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|By Dana Gardner
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|February 3, 2010 02:00 PM EST
The latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 50, focuses on the fallout from the Google's threat to pull out of China, due to a series of sophisticated hacks and attacks on Google, as well as a dozen more IT companies. Due to the attacks late last year, Google on Jan. 12 vowed to stop censoring Internet content for China's web users and possibly to leave the country altogether.
This ongoing tiff between Google and the Internet control authorities in China's Communist Party-dominated government have uncorked a Pandora's Box of security, free speech and corporate espionage issues. There are human rights issues and free speech issues, questions on China's actual role, trade and fairness issues, and the point about Google's policy of initially enabling Internet censorship and now apparently backtracking.
But there are also larger issues around security and Internet governance in general. Those are the issues we'll be focusing on today. So, even as the U.S. State Department and others in the U.S. federal government seek answers on China's purported role or complicity in the attacks, the repercussions on cloud computing and enterprise security are profound and may be long-term.
We're going to look at some of the answers to what this donnybrook means for how enterprises should best protect their intellectual property from such sophisticated hackers as government, military or, quasi-government corporate entities and whether cloud services providers like Google are better than your average enterprise, or especially medium-sized business, at thwarting such risks.
We'll look at how users of cloud computing should trust or not trust providers of such mission-critical cloud services as email, calendar, word processing, document storage, databases, and applications hosting. And, we'll look at how enterprise architecture, governance, security best practices, standards, and skills need to adapt still to meet these new requirements from insidious world-class threats.
This periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events with a panel of industry analysts and guests, comes to you with the help of our charter sponsor Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS business process management system.
So, join me now in welcoming our panel for today's discussion: Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink; Jim Hietala, Vice President for Security at The Open Group; Elinor Mills, senior writer at CNET, and Michael Dortch, Director of Research at Focus. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Here are some excerpts:
Mills: We now have a huge first public example of a company coming out and saying, not only that they've been attacked -- companies don't want to admit that ever and it's all under the radar -- but also they're pointing the fingers. Even though they're not specifically saying, "We think it's the Chinese state," but they think enough of it that they're willing to threaten to pull out of the country.
It's huge and it's going to have every company reevaluating what their response is going to be -- not just how they're going to do business in other countries, but what is their response going to be to a major attack.
Bloomberg: It's not as big of a wakeup call as it should be. You can ask yourself, "Is this an attack by some small cadre of renegade hackers or is this attack by the government of the People's Republic of China? That's an open question at this point.
Who is the victim? Is it Google, a corporation, or the United States? Is it the western world that is the victim here? Is this a harbinger of the way that international wars are going to be fought down the road?
We've all been worried about cyber warfare coming, but we maybe don't recognize it when we see it as a new battlefield. It's the same as terrorism. It's not necessarily clear who the participants are.
When you place the enterprise into this context, well, it's not necessarily just that you have a business within the context of a government subject to particular laws of particular government, you have the supernational, where large corporations have to play in multiple jurisdictions. That's already a governance challenge for these large enterprises.
We already have this awareness that every single system on our network has to look out for itself and, even then, has levels of vulnerability.
Now, we have the introduction of cyber warfare, where we have concerted professional attacks from unknown parties attacking unknown targets and where it's not clear who the players are. Anybody, whether it's a private company, a public company, or a government organization is potentially involved.
That basically raises the bar for security throughout the entire organization. We've seen this already, where perimeter-based security has fallen by the wayside as being insufficient. We already have this awareness that every single system on our network has to look out for itself and, even then, has levels of vulnerability. This just takes it to the national level.
Kobielus: I don't see anything radically or fundamentally new going on here. This is just a big, powerful, and growing world power, China, and a big and growing world power on a tech front Google, colliding. ... There has always been corporate espionage and there's always been vandalism perpetrated by companies against each other through subterfuge, and also by companies or fronts operating as the agent of unseen foreign power. ... This is international real-politic as usual, but in a different technological realm.
Hietala: In terms of the visibility it's gotten and the kinds of companies that were attacked, it's a little bit game-changing. From the information security community perspective, these sorts of attacks have been going on for quite a while, aimed at defense contractors, and are now aimed at commercial enterprises and providers of cloud services.
I don't think that the attacks per se are game-changing. There's not a lot new here. It's an attack against a browser that was couple of revs old and had vulnerability. The way in which the company was attacked isn't necessarily game-changing, but the political ramifications around it and the other things we've just been talking about are what make it a little game-changing.
Dortch: This puts Google in the very interesting position of having to decide. Is it a politically neutral corporation or is it a protector of the data that its clients around the world, not just here, and not just from governments but corporations? Is it a protector and an advocate of protection for the data that those clients have been trusted to it? Or, is it going to use the fact that it is a broker of all that data to sort of throw its muscle around and take on governments like China's in debates like this.
The implications here are bigger than even what we've been discussing so far, because they get at the very nature of what a corporation is in this brave new network world of ours.
Gardner: This boils down to almost two giant systems or schools of thought that are now colliding at a new point. They've collided at different points in the past on physical sovereignty, military sovereignty, and economic sovereignty. The competition is between what we might call free enterprise based systems and state sponsorship through centralized control systems.
Free enterprise won, when it came to the cold war, but it's hard to say what's going to happen in the economic environment where China is a little different beast. It's state sponsored and it's also taking advantage of free enterprise, but it's very choosy about what it allows for either one of those systems to do or to dominate.
When you look at the Google, Google made itself into a figurehead of representing what a free enterprise approach could do. It's not state sponsored or nationalistic. It's corporate sponsored. So, it would be interesting to see who has the better technology, who has the better financial resources, and ultimately who has the organizational wherewithal to manifest their goals online that wins out in the marketplace.
If an organized effort is better at doing this than a corporate one, well then they might dominate. But so far, we've seen a very complex system that the marketplace -- with choice, and shedding light and transparency on activities -- ultimately allows for free enterprise predominance. They can do it better, faster, cheaper and that it will ultimately win.
I think, we're really on the cusp here of a new level of competition, but not between countries or even alliances, but really between systems. The free enterprise system versus the state-sponsored or the centralized or the controlled system. It should be very interesting.
Bloomberg: ... If anything, cloud environments reduce the level of security.
They don't increase it for the very reason that we don't have a way of making them sovereign in their own right. They're always not only subject to the laws of the local jurisdiction, but they're subject to any number of different attacks that could be coming from any different location, where now the customers aren't aware of this sort of vulnerability.
So, "Trust, but verify," is a good point, but how can you verify, if you're relying on a third party to protect your data for you? It becomes much more difficult to do the verification. I'd say that organizations are going to be backing away from cloud, once they realize just how risky cloud environments are.
Mills: Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith recently gave a keynote at the Brookings Institute Forum, and he talked about modernizing and updating the laws to adapt specifically to the cloud. That included privacy rights under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act being more clearly defined, updating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and setting up a framework so that differences in the regulations and practices in various countries can be worked out and reconciled.
