Obama faces familiar world of problems in 2nd term

FILE - This March 20, 2012 file photo shows House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and President Barack Obama walk down the steps of the Capitol in Washington. The people of an intensely divided nation just created a government that looks the same way as the one before. The only hope for progress on creating jobs and everything else would be if Obama and Republicans in Congress could find some incentive to compromise. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Obama faces familiar world of problems in 2nd term — Now that his re-election is secured, President Barack Obama has a freer hand to deal with a world of familiar problems in fresh ways, from toughening America's approach to Iran and Syria while potentially engaging other repressive countries such as Cuba and North Korea and refocusing on moribund Middle East peace efforts.

The first tweaks in his Iran policy could come within weeks, officials said.

But a pressing task for Obama will be to assign a new team to carry out his national security agenda. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has announced her plans to retire but could stay a few weeks past January to help the administration as it reshuffles personnel. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is likely to depart shortly after her. CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus is expected to stay on.

The favorite to succeed Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, would face a difficult Senate confirmation process after her much-maligned explanations of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, meaning she could land instead as Obama's national security adviser. That job that doesn't require the Senate's approval. Tom Donilon, who currently holds that position, and Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator, are among the other contenders.

The chances of another early favorite, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, are hampered by Democrats' fear that Republican Scott Brown, who lost his Massachusetts Senate seat Tuesday, could win Kerry's seat in a race to replace him.

Officials, however, are pointing to Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor, Obama's ambassador to China and Republican presidential candidate, and the State Department's current No. 2, William Burns.

Huntsman is still widely respected by the administration even if he'd hoped to unseat Obama. Choosing Huntsman would allow the president to claim bipartisanship while putting an Asia expert in the job at a time when the U.S. is focusing more attention on the world's most populous continent. Burns would be an option as caretaker secretary until postelection passions in Congress subside and a permanent replacement might face smoother confirmation. He is a career diplomat who has no political baggage and would be unlikely to stir significant opposition among lawmakers.

At the Pentagon, speculation about successors has been limited. Panetta's deputy, Ashton Carter, is seen as a possibility, along with Michele Flournoy, who served as Defense Department policy chief from 2009-12 and would be the first woman in the top job.

New Cabinet members will enter at a time of various global security challenges, from the Arab Spring to China's rapid economic and military expansion in Asia. But the president's escape from any future campaigning also offers unique diplomatic opportunities, which Obama himself hinted at in March when he told then-Russian president and current prime minister Dmitry Medvedev that he'd have "more flexibility" on thorny issues after the election.

Obama's immediate predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, used their second terms to launch major, though ultimately unsuccessful initiatives for an Israeli-Palestinian accord, an elusive goal that Obama also deeply desires. This summer he listed the lack of progress toward peace among the biggest disappointments of his presidency so far, suggesting another U.S. attempt in the offing.

Clinton's Camp David negotiations and Bush's Annapolis process became signature foreign policy priorities in 2000 and 2007. But the Israelis and the Palestinians remain as far apart as ever on the contours of an agreement, from the borders of their two separate states to issues related to refugees and resources.

Any Obama-led plan for the Middle East will be complicated by Israel's fears about the Iranian nuclear program, civil war in nearby Syria and the new reality of an Islamist-led Egypt having replaced America's most faithful Arab ally. Obama's difficult relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could also complicate the process.

With Iran, the president is holding out hope that crippling economic sanctions will force the Islamic republic's leaders to scale back its uranium enrichment activity. Iran insists its program is designed for energy and medical research purposes, even as many in the West fear the ultimate goal is to produce nuclear weapons. Obama has stressed the narrowing time frame for Tehran to negotiate a peaceful solution to the standoff, while pressing Israel to hold off on any plans for a pre-emptive strike.

Officials say the administration is likely to adjust its two-track approach to Iran — which offers Tehran rewards for coming clean on its nuclear program and harsher penalties for continued defiance — in the coming weeks. Details are still being debated. In the end, however, Obama may have to resort to a military strategy if Iran continues to enrich uranium at higher levels and nears production of weapons-grade material — a possible scenario he acknowledges.

"The clock is ticking. We're not going to allow Iran to perpetually engage in negotiations that lead nowhere," Obama said in his last foreign policy debate with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. "We have a sense of when they would get breakout capacity, which means that we would not be able to intervene in time to stop their nuclear program."

Syria's widening conflict is another concern. More than 36,000 people have died in the last 20 months, as a brutal crackdown on dissent by President Bashar Assad's regime has descended into a full-scale civil war. Obama has demanded Assad's departure, yet has ruled out military assistance to the rebels or American military actions such as airstrikes or enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria.

Last week, in a significant shift in policy, the secretary of state demanded a major shakeup in the opposition's ranks in the hopes of rallying Syrians behind the rebellion. However, Clinton's spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, reiterated Wednesday the administration still rejects the notion of providing weapons to anti-Assad fighters or any talk of armed intervention.

In other places, Obama's engagement efforts may get another look. After some success with a rapidly liberalizing Myanmar, there are hopes for democratic reforms and human rights advances in Cuba and North Korea, among others.

But short of a rapid change in attitude from these governments, Obama's options for a landmark breakthrough in U.S. diplomacy are limited. He won't be able to reach out to Havana until it frees the jailed U.S. contractor Alan Gross, while Pyongyang will have to denuclearize if it wants better relations with America — steps neither regime has shown a willingness to entertain. The recent re-election of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has halted chances for now of any rapprochement between Washington and Caracas.

