AGENDA: Grinding America Down (Full Movie) FREE to watch for a limited time! from Copybook Heading Productions LLC on Vimeo.

CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY (CPS)

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven (both longtime members of the Democratic Socialists of America, where Piven today is an honorary chair), the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect. In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands. The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one. The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls."  Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level." Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act. This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown -- providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory. Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. The three met in January 1966, at a radical organizers' meeting in Syracuse, New York called the “Poor People's War Council on Poverty.” Wiley listened to the Cloward-Piven plan with interest. That same month, he launched his own activist group, the Poverty Rights Action Center, headquartered in Washington DC. In a calculated show of militancy, he sported dashikis, jeans, battered shoes, and a newly grown Afro. Regarding the Cloward-Piven strategy, Wiley told one audience: “[A] a lot of us have been hampered in our thinking about the potential here by our own middle-class backgrounds – and I think most activists basically come out of middle-class backgrounds – and were oriented toward people having to work, and that we have to get as many people as possible off the welfare rolls.... [However] I think that this [Cloward-Piven] strategy is going to catch on and be very important in the time ahead.” After a series of mass marches and rallies by welfare recipients in June 1966, Wiley declared “the birth of a movement” – the Welfare Rights Movement. Cloward and Piven publicly outlined their strategy at the Second Annual Socialist Scholars Conference, held in September 1966 at New York City's Hotel Commodore. To read an eyewitness account of their presentation, click here. In the summer of 1967, Ralph Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation. Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones." These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," wrote Sol Stern in the City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy." The National Welfare Rights Organization pushed for a “guaranteed living income,” as prescribed by Cloward and Piven, which it defined, in 1968, as $5,500 per year for every American family with four children. The following year the NWRO raised its demand to $6,500. Though Wiley never made headway with his demand for a living income, the tens of billions of dollars in welfare entitlements that he and his followers managed to squeeze from state and local governments came very close to sinking the economy, just as Cloward and Piven had predicted. In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven had given special attention to New York City, whose masses of urban poor, leftist intelligentsia and free-spending politicians rendered it uniquely vulnerable to the strategy they proposed. At the time, NYC welfare agencies were paying about $20 million per year in “special grants.” Cloward and Piven estimated that they could “multiply these expenditures tenfold or more,” draining an additional $180 million annually from the city coffers. New York City's arch-liberal mayor John Lindsay, newly elected in November 1966, capitulated to Wiley's every demand. An appeaser by nature, Lindsay sought to calm racial tensions by taking “walking tours” through Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, and other troubled areas of the city. This made for good photo-ops, but failed to mollify Wiley's cadres and the masses they mobilized, who wanted cash. “The violence of the [welfare rights] movement was frightening,” recalls Lindsay budget aid Charles Morris. Black militants laid siege to City Hall, bearing signs saying “No Money, No Peace.” Lindsay answered these provocations with ever-more-generous programs of appeasement in the form of welfare dollars. New York's welfare rolls had been growing by 12% per year already before Lindsay took office. The rate jumped to 50% annually in 1966. During Lindsay's first term of office, welfare spending in New York City more than doubled, from $400 million to $1 billion annually. Outlays for the poor consumed 28% of the city's budget by 1970. “By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy,” Sol Stern wrote in the City Journal. As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness. Crucial to Wiley's success was the cooperation of radical sympathizers inside the federal government, who supplied Wiley's movement with grants, training, and logistical assistance, channeled through federal War on Poverty programs such as VISTA's. The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in "the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani charged in a July 20, 1998 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare." In a January 2011 article in the Nation magazine, Frances Fox Piven would reflect upon the elements that had helped make the welfare-rights movement successful in the 1960s: "[B]efore people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by naming themselves 'mothers' instead of 'recipients,'" In the same 2011 article, Piven noted that "protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones capable of making some kind of response to angry demands." After the welfare-rights movement had run its course by the mid-1970s, Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness. In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "Voting Rights Movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Cloward and Piven despised America's electoral system every bit as much as they despised its welfare system, and for much the same reason. They believed that welfare checks and voting rights were mere bones tossed to the poor to keep them docile. The poor did not need welfare checks and ballots, they argued. The poor needed revolution. In their 1977 book, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Cloward and Piven asserted that the “electoral process” actually served the interests of the ruling classes, providing a safety valve to drain away the anger of the poor. The authors wrote that “as long as lower-class groups abided by the norms governing the electoral–representative system, they would have little influence.