and most of the Third World is not due to their growing middle classes. It's because they are food exporters. Which leads us to ask : Why would a food exporting country not have enough food for their own people?

The answer is in volume and prices.

There's the farm subsidies that keep US agricultural production costs artificially low. Since most of US agribusiness is in the hands of a few corporations, they get to manipulate prices (legally or not) to maximize profits. There's of course, over-consumption at the end-point of US consumers who annually end up throwing away 27% of food produced worldwide.

Artificial demand for cheap, non-competitive imported food is what has countries like India on the brink. Their farmers have to maximize yields in order to compensate for the inability to raise prices. By the way, the US's price gouging of it's own agribusiness is not the only problem. There's also the fact that many agricultural industries around the world are being cannibalized by the likes of Monsanto and Cargill.

Remember when mothers used to guilt their kids into eating because there were kids starving in Ethiopia?

I never understood the logic about that one : Stuff your face with food because their people dying of famine in Africa. Well now we know why they're dying of famine: It's exactly because we are stuffing our faces, pockets and landfills with food.

Given Oscar Pistorius is fast enough to compete for a place in the Australian Olympic delegation, I find it incredibly difficult to call him a disabled athlete. Hence my choice of "diff-able", to mean he is a differently able Olympian.

Different indeed he is.

Pistorius had been banned from competing in the "mainstream" Olympics competitions (as opposed to the Paralympics competitions) because "his carbon-fiber prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage". The Court of Arbitration for Sport found no evidence of such advantage and with their decision, opened up the doors for athletes with prosthetics.

It is a historic and one that will definitely have repercussions years to come.

If you've ever read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, you'll recognize some of these same ideas about the way that trends build over time, before reaching a critical mass and then "tipping" for no apparent reason. Gladwell helped to popularize the vocabulary of "virus" and "epidemics" when talking about certain cultural phenomena. (In fact, I was more than a little surprised that the 10-page article didn't mention Gladwell once!)

[image: New York Times Magazine]

UPDATE: Just realized that the image on the cover of the New York Times Magazine is one of those visual illusions in which you see either the "ugly hag" or the "beautiful woman," depending on your mindset. Look at the cover once, and you'll probably see the gun and a band-aid. Look at it again, though, and you'll see a doctor in scrubs.

Every spring, thousands of New Yorkers lace up their running shoes for a good cause. Kenneth Cole recently updated you on the AIDS Walk, a longtime tradition in New York. And a couple of weeks back, the March of Dimes Babies Walk raised funds to prevent birth defects. In March, the New York Road Runners Club sponsored its annual 15-kilometer Colon Cancer Challenge. Last Sunday, two Mother's Day races (10 miles and four miles) raised awareness on domestic violence.

And Saturday, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates hosted the fourth annual Healthy Kidney 10K, a 6.2 loop of Central Park that has become one of the country's most prestigious races. Regularly drawing runners from around the world, the Healthy Kidney offers a $7,500 prize to the first male and female finishers, as well as a $20,000 bonus for besting the Central Park record, set at last year's race by Dathan Ritzenhein with a time of 28 minutes and 8 seconds. (Ritzenhein will be one of three American runners at the Olympic marathon in Beijing this summer.)

Naturally, many of the athletes in these events are motivated by a different cause -- their own health and a spirit of competition. As a runner myself, it's the competitive drive that gets me to the starting line and through the event, even in the dead of winter or the pouring rain. But afterwards, just knowing that my efforts have helped make the world a healthier, more civilized place makes it all feel worthwhile.

Most importantly, if you can't make the AIDS Walk, you don't need to wait a year to participate in an event like it. Running clubs and other organizations sponsor smaller but equally important walks and road races year-round. Check out your area's opportunities and lace up, get ready, and go for it.

[Image: the author after Grete's Great Gallop, a half-marathon in Central Park in honor of Grete Waitz, a nine-time champion of the New York City Marathon who was diagnosed with cancer in 2005

"For someone coming back after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan for two or three or four tours of duty, they need to catch up quickly, and we need to help them," said former Secretary of State Colin Powell last week at City College in New York. Earlier this week, Republicans and Democrats clashed over their differing versions of how to make the GI Bill of Rights more relevant to today's veterans. Powell supports Virginia Senator Jim Webb's version of a 21st century GI Bill that would expand the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act signed into law two weeks after D-Day by FDR.

