Boston Mayor & residents - let’s defy Chavez!
September 23, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Yes, we are mostly anti-BushCo in Massachusetts. Yes, we love any and all traditions that are tied to our beloved Red Sox. But this goes beyond that and I can’t understand why the majority of us don’t see the visceral appeal of a public flipping the bird at Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez by taking down the venerable CITCO sign and replacing it with a US flag! God knows, its not because we Bostonians are too civil - think of how we spew venom at the Yankees without the slightest regret or concern about how we appear to the rest of the civilized sports world.
I’m not a hypocrite - I’ve said the same things about Bush hundreds of times and part of me admires Chavez’s gall. But I can feel that way AND! crave a defiant response. Its like hating someone in your family but not putting up with an outsider making remarks about that family member. I have a vision of hundreds of thousands of pissed off Red Sox fans looking at the U.S. flag instead of the CITGO sign and how that could affect their next car buying decision: SUV or energy-efficient or ethanol fueled . But if that is too much of a stretch, how about just the sweet satisfaction of collectively standing up and screaming "NO!!! - we don’t want your stinking oil!" I’ve been craving that since 9/11 and I don’t think I’m alone. But, gas prices are down (and will likely continue to go down through election), and the oil-dependency saga continues ad nauseam. Wimpy Mayor Merino makes me miss Howard Dean and his primal scream.
Mayor: We’d hate to C-IT-GO
By Laura Crimaldi
Saturday, September 23, 2006 - Updated: 12:07 AM EST
With one of the Hub’s most beloved icons caught in the middle of the political outrage over Venezualan President Hugo Chavez’s anti-Bush rant, Mayor Thomas M. Menino yesterday said the famed Citgo sign deserves a break.
“It’s a landmark in our city,” said Menino, who criticized Chavez for calling President Bush “the devil” at the United Nations on Wednesday, but doesn’t believe the neon sign in Kenmore Square has to go.
“The only one that gets shortchanged is us” if that were to happen, Menino said.
On Thursday, Allston-Brighton City Councilor Jerry P. McDermott filed a resolution asking the council to remove the sign and replace it with an American flag to protest Chavez’s remarks.
Citgo Oil is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela. McDermott said he’s hearing from people who love his proposal, as well as those who loathe it.
“We’re getting calls from Arizona, Pittsburgh, all across Massachusetts,” he said.
About 58 percent of Herald readers who took part in an online poll yesterday believe the sign should stay put.
Citgo owns the sign, which sits atop a Boston University building and is visible from Fenway Park. The electricity bill is footed by the oil company, said Menino and Citgo spokesman Fernando Garay.
A Red Sox spokesman declined to comment. Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera did not respond yesterday to a message seeking comment.
But there are people out there with cojones to be defiant.
Hugo to hell: Mihos wants to cut his gas station ties to ’thug’
By Jay Fitzgerald
Boston Herald General Economics Reporter
Saturday, September 23, 2006
The local furor over Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s “devil” comment escalated yesterday with gubernatorial candidate Christy Mihos saying he may cancel the Citgo gas contracts at his minimarts on Cape Cod.
“The guy’s just a thug,” said Mihos, who owns nine Christy’s Markets that have distributor contracts with Citgo, a subsidiary of the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela.
Chavez’s remarks, in which he called President Bush “the devil” during a United Nations speech earlier this week, have put Mihos in a tough spot. His business dealings with Citgo make him the potential target of political criticism while his talk of canceling his Citgo contract could create the appearance of pandering for votes.
Mihos, who’s dumping millions of dollars into his long-shot independent bid for governor, said he was outraged by Chavez’s anti-American tirade on Wednesday and is mulling what action to take.
“We’re talking about this at Christy’s Market, whether to keep with (Citgo),” he told the Herald.
Mihos said he’ll talk to customers at his markets to gauge their sentiments and assess further remarks by Chavez before making a decision. He said he’s most worried that Chavez might use his country’s oil exports and clout within the energy industry to hurt America.
If he breaks his agreements with Citgo, Mihos said he’ll probably lose tens of thousands of dollars.
