By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jun 19, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
Check out this letter from a bi-partisan coalition of Congressmen:
Dear Colleague:
Every year, U.S. retailers sell over $300 million worth of products containing hemp seeds and fibers. Hemp finds its way into more than 25,000 different products around the world, from lotions to protein bars to auto parts to fuel.
But because of outdated laws preventing the growth and cultivation of industrial hemp in the United States, American farmers can’t grow hemp. It’s all imported. What’s more, our institutions of higher education can’t even grow or cultivate hemp for research purposes.
Our bipartisan amendment is simple: It allows colleges and universities to grow and cultivate industrial hemp for academic and agricultural research purposes. It only applies in states where industrial hemp growth and cultivation is already legal.
Hemp is not marijuana. Our amendment defines industrial hemp as a product containing less than 0.3 percent THC. At this concentration, and even at much higher concentrations, it is physically impossible to use hemp as a drug.
From Colorado to Kentucky to Oregon, voters across the country have made it clear that they believe industrial hemp should be regulated as agricultural commodity, not a drug. At the very least, we should allow our universities—the greatest in the world—to research the potential benefits and downsides of this important agricultural resource.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Jun 19, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Socrates admonished “Know thyself.”
That’s tough–especially if you are a shallow person who is more interested in getting to know the popular person sitting in front of you rather than your inner self.
But an even more elusive conundrum than knowing who “we” are is knowing who “they” are.
You know who I am talking about: the extremely quotable and seemingly irrefutable “they”— as in “You know what ‘they’ say.”
Which has been a perennial problem. Everyone seems to know “what” it is that “they” say but NOT who “they” are.
Not anymore.
One of the serendipitous outcomes of the recent NSA scandal is out nation’s cutting edge technology tools has identified a group of six friends in Newark, N.J. who appear to comprise the mysterious and powerful group who seem to have something wise and influential to say about almost everything.
Here is a close up from a secret aerial shot just last week as the group was leaving a MENSA meeting and about to, ironically, opine on the NSA controversy –while also reminiscing about the groups most famous commentary: why we should never “assume” anything because, “You know what they say. It makes an a**….”, well, you remember.
Reaction to identifying the small but internationally revered group has ranged from relief to self-reflection.
One news reporter for a local station said, “That’s “they?” Adding “I see them roller-blading together all the time in the park near my station. They are terrible roller-bladders and can sometimes be really obnoxious. The one one the right has body odor.”
A local mother who often quotes they to her two teenage children spoke for many when she reflected, “I have to admit, they don’t look that impressive close up.”
And then added, “I am going to start thinking for myself more in the future. I don’t trust them–I mean “they” –as much as I used to.”
In the workshops and retreats I lead, a definition of health is always part of the conversation of the day. I feel this is essential because we have such limited time on earth to enjoy being in a human body, to experience love, to revel in nature. The healthier we are the more opportunities we have for these things to be possible over the course of the mere decades we get to have.
Often, in asking students the question, “What role does beauty play in your definition of health?” they think I’m asking about human physical beauty. I do understand the confusion since vitality can be clearly visible in one’s countenance.
But what I’m really asking about refers to the experiential and how much personal time is spent engaged with art, music, literature, nature, spirituality, or other meaningful things one would classify as beautiful.
Oftentimes, we don’t realize that a complete definition of health includes the integration of beauty into our lives, but it does, in a big way. Beauty fills a giant space in the core of human beingness.
On the flip side, as we age and tend to spend more and more time thinking about what’s wrong and worrisome, we further reinforce what’s broken. But how to fix and solve those problems comes only partly from the itemized solutions and goals we think up. The rest actually comes from allowing ourselves regularly scheduled time to just be with something profoundly bigger than our problems—with something beautiful that stirs both heart and soul.
Though spending time in “beauty” might not provide the specific solutions we desperately need for problem x, it absolutely creates the fertile ground from which creative solutions can be born. It creates perspective, it soothes, it reminds us that we are not here merely to struggle. Beauty reinforces hope.
Given the choice, why not go there? “There” is anything that does it for you.
For me, the natural world satisfies a lot of this definition involving beauty. I am mentally and viscerally
enthralled by the relationship between sky and ocean, and the constant fleeting change between them.
I took photos of this magnificent show last week over the course of 90 minutes, from about 7:15pm to 8:30pm as I hung out in the calm Gulf water and then from my chair in the sand. So moved and awed by these gorgeous natural elements, I actually sang, out loud (don’t worry, no animals nor marine life were harmed in any way).