Senator Webb's proposal would be paid for by a half a percent tax increase - called, by Democrats a "patriot's premium" - on all income above $500,000 . South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham has provided an alternative GI Bill, backed by the Bush administration and co-authored by Arizona Senator and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. Graham's bill is similar to Webb's bill, but decidedly less generous. It was tabled in a 55-42 vote in the Senate.

How did the original GI Bill of Rights fare? Historian Michael Beschloss told The Jim Lehrer News Hour in 2000, "... (I)f you look at the effect of this, this had much greater impact on bringing Americans into the middle class than everything Roosevelt had tried to do over eight years in the 1930's." Lehrer added during that conversation that he bought his first house on the GI Bill. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will not be so fortunate. Current benefits under the bill cover only 60 percent of 4-year public school education costs.

How will we welcome our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans home? Last month the Secretary of Defense Gates announced that the tours of active-duty Army currently deployed or are headed to Iraq or Afghanistan would increase to 15 months, or three months longer than the usual standard. Today's soldiers, as my AWEARNESS colleague Liza Sabater has written, have been getting short shrift from the present administration. From the media black out of images of the coffins of dead soldiers to the strain of extended tours to the mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, we have not been good to our veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

But things are looking up. Thirty-two Republicans yesterday joined with Democrats to pass the bill in a 256-166 vote to provide an annual $1,000 stipend for books, up to four years' full tuition at an in-state public university and a monthly housing allotment adjusted to the local cost of living. On the same day, the bill was passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee. Senator Webb's version of the GI bill will probably come up before the Senate next week as part of the emergency war-funding bill. Members of Congress are heading back to their home in their districts for Memorial Day recess, which begins May 23. This is the perfect time to have such a public discussion as to what exactly we owe to our veterans.

Robert Genovese, the Vice President of Marketing and Media Director at Kenneth Cole Productions, uploaded a series of five video clips from a recent visit with students at the University of Pennsylvania

James Michael Thorne shared a photo from a "World Against War" demonstration in London

Ron Mwangaguhunga weighed in on the prospects for the reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York

David Alm reviewed the new documentary film from Errol Morris about the Abu Ghraib scandal and shed some light on the cigarette tax debate

Liza Sabater provided updates from cyclone-devastated Myanmar and pointed to a tally of America's most polluted cities

Following is our final video from the University of Penn 5 part series from Monday's post.

Video 5: What percentage of sexually active Americans have practiced unsafe sex?

History is full of unsung heroes, and Mildred Loving (1939 - May 2, 2008) was one. An unwitting civil rights activist, Loving made national news back in 1957 for planning to marry a white man. Because the couple's home state of Virgina would not allow interracial marriages, they eloped to Washington D.C. to avoid the "Racial Integrity Act", which made marriage between whites and blacks a felony. They were married in 1958.

When the newlyweds returned to Virginia, they were not only ostracized but arrested for "miscegenation" -- a term coined in 1864 by an American journalist to describe, pejoratively, any union or cohabitation by people of different races. The case also violated the rulings of a precedent case, Pace v. Alabama, in which the anti-miscegenation statute was determined constitutional.

Loving and her husband, Richard, were given an ultimatum: either spend a year in jail for their crime, or leave the state for 25 years. The presiding judge told the Court, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix."

The Lovings chose the latter, and left their home to avoid further persecution. But in 1963, the American Civil Liberties Union motioned on their behalf, and in 1967 the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Lovings.

"Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival," the judge said. "To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

Mildred Loving died on May 2, 2008, having survived her husband for 33 years. In 2007, she wrote a public statement on racial equality and civil rights to explain her case and, with hope, help keep the wheels of social justice in motion.

Following is our fourth video from the University of Penn 5 part series from Monday's post.

Video 4: Is America more ready for a black president or a woman president?

If ever there was a time when the draconian Rockefeller Drug laws in New York State might be reformed, or, better yet, altogether repealed, then that time would now. The ravages of that law on Latino and African-American communities, which are disproportionately affected, are vast. But don't hold your breath. Every winter, like clockwork, this issue has come up on the political radar of the New York State Assembly, but little has changed. Politicians, especially from rural or upstate districts, don't want to be portrayed by their opposition as soft on such a fundamental law-and-order issue. And, we cannot fail to note cynically, the jobs at prisons that these laws create in rural upstate districts makes for another disincentive for reform. Governors have come to Albany and gone, and yet the Rockefeller Drug law remains, seemingly adamantine.

