January 2009 Archives

USA Network has launched a new social initiative called Characters Unite. It's a new multimedia platform spearheaded by USA to combat prejudice and intolerance while promoting acceptance and understanding. As part of the initiative, viewers are encouraged to make a pledge for tolerance and understanding.

"As a character of the USA, I hold these truths to be self-evident -- that life is richer and we are stronger as a country when we see beyond the stereotypes and appreciate each other for the characters that we are. I take this pledge to stand against prejudice, intolerance, and hate, and promote greater acceptance and understanding in my daily life. After all, characters are what make us USA.

I think that's a message we can all get behind — especially considering that the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that hate groups are already attempting to capitalize on racist tension after the election of our first African-American president.

Show your support by taking the pledge yourself and learn more about the partner organizations involved in the initiative.

On MSNBC's Hardball Monday, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) defended a measure that would aid states by making it easier for them to provide family planning services to low-income women. He said, "Family planning saves, if done correctly, an enormous sum of money down the road in the healthcare system."

The show's host, Chris Matthews, immediately countered that to him, the measure sounded a little too much like China permitting only one child per-family, which has been the law in that country since 1979.

There is almost nothing else that can ruin my day the way a news report of yet another woman being killed by an ex can. "Domestic violence" is too soft of a term to describe the senseless killing as a method of power & control. There are days when I feel like "woman killed by ex-boyfriend/husband" is always the lead on the news.

That is why news of corporate America dealing head on with the domestic violence crisis
lifts my spirits.

Corporate America normally drags its feet on implementing anything that does not directly benefit its bottom line or reduces productivity. Thankfully domestic violence advocates have proven with stats and personal stories that indeed, a woman being stalked in your office is going to cost you money and time.

Liz Claiborne, an early pioneer, developed a three-word call to action: "Recognize. Respond. Refer." "Recognize" means noticing if a colleague wears turtlenecks in summer, shrugs unenthusiastically at the arrival of flowers, is secretive about home, is absent a lot. "Respond" means inquiring and sharing your concerns. "Refer" means acting as a conduit to the resources and agencies that can help.

I know we all can't be one big happy family at work, I do believe that employers have a responsibility to its workers. This goes towards treating people like, well, people and not automatons who push papers, enter data, so forth. It means that companies, bosses, supervisors and co-workers stand up to violence and perpetrators and say, "Hell no!"

I believe part of the reason, a slice of the reason, why violence against women still exists is that we, as a society, allow it to happen in small bits. Being flattered by someone who wants to covet you. Laughing off our girlfriend getting her 10th text message from her boyfriend. Not stepping in between that couple fighting on the street.

Whether we step up for battered women and yes, men can be abused, on the street or in the board room, we must do it. And happily more and more of us are doing it in the boardroom.

If you just thought, Gross -- or even exclaimed it out loud -- you're not alone. I suggested the idea to a friend yesterday afternoon, just to see what she'd say. Indeed, that was the first word out of her mouth. Immediate, reflexive, without a moment's thought.

But what if I said, as I did to her, that reusable tampons aren't only better for the environment, they're also better for your body? And that by switching to reusables, you could save thousands of dollars over your menstrual lifetime. And that they're made from materials that stand up to washing so you're really not reusing some busted piece of cloth in that most sensitive part of your anatomy.

Eunice Wong, in an article on reusable tampons for Truthdig, writes that there are 85 million women of menstruating age in North America, and the average woman disposes of between 10,000 and 15,000 tampons, pads and applicators in her lifetime. That's about 250 to 300 pounds of waste per woman. For more fascinating facts, read the article. Those numbers are just the tip of an iceberg of alarming evidence against disposable feminine hygiene products.

For one summer in college, I lived with an aspiring midwife and ardent feminist, who insisted on keeping a candy dish of chemical-free tampons from Sweden on the coffee table in the living room. She bought them in bulk to convert her friends and every other pre-menopausal female who passed through our front door from self-abusing gluttons for big-name, toxic American tampons into self-loving, enlightened women.

That was 12 years ago, and to me, organic tampons sounded crazy -- that is, brilliant, but strange. But they primed me for this latest development, which Wong points out, isn't actually new at all.

If they were good enough for our great-grandmothers, surely they're good enough for us, which is to say, you, if you're a woman, since I am not. In other words, what do I know? Maybe Veronica should weigh in on this.

It's a shame you have to buy the New York Times Sunday edition, or have a home subscription, to receive the weekly magazine. Because if the headline of its cover story this week, "What is Female Desire?", were displayed on newsstands across the country, I'll bet the Old Gray Lady would have sold enough copies to breathe a few more years of life into its dying print edition.

But I digress. The article that accompanies that provocative question does a great deal to answer it. It focuses on the groundbreaking research of Dr. Meredith Chivers, a professor of psychology at Queens College, in Kingston, Ontario, into the great mystery of female sexuality.

It's hard to believe that we're still grappling with the question, 40 years after the feminist movement began in earnest, but this article illuminates how prudish our culture still is on the topic of women and sex. Dr. Chivers takes a candid, no-issue-is-too-controversial approach to her research. She analyzes submission fantasies, "pornography" depicting copulating chimpanzees, and the success rates of a new drug that can help women want sex even when their minds are elsewhere, like whether or not they left the iron on.

As my girlfriend read the article Saturday morning (I have a subscription to the paper), she was doing what I like to call interactive reading, which she does often. Every few seconds, she'd shout, "I knew it!" or "That's right!" as she read with undivided attention.

Suffice it to say, the article is worth reading.

[Image: Ryan McGinley of Team Gallery for the New York Times]

We've all heard the expressions: You're only as old as you feel. Thirty is the new 20. Time waits for no one.