In Afghanistan, the president will seek to stick to NATO's 2014 withdrawal date for most international troops, a central campaign promise. His administration has been trying unsuccessfully to jump-start peace negotiations between President Hamid Karzai's Western-backed government and the Taliban. The so-called reconciliation effort relies heavily on America's frustrating and unreliable ally Pakistan, where extremist groups such as al-Qaida and the Haqqani network will continue to face U.S. drone attacks.

Behind all the diplomatic efforts are larger questions of American geopolitical strategy. Obama had initial success improving U.S. relations with Russia, getting a nuclear arms-reduction pact in 2011, but has since seen America's former Cold War foe frustrate U.S. missile defense plans and hopes of an international consensus on Syria. The president has continued to trumpet the benefits of his Russia "reset" policy but may take a firmer stance against Moscow if it refuses to show compromise.

For economic reasons, China policy is less likely to change. The world's two biggest economies are deeply interdependent and, despite lingering disagreements over Beijing's currency exchange rates and intellectual property infringement, neither side will want to do anything that threatens a trade war and jeopardizes China's booming growth or America's still-fragile jobs recovery. ( Associated Press )

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The Movie About Islam That Sparked a Hostage Crisis in D.C.

'The Message': The Movie About Islam That Sparked a Hostage Crisis in D.C. - Released in 1977, it was intended to honor Muhammad as much as this year's The Innocence of Muslims was intended to degrade him; but it provoked a violent backlash.

A screenshot of the 1977 film The Message. (YouTube)

India's northernmost province, Jammu and Kashmir, was not the right place -- and September 14, 2012 was especially not the right time -- to be screening a film about the Prophet Muhammad. Nearby in Pakistan, protests over the controversial Innocence of Muslims had recently turned fatal, and demonstrators at the University of Kashmir carried placards that read "Obama, we are all Osama." Yet at a middle school in the Kupwara district -- where one-third of the population is illiterate and more than two-thirds are Muslim -- the Indian army went ahead with its screening anyway. The event instantly set off a riot.

Shouting first, then throwing stones, a contingent of Kupwara's residents, schoolteachers, and pupils misrecognized the movie as the devious and amateurish YouTube trailer that led to protests in Egypt. But after police arrested two and confiscated the Urdu-dubbed video, they discovered not the "Sam Bacile" production the locals had assumed -- soldiers were actually screening a three-hour, high-budget epic that earned an Academy Award nomination for best original score -- in 1977.

The Message (also released under the title Mohammad, Messenger of God) is now used in the military's hearts-and-minds campaign, intended for shoring up public relations in remote Muslim regions. That's a far cry from the big, late-1970s crowds that The Message was intended for, made on a budget of $17 million, according to its Syrian-American producer Moustapha Akkad .

"Being a Muslim myself who lived in the West," Akkad said, "I felt that it was my obligation, my duty, to tell the truth about Islam."

Akkad cast Anthony Quinn as Muhammad's uncle, Hamza, in the English version, and shot a separate version with Arabic-speaking actors. He gained support from Islamic scholars at Al-Azhar University and filmed exclusively in the Arab world -- efforts to appease detractors who accused him of commercially exploiting the Prophet's life. And Akkad even placed this slide, about 5 minutes into the movie, to conciliate Islamic audiences:

So the case of misdirected aggression in Kupwara -- aimed at Innocence of Muslims but hitting The Message ­­-- reveals the two films' ironic parallel history. Though Akkad sympathized and practiced Islam -- making him a foil to Bacile, a.k.a. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, one of the many monikers of the filmmaker who was recently jailed on November 7 -- his movie triggered a similar backlash. The Message provoked a bloody civilian protest 35 years ago that seems like Hollywood hyperbole today.

* * *

Washington, D.C., came to a standstill six weeks into the Carter administration when on March 9, 1977, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis and 11 other Hanafi Muslims drove a rented U-Haul from Maryland to the District of Columbia loaded with machetes, shotguns, and swords. By mid-afternoon they had seized control of the District Building, the Islamic Center, and the B'na B'rith Headquarters, shooting dead a police officer and local reporter in the process. Among the 149 hostages they seized were a future mayor -- Marion Barry, then a city councilman, who survived a shotgun wound to the chest -- and then-mayor Walter Washington, who was barricaded in his office.

Poorly remembered about the plot is what provoked it: the same film that sparked protests in India this year.

"We want the picture out of the country," Khaalis then declared. "Because it's a fairy tale, it's a joke. ... I'm Muslim and I'll die for my faith. It's a joke. It's misrepresenting the Muslim faith.

The 1977 Hanafi Siege dragged on for 39 hours, prompted Associated Press articles headlined "Moslem terrorists hijacking the capital," and would be considered the city's first major domestic-terrorism crisis. It's been commemorated as an artifact of District-security lore, staged decades before the 9/11 attacks.

After the Hanafi episode, President Carter criticized the crisis coverage in its aftermath for giving voice to extremists; he asked for "sober consideration" amongst journalists in future scenarios. United Nations ambassador Andrew Young was more blunt: "I wish there could be a law to restrict publication of information regarding violent crimes," he said days after the incident.

 
Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the leader of 
the Hanafi Muslim Movement of America

Khaalis founded the Hanafi Muslim Movement of America in 1958, and recruited a group of middle-class blacks practicing moderate Islam to join. Though they never grew beyond a few thousand in number, the group received outsized attention for one member -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA Hall-of-Famer -- who was a prominent contributor of seed money. Before establishing the Hanafis, Khaalis was a high-ranking member of the Nation of Islam, but left disillusioned and even tried, to no avail, to convince his close friend Malcolm X to leave as well. Khaalis evolved from a preacher of "peace and racial harmony" into a "fanatic bent on revenge," as Newsweek put it, when seven members of Khaalis's family were murdered in 1973 by a criminal enterprise known as the Black Mafia from Philadelphia -- allegedly over Khaalis' criticism of Nation of Islam's leader, Elijah Muhammad.