Hietala: I don't think there is a silver-bullet cloud provider out there that has superior security to have that position. All enterprises still are going to have to be at the top of their game, in terms of protecting their assets, and that extends to small or medium businesses.
At some point, you could see a cloud provider stake out that part of the market to say, "We're going to put in a superior set of controls and manage security to a higher degree than a typical small-to-medium business could," but I don't see that out there today.
Dortch: Many small businesses outsource payroll processing, customer relationship management (CRM), and a whole bunch of things. A lot of that stuff is outsourced to cloud service providers, and companies haven't asked enough questions yet about exactly how cloud providers are protecting data and exactly how they can reassure that nothing bad is going to happen to it.
For example, if their servers come under attack, can they demonstrate credibly how data is going to be protected. These are the types of questions that incidents like this can and should raise in the minds of decision-makers at small and mid-sized businesses, just as they're starting to raise these issues, and have been raising them for a while, among decision-makers at larger enterprise.
Kobielus: I think what will happen is that some cloud providers will increasingly be seen as safe havens for your data and for your applications, because (A) they have the strong security, and (B) they are hosted within, and governed by, the laws of nation states that rigorously and faithfully try to protect this information, and assure that the information can then be removed -- transferred out of that country fluidly by the owners, without loss.
How about governments in general, maybe it's the United Nations who steps in? Who is the ultimate governor of what happens in cyber space?
In other words, it's like the Cayman Islands of the cloud -- that offshore banking safe haven you can turn to for all this. Clearly, it's not going to be China.
... In terms of who has responsibility and how will governance best practices be spread uniformly across the world in such areas of IT protection, it's going to be some combination of multilateral, bilateral, and unilateral action. For multilateral, the UN points to that, but there are also regional organizations. In Southeast Asia there is ASEAN, and in the Atlantic there is NATO, and so forth.
Bloomberg: Who decides what is enough? We have these opposing forces. One is that information should be free, and the Internet should be available to everybody. That basically pushes for removing barriers to information flow.
Then you have the security concerns that are driving putting up barriers to information flow, and there is always going to be conflict between those two forces. As increasingly sophisticated attacks develop, that pushes the public consensus toward increasing security.
That will impact our ability to have freedom, and that's going to be, continue to be a battle that I don't see anybody winning. It's' really just going to be an ongoing battle as technology improves and as the bad guys attacks improve. It's going to be an ongoing battle between security and freedom and between the good guys and the bad guys, as it were, and that's never going to change.
Hietala: Large enterprises are going to have to be responsible for the security of their information. I think there are a lot of takeaways for enterprises from this attack. If you're talking about specific individuals, it's almost hopeless, because your average individual consumer doesn't have the level of knowledge to go out and find the right solutions to protect themselves today.
So, I'll focus on the large enterprises. They have to do a good job of asset inventory, know where, within their identity infrastructure, they're vulnerable to this specific attack, and then be pretty agile about implementing countermeasures to prevent it. They have to have patch management that's adequate to the task of getting patches out quickly.
They need to do things like looking at the traffic leaving their network to see if people are already in their infrastructure. These Trojans leave traces of themselves, when they ship information out of an organization. When people really understand what happened in this attack, they can take something away, go back, look at what they are doing from a security standpoint, and tighten things up.
If you're talking about individuals putting things in the cloud, that's a different discussion that doesn't seem real feasible to me to get them to the point where they can secure their information today.
Kobielus: I don't think Google is going to leave China. I think they are going to stay in China and somehow try to work it out with the PRC. I don't know where that's going, but fundamentally Google is a business and has a "don't do evil" philosophy. They're going to continue to qualify evil down to those things that don't actually align with their business interest.
In other words, they're going to stay. There's going to be a lot of wariness now to entrust Google's China operation with a whole lot of your IT -- "you" as a corporation -- and your data. There will be that wariness.
Preferred platforms
Other cloud providers will be setting up shop or hosting in other nations that are more respectful of IP, other nations that may not be launching corporate or governmental espionage at US headquartered properties in China. Those nations will become the preferred supernational cloud hosting platforms for the world.
I can't really say who those nations might be, but you know what, Switzerland always sort of stands out. They're still neutral after all these years. You've got to hand that to them. I trust them.
Bloomberg: In the short-term, the noise is going to die down or going to go back to business as usual. The security is going to need to improve, but so are hacks from the bad guys. It's going to continue, until there is the next big attack. And the question is, "What's it going to be and how big is it going to be?"
We're still waiting for that game changer. I don't think this is a game changer. It's just a way to skirmish. But, if a hacker is able to bring down the internet, for example, targeting the DNS infrastructure to the point that the entire thing collapses, that's something that could wake people up to say, "We really have to get a handle on this and come up with a better approach."
Hietala: From our perspective [at The Open Group], we're starting to see more awareness at higher levels in governments that the threats and issues here are real. They're here today. They seem to be state sponsored, and they're something that needs to be paid attention to.
Secretary of State Clinton recently gave a speech where she talked specifically about this attack, but also talked about the need for nations to band together to address the problem. I don't know what that looks like at this point, but I think that the fact that people at that level are talking about the problem is good for the industry and good for the outlook for solutions that are important in the future.
Mills: I think Google is going to get out of China and try and lead some kind of U.S. corporate effort or be a role model to try to do business in a more ethical way, without having to compromise and censor.
There will be a divergence that you'll see. China and other countries may be pushed more towards limiting and creating their own sort of channel that's government filtered. I think the battle is just going to get bigger. We're going to have more fights on this front, but I think that Google may lead the way.
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Posted by Dale Buss on February 22, 2012 11:14 AM
Tesco, the UK-based mega-retailer, is making headlines for actions that relate to its corporate citizenship stance.
For a start, the brand has decided to ditch its participation in an "eco-labeling" scheme which was aimed to calculate the carbon footprint of each product slapped with a "carbon-reduction" label provided by Carbon Trust. Despite disappointing eco-activists, Tesco said that it was too expensive and time-consuming to analyze each product's purported impact on carbon-dioxide emissions and was disappointed that other retailers hadn't followed its pioneering role in the program, which started in 2006 when the brand promised to start a "revolution in green consumption" and become carbon-neutral by 2050.
Not to be discouraged from do-gooding, Tesco has set up a not-for-profit organization to raise money for women's health charities in the UK that will be funded by sales of its new feminine-care line of products under its Halo private label. The "venture brand's" cheeky marketing campaign includes the tagline, "Halo protects women. No ifs. No butts." The campaign website includes a cheeky (pun intended) invitation to women to "show us your knickers." Feminists, start your (blog) engines!
It's also been in the news for its efforts to help get Britain's legions of unemployed youth working, with one online job posting leading to a firestorm in the British press.Continue reading...
More about: Tesco, Retail, UK, Corporate Citizenship, Green, Sustainability, Halo, Private Labels, Women, Careers, HR, CSR
Posted by Abe Sauer on January 20, 2011 11:30 PM
There may be a shortage of employment, but one lucky job seeker has the chance to assume a prestigious position in public relations for…. BP. That's right, BP is hiring a Director, Media and Communications in Florida. Essential qualifications: "Can align to disciplined messaging." No kidding. So if you don't mind being despised by everyone you meet (but hey, healthcare!), the full job description is after the jump. Plus, a bit of advice before applying.Continue reading...