OK, one of those is not like the other ones, but lately I've been thinking it's the only one with any truth in it. The other two are nice and might make us feel good about turning 40, or inspire us to take up whitewater rafting in our retirement, but age does matter -- and lately I've been feeling the sting so many felt before me.

All my life I've been young. I was the youngest of two brothers, I always had older friends throughout school, and I've often been the youngest person on-staff or faculty in my various writing and teaching jobs. Now, at 33, those days appear to be over.

I don't generally sweat aging -- indeed, I loved turning 30 because it meant my anxious, nerve-wracked 20s were over -- but the birthday pill is getting harder to swallow each year. And it's got nothing to do with my body; it's because of the newspaper.

Thanks to being "informed" I know that President Obama's chief speech writer, Jon Favreau, is 27 years old. The designer who created the dress Michelle Obama wore on the First Couple's Inaugural Ball marathon last Tuesday, Jason Wu, is 26. And slightly more obscure but no less notable, one of my new favorite writers for the New Yorker, Kalefa Senneh, is my age.

Thanks to AlterNet for posting this new review of an old classic, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a film starring Sidney Poitier as an esteemed doctor with the World Health Organization who plans to marry a white woman.

As the reviewer, Jonathan Kim of Brave New Films, points out, now is the perfect time to revisit this prescient film, and he selects his clips perfectly to make his case that if you haven't seen Guess Who's Coming to Dinner yet, you could hardly find a better moment to see it for the first time.

I was downtown on Montreal's St. Catherines street and before I knew it, I was engulfed in a sea of thousands of demonstrators. Unified by a single cause, those demonstrating against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, included "Jews Against Zionism" as well as people chanting "Israelis are terrorists."

I'd never seen anything like this in Montreal. I had my camera with me mounted with a 24mm lens and I took a few shots to try to capture the feeling of the huge crowd that had taken over Montreal's busiest street.

Forty minutes later I met my wife who had been in a store on the same street and was completely unaware that anything out of the ordinary had happened. There was no evidence at all of the passionate demonstration of thousands, no disruption to traffic, no loose flyers and no one had been arrested. It had gone as quick as it had come.

It was terrific to see Kenneth join the Morning Joe team on MSNBC for the inauguration of President Barack Obama last week. Here is video of the program in case you were tuned to a different channel. Bear in mind, you can hear Kenneth in the video, but not see him.

Over the weekend I attended a cook-out with some close friends of my family near Pachacamac, Peru. Pachacamac itself is an extensive archaeological complex located about 25 miles southeast of Lima. This ceremonial center began in 200 AD and was expanded by the Wari culture. It was later taken over by the Incas.

Today, the surrounding area is a curious mix of poverty and new development. All along the highway are billboards advertising the surrounding land as a promising and cost-efficient investment. Middle class and upper middle class Peruvians are purchasing this land in a pour of urban sprawl. The result is an interesting sense of tension between the rampant poverty and the heightened security along the route.

View more photos after the jump.

Three friends and I were chatting over coffee yesterday morning. One had just returned from Washington DC, where she went for a bit part in that great play called History. She, being a nice girl from Kansas with a heart of gold, said she felt bad when the crowd of 2 million booed our former president, George W. Bush. (I didn't hear any booing on the CNN broadcast I watched, but since she was there, I'll take her word for it.)

Quickly, another friend said she thought that was awful. "He was the president," she said, emphasizing the second word in that sentence. (It should be noted that both of these women voted for Obama.)

I asked if that alone should be just cause for respect and deference. She said yes, it should. I then asked, knowing full well the implications of my analogy, if she'd have said the same about Hitler, just because he was the chancellor of Germany. She said yes.

Now, I do not equate George W. Bush with Adolf Hitler. That would be easy and cheap, not to mention specious. But I stand by my point, as I re-iterated to my friend to be sure I hadn't been misunderstood: Just because someone (a man, in this case) is a leader, do you really believe he deserves unconditional respect, no matter what he's done or how much he has abused his power?

Her answer, even after this rephrasing, remained an unequivocal yes. I'd like to know what others think about this.

[Image: Wikimedia Commons]

President Barack Obama wasted no time in setting himself apart from the opaque, mysterious ways of the Bush administration. In this seven minute address, held on Wednesday, the new president sets out a series of new rules to essentially "fix the broken system" of the US government. Transparency, accountability, and honesty are keywords under Obama's leadership.

Obama is clearly a sharp contrast to our last president, but I don't think he is merely defining himself as such to curry favor with Americans on his first day in office. Everything he says in this address strikes me as pure Obama, regardless of how the last eight years went. His steadfast sincerity bodes well for the next four years, if not eight. The spirit we see here is unlikely to fade.

A few weeks ago, my first Awearness Blog post discussed the impact of the election of Barack Obama on race relations in America. It described my personal experience as a white man serving as a voter protection lawyer on behalf of the Obama campaign in an all-black polling place in inner-city Detroit, which included a poignant moment in which two voters reacted to my presence with suspicion and hostility.

It goes without saying that, among the many important issues that are raised by Obama's ascension to the most powerful job in the world, the likely effect of his election on our collective view of race and the relationship that people of different colors and ethnicities have with each other will be enormous. Maybe this will be truest among older people.

In February, feminist organizations will collide with the feminist bloggers and online activists at Feminism 2.0. The one-day conference will focus on bringing the best of both worlds together in order for both to do their work in a more comprehensive manner.

As I've stated before, NARAL Pro-Choice America is leading the pack of traditional feminist organizations in how they are using the internet. They use a blog, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube. But what if you are a neighborhood organization or a national women's rights group who is confused about the difference between Facebook and MySpace? It can be hard to find a consultant who sympathizes with your issues and the way you want to communicate with your constituency. You might also be a member of an organization who keeps thinking, "Why aren't we blogging?" The Feminism 2.0 conference will help each side of the equation figure out the best way to move the feminist movement by using web 2.0 tools.