On May 3, 1973, when murder and robbery rates were significantly higher than they are now, then-Governor Rockefeller signed the bill containing some of the harshest drug laws in the nation. Rockefeller, a moderate Republican, was, at the time, mulling a White House run and wanted to toughen up his country club image among the party's red-meat base. The Rockefeller drug laws have largely remained, despite protests from so many disparate organizations and individuals, because of law-and-order electoral realities at the local level.

"Under these laws," wrote Anthony Papa, an ex-convict, in the Gotham Gazette, "people convicted of drug offenses face the same penalties as those convicted of murder, and harsher penalties than those convicted of rape." Papa spent a dozen years in the New York prison system under the Rockefeller Laws on a first-time non-violent drug offense. He has devoted his life to reforming those laws. Papa's prison autobiography is called "15 to Life: How I Painted My Way Top Freedom." That title comes from the fact that Rockefeller Drug Law statutes generally require judges to impose minimum 15-years to life sentences for anyone convicted of selling two ounces, or possessing four ounces of a "narcotic drug (marijuana included)."

Democrat Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, who voted against the laws in 1973, told Clyde Heberman of The New York Times, "We're on the precipice of real Rockefeller law reform." As of 2008, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, 14,000 people, or nearly 38% of state prisoners, are incarcerated for drug offenses. Last Thursday was 35th anniversary of the Rockefeller Law.

Imagine this: You're a tenured university professor, whose ground-breaking work has earned you a sterling reputation around the world. You're well-read, intelligent, and earnest. You think seriously about the issues that face your field, your school, and the world in general. You're fortunate enough to be employed by one of the best public universities in the United States.

The administration starts making decisions you disagree with, and you speak your mind -- the mind you were hired for -- at faculty governance meetings. Suddenly you're denied a due raise and given more work. Since you're tenured, you can't get fired -- but it sure feels like you're not wanted anymore.

This is what happened to Dr. Juan Hong, a full professor of chemical engineering who recently sued the University of California at Irvine and lost.

The presiding judge claimed that because Dr. Hong was purportedly acting "pursuant to his official duties," which included participation in faculty governance, he could not avail himself of First Amendment protection if his employer retaliated against him based on his expression of opposition to the university's policy. According to the court, the University of California-Irvine "'commissioned' Mr. Hong's involvement in the peer review process and his participation is therefore part of his official duties as a faculty member. The University is free to regulate statement made in the course of that process without judicial interference."

The case resurrected a similar one from 2006 Garcetti v. Ceballos, in which Robert Cellabos, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney, challenged a verdict his office made in a case. For his "insubordinance" Ceballos was reassigned to a new position, transferred to a different courthouse, and denied a promotion. He sued the DA's office and lost, for the same reason that Dr. Hong did: freedom of speech does not apply to government officials acting in an official capacity as it does private citizens.

There's just one thing: Academics are supposed to be granted different rights than government employees. The Garcetti decision even set aside a clause for academic contexts, which should have protected Dr. Hong.

Of course, this isn't the first time an academic has gotten in trouble for speaking his or her mind. The most famous case in recent years, of course, was in 2005, when Ward Churchill lost his job at the University of Colorado at Boulder for an essay he wrote on 9/11 in which he referred to those who worked in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns" -- a controversial allusion to Adolf Eichmann, the so-called "architect of the Holocaust." His argument was simply that those who worked towers were the "technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire." Thus, they were complicit in the system that al Qaeda meant to shatter.

While invoking the Holocaust might have been unwise, the outcome was still shocking. Churchill was quickly vilified by the media and he lost his job. And though the Hong case is of a different stripe, the implication is the same: if academics are prevented from speaking freely for fear of losing their jobs or other professional opportunities, what will become of our colleges and universities? How can people educate others if they are in constant fear over what they can and cannot say?

The Hong case is pending.

Following is our second video from the University of Penn 5-part series from Monday's post.

Video 2: What is the percentage of homeless people in America?

When I last wrote about Myanmar, the military junta had blocked the entrance of humanitarian aid and teams of relief workers from the United Nations, United States and other countries. They are allowing relief inside the country as long as they are the one's controlling it's distribution and they've blamed procedural paperwork for the slow issuing of visas.

As I have said before, Global Voices Online is the place to go if you want to read a roundup of bloggers giving on the ground accounts of what's happening in Burma. From Mong Palatino's reporting I found out about the Burma Cyclone blog, which is becoming an archive of all reporting about the devastation. Another blog to keep on your short list is Freedom for Burma by Burmese Bloggers without Borders. They translated a newspaper article by the government that had described the coming storm as non-threatening. They are a good source for making political sense of the repressive regimes actions.