More about: BP, Careers
Global Marketing & PR ManagerNew York
Senior Consultant, Brand StrategyLondon
Senior Account ManagerToronto
Associate Consultant, Verbal IdentityNew York
Freelance Trademark AnalystNew York
view all jobs...
Airlines, Alcohol, Automotive, Beauty, Beverages, Branded Entertainment, Design, Corporate Citizenship, Entertainment, Fashion, Finance, Food, Healthcare, Luxury, Media, Mobile, Non-Profit, Pharma, Product Placement, Retail, Sports, Sustainability, Tech
editorial contact:email@example.com
partnerships contact:email@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


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The Annual Weight Management Symposium will be held in beautiful Portland, Oregon this April.
Author Archives: Liz Vestal
Decision Reached for the Nutrition and Dietetics Associate
You can find more updated information about this new designation in President Sonja Conner's letter.
Join Us for Our First Bariatric Subunit Tele-Forum
Interested in participating in an interactive telephone forum with a bariatric expert? Join the conversation on July 24th.
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May 6, 2015 | 2 Night Minimum
The Outer Banks Visitors Bureau has created "Soundside Live" to celebrate National Tourism Week by bringing a fabulous soundside concert to Nags Head on May 7, 2015. It will feature nationally touring artists Greensky Bluegrass and Roadkill Ghost Choir on stage as well as great local food and beverages right on the sound's edge at the Outer Banks Event Site. To celebrate this event, we are offering a 2 night package starting May 6, 2015 featuring the following:
- 2 Nights of Accommodations (May 6 & May 7, 2015)
- Noon Check Out
- 2 Tickets to the Event (May 7 from 4:00-8:00 pm)
- Outer Banks Bag
Package prices for 2 people start at $195 for a streetside room with 2 double beds and packages are available for up to 4 persons; other room types are also available–please call us at (252) 441-7211 for more information. Our hot, complimentary expanded continental breakfast is included as well as afternoon refreshments. You may view our property here. Additional concert tickets may be bought on-site and please note that concert refreshments are bought separately on-site.
We will require half of the total amount due upon making your reservation and you would have 72 hours prior to arrival to cancel without penalty; reservations must be made at least 3 days in advance. Please call (252) 441-7211 and mention this package to reserve your stay.


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Book your room at Mercure Belo Horizonte Vila Da Serra Hotel
Standard Twin Room, 2 Single BedsMax Occupancy: 3 guests (up to 1 child)
Superior Room, 1 Queen Bed with SofabedMax Occupancy: 3 guests (up to 1 child)
Superior Twin Room, 2 Single BedsMax Occupancy: 2 guests (up to 1 child)
Superior Apartment, 1 Double BedMax Occupancy: 2 guests (up to 1 child)
Standard Apartment, 1 Double BedMax Occupancy: 2 guests (up to 1 child)
Family-friendly Nova Lima aparthotel with an outdoor pool
This family-friendly aparthotel is located in Nova Lima, close to BH Shopping, Alta Vila Tower, and Serra do Curral Park. Local attractions also include Pope's Square and Madre Teresa Hospital.
Property Features
In addition to a restaurant, Mercure Belo Horizonte Vila Da Serra Hotel features an outdoor pool. Other amenities include a bar/lounge and a coffee shop/café.
Room Amenities
LCD televisions come with cable channels. Guestrooms also feature kitchens, complimentary wireless Internet access, and sofa beds.Information missing or incorrect? Tell us!
Hotel Amenities
Hotel Amenities
In addition to an outdoor pool, Mercure Belo Horizonte Vila Da Serra Hotel provides a health club and a sauna. The aparthotel offers a restaurant and a coffee shop/café. A bar/lounge is on site where guests can unwind with a drink. Public areas are equipped with complimentary high-speed wireless Internet access.
A 24-hour business center is on site at this 3.5-star property. Event facilities measure 1442 square feet (134 square meters). This family-friendly aparthotel also offers multilingual staff, complimentary newspapers in the lobby, and laundry facilities. Onsite parking is available (surcharge).
- Outdoor pool
- Sauna
- Restaurant
- Coffee shop or café
- Multilingual staff
- Total number of rooms - 119
- 24-hour front desk
- Number of floors - 11
- Bar/lounge
- Free newspapers in lobby
- Health club
- Laundry facilities
- Luggage storage
- Valet parking (surcharge)
- Year Built 2001
- 24-hour business center
- Conference space size (feet) - 1442
- Pool sun loungers
- Conference space size (meters) - 134
- Number of meeting rooms - 7
- Number of buildings/towers - 1
- Breakfast available (surcharge)
- Free WiFi
Available in all rooms: Free WiFi
Available in some public areas: Free WiFi
Valet parking (surcharge)
Room Amenities
- Pay movies
- Separate sitting area
- Air conditioning
- Climate control
- Phone
- Minibar
- Coffee/tea maker
- Kitchen
- Microwave
- Daily housekeeping
- Private bathroom
- Hair dryer
- Shower only
- Iron/ironing board
- In-room safe
- Desk
- Sofa bed
- Cribs/infant beds available
- Cable TV service
- Free WiFi
- Cookware, dishware, and utensils
- Blackout drapes/curtains
- Stovetop
- Room service (limited hours)
- Sofa bed size
Where to Eat
Buffet breakfasts are available for a surcharge and are served each morning between 6 AM and 10 AM.
Monte Belo - This buffet restaurant serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Guests can enjoy drinks at the bar.
Room service (during limited hours) is available.
Nearby Things to Do
Recreational amenities at the aparthotel include an outdoor pool, a health club, and a sauna.
To make requests for specific accessibility needs, complete the "Special or Accessibility Requests" section of "Trip Preferences" when you book your hotel.
- Accessible bathroom
- Accessible path of travel
- In-room accessibility
Hotel Policies
Minimum check-in age is 18
Check-in time starts at noon
Check-out time is noon
Payment types
You need to know
Extra-person charges may apply and vary depending on hotel policy.
Government-issued photo identification and a credit card or cash deposit are required at check-in for incidental charges.
Special requests are subject to availability upon check-in and may incur additional charges. Special requests cannot be guaranteed.
- Tourism fee: BRL 4 per accommodation, per night
- Resort fee
- Fee for buffet breakfast: BRL 20 per person (approximately)
- Valet parking fee: BRL 11 per day
We should mention
Parents traveling with a child under 18 must present the child's birth certificate and photo ID (passport for foreign visitors) upon check-in. If only one parent or legal guardian is traveling with the child, that parent or legal guardian must also present a notarized consent of travel signed by both parents. Visitors who plan to travel with children should consult with a Brazilian consulate office prior to travel for further guidance. A resort fee is included in the total price displayed. Children 11 years old and younger stay free when occupying the parent or guardian's room, using existing bedding. Only registered guests are allowed in the guestrooms.