I'll be attending this conference as a veteran of both feminist community organizing and online networking. I wrote on the Fem2.0 blog last month that my personal growth as a feminist and as an internet geek went hand in hand. As we see on this blog each day, the internet is changing the way we communicate, organize and network. It will be fascinating to see how bloggers and traditional organizers interact.

If you're in DC on Feb. 2 or can get there, I hope that you will register and join us for an amazing day! The following organizations are helping to convene this conference:
• American Association of University Women (AAUW)
• BlogHer• Care2
• Culture Kitchen
• Feminist Majority
• Feminist.com
• Feministe
• Momsrising
• National Council of Negro Women
• National Council of Women's Organizations (NCWO)
• National Organization for Women (NOW)
• VivirLatino
• Women in Media and News (WIMN)
• Women's Media Center

Jay Smooth, video blogger and New York radio DJ, eloquently addresses why the Obama presidency is wonderful, but the work is not done.

"As long as we are human, we will never be perfect in how we treat each other. As long as we are human our imperfections will always be embedded in the institutions we maintain. As long as we're human, our present reality will always be based on an imperfect history. As long as we're human -- there will always be more work to do."

I wrote yesterday about three invitations I'd received for watching the Inauguration. I chose the restaurant in Manhattan, mostly because it was indoors and not 3,000 miles away. (My other two offers involved standing outside or flying to Los Angeles.)

As most people who watched the ceremony will agree, it was an event of great emotion and moment. Among the few dozen people I watched with, attention was undivided. It was as if every person in the room was personally standing on the precipice of a new beginning, as full of anticipation as the Obamas themselves must be. Everyone there seemed to be welcoming this new leader and his administration into their lives, knowing that with Obama's presidency, life in this country and in many other countries around the world will be forever changed.

A few hours later, I went to a cafe on the Upper East Side, where the day's events were still being broadcast on a few televisions. Beside me sat a young black woman watching the news with rapt satisfaction, until an elderly white man sat down across from her. He respectfully engaged her in conversation about Obama's speech. She was warm, brimming with optimism, eager to talk to this old man about what this day means for her. He was deferential, sharing her enthusiasm, clearly happy to have lived long enough to have an experience as unique and historic as the one he and this young woman were sharing.

Naturally, not all New Yorkers support Obama. But the collective spirit here today is overwhelmingly positive. Much like the blackout of 2003 or the massive snowstorm of 2001, this Inauguration seems to have brought the city together, giving its residents a day to reflect on something larger than themselves and their petty differences. Positive humility doesn't come often a city as competitive as New York, but when it does, no one can deny the warmth it spreads across these five boroughs.

[Image: New York Times]

I've had it with news about Wall Street, bailouts, Madoff, bank this and bank that. For god's sake, can't someone find an alternative to the capitalist system that's made a few people super rich through exploitation, corruption, greed, and outright dishonesty?

As it turns out, yes. Entrepreneur and former venture capitalist Woody Tasch suggests "slow money," as opposed to "fast money." Slow money establishes markets that value the environment, local communities, and the natural world as much as financial growth. His new book, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered lays out a plan for creating such sustainable economies.

Tasch knows Wall Street as well as anyone, and now he's using that knowledge to build a new NGO called Slow Money, which will invest in companies that build natural and social capital as well as financial capital.

Plenty Magazine conducted an in-depth interview with Tasch earlier this month, which you can read here.

All through the night I restlessly dreamt of a never ending subway ride to JFK airport. My mood was somber, lackadaisical and unfocused among the murky, monochromatic subway stations. Every stop was another connection the E train. But every stop led to a completely different destination; each more desolate than the last. I woke from my restless slumber convinced that taking a car was the best course of action.

And so, at 6:45am on Jan. 15, I began my journey -- eyes burning, swollen red in the back of a Brooklyn Car Service heading to JFK airport for my flight to a five month stay in Peru, a country that I've never been to before.

The snow began to fall an hour or so prior. By the time I reached the airport my fingers were raw from chewing away the anxiety of degenerating weather. I was convinced (and secretly hoped) that my fight would be canceled and New York would have her way with me for one more night.

The truth is that I absolutely love this city. For two and a half years I have held her in my arms; held her foggy street lights, her frazzled gridlock, her gritty falafel stands and her wrong-eyed bums. Despite her reckless qualities, she is a city whose kinetic energy has made me feel more alive than I ever thought possible.

She is explosive and alluring, like a gypsy princess whose fiery eyes make even the most level-headed man crumble to his knees in a lost, taxi-less rainstorm. She is a muse who steals your wallet after demanding that you pay for dinner. She is a cut-throat whore whose only objective is build her empire on the lost, desperate dreams of the weak and the warped power-struggle of the strong. But, she is my whore.

My decision to leave New York to volunteer in Peru is not permanent. I am tied to this city in a kind of physical bond that tares through the center of my heart, splitting me in two. Her intense presence in my life has made me aware of one very important purpose. I must understand both halves of this divided self.

And so, here I am at an altitude of 3,400 feet, flying at 462 mph, in an effort to find pieces of myself in a culture and language that is not m own. I am volunteering with a small village outside of Cusco, Peru in an attempt to structure this journey and a hope to resolve questions of my own divided self.

[Image: Fox News]

Jud Laipply holds a uniquely 21st Century honor: the creator of the #1 most favorited video on YouTube, and the #2 most-watched of all time. ("All time," in this case, meaning ever since YouTube went live in 2005.)

His "Evolution of Dance," from 2006, epitomized the kind of do-it-yourself camp that's made YouTube famous. Now he's got a fever, and the only prescription is more Evolution of Dance. Given the economy, the war, and the national morale, it's hard not to think he's talking to the rest of us as much as himself.