“But there are more important things in life than money,” said the millionaire business owner who sold most of his Christy’s Markets in the late 1990s. He still owns 14 of them on Cape Cod - and nine of those have distributor agreements with Citgo.
The loudmouth Chavez has stirred other trouble in Boston, with one city councilor pushing to replace the iconic Citgo sign in Kenmore Square with a giant American flag to protest Chavez’s “devil” tirade.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino and others are trying to calm the situation, saying Boston would only be hurting itself if the giant sign was taken down.
A spokesman for Citgo yesterday reiterated that Citgo, while technically owned by the Venezuelan government, concentrates on business, not politics.
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My Satirical Self
September 18, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I hope that the boring era of ‘edgy’ is is on the way out.
I’ve certainly been guilty of overuse of irony and satire in my communications. For me, it was a defense mechanism - a way to avoid and hide and I eventually became aware of that. But what I never realized was how bad (and repetitive, tedious and stuck), I sounded to others. It has its place when used judiciously and sparingly. But it can turn others off in a way that is very difficult to turn around.
I can remember as if it were yesterday: a defining moment for me, about this sad trend. It was 1994, and I was waiting with friends, to be seated in a chain restaurant, on a busy Friday night. A young waiter was loudly, rudely, and boastfully proclaiming that he did not see the big deal about the death of Jackie Onassis and desperately trying to be overheard for what he thought was his boldness and wit. I was hotly angered, pitied him and recognized the seeds of a very bad trend. Today, it would be the norm, and just another opportunity to turn up the iPod volume. But I think of that moment when I need to make a choice between cutting loose and self-management. You never know who could be listening and forming a lasting impression about you.
This column beautifully describes how the lowest common denominator of communications permeates our culture. This is not the way to thrive in change. If you want to differentiate yourself, be mindful of your communications and lead by example. Humor is a wonderful tool if its intelligent and if it fits honestly with your message. Both Ann Richards and Kinky Friedman are good examples.
My Satirical Self: "How making fun of absolutely everything is defining a generation."
At the outset, I said I had taken shelter in the ridiculous. Upon reflection, the ridiculous may not be the most well shielded of retreats. Can you take shelter in the ridiculous if everywhere becomes ridiculous? For the tools of satire, the sharp knives of sarcasm and the pointy shivs of irony and the toy hammer of lampoon are being wielded with widespread enthusiasm, and not merely by cunning builders of satirical speeches and stories. Rather, they are being lent to us all, to enable every possible construction. Did you hear, for example, the news conference President Bush gave in Germany over the summer? “I’m looking forward to the feast you’re going to have tonight,” he said to the German chancellor in a moment of folksy charm, “and I understand that I may have the honor of slicing the pig.” This drew laughs, and when his remarks wound down, the president repeated, “I’m looking forward to that pig tonight.” This before fielding the following from a reporter:
“Does it concern you,” the man asked, stuttering, “that the Beirut airport has been bombed, and do you see a risk of triggering a wider war? And on Iran, they’ve so far refused to respond. Is it now past the deadline, or do they still have more time to respond?”
“I thought,” Bush replied, “you were going to ask about the pig.”
Try to ignore, if you can, the image of the carcass of a pig, Bush poised, knife in hand, ready to carve. Consider instead that when asked on an international stage about real carnage — about spreading violence in the Middle East, about a constellation of worries suggesting a world at the brink of war — the president’s reply did not take the questioner’s inquiry seriously but, rather, sarcastically. His rhetoric sounded less like that of a steward of state — one addressing serious matters with sobriety — than that of a smartass. And this was not Juvenal’s sarcasm, or Twain’s, or even Colbert’s: it was not elegantly tuned to a point nor artfully part of a formal design. It was, instead, almost perfectly inappropriate and, of course, not unindicative of the president’s normal rhetorical mode. For it is not, I think, as is so often said, that the president is as much inarticulate as he is too clearly articulate, in a way: his tone, consistently condescending, betrays his sense of being, like a satirist, above those he calls down to. And that tone — carelessly sarcastic, thoughtlessly ironic, indiscriminately sardonic — that is the very one you now find everywhere. Bush is us; Bush is me: his is the same sarcasm I employ when I tell my father, once again, that of course I didn’t read today’s op-ed.