The video clip I have included is by Dan Rivers who working for IBN and CNN and, takes a cue from many a video blogger and records the devastation without the government's permission. There's a moment in the clip where he says he was arrested but manages to talk himself out of going to jail. Watch the report.

This picture was taken at the 'World Against War' demonstration in London on the 15th of March in 2008. The march wound its way through Central London before ending with a rally in Trafalgar Square, which is where I took this picture. This protester is a regular at many of the demonstrations in London. He always has a newly painted sign for each protest and is happy to pose for a photograph. There wasn't much planning behind the picture, when shooting demonstrations you do not have much time to stop and think about shots, you have to keep your wits about you and always have your finger on the shutter release.

I document as many protests as I can within the UK, especially the smaller ones as they, and the issues they promote, do not receive much mainstream media coverage. My images are always available for groups or charities to use at these demonstrations.

The week before last, we published post on the ethics of placing hefty taxes on cigarettes , an effort some states hope will help increase revenue for the state but also discourage smoking.

My argument in that post was that such a tax is unethical simply because smoking is an addiction, and as an addiction, no amount of taxes are likely to make people to quit. And I believe the states know this, which is why they're imposing these taxes. Smokers, by this reasoning, are being used as a cash cow.

But once the comments rolled in, new sides of the debate came to light. It's a far more complicated issue than one of the state versus its smokers. It involves who's determining how these tax dollars are spent, whether or not -- in lieu of these taxes -- smokers should have to pay for their own health care, and the complex relationship between taxes and health care overall. And while these taxes do turn smokers into a cash cow, imagine how much we'd save if hospitals weren't treating smoking-related illnesses.

Here's a fact: Some people live healthier lives than others. So should someone who eats well, runs five miles a day, and doesn't drink or smoke be exempt from paying the taxes that subsidize the medicare of those who live on fast food and smoke three packs a day? Put another way, should someone who doesn't drink soda have to pay for the treatment of type-2 diabetes?

What about those of us who don't drive? Should we be exempt from paying for our nation's interstates, bridges, and roads?

The basic question is whether or not the government should allocate taxes from each individual based on where that individual might need financial support. Viewed that way, it wouldn't take long for our system to become so labyrinthine -- even more than it is already -- that it would inevitably break down.

This isn't to say that our current system is the best, and it should remain. Quite the contrary. The problem is systemic, but more than one system is in play here. On one hand, we have the medicare system, one of the biggest issues facing young Americans as they contemplate an uncertain future. One the other, we have the problem of fairness and taxes -- i.e., not everyone benefits equally from the money they give the government. And of course, there's our general well-being. Cancer is on the rise, life expectancy is in decline, and obesity is more prevalent now than ever before.

Can taxes solve all this?

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Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is mostly under water after Cyclon Nargis hit Yangon (pop 4 million) for 3 days with sustained rains and winds at 130mph and gusts between 150 and 160 mph and proceeded to flood all the low land coastal area and low land river delta region.

The problem right now is not just with the devastation left behind by the cyclone but the government of Myanmar itself. Last year the country formerly known as Burma, was taken by a wave of protests by Buddhist monks, who staged several acts of defiance against the repressive military junta that has taken the country hostage. Many monks and their supporters were imprisoned, abused and even executed by the military regime. One of my earliest post for this blogs was about how the Myanmar regime had gone after bloggers with a vengeance.

When I heard the cyclone had hit, I waited to see what was going to happen exactly because of the junta's past actions against the monks and anybody in the country who tried to tell the world about Burma's plight. Well, I haven't been proven wrong about my wait, by the looks of what I have been able to read at Global Voices Online, a network of local citizen journalists and bloggers from around the world.

Burmese GVO bloggers have been writing about how the junta is denying assistance and relief to the people of Burma while waging a media campaign claiming the opposite. This has been corroborated by CNN, the BBC and other news outlets --whereas the official death toll is around 20K, UN officials and other foreign envoys are estimating the death toll will surpass 100,000.

What's worse is that the junta will not open the country's air or sea ports to the world for delivering food, water, medicine and other disaster relief. The United Nations just 3 hours ago was allowed to land in the country with a first shipment after they had been initially refused. The junta still refuses to allow the United States any access to its ports.