Dr. Emmet Brown was on to something, and it wasn't time travel. In Back to the Future II, most of you will recall, Dr. Brown, the mad scientist played by Christopher Lloyd, comes back to 1985 from the future (2015!) to bring Marty McFly back to the future so he can save himself and his entire family from a pathetic fate. But whereas his 1985 time machine ran on plutonium -- ah, the Reagan era -- the new-and-improved version is fueled entirely by garbage. Indiscriminate, random garbage.

Sorry, doc. Automakers beat you to it by a full six years. Earlier this week, Fast Company introduced readers to six new cars that run on everything from sunlight and recycled rain water to garbage and good old fashioned manpower. What's more, one of them couldn't be less of a Delorean: the Bamgoo, made by Mazda Kiyora, is made of bamboo, and at just 130 pounds, weighs less than I do.

Granted, the Bamgoo won't be barreling down the Autobahn, since it can only go 30mph. But some of these green steeds could pass for Transformers, or maybe Iron Man's weekend sports car.

[Image: Fast Company]

In the spirit of trying to keep corporations in check, check out what these documentary filmmakers have to say about oil spills and what needs doing to prevent or remedy such sticky situations.


"Nearly two decades after the Exxon Valdez spilled eleven million gallons of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound, both the natural environment and the lives of fishermen continue to suffer. A fisherman and an environmental activist describe the historic accident and detail how corporate promises to clean up the spill and compensate Alaskans have not been kept."

Watch "The Sierra Club Chronicles: Episode 2" on the Sundance Channel Friday, Jan. 16 at 10:30am, or Sunday, Jan. 18 at 3:30pm.

Remember when the adorably mop-haired Charlie Bucket (see above) and his affably sour "Grandpa Joe" (played, we cannot fail to note, by song and dance veteran Jack Albertson) gloriously broke out in the now-immortal song "I've got a Golden Ticket" in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? That perfect, honey-hued cinematic moment is probably how many inaugural ticket holders presently feel on their way to watching history resolve itself. On January 20, 2009 the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, will be sworn in at an inaugural that is garnering tons of buzz in the blogosphere, the Oprah-verse and in world capitals far-and-wide.

Celebrity politics has arrived. Who would have thought that an Obama "Golden Ticket" -- as opposed to a "Commemorative Invite" -- would fetch nearly as much on sites like Craigslist as, say, Rolling Stones tickets. Predictably, scams have popped up. And eBay, curiously, as well as StubHub has banned the sale of Obama inaugural tickets, opting out altogether from the scalper's delight. But with all the buzz, celebreality and general excitement, who wouldn't give their left arm for an "Inaugural Golden Ticket"? The official schedule is packed leading up to the swearing in ceremony. And then there are the official balls, the unofficial balls, the cable channels taping concerts with boldface A-list celebrities and the ridiculous parties, hookups and delicious Washington insider gossip that the tabloids, at the very least, will be dining on for at least a week afterwards. "If you thought the Golden Globes was a party," says the AP, "just wait until you see Barack Obama's inauguration."

For realsies?

So apparently a lot of people are out of work these days. I'm not talking about the latest unemployment figures or the number of people who applied for assistance in the past six months. I'm referring to the sudden influx of people I see in places I'm accustomed to having to myself on weekday mornings and afternoons.

Exhibit A: The gym.

One luxury of working from home is that I can go to my local YMCA during off-peak times. I've rarely had to wait for a treadmill, the weight room is quiet, and there's always a place to stretch out in the sauna. Not anymore. These days, the Y is packed from open to close. Who are all these people at my gym, I wonder. Don't they have jobs to go to? No, I guess they don't.

Exhibit B: The movies.

If I have time to catch a movie, which is woefully rare, I opt for matinees whenever possible. This allows me to feel like I don't live in the most populated city in the country, where movie-going ranks up there with seeing the Giants play in the Super Bowl as an activity of choice. I mean, in how many cities would a relatively obscure French film like I've Loved You So Long screen for several months?

It goes without saying that my favorite movie houses, like my gym, are no longer my domain. I have to share them with John Q. Public.

Exhibit C: Restaurants.

Unlike exhibits A and B, exhibit C is not a problem -- yet. Where I used to have to wait for a table, now I'm ushered right in and sat wherever I choose. No more waiting, no more crowds. But I also fear, before long, no more favorite restaurants. With one place after another shuttering its doors, this pleasure may be short-lived. And that would be a shame, not for my sake, but for the people who run these little bistros and cafes that I and many others have grown to love. That said, at least people are rediscovering their ovens and stoves.

The upside of a bad economy, in other words, is that a lot more people are getting in shape, cooking at home, reading books, going to movies, and otherwise biding their time in productive ways that won't break their banks. I'd like to see more of the recession mentality during boom times. I think we'd all be better off.

[Image: Rufino Uribe for Wikimedia Commons]

Every few summers we are hit by media stories of an epidemic of shark attacks. For our friends down under, their summer of the shark has already begun.

Yes, a fatality is sad and we should take note of it, but time and again, scientists have to remind us of how rare being killed by a shark is:

The fact is, there is an attack that causes injury requiring medical treatment only about once every five years.

The last fatal attack in New Zealand waters was in 1976, and since record-keeping began in 1852 just 10 people have died from a shark attack.

You have far more chance of being struck by lightning or winning Lotto.

As a Midwestern gal who gets into the ocean twice a decade, these stats run through my mind when I snorkel or even wade into the ocean's warm waters. The mantra is my attempt to keep myself from falling victim of the media frenzy and staying on my boring beach mat. Logic allowed me to snorkel in Shark's Cove in Hawaii.