However, what I feel is profoundly beautiful, and what you feel is beautiful, probably differ. What is it for you? The important thing is to know in one’s heart what that is. Conscious awareness is essential here in order to participate in the experience when it shows up.
While I love the ocean, I spend most of my time in Kentucky, which I also love. I’m enthralled here too, from my front porch.
I took this photo yesterday while observing my doggie, Apple, as she watched a family of robins hop around the front lawn in the rain.
I was acutely aware of everything good about this rainy day, the smell of the warm damp air, the sound of water, the flowers and happy birds everywhere.
It took just 10 minutes on the porch for my bad mood to be soothed after paying medical bills all morning.
I would definitely classify this experience as a beautiful one—I love a rainy morning in the summer, but it was Apple’s calm, sweetly quiet observing that made my heart melt in the midst of it. And all at once I felt a revelation about the simplicity of beauty in beingness. What matters most can be so routine and so right in front of us all the time that all it takes is some stillness and some noticing.
I’ve lived in my house for 16 years, and I work from home for the most part, I can’t remember the last time I made the conscious decision to sit out on the front porch with Apple during a rain shower.
So now I know. These occasions add up; they make a difference in the overall quality of a life lived. Near the end, I want to say that I lived a beautiful life. So I intend it now—I’m seeking it and living it—trying to make enough time for the nourishment of beauty in my definition of health today.
It must be working; I feel pretty good these days too.
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Jun 18, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
I thought the GOP hit bottom with women voters in 2012, thanks to “legitimate rape,” “binders of women,” etc., and I was looking forward to the ‘new and improved’ party after its public autopsy and rebranding. But apparently several holdouts haven’t gotten the memo – and it’s not just bothering us leftist liberals. Several republican strategists and senior leaders (including Bob Dole) have been critical, college-age republicans say the party is out of touch, and Rep Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania said the party was ‘stupid’ to focus on abortion and parsing words about rape instead of on jobs and infrastructure.
But there are still plenty of state legislatures, talk-radio hosts, and US Congressmen who seem to be obsessed with reproductive functions – they remind me less of responsible leaders and more of my teenage sons, but even they’ve outgrown that phase (although they still enjoy rating each other’s burps). And of course I understand that a few idiotic comments don’t represent an entire party, but it’s hard not to see a pattern, between all the mandatory transvaginal ultrasound laws, the Governor of Iowa signing a law that makes him personally responsible for deciding which women in his state can have a federally-funded abortion, or Saxby Chambliss claiming that sexual assault in the military was just a result of all those young people’s hormones. Critics were quick to point out that many of the accused assailants were well past puberty (although I’ll cut the man some slack, given that my 47-year-old husband still frequently behaves like a teenager), but what I want to know is whether Chambliss realizes that by his logic, we should expect (and forgive) sexual assault every other place where hormonally-charged young people live together (like college dorms).
And don’t get me started on the insane illogic of opposing both abortion and family planning. (We’ve already seen how poorly that works from religious leaders – My former mother-in-law was a devout Catholic who nevertheless used birth control, like almost American Catholics, because as she put it in her beautiful Italian accent, “How can-a the Pope tell-a me how to have-a sex if he no-a have sex?”) Or the incredibly tone-deaf misogyny of people like the Governor of Mississippi, who attributed the decline in American education to the fact that mothers have entered the work force. (However, I’m getting a good laugh out of the attempts in some states to limit abortion by calculating based on the date of woman’s last period, which means that she was pregnant 2 weeks before she actually conceived.)
Fortunately, this trend is making life incredibly easy for comedians, particularly those of us who miss Todd Akin et al., as well as a great climate for ’60s-type protest songs. So here’s my contribution:
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Jun 18, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
I wonder whatever happened to this guy?
There are many times I wish he were around to explain something to me–or for me!
Right now I’m having trouble with my cable and having difficulty explaining it to technical support.
I swear I think the UPS guy could probably lay out the entire problem in just a few strokes on a whiteboard and probably never once come close to using using his “outside voice.”
I think drawing must be the key because explaining cable problems using words never seems to get me very far.