And while I was writing this post I have been contacted by UN journalist Dan Patterson with a report he created directly from the United Nations. In it Dan tells that 1.5 million people have been affected by the cyclone and that the situation is not only fluid on the ground but also at the UN, where over a dozen of envoys are waiting to get the government's go to bring in their teams and start work.

We have no word yet, due to the juntas blockade, as to who to send money and/or help. Help is trickling in from Indonesia, but since US organizations are not being allowed into the country, at least one Thai blogger activist doubts that any money or aid given now will reach the people that need it the most. In one report I read earlier, people were reporting that soldiers were selling water, food, wood and aluminum siding with a 600% markup in price. This is aid, btw, they are supposed to distribute for free.

Once we get a straight answer from either the United Nations or people on the ground in Burma, we will let you know whom to contact for donations and relief supplies. For now, all we can do is wait and see if the government will move out of the way and let the world help their country get relief and start to rebuild.

At some point I am going to have to write about the whole phenomena and explosion of what I call hipster t-shirt companies. It seems like every day there's a new company hawking t-shirts with pithy, snarky phrases or serendipitously political messages.

Today I discovered Wire and Twine through Digg one of the companies I put in the "eco-hipster" category : not quite political but socially engaged enough to make saving the earth their fabulously designed call to action.

Wire and Twine created a whole site for their special "50 ways to help the planet" t-shirt. At 50 Ways To Help, they explain each and every icon that appears on the t-shirt. Yet look closely to the page. You could in theory print it, cut each box and share each card with your friends and family. You know, because we wouldn't leave the cards anywhere and just litter, wouldn't we?

As a former personal chef and avocational foodie, there is no way on earth I'd agree with #4, but I totally agree with #8, #10, #14, #24 and absolutely with #28 (because it totally makes sense).

Check out the 50 ways to help the planet and tell us which ones you find interesting enough to discuss.

Last weekend, Iron Man kicked off the summer blockbuster season with a whopping $100 million dollar box office return. A Stan Lee creation and Marvel comic book from the Vietnam War era, Iron Man tells the story of Tony Stark, a billionaire weapons inventor for the US government whose capture by enemy forces inspires him to create a robotic exoskelaton that he uses to fight his captors and launch himself a few hundred feet to freedom. Then he goes home to perfect his combat suit.

The updated version, as you surely know, changes Stark's location to Afghanistan, and his captors to Middle Eastern insurgents. He's good, they're evil. He kills a lot of them and escapes. Depending on your politics, this is where you want to either shout for joy or sit the whole film crew down and explain how this plot-point is an offensive, jingoistic, one-sided depiction of our involvement in the "War on Terror."

After all, the treatment Stark receives in the deep recesses of his cave-prison isn't far off from the way the US government treats its own captives at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the many other "secret" prisons around the world.

But I'll leave the film's politics alone for now. Instead, let's think about the Iron Man character itself: a man-cum-superhero through MacGyver-like wizardry.

The conceit is that Tony Stark is a scientific genius, and can thus create a suit that even his peers can't replicate. But maybe Stark isn't so advanced after all, and Iron Man is less a sci-fi romp than a glimpse at what our military isn't far from realizing.

As Clayton Dach writes in the May/June issue of Adbusters, the (near)future soldier will have "next-generation sidearms; headsets that provide live command and control, detailed geographic data and the ability to fire around corners; smart suits equipped with ultralight nanotech armor, micro-climate conditioning, real-time health monitoring and even automated medical care like CPR and drug delivery. Also on the docket are robotic exoskeletons that allow the soldiers wearing them to carry hundreds of pounds - even while running - without breaking a sweat, as well as handheld imaging equipment that grants the ability to see targets through walls."

And this isn't Dach's imagination at work. It comes right from the Future Combat Systems, or FCS, i.e., the real Tony Stark of the US Army.

Dach also describes how drugs, from amphetamines to anti-anxiety pills, have long been used to aid soldiers, both during and after combat. No news there. But he ends his piece with an indictment of our military's use of technology to effectively create "absent" soldiers -- or the ability to fight entirely via automated, autonomous, and remote technologies. By taking the human factor out of the equation, asks Dach, where will we place accountability?

"The future's soldier could be one surrounded by an inveigling haze of pharmaceuticals, decision-making robots, errant bombs and faulty surveillance data," he writes. "The only thing to emerge from this haze will be an exhilarating sense of our own guiltlessness. Alas, the populations against which we use our fancy toys are unlikely to share in the feeling."