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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's new computer adaptive testing system is set to generate as much as $5.4 million for the state through a licensing agreement with Florida approved Friday by the State Board of Education.
The test, commonly referred to as SAGE testing, is currently being used in schools for the first time and was developed specifically for Utah to align with the Common Core State Standards, a series of national academic benchmarks adopted voluntarily by all but six states.
But Florida officials have requested the use of Utah's test materials for one year while educators there continue work on their own state-specific assessment.
"Florida is developing their own assessment so this is just to get them started," Associate State Superintendent Judy Park said.
The board also gave approval to the State Office of Education to pursue similar licensing agreements in the future.
Park said funds from the licensing agreement will be used primarily to generate additional test materials and expand the bank of questions in Utah's SAGE system.
Some test materials will also need to be replaced, Park said, due to intentional release for practice materials or in the event that a question is compromised, such as a recent incident where a Utah student took photos of a testing screen and posted the images to anti-Common Core websites.
Park said the material shared by the student will have to be eliminated from SAGE testing and the cost of replacing a single test question, she said, is between $5,000 and $10,000.
More than 11,000 individual questions have been developed for SAGE. Park said that while officials have not yet determined a target number for assessment materials, the state will need to develop "a whole lot more" questions for the testing system.
"With a larger bank (of questions), that means that if a question is compromised you already have other items to fill in the hole," she said.
Utah's SAGE testing has generated vocal criticism largely due to its perceived connection to the Common Core, which is seen by some as a federal takeover of education despite being developed by a consortium of state leaders.
The test has also generated angst due to its unfamiliar 21st-century format, which requires computers in place of a paper and pencil and which adjusts in difficulty based on correct and incorrect answers, resulting in a unique set of questions for each individual student.
Those concerns have led to an increase in the number of parents refusing to let their students participate in year-end testing. The State School Board recently revised its policy on test participation, allowing parents to opt-out their students from SAGE testing without penalizing a school or teachers under state accountability systems, such as school grading.
Federal accountability reports continue to require that 95 percent of a student body be tested each year in core subjects, meaning that students who opt-out could potentially hurt Utah's performance when compared with other states.
Park said the amount of money Utah receives from Florida will depend on the total number of items licensed and students who participate in the testing. At this point no other states have expressed interest in licensing Utah's test questions.
She also said that education officials are pleased with the first wave of adaptive testing.
"We're very pleased with this initial roll-out," Park said. "It's gone much smoother and much better than we anticipated."
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Asset allocation? Think asset location
Annuities can be very valuable
Join the NASDAQ Community today and get free, instant access to portfolios, stock ratings, real-time alerts, and more!
On Aug 9, 2013, Zacks Investment Research upgraded
MWI Veterinary Supply Inc.
) - a leading distributor of animal health products to
veterinarians - to a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). The upgrade came on the
back of MWI Vet's consistently better-than-expected quarterly
results in the recent past.
Why the Upgrade?
MWI Vet witnessed rising earnings estimates on the back of
excellent third-quarter fiscal 2013 results. The earnings beat in
the third quarter represented the seventh successive quarterly
earnings beat.
This Meridian, Ida.-based company delivered positive earnings
surprises in all of the last four quarters with an average beat
of 5.29%. The long-term expected earnings growth rate for this
stock also stands at an impressive 14.8%. Despite the drought
conditions in the U.S. production animal market, the company's
revenues have consistently moved north over the last few
In addition, MWI Vet has been trying to focus on value-added
services, including the e-commerce platform and pharmacy
fulfillment programs for both production and companion animal
products.The company's organic growth in the U.S. was driven by
its prompt customer service, rapid adoption of the e-commerce
platform by veterinarians and strong performance of the sales
force. We believe that these key strategies hold immense
potential for the company's future growth.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2013 has increased by 1.2% to
$4.93 per share, as all the estimates were revised higher over
the last 30 days.
Stocks to Consider
Other medical devices companies that are expected to
outperform in the near term are
Cyberonics Inc.
Thoratec Corp.
) and
Alere Inc.
). All three stocks carry a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).
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American Craft Beer Fest returns to Boston on May 29 & 30, featuring 640+ beers from 140+ brewers. Tickets are on sale now.
Cēsu Alus Darîtava
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Have one? Upload it now.
What are Archived Beers?
- Retired (no longer brewed).
- Limited (brewed once) and past the availability threshold.
- Inactive beers that haven't been reviewed in ages.
- Entered ages ago, but never reviewed.
Cēsu Alus Darîtava in Cesis, Latvia
- out of 100 based on 0 ratings.


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Reach tens of thousands of people instantly by advertising with Ekklesia. Find out more
The BBC and ITV, two of the three 'big broadcasters' in the UK, have issued a joint statement regarding Northern Ireland parties.
The government has been asked by a cross-party group of MPs.
to commission fresh research into why people use food banks.
A question for every one of us: how particular are you about truth and accuracy if a statement gives you an advantage or feeds your confirmation bias? Over the next 98 days, we are going to see and hear a lot of information which will either do this, or will make us fume and curse its falsity.
Though the recent cross-party attempt to gain a House of Commons vote against the £100 billion renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system was defeated by the Conservative-led Government, with support from a number of Labour MPs, important points were put on the record about the humanitarian and environmental impact of these WMDs.
A leading advice agency in Scotland has expressed disappointment at the failure of proposed devolved powers to Scotland on welfare.
Cutting benefits for the least well-off doesn't help people move into work – evidence shows it just makes them poorer, says Helen Barnard, programme manager at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Tougher tax legislation could bring in billions of extra revenue to fight poverty, says charities and church organisations across Britain.
Secret plans considering relocating Trident to Wales have been described as "logistically untenable" and a "slap in the face" for the people of Wales.


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Another "Raising Canes" clip has dropped and this one is centered around true freshman quarterback Brad Kaaya, leading up to his first career game at Louisville on Labor Day.
Kaaya, who arrived in Coral Gables last May, was off-limits to reporters the week of the early September showdown and has been relatively quiet the past few weekends as Miami knocked off…
The Miami Hurricanes knocked off Arkansas State at home on Saturday, 41-20 in precisely the type of game "The U" needed with the Nebraska Cornhuskers on deck.
After a season-opening loss at Louisville and a sloppy, albeit convincing win against Florida A&M, the Hurricanes held the upset-minded Red Wolves in control in a game that was seemingly over by the second…
Another set of struggles by a Miami Hurricanes coach equates to another boneheaded move by a frustrated fan base. Just another day in Coral Gables.
In this latest edition of the inmates attempting to run the asylum, UM enthusiast Danny Vazquez is choosing modern technology for a relic of an idea that will not only fall on deaf ears, but will bring…
Former 4-star safety Kiy Hester is leaving the Miami Hurricanes, taking his talents back to the Garden State. Hester is expected to transfer to Rutgers, so he can be closer to his ailing mother.