Witnesses to Khaalis' Washington siege say The Message nudged him toward vigilantism. One hostage would later recount how Khaalis coordinated his attack to coincide with the movie's premiere: "[Khaalis] said he had been planning how and when to respond and waited for guidance...word of the showing of the motion picture." When Khaalis spoke to negotiators by phone from within the B'na B'rith building, he had two main demands: First, that the imprisoned murderers of his family be released and brought to him from jail. Second, that a sacrilegious movie be banished from theaters.

"First thing I want the killers of my babies . . . I say we want them right here. I want to see how tough they are. I want the one who killed Malcolm [X] too ... You killed my babies and shot my women ... we are going to kill foreign Muslims at the Islamic Center [and] create an international incident."

Police did not heed his first request, but accepted the second. That afternoon, The Message was frozen mid-reel at New York screenings, postponing its premiere. Akkad, the film's producer, told The Washington Post in an interview during the two-day siege, "I am willing to show this movie to any Moslem and if they don't like it, I am willing to burn it. If there is any offense, I promise I will burn it."

Many would later question whether the Hanafis had actually seen The Message, not only because public screenings had just begun, but because the movie seemed blatantly non-confrontational. It began with an opening interlude just before the disarming slide shown above.

The interlude starts with a white-turbaned actor, playing the part of the Prophet Muhammad's scroll carrier, uttering the first words.

"In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful ... accept Islam for your salvation."

Then the Emperor of Byzantium Heraclius retorts from underneath a purple jeweled crown.

"Was it like this when John the Baptist came to King Herod out in the desert, crying about salvation?"

New scene, another courier, this time with the Persian emperor, berating Muhammad's follower:

"You come out of the desert, smelling of camel and goat!"

Critics panned The Message in 1977 for its valorizing portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad's life. In Newsweek, film critic Janet Maslin deemed it "remarkably innocuous," dismissing the film as dumbed down and boosterish: "cinematically crude and so reverential toward its subject as to seem mechanical." The reviewers hardly mentioned the roadblocks Akkad overcame (not to mention the $700,000 replica of Mecca he constructed): Saudi and Moroccan officials, after initially permitting the project, revoked their permissions, which cost Akkad $6 million. Delays forced him to finish filming in Libya, with Muammar Qaddafi's willing approval. (And in 1981, Akkad reciprocated by producing Lion of the Desert -- about a Libyan revolutionary hero -- which was paid for by Qaddafi and also starred Anthony Quinn.)

Although The Message would be re-released for domestic and international audiences, the Hanafi Siege put a damper on Akkad's vision. In 1978, he about-faced to make his next feature, Halloween -- a low-budget slasher flick that grossed $60 million worldwide and gave Jamie Lee Curtis her first credit. After flopping with his epic, Akkad would spin Halloween into a franchise, making seven sequels. But Akkad could not escape religious fanaticism. He was killed in a terrorist bombing of a Jordan hotel in 2005. (Mark Steyn eulogized Akkad in The Atlantic in 2006.)

* * *

Stopping Akkad's so-called sacrilegious picture was Khaalis's only successful demand. While the hostage standoff dragged on, police brought in ambassadors from Iran, Pakistan, and Egypt to communicate with Khaalis and attempt to appease him. They recited Koran verses and poetry to keep him calm. The State Department briefed President Carter on the situation, but the conflict subsided with a steady stream of hostages being released, and the Hanafis surrendering peacefully.

During their trial, the defense lawyer emphasized The Message as a leading motive of their protest, hoping to earn more-lenient sentences by arguing they had only acted in religious expression toward a denigrating film. "You can't convict these men for stopping a movie without any criminal intent whatsoever." A jury convicted the 12 Hanafi attackers with armed kidnapping, conspiracy, and murder, with Khaalis serving the rest of his life behind bars.

The 1977 Hanafi Siege would become overshadowed by other national-security scares of the era, sandwiched between more-famous hostage standoffs like the 1972 Munich Olympics and the Iranian hostage crisis years later. But with the recent uproar over Innocence of Muslims, The Message now seems like an odd progenitor -- a film with a foreign-born backer, a strong tie to Libya, and a precipitating legacy of violence. ( theatlantic.com )

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11 Simple Economic Lessons to Make You a Smarter Shopper on Black Friday

11 Simple Economic Lessons to Make You a Smarter Shopper on Black Friday - Getting the best deals starts with understanding the science of prices -- and the games retail companies play to fool us into paying more than we should

Reuters

The first and last rule of prices is that nobody knows what anything is really worth. Shoppers are guided by shallow clues ("this is cheaper than that") and latent emotions ("it just feels like a good deal") rather than knowledge and deliberate thinking. Smart shopping might be an oxymoron. But smarter shopping? That's a noble goal. Here are 11 tips from microeconomics, behavioral economics, and social psychology to guide you to successful and as-smart-as-possible Black Friday.

(1) Remember Why It's Called "Black Friday." 

No, not because it starts at 3 am. It's called Black Friday because it's the beginning of the season when many stores go from being in the red to being in the black. That doesn't sound like much of an economic lesson for you, but that's the point. Black Friday isn't for you. It's for the stores. 