[Image: Corsiworld]

There was a point when the pundits were telling us that there was little to no difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And for a time -- when the debates devolved into the candidates parsing the differences in their approach to universal health care -- it did indeed seem as though the main difference between the two came down to race and gender.

But it was only as the campaign moved on past Pennsylvania, leading up to yesterday's primaries in Indiana and N. Carolina, that we began to see separation between the two. The infamous 3 am Clinton campaign alarm clock ad asked who would you want to answer the phone when the pressure was on. The rhetorical question was meant to elicit Hillary as the answer. Unfortunately for her, when it came to real life, she wasn't up to the task, cracking under pressure and making it clear to all that these candidates are very different.

The critical moment arrived for Hillary Clinton with the Indiana and N. Carolina primaries. This was a must win situation for her if she was going to maintain momentum and be able to make the case to the super delegates that only she could defeat McCain. With the heat on, she chose to pander, to tell the public what she thought they wanted to hear whether it made good policy or not. The most glaring example of this is the repeal of the gas tax, a bad idea that would ultimately do more damage to our economy and bring minimal savings to American drivers. To show off her machismo she threatened to nuke Iran, again grandstanding and playing tough just like George Bush and John McCain.

Obama, on the other hand, had has come out of two of his most difficult weeks looking very much like a statesman, taking the high road and calling Hillary out for endorsing the foolish gas holiday and blustering on abut Iran.

Tested under fire, Obama has emerged stronger while Hillary's desperate attempt to connect with the electorate's basest instincts is proving fatal to her presidential prospects. The question remaining is how much lower will she sink in her standings before giving in to the inevitable. Her resilience and refusal to concede has cast her as a fighter, a positive image that she can still lay claim to in the waning days of the campaign. Should she continue to fight, doing the dirty anti-Obama work for the Republicans, then she will lose what little credibility she has left and be remembered as the candidate whose sense of entitlement put her ambition ahead of the good of the country.

Back in February, we reported on a new law that would force any restaurant in New York City with at least 15 locations nationwide to post nutritional information alongside their menus. On Monday this week, the law finally went into effect, and already some New York restaurants are testing their limits.

Five restaurants were cited on Monday for failing to comply with this effort to curb obesity, type-2 diabetes, and other diet-related illnesses. They were the usual suspects: Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, TGI Friday's, Sbarro, and Popeye's. Oddly enough, though, in each case it was only one location that failed to comply with the law, indicating that all the other restaurants in each of those chains have posted the information.

While no fines will be issued until mid-July, this slap on the wrist should prove that the New York Department of Health is serious.

Originally, the law was slated to take effect in late March, but was delayed because of a lawsuit by the New York State Restaurant Association. And though the association is now taking the case to a federal appeals court, the presiding judge, Richard J. Holwell, didn't wait to begin enforcing the law.

Come July, chain restaurants that fail to post the information will receive fines ranging from $200 to $2,000. It'll be interesting to see if some of them do the math and find that simply paying the fines is cheaper than the loss of business they might see if they do inform their customers that a single meal in their eatery packs enough calories, fat, and cholesterol for a whole week.

Then again, maybe posting that information won't affect their businesses at all. That's up to the consumers.

What I'd like to know, is when non-chain restaurants will be held accountable for our nutritional well-being. A law like this suggests that only chain restaurants -- the ones everyone knows are unhealthy -- aren't nourishing our bodies like they should be. What of all the fried potato skins, mac-n-cheese plates, and five-egg omlettes at one-of-a-kind establishments across the city?

[images: 60,000 Plastic Bags by Chris Jordan]

There were some questions earlier in the week as to whether or not Farrow would be allowed to host the Foreign Correspondents' Club lunch in Hong Kong as the torch relayed through the city on Friday. The torch's presence in Hong Kong was particularly sensitive because it appeared for the first time on Chinese soil. The lingering questions of Hong Kong autonomy, which reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, caused anxiety in Beijing.

The Chinese government, which regards the Olympics as their official-unofficial superpower coming out party, is unnerved by Ms. Farrow's campaign and, more specifically, its present proximity to their sphere of influence. At a press conference on Tuesday, China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said, according to the Xinhua News Agency, "I think Mia Farrow should deepen her knowledge and understanding of China's active and constructive role in handling the Darfur issue."