"My mom, she is sick an stuff and she's gotta ge surgery," Hester told NJ.com last week. "And I wanted to be there for her, to support her."
The Miami Hurricanes won their home opener on Saturday, taking out the Florida A&M Rattlers—an in-state FBS opponent who has played the role of punching bag for many top-flight teams over the years.
Miami and Florida A&M have traded blows over the years—with a little more meaning than when the Rattlers take on out-of-state powers, due to rivalries that date back…
Listen LIVE every Thursday from
7-9pm ET at allCanes.com or stream live through the allCanes iPhone app allCanes Radio will again be broadcasting live from Titanic Restaurant & Brewery, next door to allCanes.
Miss a show? Check out the
program archive online."
5831 Ponce de Leon Boulevard
Coral Gables, FL -33146
Monday-Friday: 10am - 7pm
Saturday: 10am - 6pm
Sunday:11am - 5pm


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Albelda ambivalent on future
Sat, 25 May 2013 13:02:00
Long-serving Valencia midfielder David Albelda admits the game against Granada could be his last at the Mestalla, but has refused to rule out the prospect of extending his stay at Los Che.
The 35-year-old made his Valencia debut back in 1996 and - save for two seasons on loan at Villarreal - has spent his entire career at the Mediterranean club.
He has previously indicated he would seek an new challenge at the end of the season, while uncertainty over who will coach the team next term - Ernesto Valverde has still not signed a new contract - had seemingly done little to convince the veteran to stay.
Yet Albelda told reporters this week that his plans remain up in the air.
"This could be my last home game but it may not be," he said.
"On a personal level I have to make my the hardest decision of my career: either opt for a change of scenery, retire, or see what offers the new board make me.
"At the end of the day this club, and our aim to get into the Champions League, must come first.
"We'll see what happens when we know who the coach is going to be, but I do not want to be a burden."
Valencia are in a fierce scrap with Real Sociedad to secure the fourth and final Champions League berth, with the sides locked on 62 points with two games remaining.
Three points are the least that is required from tomorrow's home with Granada, who with a five-point cushion to the bottom three are not yet safe from the drop.
Granada defender Pape Diakhate says his team will not let their performance levels drop in their final two games, even though it would take a hugely unfortunate turn of events to see them dragged into the mire.
"We still haven't achieved survival, we have two games left, and one of them will be very difficult," said Diakhate.
"We are professionals, we're not safe yet and we have to keep working as we have been, we still need to pick up points to survive."
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SOCCER Headlines
Sevilla midfielder Rakitic plays down rumor of summer move
Iniesta hopes team-mate Puyol will stay at Camp Nou
Cerezo: Costa won't be leaving Atletico Madrid this summer
Big fine! Barcelona pays $18.6M in tax over Neymar transfer
Villarreal fights off Espanyol to claim important win
Atletico suffers setback in shutout loss to Osasuna
Barcelona to miss Pique for two weeks with torn muscle
Sevilla end dismal run on the road at Rayo Vallecano
Real Sociedad pulls upset to deal major blow to Barca
Real Madrid jumps to first place with win | Bale golazo


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Seeds and mulching
I am planning on mulching my garden this year with pine straw.....have never done this before. Do I plant the seeds and then mulch over them? (will they grow through the mulch?) or do I wait to mulch until the plants are coming up and big enough to tell what they are?
IF your soil temps are high enough for germination and growth - you don't want to mulch until it is - you can mulch the whole thing, then pull the mulch 2-3" back from the rows where you will put the seeds, plant the seeds. Once the seedlings are 2-3" tall, slowly replace the mulch up to the sides of the row of plants.
Pine straw is a good mulch - we use it sometimes too - but it is acidic and it does take more time than other mulches to decompose so be sure to keep it away from direct contact with the stems of the plants so it won't bind up any nitrogen that they may need. OR you can layer on the pine straw and then add additional fertilizer by just scattering it over the mulch.


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Actually the Post's budget piece didn't tell readers that. Instead it said:
"All told, Obama's policies would add about $5.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade (compared with nearly $8 trillion under current law). Meanwhile, interest payments on the debt would climb to nearly $800 billion a year by 2025 — more than Obama proposes to spend on any program in that year other than Social Security and Medicare."
Pretty damn scary, huh? Just think of that -- adding $5.7 trillion to the debt, and interest payments that will be larger than spending on any program other than Social Security and Medicare! Sounds like we're going to hell in a handbasket.
If the point of the story was to convey information rather than advancing its deficit cutting agenda (which seems aimed largely at Social Security and Medicare), the paper would have told readers that the interest tab projected for 2025 is 3.0 percent of GDP. Before you scream about what we are doing to our children, consider that interest payments were 3.0 percent of GDP or more every year from 1985 to 1997, except 1994 when they were 2.9 percent. (These numbers are in the same document, Table E-6). These payments were larger than spending on any program except the military and Social Security.
Unlike the NYT, the Post makes almost no effort to put the budget numbers in any context, expressing terms almost exclusively in billions and trillions which they know are meaningless to almost all their readers. It's just another way of saying that the government spends and borrows lots of money, the sort of claim that papers are supposed to leave to the opinion pages.
Give the NYT credit, it is trying to write about the budget in a way that doesn't just bury people in really big numbers. Its main article on President Obama's budget included several references that indicated how large various items were relative to the size of the economy and used other comparisons to place them in a context that could make them understandable to readers. This is a good start, but it could be better.
One item that readers would miss in this piece is any sort of historical comparison. This is important because the piece notes Obama's proposed increases in spending, but readers may not realize this is against a baseline of large cuts. The key area for increases is discretionary spending, both domestic and military. Obama proposes to increase spending in each area by less than 0.3 percentage points of GDP. This implies that spending in both areas will fall to close to 2.5 percent of GDP by the end of the 10-year horizon.
By comparison, spending in both areas had always been far higher as a share of GDP. Military spending had averaged well over 5.0 percent of GDP in the 1970s and 1980s during the cold war years, but declined to 3.0 percent by 2000 before again being ramped up as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Domestic discretionary spending averaged 3.9 percent of GDP in the 1980s and 3.4 percent in the 1990s and well over 4.0 percent in the 1970s. Before the downturn the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was projecting that domestic discretionary spending would be close to 2.8 percent of GDP by the end of this decade. This means that even with the increases proposed by President Obama he would still be spending less than the baseline path that CBO envisioned when President Bush was in the White House.
Robert Samuelson used his column today to tout a new study that analyzes home purchases by the income level of the buyer in contrast to previous work that analyzed data by average income in a zip code. The conclusion of the study is that increased aggregate debt to income levels was the result of more people buying homes, not higher ratios of debt to income among purchasers. This means that the problem was not a deterioration in lending standards. It also finds that the growth of debt was proportionate to income in each quintile, meaning that low-income households were not singled out for bad loans.
This is an interesting analysis that seems to contradict much other evidence. For example, while it shows no correlation between income levels and delinquency, we know that African Americans were far more likely to lose their home in the crash than the population as a whole. It would be striking if this is exclusively a question of race and not income.