It makes me wonder what happens when the language of argument and the language of ridicule become the same, when the address of a potentate is voiced no more soberly than the goofings of some rube. Perhaps that leveling of language merely passes, the rhetorical registers recalibrated by nothing so much as an unfolding of the days. Or perhaps there’s another way of putting it, one voiced by President Bush himself. After Colbert, after Germany, just before Labor Day, there was yet another news conference, one that found the president asking the press corps — who so lately protested their mistreatment at satirical hands — how long they were to be stationed in a temporary briefing room across from their typical quarters. “The decision will be made by commanders on the ground,” cracked one. “There’s no timetable,” went another. “What do you think this is,” quipped the president, “the correspondents’ dinner or something?”
That, it seems to me, is an excellent question.
(Via NYT > Most E-mailed Articles.)
Join the Corporate Literati: Don’t let your day job prevent you from becoming the next Hemingway.
September 15, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Great advice and I’ll broaden the message for my clients and readers to: don’t let your day job prevent you from becoming a desired better version of yourself.
The Energy Harvest
September 15, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I read this and thought of both Al Gore and Google and how desperately we need change leadership.
[TS] The Energy Harvest: "Not only is ethanol fuel for real, but we have not even begun to tap its full potential…."
A breakthrough is expected within five years, and when that happens it will be possible to extract “more than double” the amount of ethanol from each sugar stalk, said José Luiz Oliverio, a senior V.P. at Dedini, the Brazilian industrial giant, which has a pilot cellulosic ethanol project.
I asked Brazilian experts what they’d do if they were the U.S. president. The consensus answer: Require U.S. oil companies to provide ethanol fuel pumps at all their gas stations, require U.S. auto companies to make all their new cars flex-fuel and improve mileage standards, and get rid of the crazy 54-cent tariff we’ve imposed on imported sugar ethanol (to protect our farmers). And then let the market work.
Demand for ethanol would soar. This would push us faster down the innovation curve, so we’d solve the cellulosic ethanol problem quicker, and that would strengthen the democrats in our hemisphere and weaken the petrocrats in the Middle East. If only we were as smart as Brazil …
(Via NYT > Columnists.)
Philanthropy Google’s Way: Not the Usual
September 15, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I read this and its like this black cloud, this sense of decline, this loss of pride and this sense of leadership vacuum, that have been hanging over the U.S. for the past six years, are lifting a little and glimmers of something new and great are appearing. Its progress. Its change. Its bigger games. Its leadership. And its so inspiring.
Philanthropy Google’s Way: Not the Usual: "Unlike most charities, Google’s new philanthropy will be for-profit, a move that could greatly increase its range and flexibility."
The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.
But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes.
One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy’s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.
The philanthropy is consulting with hybrid-engine scientists and automakers, and has arranged for the purchase of a small fleet of cars with plans to convert the engines so that their gas mileage exceeds 100 miles per gallon. The goal of the project is to reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming.
Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, believe for-profit status will greatly increase their philanthropy’s range and flexibility. It could, for example, form a company to sell the converted cars, finance that company in partnership with venture capitalists, and even hire a lobbyist to pressure Congress to pass legislation granting a tax credit to consumers who buy the cars.
The executive director whom Mr. Page and Mr. Brin have hired, Dr. Larry Brilliant, is every bit as iconoclastic as Google’s philanthropic arm. Dr. Brilliant, a 61-year-old physician and public health expert, has studied under a Hindu guru in a monastery at the foothills of the Himalayas and worked as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
In one project, which Dr. Brilliant brought with him to the job, Google.org will try to develop a system to detect disease outbreaks early.
Dr. Brilliant likens the traditional structure of corporate foundations to a musician confined to playing only the high register on a piano. “Google.org can play on the entire keyboard,” Dr. Brilliant said in an interview. “It can start companies, build industries, pay consultants, lobby, give money to individuals and make a profit.”
(Via NYT > Technology.)
Kinky for Texas Governor?