Logic also tells me that if I win that lottery of nature, it's not going be a love tap:

The largest great white on record, which measured around 24 feet long, would've had a bite force of 9,320 Newton at the tip of its jaws and 18,216 N at the back of its jaws, where the leverage is higher.

YIKES!

Logic has a funny way of playing both sides of the emotional fence.

As if to underscore the almost cartoonish absurdity of the bailouts being granted under the aegis of (sotto voce) "the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression," last week two upstanding statesmen of the porn industry (averted gaze) asked the federal government, tongue in cheek -- pun definitely intended -- for a $5 billion bailout. And why not: the auto industry is getting a cash infusion from Uncle Sam, and Part II of the TARP cash-monies are coming to the rescue of the financial industry soon after Obama takes office.

Can anyone apply, in earnest, for a cash bailout? Bloggers? Earnest 1970s blaxploitation movie "car wash"ers? Troubled turn-of-the-millennium television shows? The possibilities are limited only by the human imagination?

Wow. The past few weeks have brought a flurry of disturbing -- if not entirely shocking -- admissions from the highest-ups in the Bush Administration.

First Dick Cheney admits to being aware of the tactics used against terrorist suspects at Gitmo. Then he calls the initial campaign in Iraq "masterfully done," despite the poverty and internal violence that's ravaged that country since Saddam Hussein's fall.

Now the president himself, George W. Bush, says he not only knew about the torture methods used on the suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalin Sheik Mohommed, but that he sought legal approval to move ahead with them. Such tactics included waterboarding, placing Mohammed in a freezing cell, and forcing him to stand up and position himself in stress poses for hours on-end.

Bush says he believes that the "information gained [from KSM] helped save lives on American soil." Yet, a former intelligence analyst at the Pentagon told Vanity Fair that Mohammed gave them "no actionable information," and a former CIA senior official who studied the report said that "90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t."

My hat goes off to Brit Hume for pressing the president on this issue during an interview on FOX News this past Sunday. It's one of the network's few truly "fair and balanced" moments.

2009 may be a new year, but unfortunately, the hardships people face in today's world still remain. Along with a myriad of other problems, difficult financial times are a hard reality for many people and in America, the continuing surge in foreclosures and evictions remains a visible indicator of our country's hurting economy. And sadly, it is not just homes that people are abandoning but their beloved animal companions as well.

In areas where foreclosures rates are high, local shelters are bursting at the seams and some report a 44 percent increase in surrendered pets compared to 2007. Similar to so many other stories, employees at the SPCA of Erie County, NY tell the heart wrenching tale of a man having to surrender his beloved cat and two dogs, as he now lived in a U-Haul truck with his few remaining possessions. Forced to choose between feeding themselves or their pets, many owners feel the only option they have is to give their animals away - resulting in shelters becoming even more overloaded and overwhelmed than usual with the thousands of family pets who are now just as homeless as the owners themselves.

There are between 4, 000 and 6,000 animal shelters in the U.S., with six to eight million cats and dogs entering them each year; only two to three million ever leave for a new home.

And yet, the animals that make it into a shelter are the lucky ones - they were given a fighting chance for a new beginning. The unlucky ones - who were once viewed as "family members" - have been left locked inside homes and apartments without food or water, tied up and deserted in backyards, or simply let loose to struggle on their own in the winter cold. And these terrible stories are not infrequent, making them all the more painful to hear. Despite what one thinks about shelters, no animal should ever be left behind to slowly starve to death, period. Of course this same sentiment is being echoed nationwide by rescue groups and shelters, and thankfully, many have rallied together to create better options for both the grieving pets and their owners.

Some examples include the creation of animal food banks, temporary housing programs for pets while owners look for pet-friendly rentals, as well as the creation of grants and funding opportunities to assist animal shelters and rescues with their own limited budgets. To learn how you can help save our animals, more detailed information can be found through the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Humane Society of the United States.

Michael Lewis made a name for himself in the mid-1980s by having impeccable judgment in the markets. He was a 24-year-old rookie at Solomon Brothers in 1985, just before the last big Wall Street debacle.

He made a new name for himself just four years later, when he published the now canonized book Liar's Poker, in which he recounted his experience as one of those young men who, despite some early luck, had no idea what he was doing.

"Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud," he writes in "The End," a piece for Portfolio Magazine published last month. "Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money, would be expelled from finance."

Now he looks back on what's become a decades-long problem. In Lewis's view, this isn't so much a second crisis as a continuation of the first one.

Lewis admits that within months of publishing Liar's Poker in 1989, he was getting letters from aspiring Gordon Gekkos who wanted to know if he had any other advice. "They read it as a how-to manual," Lewis writes in Portfolio.

Maybe this article will finally set the record straight, and at least a few of the next crop of financiers won't let the next 20 years look like the last.

[Image: Ji Lee for Portfolio Magazine]

Ready to put the holidays behind us... I like to think of what I'd like to carry into this new year. Of course some memories of happy times with loved ones... and my new cashmere cardigan is lovely... a gift that left a dramatic impression on me was a donation in my name to charity: water. Always grateful to know that money has gone to a worthwhile cause, I am doubly grateful for the opportunity to become more acutely aware of a simple truth: Not everybody has access to water.

I was thrilled to find out that my colleague, Heather, is a huge advocate for charity: water. I had not heard of this organization until I received the previously mentioned gift. I clicked on the PSA at the website: charitywater.org (a very well done, inspiring site I might add) and was dumbstruck by the message: 1 out of 6 people on the planet do not have access to clean safe drinking water. (That's the equivalent of 2.8 of my loved ones at our family's christmas dinner, 5 out of my department at work, and as of now, 21 of the facebook fans of the awearness blog?!)


WATER! It is an arresting thought.


I take a minute to think about water... I drink water all day long... take a nice hot shower in the morning, an occasional luxurious bath. I enjoy the comfort of clean clothes that I wash in water. I cook with water. And all the coffee I drink is made with water!