We also know that both subprime and Alt-A mortgages skyrocketed as a share of total mortgage issuance during the downturn, with the former going from around 8-9 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2005. The latter went from 2-3 percent to 15 percent in 2005. It is difficult to believe that the growth of these riskier mortgage types wasn't not associated with a rise in the debt to income ratios of borrowers.
And, we have a survey done by the National Association of Realtors at the time. This survey found that 43 percent of first-time homebuyers in 2005 put zero down or less (many people borrowed more than the value of their home). This certainly would not have been the case ten years earlier. Part of the problem could be that the first year in the analysis is 2002, a point at which the bubble was already well underway. The deterioration from 2002 to 2006 would have been far less than if the analysis had begun in a year before the bubble began. The other possibility is that the analysis is not picking up second loans that raised debt-to-income as well as debt to value ratios.
However the deeper point in this discussion is that the question of banker fraud versus a mistaken belief that the bubble will last forever is not an either/or proposition. It is entirely possible that most of the bankers issuing mortgages that they knew borrowers could not pay, or that were based on mis-stated information that they had entered, believed that rising house prices would ensure the quality of the mortgages. The investment bankers who packaged them into mortgage backed securities may have also believed in the bubble.
However this does not change the fact that falsifying mortgage information is fraud and that knowingly packaging fraudulent mortgages into mortgage backed securities is also fraud. The people convicted of fraud charges in the Enron scandal all had large amounts of Enron stock. This indicated that they believed the company was a good buy and presumably had a good business model. They still committed fraud. That is likely true of the folks at places like Countrywide, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup.
The Commerce Department reported that GDP grew at a 2.6 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, roughly a half point below most forecasts. This brought growth for the year (fourth quarter to fourth quarter) to 2.5 percent, a modest slowing from the 3.1 percent rate in 2013. Since GDP is the broadest measure of overall economic activity, the weak quarter and weak year-round performance might seem to fly in the face of all the upbeat news we've been hearing on the economy recently. But, most news coverage seemed determined not to let the data spoil the story.
For example, the Post told readers:
"For all of 2014, the U.S. economy grew at a 2.4 percent pace — a relatively dreary number much in line with the previous years of a long recovery. But that number is somewhat misleading: A brutal winter in the northeast led to a sharp contraction in the first quarter. Since then, the nation has seen its best nine-month stretch of growth since 2003 and 2004."
Actually, instead of the 2.4 percent (I get 2.5 percent) pace being misleading, the comment about the next 9 months is misleading. The economy shrank a 2.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter, a drop that was clearly in large part due to the weather. However the strong growth reported for the next two quarters was in large part due to the first quarter shrinkage.
To see this point, assume that the actual rate of growth in the economy is 2.8 percent annually, or 0.7 percentage points a quarter. Now suppose that the economy goes into reverse in a quarter due to weather so that we show that it shrank 0.5 percentage points (2.0 percent annual rate). If the economy returns to its trend path in the following quarter, then it will grow by 1.9 percentage points (0.7 percentage points for the quarter's trend growth, 0.7 percentage points for the first quarter, and 0.5 percentage points to make up for the drop). This 1.9 percentage point quarterly growth translates into roughly a 7.6 percent annual rate.
This exercise is overly simplistic, but that is basically the story of the rapid growth in the second and third quarters. This growth cannot be understood without reference to the decline in GDP in the first quarter.
The NYT seemed to largely ignore the data altogether, with a lead paragraph telling readers:
"Powered by healthy spending from increasingly optimistic consumers, the American economy is emerging as an island of relative strength in the face of renewed torpor and turmoil elsewhere in much of the world."
Wow, 2.5 annual growth! That should embarrass China with its 7.4 percent growth. Those interested in comparisons with our own past recoveries should know that growth averaged 5.2 percent over the three years 1976-1978 and 5.4 percent over the years 1983-1985. Still feel like celebrating?
Okay folks, get out those umbrellas, we are about to showered with all sorts of garbage as the corporate interests pushing for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact ((TTIP) go into overdrive to get Congress to approve their deals. We are entering the logic-free zone where ostensibly serious people say any sort of nonsense imaginable to advance these trade deals (not free-trade deals).
Today's entry is a piece by David Ignatius in the Washington Post pushing the merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Ignatius' big punch line is:
"The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that the market-opening features of the TPP will boost U.S. exports by about $123 billion annually by 2025 and add 600,000 jobs."
Hey, 600,000 jobs sounds pretty good. What sort of troglodyte could be opposed to that?
There are a few points that are worth noting on this. First, the comment on exports is a big giveaway. No serious person would talk about exports. Exports do not create jobs in an underemployed economy, net exports create jobs. To see the distinction, suppose that GM shuts a car assembly plant in Ohio and instead ships the parts to Mexico to be assembled. The finished cars are then imported back into the United States.
Exports have risen in this story by the value of the car parts. If you think GM's move of the assembly plant to Mexico was a job creator in the United States, then think more carefully. Anyone who understands basic economics knows that exports by themselves don't create jobs, you have to look at net exports (exports minus imports). Someone who just discusses exports is either ignorant of economics or not being honest.
The next point is that standard trade models are full employment models. This means that everyone who wants a job at the prevailing wage has a job. (Ignatius does not provide a link so it's not clear where he got his numbers.) This means that they create jobs through increasing efficiency. The job creation effect will almost invariably be small and it results from an increased supply of labor. Greater efficiency means higher wages (in these models) and therefore more people want to work.
Is someone paying them to give their readers inaccurate information? I'm inclined to doubt that explanation, but why does the paper keep using this description when it is so obviously not true?
The issue came up in the context of a discussion of the agenda of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. The article notes differences between House Democrats and President Obama and trade, and then tells readers;
"Republican leaders are preparing legislation that would grant Obama broad authority to finalize one of the largest free-trade pacts [the Trans-Pacific Partnership] in the nation's history."
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is far from a "free-trade" deal. It actually will increase some protection in some areas, notably stronger and longer patent and copyright protection. Most of the deal is devoted to creating a uniform and largely business friendly regulatory structure. It creates special courts for businesses to sue governments outside of the normal judicial process. Since most trade barriers between the parties in the pact are already low, it will do little to reduce formal barriers to trade.
It is difficult to see why the Post cannot simply refer to the TPP as a "trade agreement," or even more accurately a "commercial agreement." It could save its praise of the pact for the opinion pages.
Steven Rattner doesn't like people focusing on stimulus as a path to help Europe grow because it is "simplistic." Instead he wants Europe to focus on reducing business regulation, protections for workers, and taxes for the wealthy.
Interestingly, he presents zero evidence that these changes will boost the continent's growth, in contrast to the now vast amount of evidence (e.g. here, here, and here) that stimulus will increase growth. On their face, many assertions seem outright wrong. For example, according to the OECD's assessment, employment protection for workers in Germany are the second strongest in Europe, yet it has an unemployment rate of 5.1 percent. This suggests that labor market protections are not the biggest problem stunting growth.