The biggest mistake that people make on Black Friday is that they assume that the most popular day of the year to shop is the best day of the year to buy anything. If you're walking into a store at 5 AM Thursday morning, you're probably expecting floor-kissing prices in every corner. But store-wide discounts aren't in the best interest of the store. It's more common that a few tantalizing items will be sold at a loss to lure shoppers through the door while smart floor design guides them toward more profitable (even full-priced) items. "Black Friday is about cheap stuff at cheap prices, and I mean cheap in every connotation of the word," Dan de Grandpre, a veteran deal expert, told the New York Times. 

Stores know you're making this mistake, and they know how to manipulate floor traffic to their higher-margin stuff. As experts in "retail ergonomics" (it's a thing) have shown, counterclockwise traffic flows result in more spending; putting high-margin items at eye-level to the customers' right is most likely to motivate a purchase; and forcing you to walk around a display is an easy way to draw our attention to items the store wants us to throw in the cart.

(2) The Best Deals Aren't This Week (Probably). 

The two most common reasons for steep discounts are price discrimination and inventory pressure. Price discrimination is the store saying: "Hey you, cheapo, I know you won't buy this steel pot at $50, so we're selling it at $40. Buy it now!" Inventory pressure is the store saying: "You didn't buy our steel pot at $50, or $40, and now it's taking up overhead and costing us money, so how about $38?"

It's in the stores' interest to make you think prices will go up after Black Friday. But for many items, they probably won't. Instead, as inventory piles up, prices will stay low or go lower in early December. Still, it's better for the economy if more customers buy into the Black Friday hype and behave as though we're in a mini-inflationary cycle where prices on all goods are about to jump. The alternative -- everybody sits on their hands and waits until December 26 to shop for gifts -- isn't particularly good for anybody. Plus, predicting exactly when prices on your single favorite item will be lowest is like trying to buy a plane ticket at its single lowest price. Even our smartest algorithms struggle to do it. 

(3) Two Words to Remember: Net Cost. 

The damage from Black Friday won't be found on your mall receipts. To appreciate the net cost of your shopping trip, remember to include the gas you use commuting from mega-sale to mega-sale, the shipping and handling costs, and the warranties and rebates (much more on those later). 

We tend to ignore net cost when we shop because we're focused on the bargain story. Shoppers love stories -- "This skirt was 80% off, EIGHTY!!" -- precisely because we don't know what most items are really worth. Narratives fill the space where knowledge should be. If you drive 40 minutes to a super-sale and sit in a parking-lot line for another 20 minutes, that's an hour of your time and gasoline. That hour might not be part of the story you tell yourself and your friends later. But those are real costs counting against that magnificent 80% discount you found inside.

(4) Make a List. Check it Twice. 

Shoppers understand that spending a little money makes it easier to spend a little more money. We get a dopamine rush from buying the perfect thing. We also allow past savvy purchases to guide future (dumber) purchases. Making choice after choice depletes our good judgment. This effect, called decision fatigue, exhausts our ability to resist items that feel cheap at the end of a shopping trip. 

Keeping track of how much you've spent sounds like sage advice, especially if you're keeping a budget. But be aware that that number will also frame prices in a negative way. Economist Dan Ariely has called this the "problem of relativity." Imagine you see a fetching $50 chair. Would you be more likely to buy it after a $5 lunch or as part of a $500 spending spree? Fifty dollars is $50, no matter how you cut it. But it's easier to swallow when it's "only" a tenth of your total haul. 

The best way to overcome decision fatigue and "the problem of relativity" is to write a list and buy only what's on the list. That way you approach Black Friday not as an exploratory mission into the dark world of discounts and window shopping, but as a pure check-the-boxes trip.

(5) Beware of "Free." 

Something weird happens to our brains when the price for something goes from $1 to $0.01 to free. We stop thinking clearly. Getting things for free feels like such a good deal that we'll go out of our way to get it. Here's Dan Ariely in his book Predictably Irrational:

"A few years ago, Amazon.com started offering free shipping of orders over a certain amount. Someone who purchased a single book for $16.95 might pay an additional $3.95 for shipping, for instance. But if the customer bought another book, for a total of $31.90, they would get their shipping FREE! Some of the purchasers probably didn't want the second book (and I am talking here from personal experience) but the FREE! shipping was so tempting that to get it, they were willing to pay the cost of the extra book."

Free isn't bad. It's good. It's great. It's free! But we're often so enraptured by free that we overreact, tailoring our purchases around getting to FREE! shipping, or FREE! membership, or FREE! headphones, and wind up spending more in the process. Don't do it. Instead, just buy exactly what you want and nothing more.

(6) Warranties and Rebates Are Dastardly Tricks. 

Price discrimination is most dangerous when you can barely see it. Buying insurance on an electronic toy? Ah, such peace of mind! Rebates? Ah, such savings! 

Perhaps. But both are forms of price discrimination. Warranties push risk-averse customers into paying a higher price for the same product. "[Warranties] make no rational sense," Harvard economist David Cutler told the Washington Post. "The implied probability that [a product] will break has to be substantially greater than the risk that you can't afford to fix it or replace it. If you're buying a $400 item, for the overwhelming number of consumers that level of spending is not a risk you need to insure under any circumstances."

Rebates test customers' memories and willpower. A $10 rebate on a $40 candlestick feels right in the moment. But four months later, when the words "candlestick rebate" flash in your brain at work, are you really going to take time out of your day to save the equivalent of one day's lunch? Retail companies are betting that many of you will answer that question with a "meh."