… [I]t is usually when unrest among the lower classes breaks out of the confines of electoral procedures that the poor may have some influence,” as when poor people engage in “strikes,” “riots,” “crime,” “incendiarism,” “massive school truancy,” “worker absenteeism,” “rent defaults,” and other forms of “mass defiance” and “institutional disruption.” In 1981, Cloward and Piven wrote that poor people lose power “when leaders try to turn movements into electoral organizations.” That is because the “capability of the poor” to effect change lies “in the vulnerability of societal institutions to disruption, and not in the susceptibility of these institutions to transformation through the votes of the poor.” To advance their radical agenda, Cloward and Piven focused more intently on transforming the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. Because Democrats professed to represent the lower classes, many poor people believed they could get what they wanted by voting Democrat. Thus their energies would be channeled into useless “voter activity,” rather than strikes, riots, “incendiarism” and the like. Ten years earlier, when Cloward and Piven determined that the welfare state was acting as a safety valve for the establishment, they resolved to destroy the welfare state. The method of destruction they chose was drawn from the teachings of Saul Alinsky: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” And so they did, challenging the welfare state to pay out every penny to every person theoretically entitled to it. Alinsky called this sort of tactic “mass jujitsu” – using “the strength of the enemy against itself. Now Cloward and Piven concluded that the Democratic Party was also acting as a safety valve for the establishment. Thus they would try to force Democrats to "live up to their own book of rules" -- i.e., if the Democrats say they represent the poor, let them prove it. Cloward and Piven presented their plan in a December 1982 article titled, “A Movement Strategy to Transform the Democratic Party,” published in the left-wing journal Social Policy. They sought to do to the voting system what they had previously done to the welfare system. They would flood the polls with millions of new voters, drawn from the angry ranks of the underclass, all belligerent and the demanding their voting rights. The result would be a catastrophic disruption of America's electoral system, the authors predicted. Cloward and Piven hoped that the flood of new voters would provoke a backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike, who would join forces to disenfranchise the unruly hordes, using such expedients as purging invalid voters from the rolls, imposing cumbersome registration procedures, stiffening residency requirements, and so forth. This voter-suppression campaign would spark “a political firestorm over democratic rights,” they wrote. Voting-rights activists would descend on America's election boards and polling stations much as George Wiley's welfare warriors had flooded social-services offices. Wrote Cloward and Piven: “By staging rallies, demonstrations, and sit-ins … over every new restriction on registration procedures, a protest movement can dramatize the conflict.... Through conflict, the registration movement will convert registering and voting into meaningful acts of collective protest.” The expected conflict would also expose the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party, which would be “disrupted and transformed,” the authors predicted. A new party would rise from the ashes of the old. Outwardly, it would preserve the forms and symbols of the old Democratic Party, but the new Democrats would be genuine partisans of the poor, dedicated to class struggle. This was the radical vision driving the Voting Rights Movement. ACORN spearheaded this "voting rights" movement, which was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Also key to the movement were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James. All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which President Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. At the White House signing ceremony for this bill, both Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were in attendance. The new law eliminated many controls on voter fraud, making it easy for voters to register but difficult to determine the validity of new registrations. Under the new law, states were required to provide opportunities for voter registration to any person who showed up at a government office to renew a driver's license or to apply for welfare or unemployment benefits. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” notes Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his book, Stealing Elections. “States had to permit mailing voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election officials. Finally, states were limited in pruning 'deadwood' –people who had died, moved, or been convicted of crimes – from their rolls. The Motor-Voter bill did indeed cause the voter rolls to be swamped with invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented  levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections during the 1990s, and culminating in the Florida recount crisis in the 2000 presidential election.  On the eve of the 2000 election, in Indiana alone, state officials discovered that one in five registered voters were duplicates, deceased, or otherwise invalid. The cloud of confusion hanging over elections serves leftist agitators well. “President Bush came to office without a clear mandate,” the leftwing billionaire George Soros declared. “He was elected president by a single vote on the Supreme Court.” Once again, the "flood-the-rolls" strategy had done its work. Cloward, Piven, and their disciples had introduced a level of fear, tension, and foreboding to U.S. elections previously encountered mainly in Third World countries. In January 2010, journalist John Fund reported that Congressman Barney Frank and U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer were preparing to unveil legislation calling for "universal voter registration," whereby any person whose name was on any federal roll at all -- be it a list of welfare recipients, food stamp recipients, unemployment compensation recipients, licensed drivers, convicted felons, property owners, etc. -- would automatically be registered to vote in political elections. Without corresponding identity-verification measures at polling places, such a law would vastly expand the pool of eligible voters, thereby multiplying the opportunities for fraudulent voters to cast ballots under other people's names. Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his "Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns to overload, and cause the collapse of, various American institutions. Leftists such as Barack Obama euphemistically refer to this collapse as a "fundamental transformation," on the theory that society can only be improved by destroying the deeply flawed existing order and replacing it with what they view as a better alternative. Click here to read about more recent efforts by the Left to overload the American system. Major Resource: The Shadow Party, by David Horowitz and Richard Poe (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2006), pp, 106-128.