Mia Farrow's talk, which was entitled, ''Darfur and the Olympics," went off without a hitch in Hong Kong. In her remarks Farrow took the current administration to task, as well as Britain, China and the United Nations Security Council, saying, according to Bloomberg, ''Nations with capable armies should offer African nations training, logistical support and helicopters.'' Further, Farrow took on the 19 major corporate Olympic sponsors. According to AFP, Dream For Darfur "flunked" 16 of the 19 sponsors - including Visa, Coke and Swatch -- in a 73-page Olympic Corporate Sponsor Darfur Report Card. "History will note their silence ... I'm disgusted. Adidas, Kodak and McDonald's, by contrast, drew praise for urging the United Nations Security Council to enforce Resolution 1769, which authorized in 2007 a UN-African Union hybrid operation will be known as UNAMID to quell the violence in Darfur.

Farrow has made a career of taking on the powerful. Barely into her 20s, Farrow refused to co-star with her then-husband Frank Sinatra in The Detective, precipitating divorce papers being served on the set of 1968's Rosemary's Baby. There was the spectacular break-up with Woody Allen. And, most recently, Farrow shamed the most powerful man in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, into ending his role as artistic advisor for the Beijing Olympics. The stakes with China, however, are infinitely higher than the gamesmanship along the Hollywood food chain.

John McCain called for it first. Hillary Clinton saw a good game and followed suit days after. That was the 21st of April. By the 29th Barack Obama was saying, this was just a gimmick to help them get through the elections.

Yet McCain and Clinton have gone full force on this "gas tax holiday" idea, even though on the The Hill, the idea is DOA. Let's add to the non-starter the fact that many economists have declared the proposal a horrible idea. What are McCain and Clinton to do?

Well, McCain has owned up to the fact that it's just an itsy bitsy band-aid measure that has no real value. Clinton on the other hand has dismissed economists and experts on the matter as elitists.

Obama on the other hand has gone on record as having voted for something like this during his years in the Illinois legislature and reckoning it was a complete mistake. What does he call it? "This is a strategy to get through the next election".

Since the dawn of mankind, life expectancy has increased with each passing generation. King Tut was a ripe old man when he died at 18 or 19. Flash-forward a few thousand years to 1980, when my grandfather died at 72, a respectable age to pass at that time. Today, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the average man can expect to live nearly 78 years.

But according to recent reports, our overall life expectancy in the United States is in decline, with the worst statistics coming from regions in the Midwest and the South. The Northeast and large parts of California are among the few areas where life expectancy continues to rise.

There are many reasons for this, of course: Diet, economic hardship, disposition, and even the weather. Still, with all of our progress, should life expectancy really be declining anywhere, regardless of how solid the reasons may be?

If you're curious where you fall in the spectrum, you can calculate your life expectancy at BlueZones.com, a new Website promoting longer and healthier lives.

Your results might surprise you.

I wrote recently about Warren Buffet's call to tax the rich. In it he issued a challenge : He would donate $1 million to charity if the people in the Forbes 400 would admit they proportionately pay less taxes than their secretaries.

The only billionaire to have accepted his challenge has been Mark Cuban. He also happens to be the only billionaire blogger. He is not only known as "The Blog Maverick" for his obvious reference to his basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks. He became an instant "blogebrity" when it was revealed he was the silent investor of the pioneering blog network, Weblogs, Inc.

In Warren Buffet, Taxes and the Presidency, not only agrees with Buffet that he pays a disproportionately low percentage of taxes. He ups the ante by proposing a restructuring of consumer taxes :

Its also wrong that those who must live paycheck to paycheck find themselves paying the same amount of taxes on consumables as the super rich. That 8pct sales tax on life's basic necessities is real time cash out of pocket, a far greater percentage of income and much more expensive money than the federal taxes we pay the following April 15th.

I would be perfectly fine paying a higher percentage of income, both in federal income taxes and as part of a consumption tax on luxury items. If Warren wants to buy or build a yacht for a hundred million dollars. Nail him with a 10pct federal tax surcharge. If I want to buy a Gulfstream Jet for 40mm dollars. Nail me with a 10pct federal surcharge above and beyond current taxes. There are plenty of items, from jewelry to 100k plus cars to 10mm dollars or more first, 2nd and 3rd homes. If you can afford to buy these kind of goodies, and choose to, cough it up.

Yet here's what really is interesting about his proposition : Tax the hell out of the super wealthy (Forbes estimates their collective worth is $1.54 trillion, up from $290 billion the previous year); yet decrease spending by each percentage of tax raised and completely open up the process by which the government spends said money :

Right now I hate paying taxes because I feel like I'm giving money to a known crack addict. However much you give, its not enough. They will buy their crack, get a short term high and soon be back asking for more.