Rattner also warns about Europe and even Germany losing "competitiveness." It is not clear what meaning he assigns to that word, but Germany has a trade surplus of more than 6.0 percent of GDP, in contrast to a deficit of 2.4 percent of GDP in the United States.
In some cases, his complaints not only lack evidence, but they defy logic. It is not efficient to allow companies to dismiss workers at will. Long-term employees make substantial commitments and sacrifices to develop firm specific skills. It will often be difficult for them to find new employment if they lose their job in their late forties or fifties. Dismissing these workers imposes costs on them and the government in the form of unemployment benefits and other transfer payments. That might be good for the businesses who can chalk up higher profits, but it is bad for the economy and society.
In short, this piece tells us that Rattner wants Europe to be more pro-business at the expense of the rest of society. He doesn't have any real argument as to why anyone who is not rich should support his position, although I suppose it is not simplistic.
We're still down close to five million jobs from our trend employment path. Or, to put this in generational terms, millions of kids are being raised by parents who can't find work. We have endless needs for infrastructure, health care, child care, and education, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions which are not being met because of concerns over budget deficits. Given this situation, Ruth Marcus would naturally use her column in the Washington Post to warn about the government debt.
She bemoans the fact that President Obama barely even mentioned the debt in his State of the Union address:
"Oh, the debt. Yawn. How passe. How 2009.
"Once, President Obama held a summit on fiscal responsibility (2009). Once, he gave an entire speech devoted to the subject (2011). Once, his State of the Union addresses (2010, 2011, 2013) were studded with double-digit references to the problem of sky-high deficits and lingering mountains of debt.
"Now, the topic receives just a glancing mention, a clause ('shrinking deficits') in a series of presidential back-pats and a refutation of warnings of Apocalypse Soon."
While Marcus is clearly terrified by the deficit and debt, the column gives no reason why we should be more concerned about debts and deficits (yes, big numbers) than the number of trees in the United States (a number I do not know offhand, but I'm sure it's also big).
The best we get is a quote from an earlier State of the Union that is both wrong and arguably appealing to racist sentiments:
"Even after our economy recovers, our government will still be on track to spend more money than it takes in throughout this decade and beyond. That means we'll have to keep borrowing more from countries like China. That means more of your tax dollars each year will go toward paying off the interest on all the loans that we keep taking out."
The budget deficit actually does not mean that we have to borrow from countries like China. We have to borrow from countries like China because we run a trade deficit. This in turn is the result of an over-valued dollar. The over-valuation of the dollar is the result of countries like China buying up large amounts of U.S. assets, including U.S. government debt. (This is how they "manipulate" their currency.)
If countries like China stopped buying U.S. debt and other dollar denominated assets then the value of the dollar would fall and we would move towards balanced trade. This would increase employment and also, by the way, reduce our budget deficit.
Marcus later tells readers, quoting in part from the Congressional Budget Office:
"Another is that, unlike at the start of the financial crisis, when debt amounted to just (!) 43 percent of GDP, the overhang of already huge debt could 'restrict policymakers' ability to use tax and spending policies to respond [exclamation mark in original].'"
That is not exactly what the NYT said. Instead its article on the dispute between the new Greek government and Germany and other northern European countries chose to use bias in the opposite direction telling readers:
"But beneath the arguments over austerity is a deeper conflict of democratic wills, between the verdict of voters in Greece, who are desperate for some relief, and those in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands, who do not want their taxes used to underwrite a blank check for countries that get into financial trouble."
Really? The voters in Germany, Finland, and Netherlands are just concerned about issuing blank checks? Have they noticed that Greece cut its budget by 27 percent since 2008? This would be equivalent of a cut in annual spending in the United States of almost $1 trillion in its impact on the budget and close to $2 trillion in its impact on the economy.
These cutbacks, coupled with the austerity that the European Union has imposed on much of the rest of the euro zone, has had the predictable effect of throwing Greece's economy into a downturn that makes the U.S. depression look like an economic boom. Are voters in Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands really so ignorant of economics that they do not understand this fact?
At another point the article tells readers:
"Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the head of the group of finance ministers from countries using the euro, said he did 'not believe in this north-south divide,' noting that 'there are a lot of countries in the north, think of the Baltics; in the south, think of Spain; and Ireland' in the west, and they 'have done major reforms, and they are all back on the growth track.'"
It would have been worth pointing out that on Mr. Dijsselbloem's "growth track" Spain's economy is projected to first exceed its 2008 GDP in 2019. Ireland is projected to first pass its 2007 peak in 2016. By comparison, in the Great Depression, U.S. GDP was 6.0 percent larger in 1937 than it had been at the onset of the depression eight years earlier in 1929.
It also would be worth pointing out that many of the crisis countries' problems did not stem from a lack of "budget discipline." Several were running modest deficits and Spain and Ireland actually had large budget surpluses before the crash. Their economic problems stemmed from the fact that bankers in places like Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands were not very competent and thought that the housing bubbles in these countries could keep growing forever. Therefore they funneled hundreds of billions of dollars in loans that further inflated the bubbles and distorted the crisis countries' economies.
A NYT article on the dwindling size of the middle class noted that seniors are more likely to be middle class than in the past. It told readers:
"Today's seniors have better retirement benefits than previous generations. Also, older Americans are increasingly working past traditional retirement age."
In fact, seniors on average almost certainly have worse retirement benefits. The increase in the normal retirement age from 65 to 66 is equiavlent to a 6 percent cut in Social Security benefits. In addition, changes in the methodology used for calculating the consumer price index reduced the size of the annual cost-of-living (COLA) adjustment by 0.3-0.5 percentage points compared to the increases in the early and mid-1990s. (This means that for the same actual rate of inflation, seniors would see a COLA that is 0.3-0.5 percentage points less than what they would have received in the early and mid-1990s.)
In addition, today's seniors are less likely to have a defined benefit pension, as these are dwindling rapidly. Defined contribution pensions have not come close to making up the loss. Seniors also are far less likely to have retiree health insurance to cover non-Medicare expenses. Medicare has also become less generous in many respects, although the addition of the Medicare drug benefits (Part D) has been a big help to seniors.
The main reason seniors have more income is that they are working later in life. This is a positive insofar as it is the result of the voluntary decision of people in good health who enjoy their work. However in many cases, this is almost certainly not true. Many older workers are staying in the workforce because they have no other way to make ends meet.
Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books, his latest being The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. Read more about Dean. Archives
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Category Archives: Books
'Tis the Season to Create a New Religion
Christmas trees are for sale on every corner, it seems, bringing the scent of the woods to the streets of Brooklyn. Christmas lights adorn streets and houses, and carols play in all the stores. "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" has earwormed into my head. I'm remembering last year, when my Harry Potter-loving family attended a seasonal event, the Harry Potter Yule Ball. The Yule Ball is an all-ages rock 'n' roll show that comes out of a movement of fans of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The crowd was mostly people in their 20s and 30s, a few of us in our 40s or older, and some kids like mine—young teens and tweens. We didn't go because it was Christmas-y, but because it was Harry Potter-y.