In the past couple of years, as I try to take on a shade of green, I have become more water aware -- waste not want not! I've shortened my longest showers, I turn the water off when I'm brushing my teeth. Only do full loads of laundry. I did not even water the lawn this past summer (with a nod for the big assist from mother nature!)


But now I hope I will be even more mindful (and appreciative) of the water I use.


And that my sharpened awareness will inspire some creative ways to get behind the cause of getting safe clean drinking water available to everyone.

One of the more tantalizing mini-stories leading up to the inauguration is why wasn't President-elect Barack Obama's family able to stay in the official state guest house, a 70,000-square-foot, 119-room mansion across the street from the White House in the run-up to the festivities, so that his children could acclimate themselves to life in the Washington DC fishbowl as they start at their new school, Sidwell Friends. Media organizations as varied as Sydney Morning Herald and The Times Online to Rachel Maddow's MSNBC talk show have followed the story with rapt attention (as have I), inquiring as to who might be the mystery guest that caused the Obama family to stay in a luxurious suite at the Hay-Adams instead of on the grounds of his future residence. Who could be so important as to bump the next POTUS? The Washington Post has the answer:

"The only overnight visitor at the presidential guest manse is none other than John Howard, a former Australian prime minister and leading member of President Bush's coalition of the willing in Iraq.

"Howard and his entourage will be bunking at Blair House on Jan. 12, the night before he, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe are to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bush, said Sally McDonough, a spokeswoman for first lady Laura Bush. The three current and former heads of state are longtime political allies of Bush, and Blair and Howard were key partners in the U.S.-led war in Iraq."

This news morsel in the run-up to the inauguration is even getting coverage Down Under. Howard, who has run up $257,864 in taxpayer-funded bills for travel and other expenses since leaving office, has announced that he will be picking up his own tab on his trip abroad to the states. Curiously, former Prime Minister Howard and President-elect Obama have tussled once before. Howard, an ally of exiting President Bush, interjected himself into the 2008 election in favor of the Republicans. Last year, the day after Obama announced his candidacy, Howard suggested that Al Qaeda "would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats." Obama, who during the campaign sharply compared Hillary Clinton to Annie Oakley when she corralled him into a corner on gun-conrol, replied to Howard, "I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops in Iraq, and my understanding is Mr. Howard has deployed 1400, so if he is ... to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq. Otherwise it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric."

[Image: Sydney Morning Herald]

Documentary filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei considers the epidemic of nose jobs in contemporary Iran, the world leader in rhinoplasty with an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 operations each year. In a country that discourages personal expression and disdains Western culture, young Iranians eagerly change their noses to model images in European and American fashion magazines. With a light touch, Oskouei listens to patients and surgeons comment on this enigmatic phenomenon.

If you've seen the movie Burn After Reading, which was directed by the Coen brothers, then you've seen how the desire for plastic surgery can severely aggravate one's mental condition. The main character had to triumph over many obstacles and she clumsily sacrificed Brad Pitt's character in order to obtain funds for her aesthetic surgeries. She needed to find the money herself because insurance wouldn't cover the "unnecessary" surgeries.

Yet, I heard that in other countries, such as Brazil, plastic surgery is deemed coverable because different levels of beauty elicit discrimination. Brazilians argue: Why should beauty give someone the upper hand in the workplace or otherwise? Plastic surgery supposedly evens out the beauty playing field.

But I had never heard that Iranians partake in the most plastic surgeries per capita of any one in the world. Find out why by watching Nose, Iranian Style on the Sundance Channel Saturday, Jan. 10 at 6am or Sunday, Jan. 25 at 6:15am.

One of the weaknesses President-elect Obama had coming into the presidential election cycle was that he hadn't gone up against a formidable opponent since his first race against Rep. Bobby Rush. Some thought that the prolonged primary against Hillary Clinton would toughen Obama up. The other point people pondered was how well he would fare under a national spotlight.

During his last vacation before becoming president, Obama ditched his media entourage:

Obama even took the unusual step Friday morning of leaving behind the pool of reporters assigned to follow him, taking his daughters to a nearby water park without them. It was a breach of longstanding protocol between presidents (or presidents-elect) and the media, that a gaggle of reporters representing television, print and wire services is with his motorcade at all times.

Then when reporters finally caught up with Obama at Koko Marina Paradise Deli and he acknowledged them for one of few times since arriving in Hawaii last Saturday, he sounded resigned.

After ordering a tuna melt on 12-grain bread, Obama approached reporters and placed his hand on the shoulder of pool reporter Philip Rucker of The Washington Post, who was scribbling away in his notebook.

"You don't really need to write all that down," Obama said.

Earlier this week, his daughters started their new school and the media complied to his requests for some privacy. Yet we also know when they left the hotel, arrived at school and what they were wearing. An official photo was also released.

Are they celebrities or are they our First Family? Or has those two identities merged? How much of their lives are we entitled to know? The idea that Obama will give up his Blackberry is partly to protect his personal relationships. Is there a line somewhere between our right to know as citizens and the Obama's right to privacy?

[Image: Erica Apana via KGMB-TV]

For months now, we've been hearing about the prospect of a second Great Depression. Some have said it's imminent, while others argue that we learned too much after the last one to let it happen again.

No way will we see former bankers and captains of industry joining the scads of working men and women in lines for soup that snake around the block on grey, wintry mornings. No way will we see bedraggled men in tattered Armani suits standing beside their Bentleys begging for change. No way will the worst happen.

Not so fast, says Paul Krugman, the op-ed columnist for the New York Times. In a lengthy warning published this week, and picked up by AlterNet due to non-subscriber viewing restrictions on the Times's site, Krugman offers a brief history of modern economics and, along the way, endorses President-elect Obama's call for the "swift and bold action" we need to not simply slow the descent into an economic nightmare, but to stop it dead in its tracks.