I definitely need to get a whiteboard for times like this! Or just find this gentleman to explain all my technical problems to tech support.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jun 18, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
Click here to review & purchase
The Great Recession of 2008-2010 was hell on dreams. For all of the trillions of dollars sunk in the stock market, and the staggering job losses, it is the collapse in confidence and optimism that lingers and that has had the most sustained impact on American life. So argues George Packer’s superb book, “The Unwinding”, which should stand as one of the most compelling narratives of the toll of our near depression.
The heart of this book is a series of extended profiles whose lives exemplify different themes: Tammy Thomas, a black woman in Youngstown Ohio, who makes the transition from an assembly line worker to community organizer; Dean Price, a working class North Carolina boy who makes and loses a fortune building truck stops before refashioning himself as a biodiesel entrepreneur, before he crashes again; Jeff Connaughton (whom I know as a fellow Alabama expatriate), who rides his on again, off again connection to Joe Biden to a backstage role as an influential Washington operator; and a mildly famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal who remains a considerable force in the venture capital world. Packer also fashions two places into virtual characters in their own right: the foreclosure wracked city of Tampa, Florida, which experienced some of the worst wreckage of the housing implosion of the last decade, and the confines of Zuccotti Park, the site of the original Occupy Wall Street protests.
Packer weaves back and forth between these subjects to sketch a canvass of what went wrong. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing base stops being a reliable conduit for high school educated men and women to climb into the middle class; hard working people start sliding backwards and become functionally poor while they are grinding themselves into poor health and exhaustion. The rural south stops being idyllic and becomes a hotspot for mental depression and social estrangement. Washington turns its leadership over to a permanent lobbying machine that reduces every policy debate to a transaction. Wall Street slips out from under the grip of regulators and plays by its own devil-may–care rules until it runs itself and the economy into a ditch. All over the country, the work ethic is fitfully rewarded, sometimes even punished; upward mobility operates on steroids at the top brackets of society and all but disappears at the middle and bottom rungs.
Some critics have pointed out that there is, in the wake of the first recession covered in 24 hour news cycles, not much that is deeply original about Packer’s inventory of decline, and that, as David Brooks argues, the storytelling genius does not compensate for the lack of sociological depth or data points in a book that is so openly ambitious to shape the national conversation. But the other chronicles of this period, Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum’s, “That Used to Be Us” and Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” come to mind, along with a host of other narratives that reconstruct the capital markets crisis, are simultaneously more precise and more bloodless than Packer: they rely, more or less exclusively, on the perspective of insiders who have a lot to reveal or justify but who certainly never missed a meal during the economic storm. Packer puts his emphasis mostly on people who suffered genuine degradation and misery during the Great Recession. And unlike the many accounts of this period who worry that we have too quickly reverted to normalcy, with not enough lessons learned, Packer captures the not so well understood fact that a discernible number of Americans have become permanently radicalized by their suffering: America does not look the same to them as it used to, and they drift into a destabilized zone that is alienated from the moral and social certainties of their youth.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: What We Lost in the Storm — A Review of “The Unwinding”
By Nancy Slotnick, on Tue Jun 18, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
I love girls.
I love girls. Ok, I should really say I love Girls, the new HBO show, but the previous sentence was my feeble attempt to capture the attention of my male readership. Anyway, the show is awesome. The guy’s line “I want you to know, the first time I f*ck you, I might scare you a little, because I’m a man, and I know how to do things,” makes Marni need to masturbate before she even makes it back to her apartment. This is alpha male behavior. Does it exist outside of cable television? Can it be taken seriously or are players, pick up artists and sketch comedians the only guys who really talk this way?
Women want a contradiction in terms, and Lena Dunham does a fantastic job of pointing this out. We want men to take us by storm. We tell ourselves “If he really wanted to meet me, he would come over and talk to me.” But yet when they do take charge, we don’t want to be bossed around. Our girlfriends shame us if we cancel plans because we have a date, as if a whipped boyfriend is the only kind of boyfriend that is acceptable. Maybe they’re just jealous?
I’ve been a dating coach for the last decade, and every girl I meet wants to nab the bad boy who is also a good guy: a husband/father candidate who is an Alpha male in the bedroom. Because I found one for me, I’m in a pretty good position to help in this regard. But the first rule of being married to an Alpha male is very similar to the first rule of Fight Club. In case you haven’t seen it- the rule is you do not speak of it- but I shouldn’t even tell you this because if you want to date an Alpha male you should see Fight Club. And commit not to cringe. Then see it again and watch it as a relationship movie- fascinating on a whole nother level. But I digress.
