Images
Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation by Nilofer Merchant
My sports therapist at Performance Sports Chiropractic brought this up to me last week and I was horrified. The research shows that almost no amount of exercise can overcome extended sitting. We were not intended to sit!
” After 1 hour of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat declines by as much as 90%. Extended sitting slows the body’s metabolism affecting things like (good cholesterol) HDL levels in our bodies. Research shows that this lack of physical activity is directly tied to 6% of the impact for heart diseases, 7% for type 2 diabetes, and 10% for breast cancer, or colon cancer. ”
Read the article or watch his TED talk and stand up and move about more
8 Reasons BlackBerry Owners Get It Done
Great infographic from Verizon Insider Blog today.
“BlackBerry smartphones are an essential tool for those who maximize every minute.”
I don’t hit all the boxes but come close 🙂
Click through the photo for the original post.
Social Media Explained
Jeff Gadway, Senior Manager, BlackBerry Product Marketing, posted this to the new BBM Channels this morning to fully explain the meaning and use of Social Networking. I love it.
San Bernardino and California. What Happened?
Speigel Online ran an article yesterday about American Cities drowing in debt (click through the picture for the article.) The feature story is San Bernardino – where I spent a great part of my childhood:
“San Bernardino, California, has gone from being the birthplace of McDonald’s, one of the world’s most successful companies, to a mound of unpaid debts. It’s a sad example of what a lack of infrastructure investment and an almost religious aversion to higher taxes have done to cities across the United States.”
They go on to say: “On August 1, 2012, San Bernardino filed for bankruptcy. Today this city, located an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, is one of the poorest, most violent cities in the United States. Once the setting for one of America’s greatest success stories, the city can no longer even afford to pay its police officers and is rotting in its own waste.”
The same day the Wall Street Journal posted a graphic of the best states for business per a survey by Chief Executive Magazine. California ranks dead last. #50.
Having lived my entire life in California, and half of my pre College years in San Bernardino, makes all this really tough to understand. This isn’t the state I grew up in or remember. I sometimes wonder if it was all just a dream.
I remember Disneyland being built. Aerospace jobs everywhere. Freeways being built. Safe elementary schools with green grass and big playgrounds. A UC System that actually catered to the California resident at a price that was next to nothing for the student (today the UC system by its own admission is composed of over 60% foreign or out of state students – higher tuition rates to the system).
This isn’t fantasy. It existed. Many explanations have been offered on what happened to tilt California from the land of opportunity and the Golden Gate to the state that business wants to flee from and that hosts three cities in bankruptcy.
Joel Kotkin addresses this change with this summary (http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_california-economy.html):
“What went so wrong? The answer lies in a change in the nature of progressive politics in California. During the second half of the twentieth century, the state shifted from an older progressivism, which emphasized infrastructure investment and business growth, to a newer version, which views the private sector much the way the Huns viewed a city—as something to be sacked and plundered. The result is two separate California realities: a lucrative one for the wealthy and for government workers, who are largely insulated from economic decline; and a grim one for the private-sector middle and working classes, who are fleeing the state.”
Public sector unions, a rising immigrant class, social spending in lieu of infrastrucure investments have all contributed to this decline. In simple terms, I wonder if this state would have/could have tolerated this decline if it were not for the beaches, sunshine, motion picture industry, silicon valley, and incredibly productive farmland areas that add an attractive and seductive face to the real decay that is becoming increasingly difficult to mask over.
David Mamet’s The Anarchist: The New Left’s Terrible Triumph
David Mamet’s The Anarchist: The New Left’s Terrible Triumph
Great article by Hugh Hewitt in Townhall last week. Mamet’s new play opened for previews last week in New York. Formal reviews out in early December.
I grew up ashamed of most of the 60’s radical and “revolutionary” activity. Mamet takes a look at this movement through the eyes of an imprisoned 60’s radical and her prison warden and the dialogues they have regarding her being approved for parole.
One of these real life retreads is Bill Ayers. Wiki: “1969 he co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group[2] that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings (including police stations, the U.S. Capitol Building, and the Pentagon) during the 1960s and 1970s in response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.”
He’s now reconstituted himself as a retired professor from the University of Chicago. “Although never convicted of any crime, he told the New York Times in September 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs…I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Hewitt asks:
“But where did their “ideas” go? No one in the MSM espouses that claptrap anymore, or uses the hackneyed phrases of “the movement,” but very, very few people in the Manhattan-Beltway media elite talk about anything serious at all.
Here’s a clue. The idiot wind of the ‘60s blew and blew and blew and ended up bottled in newsrooms and green rooms all across the land. It ended up tenured and stupid, credentialed and wholly incapable of basic economic analysis though it is very good at regression analysis applied to polling data and Twitter quips.
Ezra Klein, Rachel Maddow, Jon Chait and Chris Hayes are the heirs to and current super-egos of the great noise from four decades back, with Kos as its id. That’s it: all that is left of the New Left.”
Be interesting to see how the New York Times and so on review this. Mamet was on a private plane when the towers were struck in 2001. The moment had a considerable impact on how he viewed terrorists, anarchists, and self styled revolutionaries. I’m sure that impact is reflected in this play.
sextoncomp 