Krugman points out that the more likely scenario will be that Congress will pass cautious legislation that won't show results until late this year, and by then it won't so much solve the problem as prevent it from getting much worse. Obama's belief, quite simply, is that we need to spend money in order to make money. But this doesn't mean throwing more liquidity to the people who helped create this crisis. Instead, Obama wants to infuse the economy with a stimulus package worth up to $775 billion to improve our nation's infrastructure and provide "huge" tax cuts to businesses and middle-class Americans.

As a New Yorker, I need swift and bold action, as I'm sure many others around the country do as well. In my city, unemployment just surpassed 6 percent, and the state's websites for unemployment benefits have experienced a crush of traffic. The same is true in North Carolina and Ohio, and other states aren't faring much better. As many as 10,000 people are trying to log onto the New York system every hour, causing the site to crash, delaying what's become a truly labyrinthine process to getting enough money to buy food.

Our computer systems have done wonders for us and created boom economies. Now they're complicating our lives and potentially adding to the anxiety and panic so many people are feeling, not just in the US but around the world. Obviously, they're not to blame. But when the going gets even tougher than it is now, I have a bad feeling that blame will become a national pastime. If that happens, and we start taking out our frustration on anything and everything, including the websites that won't let us file for unemployment, we're likely to descend not merely into depression, but into barbarism as well.



Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss. The buzzword this year was change. No, I mean that literally. Change was Time Magazine's Buzzword of The Year, just edging out Bailout and Hockey Mom (Isn't Hockey Mom two words?). Anyway, change was everywhere -- Obama bumper stickers, Obama placards, Obama speeches. And change was on everyone's mind, to be sure. Change is good, we were told. Change is necessary. So we did as the media told us, and we changed. Even if it was change for change's sake, we changed. And now that we have made this monumental, historic change, let's take a moment to ask ourselves, what, or better yet, who did we really change?



A good place to start examining the real and permanent change we have made as a society since back on November 4th, 2008, is the website set up by the Obama-Biden "Transition Team" (every change needs a transition team, after all). It is a site called, appropriately enough, change.gov. Yes, I know, change and government in the same web address makes me cynical too. But what are cynics other than disappointed idealists? So I suspended everything I know both intrinsically and through a lifetime of experience about the human condition, and I logged onto change.gov.



Understand this, change.gov is a website that purports to reach out, to be inclusive, to change the way we see our government and our government sees us, by creating an interactive experience between the two. "Open for questions," it screams on its homepage. It cannot do it without all of us being a part of our own government; partners in our own change. "Your ideas can help change the future of the country." Good enough. This was the perfect place for me to get something off my chest; to share a thought or an opinion, as the site implores me to do; to be a participant in my own change.



So I wrote to my new and improved government and expressed my terrible disappointment in President... I'm sorry, in President-elect Obama's selection of Shaun Donovan as secretary of Housing. Mr. Donovan is an ineffectual, borderline criminal bureaucrat, who ran, without distinction, the New York City Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development for almost five years. In that time, Mr. Donovan, appointed by Bottom-Line Man himself, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, oversaw an agency that systemically overhauled the way it did business by terrorizing poor, middle class and elderly New Yorkers who depended on stabilized housing to survive.


Don't believe me? Ask the former tenants of Stuyvesant Town, Starrett City, or Independence Plaza North. Donovan had his legion of flunky municipal workers pour over old housing paperwork to find errors on tenants' forms. When those errors (which in most, if not all, cases were technicalities on registration intake forms) were discovered, the tenants' subsidies were terminated and they were removed from their homes. This satisfied Bloomberg's relationship with redevelopers and landlords, as it opened these housing units up to fair market prices, and it is essentially why a one bedroom apartment costs $4,000 a month in New York City. It is also why the diverse communities in NYC have been whittled down to a precious few. Housing Preservation? Sounds more like Housing Termination.


So what, then, is Shaun Donovan, but a shill for the Bloomberg-Pataki New Housing Marketplace Plan -- a plan that claims to "preserve" 165,000 units of affordable housing for New Yorkers, but in reality is a redistribution -- no, let's call it what it is, a ghettoizing of tenants -- a removal of them from their homes through underhanded measures, and in some cases a resettling of those tenants in areas that are unfit to live. Ask Mr. Donovan if he would move his family into one of these great new housing units? In the end, Shaun Donovan headed an agency that was complicit with Bloomberg, Pataki and their billionaire crony developers (and political contributors) to remove the poor and middle class from their homes in prime real estate areas of New York to make way for luxury apartment houses. This is Mr. Donovan's most outstanding achievement. Is this the kind of a man who represents "The Change We Need"?



I sent this very clear and impassioned disapproval of Mr. Donovan's selection by change-agent Obama to change.gov. Two days later, I received a response. Yes, my new government, the one that cannot do it without me, wrote me back! It wasn't from Mr. Obama himself, of course, he was in Hawaii on vacation. But rather it was a letter from John Podesta, co-chairman of the Obama-Biden Transition Team, and another Clinton administration retread (he was Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998-2001). Apropos of nothing, Mr. Podesta's lengthy response was an eloquent and cordial invitation for me to start up my own community level meetings to discuss... health care. Health care?! Surely a valuable topic, but my letter to them was about their housing appointment. My new government that needs me, wants me and cannot do it without me and my ideas... sent me a stock letter? I mean, how many letters could they have possibly received about the appointment of their housing secretary, for God's sake? Could they not have taken even one minute to respond specifically? And now I get a new stock letter every two weeks from Mr. Podesta. But I have yet to receive one regarding housing, the housing secretary appointment, or any other housing issue.