A number of years ago, some fans formed a band called Harry and the Potters, and this began a genre that is called Wizard Rock, or Wrock. It now includes quite a large number of bands, some of which performed at the ball. Their music is what I would call midrash on Harry Potter. It takes the perspective of characters in the books, exploring their thoughts and lives. One example is singer Lauren Fairweather, who writes songs like "Maybe," which is from the perspective of character Severus Snape.
There was fan-created merchandise at the Yule Ball, and information about the Harry Potter Alliance, a social justice organization that has brought together Harry Potter fans (and, later, Hunger Games fans too) to work for equality, human rights, and literacy.
It was my first experience with Harry Potter fandom and the midrash it has generated. Among the millions of fans of J.K. Rowling's work, there are a subset for whom the Harry Potter saga has deep resonance. They were the ones performing, and the ones who were there that night. My family had gone on a whim, but there were others for whom the evening was meaningful in a profound way.
At the end of the night, the final song Harry and the Potters performed was "The Weapon (We Have is Love)." To my surprise, the fans standing around the stage put their arms around one another as they swayed and sang passionately along.
I suddenly felt that I was witnessing the birth of a religion. It had familiar elements: a sacred scripture, interpretation of that scripture, a social action component. Its adherents are emotionally involved with it and feel a sense of community with each other. There are differences from most of the established religions, too: There's no deity to try to figure out, and no history of oppressing others or being oppressed in the name of the religion.
The theology is very basic—at least at this point. The primary motivator is love: Harry's mother's love that saved him from Voldemort as a baby; Snape's love for Harry's mother; Harry's love for Sirius Black and his friends, which ultimately allows him to triumph over Voldemort. Fans take the idea of this fierce, life-saving and life-altering love and apply it to their version of what many Jews would call tikkun olam, repairing the world.
I imagine that 500 years from now a deity might have developed, as well as separate denominations of Potterism—Snapians and Harrians, most likely. After all, it seems that that's what religions do: they form, and after maybe 100 years, they split into different groups because there are different ideas of how to do it right. I don't think that even a religion based on "the weapon that we have is love" would be different. And that's okay. I would hope that the Harrians and Snapians would recognize one another's Potterism as authentic, even if it's not their preferred way of practicing their religion.
Probably I'm just making this up, and this fan movement won't develop into a religion. I expect that many of the Harry Potter fans would be angry that I would even say that it could. But that was my feeling in that moment at the end of the Yule Ball, and it was beautiful to see the inspiration, the love and joy, the simplicity, and to imagine that the beginning of my religion, Judaism, was that way too.
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Justice in the City – A how-to?
I am not really the kind of person who recommends books. I periodically review them, but that's different. They get on the queue, I read them, I eventually get around to writing them up (Sorry, Aryeh, it did take a while this time), but I don't usually go around suggesting books to friends. But this book is different.
So, let me begin by saying that I have recommended this book to just about anyone who might have the slightest reason at all to read it. First, I recommended it to all my colleagues at Occupy Faith DC, because, while few of them are Jewish, this book is an incredible map to creating justice in the kinds of urban settings that Occupy has dwelt in. Then, I recommended it to several people who work in specific social justice fields – not necessarily economic justice, although that too, but across the spectrum.
This book is different than any of the -now an entire genre- books of Jewish social justice. I have to admit – I've pretty much stopped reading them. I read a few at the beginning. I read one for review purposes not too long ago. I can get through most of them, and for people who like reading that sort of thing, that's just the sort of thing they'll like, and I recommend it. There are lots of good reasons for Jews to read these books, sometimes because it will pull them in to understand their Judaism better. More rarely, because I think it will make Jews who are already well-embedded in Judaism be better at thinking about justice. But few books in this genre are worth reading by people because they lay out a game plan for genuine social change that Jews can be part of, and even fewer would I suggest that non-Jews read.
But this book is different.
Rabbi Aryeh Cohen's book, Justice in the City, (you can also read his blog, by the same name, here) is a beautifully (i.e. clearly) written (and since I assume it will someday be available on ebook, do get it hard copy, the book has a nice feel and layout, too), compelling, easy-to-read discussion of how rabbinic texts, primarily the Babylonian Talmud, lay out a vision of justice. Rabbi Cohen himself states his aim as slightly lower – what a just city should be- but in reading the book, there is merit in thinking of it as a broader picture than that. In fact my only minor quibble with the book is that it uses endnotes rather than footnotes (although they're located after each chapter, but I still think endnotes are an abomination).
When I first picked up the book, I was a little concerned because Cohen lays out his project as as a dialogue between the Talmud and the modern, French (in my opinion pseudo-) philosopher Levinas. But I needn't have worried; in fact, he uses Levinas almost as a foil, to craft questions shaped by Levinas' methods to be more pointed, and the answers clearer.
Without giving anything away, the first half of the book (roughly) is dedicated to overall themes laid out by the rabbis ( he characterizes them as "Be like God and not like Pharaoh;" "the obligation of dissent;" and "the boundaries of responsibility"). The second half of the book lays out specific cases: homelessness, labor, restorative versus punitive justice. It is very clear how these can be applied to contemporary life, and this is what makes the book so valuable, not just to Jews, but to any people of faith seeking to create a better world. Continue reading
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5 Classic Whitney Houston Songs
The music world lost one of its biggest talents over the weekend as Whitney Houston passed away Saturday at the age of 48.
Whitney's impact on music is immense. Her vocal style, range, and control were groundbreaking, paving the way for a slew of modern day vocalists like Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, and Christina Aguilera, to name just a few.
To honour Houston's remarkable talent, we put together 5 of our favourite Whitney Houston performances. Good luck getting through this list without goosebumps!
5. The Star Spangled Banner
At Super Bowl XXV, Whitney gave one of the most memorable national anthem performances of all-time, setting a standard that other Star Spangled Banner renditions simply fail to match.
4. I Wanna Dance With Somebody
"I Wanna Dance With Somebody" was a landmark 80s pop hit. The song marked Houston's fourth consecutive number one hit and is her second most successful single to date.
3. How Will I Know
Houston's second #1 single, "How Will I Know" discusses an age-old theme: How do you know if someone loves you back? The song exposed Whitney's talent to the MTV generation, setting the stage for her massive success.
2. Greatest Love Of All
Lyrically, "Greatest Love Of All" is a song about personal strength. The song, originally written by Michael Lasser and Linda Creed during Creed's struggle with Breast Cancer, was a perfect fit for Houston's powerful vocals.
1. I Will Always Love You
"I Will Always Love You" could very well be Whitney Houston's opus. Originally appearing on the soundtrack to the film "Bodyguard," the song is Houston's longest running number one hit, setting a record at the time with 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. The record breaking hit highlights Houston's vocal control, ranging from a soft opening verse to a crescendo chorus.
What's your favorite Whitney Houston song? Tell us in the comments
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