The federal government , whether in Republican or Democratic hands is the same way. No matter how much you give, they are always asking for more, more, more. Always spending on the ridiculous, without remorse and without the ability to restrain itself. Just like a drug addict.

If you are going to raise my taxes, I want somethings in return.

Raise my taxes by 1 pct, by every 1 pct you cut federal spending. Your choice of raising taxes on luxury items, or on annual income of 10mm dollars per year or more. Cutting spending means the government needs to raise less which allows you to raise the income threshold on which you charge this "Forbes 400 surcharge"

And I want 1 more thing. I want transparency. The way the government publishes information on money it spends ,receives and owes is a joke. No one in this country has any real knowledge of how much our country really owes. There are so many hidden and unpublished liabilities that if our country were a public company, someone would go to jail.

It is really thought provoking for his call for transparency and opening the government's spending process. Democracies are supposed to be systems of check and balances and at this point in time it is almost impossible for US Americans to truly follow everything the government and politicians say they will do but actually end up doing.

Read the whole post and tell us what you think.

It was now Fourth of July weekend and I sat quietly at my son's bedside in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at NYU Hospital. I read the word "cancer" on a pamphlet given to me by my son's new oncologist. CANCER. The C word. That word put me into a trance-like state. I had read the word many times before. I had heard that people developed it and even died from it but not in my family, not in my husband's family and certainly NOT MY FOUR YEAR OLD BEAUTIFUL AND HEALTHY CHILD.

As I sat numbly in that intensive care unit, I developed a sense of panic for answers to this unbearable crisis that had to be provided instantly! This would be one of many, answer-seeking panic attacks for me. I had no choice but to call the pediatric brain surgeon "on call" that weekend. All the other surgeons were gone to enjoy their holiday weekend. I had a million questions for this "on call" surgeon and yet I wasn't even really sure why I was calling him at home. I was desperately searching for someone to say something, anything to make this surreal nightmare go away. So I paged the doctor and he quickly returned my phone call. I answered my cell phone and heard him announce himself. At that moment, what I heard in the background coming from the doctor's end, that split second of time, before I started to speak changed my outlook on the world forever. I simply heard children (presumably the doctor's children) laughing and playing and splashing in a pool. . . enjoying the warmth of the sunshine and indulging in the carefree happiness of childhood. . . and I was here . . . in the NYU PICU staring at my four year old little boy whose head was wrapped in a white turban and he had CANCER.

When I heard those children playing in the background on that phone call that day everything became clear to me. I was now one of them. I was now the mother of child with cancer. I was no longer that mother happily skipping through life ignorant of the heartaches and catastrophes that happen only to "other people". I was now one of them. It made no difference to me that it was actually my child that had developed cancer and not me. As any mother will tell you, a child is part of you. It would have been easier on me if I had developed cancer instead of my child.

Warren Buffet ranks #1 in the Forbes list of wealthiest people on the planet. The man has a net worth of $62.1 billion, most of which he has pledged to the William and Melinda Gates Foundation. The total amount of his philanthropic gifts has been valued around $37 billion. A gift, by the way, that is technically not considered as a donation but as wealth : The gift is of shares in all his current investment holdings. Buffett is confident the value will go up in the future -- even a modest increase in value each year would add several billion dollars in annuities to the gift.

Yet Warren Buffett is not only going to be remembered as the man who has given the most wealth away. Warren Buffett is going to be remembered as the billionaire who admitted on national TV that he pays too little in taxes.

Take your time ... let that sink in .... yes, you read that right ....

Warren Buffett says that our taxation policies favor the mega wealthy and punish the working class. In his little experiment he demonstrated how he pays on average 17% of his earned income to the government. This is not even taxes on his wealth, which is covered by ever decreasing capital gains taxes. In a little experiment he conducted in his own company, he discovered he pays a disproportionately low percentage of taxes on his earned income compared to his secretary and office workers who have to pay on average 32%.

The video we have here is his conversation with Tom Brokaw on the subject. In the Nightline piece he not only rails against the government's taxation dishonesty, he also announced a challenge: He pledged to donate $1 million to charity if the collective group of the richest Americans would admit they pay less taxes than the average American.

Of course, for a guy who had given away the previous year $37 billion of his wealth, that's peanuts. As a stunt to start a discussion about the United States "war against the middle class", I think is brilliant.