(7) Avoid the Rush. 

Your brain is smarter in slow motion. Feeling hurried can force bad decisions in all aspects of life, as nowhere is it true more than a crowded store. When we're bombarded with stimuli, racing to grab cardboard boxes before the frantic mother of five behind us, we forget the key question in shopping: Will I still want this thing when I leave the store?

Thinking about how much we'll regret our purchases can radically change our shopping behavior. A recent study of holiday shopping out of Harvard and Columbia Business Schools devised a mischievous three-part experiment. First, shoppers chose between an expensive or cheap article of clothing. Second, they were randomly divided into groups and asked how much they expected to regret their purchase in one day or ten years. Third, they were released into a mall. The economists found that thinking about short-term regret moved shoppers to buy discounted products. Those primed to take the long view bought more extravagant goods.

One conclusion from the study is that short-term thinking leads to discount hunting while taking a longer perspective on our buying habits motivates us to price quality over bargains. In the frenzied atmosphere of a Black Friday store, we're manically focused on saving money. But a broader perspective might move us to spend more on the few items we really care about.

(8) Beware "Good Deals" on Items You Know Zilch About. 

I love this story from Priceless by William Poundstone. Once, Williams-Sonoma couldn't sell their $279 breadmaker, perhaps because, you know, it was a $279 breadmaker. But when the company introduced a $429 breadmaker next to their $279 model, sales of the cheaper model doubled even though practically nobody bought the $429 machine. 

Plausible Lesson 1: Williams-Sonoma shoppers are inscrutably nuts.

Plausible Lesson 2: We don't know what anything's worth, especially weird stuff like breadmakers, so we're more susceptible to cues that tell persuasive stories about what they *should* cost. Don't let that happen! Don't fall for what looks like a "good deal" just because you can justify it to yourself on the basis of "it was 40% cheaper than the other model." Research prices before you allow store cues to give you answers.

(9) The Most Efficient Gift Is the Worst Gift. 

It's cash. Yes, it's awful. It's cold and bloodless and impersonal and everybody will hate you if you get it for them. It's also extremely efficient for buying somebody exactly what they want for the perfect price. The famous economic paper "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas" showed that gift-giving "destroys" between a tenth and a third of the value in what we buy. That means the recipient of a $100 shirt would value it between $70 and $90. Cash is better.

You can't get cash for that special someone, unless you happen to be dating an economist studying deadweight loss. So best to follow the advice of Geoffrey Miller, the University of New Mexico professor, whose book The Mating Mind informs us the best gifts are "the most useless to women and the most expensive to men."

(10) Waking Up at 2 AM to Stand in Line For Hours Isn't *Necessarily* Crazy. 

Your shopping experience, like any experience, has a value. In other words, it has a price. It might seem silly for people to waste perfectly good hours of sleep to wait in line at Best Buy. I happen to think it is silly. But it is not irrational, for two reasons. 

First, it's another example of price discrimination, since retail stores are essentially gifting their best deals to their most discount-desperate customers. Second, if you love waiting in frigid Walmart lines at 2 AM, well that's just, like, your time-cost preference, man. Maybe the absurd inconvenience of the wait is a part of the story you want to remember and tell friends later. We pay for memories and stories and extreme experiences that will bring us joy later down the line all the time. Maybe this isn't any different. So don't think: While I was sleeping, my friends were wasting their lives for a slim bargain. Think: While I was sleeping, my friends were paying for an entertaining experience with their time.

(11) One Last Thing: Don't Buy That One Last Thing!

Black Friday is exhausting. And when you feel exhausted, your brain gets drunk with stupid. It's decision fatigue, it's leg fatigue, it's everything fatigue. Retail stores know this. So they put cheap stuff tantalizingly close to our arms in the checkout aisle. It's so cheap, and small, and cute, I have to have it, your decision-fatigued brain will plead. Don't listen. ( theatlantic.com )

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We will lead on climate change

We will lead on climate change - New York must press ahead with urgency to equip itself for the new age of extreme weather

A mailbox sits on the porch of a burned out home in the Breezy Point section of Queens.

In just 22 months as governor, I’ve witnessed firsthand the destructive force of three powerful storms that have crippled the state: Irene, Lee and now Sandy.

Each has taken an immeasurable toll on communities. Precious lives have been lost, and homes and businesses destroyed. This storm alone was responsible for 60 deaths to date and more than $30 billion in damage in New York State.

Extreme weather is the new normal. In the past two years, we have had two storms, each with the odds of a 100-year occurrence. Debating why does not lead to solutions — it leads to gridlock. The denial and deliberation from extremists on both sides about the causes of climate change are distracting us from addressing its inarguable effects. Recent events demand that we get serious once and for all.

We need to act, not simply react.

First, we must begin by thinking about where and how we rebuild. The next generation’s infrastructure must be able to withstand another storm. We must also reduce the energy consumption that contributes to climate change — which means, for starters, upgrading our building codes.

Thinking carefully about where we locate critical pieces of our infrastructure networks will avoid a disaster domino effect, such as the explosion of the Con Ed substation that knocked out power to much of lower Manhattan.

Second, we must fortify and upgrade the systems that paralyze us when they fail. That means building redundancies into our fuel system and putting in place generators and pumping systems that are readily deployable. Actions such as these will avoid panic at the pump, lengthy lines and frustrated motorists.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo inspects a deluge of water flooding the Battery Tunnel in Manhattan as Hurricane Sandy made its approach in New York.