By Erica and Matt Chua, on Mon Jun 17, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET
LOCAVORista may have fallen in love with Buenos Aires and thought it had the best street art, but she was mistaken…Sao Paulo holds that crown. Yes, Buenos Aires offers a wide array of high-quality street art, but it pales in comparasion to Villa Madalena’s paint covered walls. In fact, it’s harder to find places without street art in this posh Sao Paulo neighborhood than trying to locate art. Let’s take a quick walk through the neighborhood to check out just some of the paintings.
The minds of the many artists in the neighborhoods have spilled out onto the walls exactly as this mural depicts: directly from brains to spray paint.
One of the larger works, the whimsical scene stretches almost an entire block, even working in the landscaping.
Read the rest of… Erica & Matt Chua: Sao Paulo Street Art Smackdown
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jun 17, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
I have received three flirty messages from three different fake FB profiles pretending to be a young woman eager to exchange private emails with me.
I finally responded to the last one just now.
“Thanks for your message.
However, another woman sent me an almost identical flirty message yesterday and we got married this afternoon.
And it’s really going well. To top it all off (and no offense) but she is a lot hotter than you are.
Here name is Rebecca Brown and we have “married” now as our Facebook relationship status
Good luck with finding romance. Or amusing yourself pretending to be a young woman. Which is, frankly, a turn off to most women your age and not the most well thought out romance strategy.
But you never know…you just might stumble onto an interaction that will change your life forever doing just what you are doing now. It could happen.
Keep the faith. And keep putting yourself out there until something better than rejections like this one from me start to happen for you.
There’s more than one fish in the sea. And more than one profile to fake private message on Facebook. Somewhere out there there on FB tonight there is a soulmate for you who as we message is writing a really funny trolling message under a fake name and profile just like you. And you two are destined to meet someday and fall in love. Someone who “gets you” and will love you just the way you are. And that is no laughing matter.
Q: I recently listened to your interview on NPR and applaud you for your comeback after spending time in a federal institution. I was on my way back to academia when I was arrested while being a practicing psychologist for two counts of fraud. I got 21 months. I have no criminal record prior to this and am very concerned about my future beyond incarceration. Any thoughts? Right now I am still in the numb/ embarrassment stage. —R.V., A City in Calif.
I actually have a chapter in a new book about recovering from crisis. I think the key is to repair and reinvent yourself in a way that stays true to the best of who you are. For instance, if you lose your professional license, could you still offer counseling at a halfway house after you complete your sentence? Or perhaps at a shelter for the homeless or victims of domestic violence?Something that will be therapeutic for you and helpful for others. For me that’s taken many forms, from teaching about the legislative process and addressing elected officials about ethical dilemmas to advocating for educational opportunities inside prison.
I won’t lie to you: Prison sucks. But it forced me to pause and reflect and thus gave me an advantage over the Sanfords and Weiners on the road to recovery. It can do that for you, but you must constantly remind yourself that failure is not falling down but staying down.
Q: I want to run campaigns, but getting a job as a manager is quite difficult. Candidates have two main problems: They often seem to think that they do not need to be managed, and when they do, they do not want to spend money for a salary. Of course, it is full-time work that is simply too much to ask of a volunteer. I have spent a lot of time on campaigns in general, and last year in particular. Consequently, I have taken the position that I will not do any more free work for politicians—I’ve seen that it usually does not pay off. I do not like sitting on the sidelines. Do you have any ideas? —C.B., New York CityI totally agree with the paradox you reference regarding candidates and campaign managers. As I’ve said before, candidates who try to run their own campaigns have a fool for a manager.
I think you should broaden your search and consider working for an issue campaign instead. There are lots of benefits to that; for instance: (1) no lying awake at night wondering if your candidate will make a campaign-ending faux pas; (2) no screaming candidate calling your cell at 2 a.m. to berate you about a typo in an email you did not write; (3) no frantic middle-of-the-night calls to bail the candidate’s son out of jail.
Most important, when you work for an issue campaign, you don’t have to worry if the candidate will actually follow through on the campaign pledge that motivated you to work on his behalf, because an issue never lies. And you don’t have to worry that your candidate’s efforts to follow through will be scuttled by her evil colleagues in the legislature, or wherever. So if you win an issue campaign, you really do win.
Read the rest of… Jeff Smith: Do As I Say — A Political Advice Column