Here is the real litmus test for change in the coming weeks and months ahead: Are we still importing oil from countries that hate us? Are we still printing money to rescue failed businesses while ordinary Americans are losing their homes and jobs? Is America still sitting idly by while Israelis and Palestinians kill each other over a sandlot? Have we been attacked again at home? Are our young people still dying six thousand miles away in a senseless war? And is our government still giving us stock answers to the most important questions facing our nation?



There is a relatively 'new' gum on the market, called "5". It is in the fanciest packaging and is supported by the slickest marketing ads and commercials you've ever seen. Do you know what 5 gum really is? It's the same old Wrigley's chewing gum we used to chew when we were kids. Don't believe me? Taste it. Then turn it over and read the fine print on the label, it says Wrigley's Chewing Gum Company. Same sugary-sweet junk, different package.

[Image: Brand Curve]

During recent conversations, several people have mentioned Kiva.org to me; naturally, I went home and checked it out to see what exactly all the buzz was about. What I discovered is unlike anything I have ever heard of before. Essentially, Kiva lets you lend funds to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty.

Read the details of"how Kiva works - then come back here and let us know what you think about the organization. If you have any stories about using the site, let us know how it went.

While on assignment to shoot the 21st Annual Christmas Toys in the Sun Motorcycle Run for the Sun Sentinel, a South Florida daily newspaper, I spent the entire day photographing all aspects of the motorcycle subculture. In the middle of shooting portraits of the bikers on this overcast day, I came across what would lead to be my best photograph from the take. It was United States Air Force Captain Stephen M. Chomiak, a member of the Vietnam Veterans of America, Chapter 23, who inspired this photograph. For the past nine years, Captain Chomiak has set up his replica of the Vietnam Memorial Wall at Markham Park in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as a part of the annual Toys in the Sun Motorcycle Run. About 35,000 motorcycles ride from Pompano Harness track to Markham Park for the event every year, and this year, over 60,000 toys in addition to approximately $500,000 were brought in to donate to charity for the holidays. Seeing it through the lens of my camera made the event much more meaningful, seeing as how I have participated in the event with my father in years past.

The overall unemployment rate reached 6.7 percent in November and the new numbers are expected to be worse when reported in early January.

To combat this growing problem, the Obama administration has repeatedly talked about their plan to create or save 1-3 million jobs through an investment in infrastructure:

The Obama-Biden emergency plan would make $25 billion immediately available in a Jobs and Growth Fund to help ensure that in-progress and fast-tracked infrastructure projects are not sidelined, and to ensure that schools can meet their energy costs and undertake key repairs starting this fall. This increased investment is necessary to stem growing budget pressures on infrastructure projects.

The 2007 bridge collapse in Minnesota and the recent water main break in Maryland are examples of how needed this plan is for our everyday safety. Yet when one thinks about who is building the roads, schools and bridges, it's men. For Linda Hirshman and others, that's a problem:

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force...

Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure -- human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers' assistants).

Critics of Hirshman's stance note that men's unemployment rate is higher than women's and that it is traditionally male jobs that are disappearing from the landscape (construction and Wall Street), so why not have the Obama plan target men?

Well, why don't we work harder to train women to get into trade work? Chicago Women in Trades reports that "[i]n 2002, the median weekly earnings for traditional female occupations such as child care workers and food preparation workers ranged between $251 and $309. The median weekly wage for male-dominated occupations such as precision production, craft and repair occupations was $645." Thus while women might be keeping their job more, they are suffering from working in low-wage work. This isn't just a women's issue because as more and more men find themselves out of work, it is their wives who will need to return to the workforce or increase their work hours. If Dad works in construction, but Mom has a degree in social work, the money won't come out comparable. We need to get women access to high-paying jobs such as construction and plumbing.

We do need a plan to address the loss of teachers, social workers, and the closing of libraries. But we also need a plan to repair everything that we've been ignoring for years. The Obama administration has inherited a whole mess of things that need fixing and if they can get even half of it done, his administration might be deemed a success.

[Image: Kevin Rofidal, United States Coast Guard]

Creative capitalism is on the rise. This economic crisis is conjuring up some unlikely scenarios of heroic behavior from a strange cast of characters. What happens, for example, when artists use their cachet to help the business community (that formula is usually the other way round)? Pixie-ish Icelandic singer Björk has started a venture fund looking to invest in small Icelandic companies with the aim of helping the recovery of her home country's beleaguered economy.

Economists predict that this is only, unfortunately, the first bite of the upcoming economic frost that Iceland will face in 2009. After five years of economic expansion, the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market hit the Arctic country of just over 300,000 hard in October. The Icelandic kronur and the country's stock market plunged in value on billions of dollars of foreign debt. "Iceland right now is like Chernobyl after the blast," Thorhallur Vilhjalmsson, the PR manager for the Icelandic National Concert and Conference Centre told Bloomberg. "It looks normal, but there's radiation." With inflation rising to 18.1 percent this month, the IMF, which predicts that Iceland's economy will contract 9.6 percent in 2009, has put together a rescue package. Because we are now, whether we like it or not, a global village, lenders in the Netherlands, Austria, Britain, Germany and France have all reported losses on their exposure to Icelandic banks.

Björk is partnering with Audur Capital, an investment company founded and run by women, based in Reykjavik. Audur Capital has put down 100 million Iceland kronur (USD $826,000) in initial investments toward sustainable, eco-friendly businesses. What is this Björk Fund's investment strategy? According to the Andur Capital Private Equity page, "companies must be sustainable, both in terms of financial returns as well as being socially and environmentally responsible. Björk is particularly interested in companies that exploit our well educated human capital and vibrant culture, new knowledge, new technology or a new approach to business." More about the investment process here.

[Image: WinnieCooper.net]

Happy New Year from Kenneth Cole Productions!