Mass transit is the lifeblood of New York, and a 21st century city must protect and improve its mass transit infrastructure. Subways and tunnels are clearly vulnerable to major flooding that can bring us to a standstill. We must diversify transit options so that if one system is temporarily disabled, commuters are not stranded at work or stuck at home.

Similarly, cell phone networks and other communications systems must be strengthened to ensure that first responders and citizens never lose the ability to communicate fully and instantly. The power outage knocked out service in the hardest-hit areas and rendered service elsewhere spotty at best.

Our electrical power grid and the structures that control it must undergo a fundamental redesign. Power utilities are the equivalent of vinyl records in the age of the iPod: antiquated, 1950s-style institutions that don’t serve our current needs.

New York City firefighters look at the wreckage of several boats washed ashore by Hurricane Sandy in the Great Kills community of Staten Island.

The electrical system is particularly vulnerable. Entire above-ground wire networks in heavily wooded areas spell disaster in virtually every storm, yet nothing is being done to rectify this obvious vulnerability. To a large degree, the state and local governments are captive to the utilities in an emergency, just like their customers.

Six utilities do not compete for customers, but in a natural disaster they must compete against one another for scarce materials and personnel. We must investigate the weaknesses in the system and reform it to ensure that customers do not face catastrophic power losses every few years.

Finally, common sense demands reforming for the way we do business to protect against the impact of disasters. For example, we need a better system to track patients in health-care facilities and vulnerable people in the community so first responders know immediately who may need help.

Recent experiences also underscore the need for an improved cybersecurity monitoring operation, a well-trained army of people who can step in and help protect and rebuild vital systems without delay.

Volunteers deliver blankets to Staten Island residents affected by Hurricane Sandy.

There is no more time for debate. This is our moment to act. On Thursday, I am announcing the formation of three commissions to look at key components of managing a new, better prepared New York: how we get ready before an event, how we respond in its immediate aftermath and what changes we can make to our infrastructure that will better prepare us to face Mother Nature’s inevitable fury.

New York has a natural advantage in this seemingly daunting task. We begin with an extraordinary enterprising spirit, unparalleled resiliency and a long history of engineering the impossible.

We are the state that built the Erie Canal, opening up commerce to the West. We built a subway system so extensive that its 800 miles of track could run from New York all the way to Chicago.

Time and again, we pushed boundaries and broke records. We have been tested before, and we have always risen to the challenge. We will not allow the national paralysis over climate change to stop us from pursuing the necessary path for the future. ( nydailynews.com )

READ MORE - We will lead on climate change

Roots of tension in the Arab world are far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

It’s clearer than ever: Israel is not the problem - Roots of tension in the Arab world are far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Syrian protesters hurl stones at the Israeli army along the Syria-Israel border last year. Syria’s Bashar Assad and others never miss a chance to point the finger at Israel — but the Arab Spring is proof that the Jewish State is not the obstacle to peace and stability.

In Syria, body parts are strewn across the streets of Damascus while heartbreaking images — row upon row of children’s corpses — flash across the TV screens in our living rooms.

In Bahrain, doctors are thrown into jail for treating injured protestors.

In Iran, the mullahs defy international sanctions in an unrelenting quest to achieve nuclear breakout capability — a breakpoint that would undoubtedly set off a nuclear arms race in the region.

Yet, incredibly, 18 months into the Arab Spring, we’re still being fed the myth that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of all instability in the Middle East. Its resolution, we are told, would alleviate all tensions and solve the most pressing problems in the region.

Just recently, the brutal Assad regime had the audacity to argue before the UN Human Rights Council that Israel’s occupation remains the main obstacle for peace and stability in the region. This from a regime that is running 27 “torture centers” across the country and has slaughtered thousands of its own people in a civil war that can potentially ignite a major conflagration.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is neither the defining issue of the region nor the principal source of Arab discontent. Considering the 1,300-year-old span and depth of the Sunni-Shiite divide, the century old Israeli-Arab conflict seems brief by comparison. In truth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a convenient sideshow to the real problems within Arab societies and an implausible excuse used by Arab dictators who have ill-served the interests of their own populations and are now reaping the consequences of that neglect.

Protesters marching against their own repressive regimes throughout the Middle East are demanding freedom, human rights and a more equitable distribution of national resources and wealth. More than an Arab Spring, this is a Winter of Arab Discontent: Discontent that is a result of high unemployment rates within societies that are predominantly young (the median age in Egypt is 24).

According to a survey conducted by public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, “Earning a fair wage and owning a home are now the two highest priorities for young people in the Middle East.” In short, people would like a job and to be able to put food on the table.

In the vacuum created by the Arab Spring uprisings, new and dangerous alliances are being formed based on the Sunni-Shiite schism. Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and the preeminent Shiite power in the region, is dangerously extending its influence, using proxies such as Hezbollah and alliances with Syria and Iraq. In an already volatile and unstable region, the rise of political Islam is a risky development that must not be ignored or obfuscated.

While no one can predict the future, Israel strongly believes that there is an opportunity in this current state of uncertainty and ambiguity. We hope for regional peace and prosperity and for the promise of democracy to be fulfilled for all of our neighbors. However, as Israel knows from its experience in the Gaza elections, which brought Hamas to power, “democracy” is just as much an end goal as it is a tool — a tool that is often used and abused by Islamist parties to seize power. Democracy is about much more than elections.

In 1979, while educated, pro-democracy youth in Iran helped take down the shah with their own version of Tahrir Square, they were unable to translate spontaneous outbursts into political power, which was ultimately seized by the Islamists. The Islamic Republic of Iran, focused not on democracy, but on exporting Islamic revolution and terror throughout the world, stands as a memory of this failure.