September 14, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · 1 Comment
Ironic that you have to get this from a UK publication, Guardian Unlimited: I find Kinky’s straight-talk populism incredibly appealing and a terrific model for both communications leadership as well as differentiation. Of course the old guard writes him off as a whacko and a nuisance, but they wrong. He’s brilliant..and outrageous and hilarious. What pisses me off the most is how his detractors say he’s all fluff and no substance with no clear agenda. I see it just the opposite. Whether you agree with his stands or not, you have to admit that Kinky takes a stand. According to current polls he’s expected to have a major impact on the election, and could possibly win. I think Ann Richards would be smiling.
Friedman Says He’d Legalize Pot in Texas
Thursday September 14, 2006 8:31 PM
By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press Writer
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Kinky Friedman says he favors legalizing marijuana to keep nonviolent users out of prison. If Texas elects him governor, he says, he’ll try to get locked-up pot users released to make room for more violent criminals.
“I think that’s long overdue,” Friedman told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. “I think everybody knows what (U.S. Sen.) John McCain said is right: We’ve pretty well lost the war on drugs doing it the way we’re doing it. Drugs are more available and cheaper than ever before. What we’re doing is not working.”
Friedman, the often irreverent singer, entertainer and mystery writer, is running as an independent in a bid to unseat Republican Gov. Rick Perry, and he’s getting some serious attention.
He said he’d take a closer look at the use of the death penalty in Texas, wants to clean house on the state’s board and commissions and would dump public school assessment tests, even if it costs the state federal money.
On the death penalty, he said he would be more liberal with the governor’s authority to grant a one-time 30-day reprieve to condemned killers.
“I would be careful killing a guy,” he said. “I think there are people who need to die, but the question I’ve asked mostly is: When was the last time we’ve executed a rich man in Texas?”
He bristled at the criticism heaped on him after he called some Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Houston “crackheads and thugs.”
Friedman said Wednesday that his plan to give $100 million to Houston to hire more police “was not in any way racist.”
“How can you possibly regret that, telling the truth?” he asked. “I am not a racist, I am a realist. In looking at the statistics, I know that 20 percent of the homicides in Houston have been committed by the element in the evacuee population.
“I never said what color their skin was. I never said all evacuees are crack dealers or crackheads. I’m smarter than that.”
Also in the race for governor are Democrat Chris Bell, Libertarian James Werner and another independent, Carole Strayhorn, the state comptroller who won that office as a Republican.
As for Friedman, he said he doesn’t like being called a politician.
“I don’t mind being called a flip-flopper,” he said, a description Perry’s campaign has placed on him. “I think we actually could use a flip-flopper as governor because a flip-flopper is a human being open to change, and God knows change is what we need now.”
He acknowledged that the Texas governor’s authority is limited compared with executives in other states but said he would use the bully pulpit to cajole legislators. He doesn’t trust them, he said, adding: “I do not trust the media either.”
“Right now the lobbyists are leading us. We have a lack of leadership, a vacuum,” he said.
One of the Texas governor’s few powerful roles is in appointing state board members, and Friedman said he would replace as many as he could, including regents at the University of Texas and Texas A&M.
“You clean house,” he said. “You get the old farts out of there. You put a bunch of young people in and you put a bunch of people who care about Texas. It’s pretty simple.”
If he wins - most polls show Perry leading in the race but not running away with it - Friedman said one of the first calls he’d make as governor would be to Robert Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam in Houston, who he said “the Lord put in my path at the Austin airport earlier this year.”
“He’s a very visionary man,” Friedman said. “You would think we’re at opposite poles, but we’re not. That’s the guy I would tap. I would tap him to help us get those gangsters and thugs and crackheads out of there.”
The Boom in Galaxies After the Big Bang
September 14, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
More proof that the Universe is continually expanding at an increasingly accelerated rate. Why resist change, growth and transformation when its the natural state of everything!
The Boom in Galaxies After the Big Bang: "Two independent teams of astronomers are reporting that they might be zeroing in on the time that bright galaxies began to light up the primordial universe."