The problems facing our region are systemic, and the Arab Spring uprisings did not eliminate them, but rather exposed them for the world to see. Civil society in the Arab world is as fractured and complex as ever. The democratic process is just beginning for the region, and immense challenges face both the electorate and its leaders.

One thing is certain: Their destiny is entirely in their own hands. While no one expects parliamentary elections to settle millenniums-old religious conflicts or to lift the economy overnight, prioritizing democracy and quality of life over sectarian politics is a winning formula that Israel proudly supports and believes to be the best hope for long-term regional stability.

It is our hope that this course will eventually lead the region to a path of unity, true democracy and prosperity for Muslims, Jews and Christians alike. But while it is critically important to bring about a full and fair resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, recent events should serve as a reminder to us all: When discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a regional perspective on the true nature of Arab discontent is imperative. ( nydailynews.com )

READ MORE - Roots of tension in the Arab world are far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Email Doesn't Have to Suck

Email Doesn't Have to Suck - There's a better way to manage your inbox--let SaneBox do most of the work for you.

Email is a pain. There are simply too many messages to handle—and I'm not even talking about spam from marketers (I use a separate address to collect those emails). The headache is the increasing number of legitimate business messages—it's a humongous time-suck that only seems to be getting worse.

Two years ago I answered nearly every message. A year ago I downgraded to at least trying to read them all. Last winter I started scanning the sender subject fields concentrating on the ones coming from people I knew or looked like they might contain information I needed. And lately, I've been considering closing my account and starting over with a private address reserved for only work colleagues and select sources.

Until, that is, I tried SaneBox.

It's like Gmail's Priority Inbox feature in that it looks at your messages and prior history engaging with those senders and decides which emails you're likely to deem most important.

When you turn on the Priority Inbox feature in Gmail, Google separates your email into three categories: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything Else; all the mail is still in your inbox, but the important messages are up top.

SaneBox is a bit different in that it removes less important messages from your inbox completely, moving them to an @SaneLater folder that you can peruse whenever you want. If SaneBox puts an important message into that folder you can move it to your inbox and it remembers the action so the next time you receive a message from that person, it will go to your inbox.

Priority Inbox is trainable in this way, as well; the more you move stuff around, the better it gets at categorization. But I prefer SaneBox.

SaneBox vs. Gmail's Priority Inbox

SaneBox gives you a custom dashboard including a timeline that graphs how many important and less important emails you get every day. My current average, according to SaneBox, is 81 a day. If I took a minute to read, digest, and respond to each one of them, that's nearly an hour and a half a day going through email. If you figure there's at least 250 work days in a year, I'm spending 375 hours annually on email. That's not acceptable.

In addition to the @SaneLater folder that stores non-essential messages, you can also enable folders such as @SaneNews for newsletters and @SaneBlackHole for those messages you want to send straight to your Trash. (Ha! Finally I'm getting revenge on a certain five-letter-titled fitness magazine that has not let me unsubscribe to its newsletters for two full years!)

Automated nagging!

And it also has a nifty feature that lets you CC or BCC a message to @SaneBox.com to remind you if someone doesn't respond.

So let's say you need an answer from your boss about a project and you need it no later than two days from now. In the CC field just include the address 2days@SaneBox.com and in two days SaneBox will put the message back in the top of your inbox if she never replied to it. This way you remember to bug her again.

SaneBox also creates an @SaneRemindMe folder that lets you keep track of all the messages to which you still need replies. Use oneweek@SaneBox.com, June5@SaneBox.com or 5minutes@SaneBox.com; it doesn't matter, SaneBox will figure out the time frame you need.

The service is $5 a month and works with email clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, iPhone, and Android and as well most email services like Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail. The only service it doesn't currently support is Hotmail. ( inc.com )

READ MORE - Email Doesn't Have to Suck

Why Does the White House Always Pardon White Turkeys?

An ancient breed of turkey hangs in a larder in this 1566 century painting by Flemish master Joachim Beuckelaer.

Why Does the White House Always Pardon White Turkeys? - When I was very young I lived in a big house in a small city in a rather rural, impoverished part of Southern Mexico. The house had a substantial flower and vegetable garden and, for a while, a turkey I'd sometimes find somewhere between the patch of sunflowers and the lettuce. Most of the food we ate came from the garden and the market stalls in town and the nearby holdings of Don Gustavo, who milked his cows into a bucket and left it to us to pasteurize on our own. But one of my earliest memories is of the turkey hen who lived in the garden, and the day she flew onto the red-tiled roof of the house and wouldn't come down.

Yes, turkeys are meant to fly.

We think of turkeys as a quintessential North American bird, but like corn they were first domesticated by the indigenous inhabitants of Central and Southern Mexico and Guatemala. Early Spanish explorers brought turkeys back across the Atlantic to Europe, and when the Pilgrims set sail for the new world they brought coops worth of the domesticated Mexican fowl with them from England. It was an accident of history they landed on territory where "ther was great store of wild Turkies," as Gov. William Bradford put it in 1621. Known for a time as the "forest turkey," today we call the type of bird the Pilgrims found the Eastern Wild Turkey.

I think about the first turkey I encountered -- yes, we eventually ate her -- whenever I see the annual turkey pardon at the White House. The sad, flightless, white-feathered American birds held down by men in suits amid the trimmed hedges of the Rose Garden look nothing like the creatures I recall being sold in markets in Mexico. And they bear only a passing resemblance to turkeys in the traditional Thanksgiving illustrations that we all know so well here in the United States.