The number of galaxies, they say in two papers published today in Nature, seems to have sharply increased 700 million to 900 million years after the Big Bang. If true, the results could be a boon to theorists who would like to understand how galaxies formed and what stars they were made of.
The results also lend support to the prevailing notion of galaxy formation. That theory holds that luminous galaxies were rare in early times and that they grew from the assembly of smaller building blocks.
Astronomers compute the distances of cosmic objects in space and time by measuring how much their light has been lengthened in wavelength, or “red shifted,” by their motion away from Earth because of the expansion of the universe.
(Via NYT > Science.)
Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’
September 13, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
You don’t need deep knowledge of particle physics to appreciate this experiment. Consider it: we could be sleepwalking, aware of only a tiny fraction of multiple, possibly limitless realities, right in front of us! I don’t want to wait for the Hadron Collider. I want to wake up now.
Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’: "
Someone will throw a switch next year to start one of the most ambitious experiments in history, probing the secrets of the universe and possibly finding new dimensions.
"
Tiny black holes
If the theories are correct, the machine will create tiny black holes that evaporate, and possibly even find particles indicating that the three dimensions known to mankind are just a fraction of those that actually exist."That would be an even bigger headline than the black holes. It could be that there is a whole new universe a millimeter away from our heads, but at right angles to the three dimensions that are here," Cox said.
"That would be a real paradigm shift — our relegation to a little sheet in a multidimensional universe. That kind of thing is really profound and will capture the imagination that perhaps the origin of mass won’t, although it should.
"For the first time in many decades we have built a machine that exceeds our powers of prediction. New processes are bound to be discovered," he added. "We are truly journeying into unknown territory."
(Via MSNBC.com: Science.)
A Wiki for Patents
September 13, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Talk about change! Here’s a model for knowledge sharing that would’ve been hard to imagine in the not so distant past.
Courtesy of IP Law Daily comes news of a new wiki, WikiPatents. This cool idea evolved from struggles that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has experienced in efficiently processing patent applications. According to the site’s FAQs
WikiPatents is intended to be the crossroads at which inventors, engineers, scientists, patent owners, competitors, litigants, the open source community, IP attorneys, patent Examiners, and other concerned members of the patent community openly share relevant and valuable information about specific patents and patent applications.
The forum, open to the public under certain guidelines, including user votes on the quality of the various wiki submission, is designed to be particularly helpful to the open source and software development communities, two areas where overburdened patent examiners are particularly taxed. The USPTO is often at a loss in judging when ‘prior art’ exists in the software field.
Prior art are creations or previous advances that are used to develop new goods, services and production processes. In the tech arena, software specifically, it’s hard to tell when prior art is simply relabeled and presented as something entirely new. Patents Wiki could be a big step in giving the USPTO million of expert advisers in calling the shots on patent applications.
(Via IP Democracy.)
Net neutrality not going away
September 13, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I wondered why there was no grassroots small business movement behind net neutrality. This answers my question.
The leaders of SavetheInternet.com and the It’s Our Net Coalition say they will keep building grassroots support for Net neutrality legislation with the intent of making it part of any telecom reform that takes place in 2007. So far, SavetheInternet.com has collected 1.1 million petition signatures. In August, they visited the home offices of 20 U.S. senators with groups of between 20 and 50 citizens to reinforce the nature of the opposition. Four more U.S. senators — Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) and Sen. James Jeffords (Ind.-Vermont) — are now supporting Net neutrality.
Meanwhile, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association is taking its anti-Net neutrality campaign to a bigger stage, showing 30-second TV spots, which dismiss the debate as “mumbo jumbo,” nationally.
Scott claims the cable and telephone companies have spent $50 million in advertising inside the Washington Beltway to sway members of Congress. “I think the momentum is very clearly on our side,” he said. “This is organized money versus organized people. The fact that Congress hasn’t recognized the robust support from small businesses is because the big companies are spending millions to keep their voices from being heard.”
Evan Tracey of TNS Media Intelligence/cmag, however, said the $50 million is total ad spending for advocacy issues and not just Net Neutrality ads.
(Via TELEPHONY Magazine - Telecom News and Analysis.)
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