Above is your iconic North American wild turkey tom, the type of bird you and I drew in elementary school along with men and women in black, buckled shoes. Below, a turkey pardoned Wednesday by President Obama:

 

A Broad Breasted White from the National Turkey Federation, foreground. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)

Unless you have gone out of your way to order and buy a heritage bird, this is the type of turkey you just ate on Thanksgiving: a Broad Breasted White. It is the only turkey breed still widely raised for the market, and it is a troubled creature. Wild turkeys have feathers colored iridescent red, green, copper, and bronze -- colors memorialized in crayon and tempera-paint images on the walls of every elementary school in America each fall. Heritage breeds like the Jersey Buff, the Narragansett, and the Bourbon Red grow feathers in an array of striking patterns and can range from tawny to black. All those shades have been bred away by the turkey industry, because feather buds (the pin feathers) are less noticeable under the skin of a plucked bird if they are white. With short legs and wide breasts -- the better to serve up white meat -- Broad Breasted White turkeys do not fly and can't even reproduce on their own.

As the New York Times described it in 2001:

After years of selective breeding, only one breed of turkey, the aptly named Broadbreasted White, remains in large-scale production in the United States. For about 30 years, it has been the breeding stock owned by the three major companies, Hybrid Turkeys of Ontario, Canada; British United Turkeys of America in Lewisburg, W. Va.; and Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms, Sonoma, Calif. A blowzy specimen with short stubby legs, its disproportionate supply of white meat has come at the expense of taste and texture. It's stupid to boot.

The joke about turkeys drowning in the rain may actually have some basis in fact. Glenn Drowns, secretary-treasurer of the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities, and owner of the Sand Hill Preservation Center in Calamus, Iowa, a preservation farm, is infuriated by the degradation of the turkey. ''The commercial guys say they have to keep the turkeys in buildings because they'd drown in the rain,'' he said. ''It makes my blood pressure boil. Next year I'm going to raise some of them to see if they are that far gone.''

Because most Americans aren't old enough to have eaten the old-fashioned turkey, they have no idea what they are missing. The rest of us just forgot over the years, lulled into thinking that new is improved. Tasting the four heritage turkeys against two Broadbreasted Whites, one of which was free range, reminded me why the Thanksgiving turkey was so eagerly looked forward to 50 years ago, and why, today, cooks have had to dream up dozens of ways of making it taste better.

The common ancestor for all heritage breeds is the wild turkey, native to these shores. Wild turkeys went from Central America to Europe with the first explorers. Then they were imported to North America by English settlers as the black Spanish turkey, which was bred with the wild North American turkey. The Standard Bronze was the result and the other breeds followed: the Narragansett from Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island; the Bourbon from Bourbon County, Ky., and the Jersey Buff from New Jersey.

Fifty years ago, when Americans were still eating turkeys raised nearby, there were millions of those birds....

Today, their flocks number in the thousands. The White House pardons white turkeys because that's what the National Turkey Federation sends over. A nonprofit, NTF is "the national advocate for all segments of the turkey industry"; its president was registered as a lobbyist in 2012. It began sending the White House a turkey each year before Thanksgiving during the Truman administration. Presidents ultimately chose not to eat their gift, though the "pardoning" of the bird only formally began in 1989, during the administration of George H.W. Bush. (See also "The Definitive History of the Presidential Turkey Pardon," courtesy of the White House.) Since then all the pardoned turkeys have been white, according to the photographic record.

"We just pardon who they send us," an administration official explained.

The NTF sends the White House the only breed their members raise. "The turkeys that are pardoned and the ones that are raised for consumption are almost exclusively white breasted. That is the breed that growers have found have the most white meat, which is what Americans prefer," said Kimmon Williams, a spokesperson for the National Turkey Federation.

"True wild turkeys aren't grown too much for consumption because they are a smaller bird," she added. "None of our members produce wild turkeys and I'm not entirely sure what companies do."

Heritage birds are represented by a different group, the Heritage Turkey Foundation, while wild birds find advocates at the National Wild Turkey Federation, which works with sportsmen on conservation issues. (Apparently "Turkey hunting is the hand-knit doily of the hunting genres. Arcane, involved, complex, and to outsiders, never worth the trouble," according to a recent article in Garden and Gun. Who knew.) The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy works to preserve heritage turkey breeds, as does the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities. 

Some think the goofy Washington tradition of the president pardoning a turkey has passed its prime. "Of all the indignities a president must endure, officiating at the annual turkey pardon is perhaps the most unbecoming," wrote Joe Heim midweek in the Washington Post, calling the practice "unforgivably silly" and something "no president should intentionally subject himself -- or the country -- to."

But like so many other practices Washington interest groups have managed to get the government to sign on to, it seems unlikely the president will be able to get rid of the turkey receiving and pardoning ceremony without a minor uproar. Besides, people love silly White House traditions precisely because they are so incongruous, providing light-hearted photos of the most powerful man in the world.

Given the Obamas' concern with food sourcing and healthy eating, though, it might be time to diversify the turkey-pardon pool. Some of those heritage breeds are gorgeous birds, and the cause of preserving them is certainly as worthwhile as the annual event with Big Turkey's trade association. Heck, it might even make for a better photo. At the very least, it would turn an annual bit of White House silliness in an opportunity to raise awareness about a tiny sliver of American agricultural heritage, and provoke thinking about its future. ( theatlantic.com )

 

A flock of heritage turkey breeds. (Porterturkeys.com)

READ MORE - Why Does the White House Always Pardon White Turkeys?