Since Feb 14, 2005 --Hits: 61,630,061 --Visitors: 7,024,052
Copyright 2003-2012 : DiscoverTheNetworks.org  

Karl Marx

Karl Marx, the son of Hirschel and Henrietta Marx, was born in Trier, Germany, in 1818. Hirschel Marx was a lawyer and to escape anti-Semitism decided to abandon his Jewish faith when Karl was a child. Although the majority of people living in Trier were Catholics, Marx decided to become a Protestant. He also changed his name from Hirschel to Heinrich.
After schooling in Trier (1830-35), Marx entered Bonn University to study law. At university he spent much of his time socialising and running up large debts. His father was horrified when he discovered that Karl had been wounded in a duel. Heinrich Marx agreed to pay off his son's debts but insisted that he moved to the more sedate Berlin University.
The move to Berlin resulted in a change in Marx and for the next few years he worked hard at his studies. Marx came under the influence of one of his lecturers, Bruno Bauer, whose atheism and radical political opinions got him into trouble with the authorities. Bauer introduced Marx to the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, who had been the professor of philosophy at Berlin until his death in 1831.
Marx was especially impressed by Hegel's theory that a thing or thought could not be separated from its opposite. For example, the slave could not exist without the master, and vice versa. Hegel argued that unity would eventually be achieved by the equalising of all opposites, by means of the dialectic (logical progression) of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This was Hegel's theory of the evolving process of history.
Heinrich Marx died in 1838. Marx now had to earn his own living and he decided to become a university lecturer. After completing his doctoral thesis at the University of Jena, Marx hoped that his mentor, Bruno Bauer, would help find him a teaching post. However, in 1842 Bauer was dismissed as a result of his outspoken atheism and was unable to help.
Marx now tried journalism but his radical political views meant that most editors were unwilling to publish his articles. He moved to Cologne where the city's liberal opposition movement was fairly strong. Known as the Cologne Circle, this group had its own newspaper, The Rhenish Gazette. The newspaper published an article by Marx where he defended the freedom of the press. The group was impressed by the article and in October, 1842, Marx was appointed editor of the newspaper.
While in Cologne he met Moses Hess, a radical who called himself a socialist. Marx began attending socialist meetings organised by Hess. Members of the group told Marx of the sufferings being endured by the German working-class and explained how they believed that only socialism could bring this to an end. Based on what he heard at these meetings, Marx decided to write an article on the poverty of the Mosel wine-farmers. The article was also critical of the government and soon after it was published in The Rhenish Gazette in January 1843, the newspaper was banned by the Prussian authorities.

Karl Marx

Warned that he might be arrested, Marx quickly married his girlfriend, Jenny von Westphalen, and moved to France where he was offered the post of editor of a new political journal, Franco-German Annals. Among the contributors to the journal was his old mentor, Bruno Bauer, the Russian anarchist, Michael Bakunin and the radical son of a wealthy German industrialist, Friedrich Engels.
In Paris he began mixing with members of the working class for the first time. Marx was shocked by their poverty but impressed by their sense of comradeship. In an article that he wrote for the Franco-German Annals, Marx applied Hegel's dialectic theory to what he had observed in Paris. Marx, who now described himself as a communist, argued that the working class (the proletariat), would eventually be the emancipators of society. When published in February 1844, the journal was immediately banned in Germany. Marx also upset the owner of the journal, Arnold Ruge, who objected to his editor's attack on capitalism.
In 1844 Marx wrote Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In this work he developed his ideas on the concept of alienation. Marx identified three kinds of alienation in capitalist society. First, the worker is alienated from what he produces. Second, the worker is alienated from himself; only when he is not working does he feel truly himself. Finally, in capitalist society people are alienated from each other; that is, in a competitive society people are set against other people. Marx believed the solution to this problem was communism as this would enable the fulfilment of "his potentialities as a human."
While in Paris he become a close friend of Friedrich Engels, who had just finished writing a book about the lives of the industrial workers in England. Engels shared Marx's views on capitalism and after their first meeting Engels wrote that there was virtually "complete agreement in all theoretical fields". Marx and Engels decided to work together. It was a good partnership, whereas Marx was at his best when dealing with difficult abstract concepts, Engels had the ability to write for a mass audience.
While working on their first article together, The Holy Family, the Prussian authorities put pressure on the French government to expel Marx from the country. On 25th January 1845, Marx received an order deporting him from France. Marx and Engels decided to move to Belgium, a country that permitted greater freedom of expression than any other European state. Marx went to live in Brussels, where there was a sizable community of political exiles, including the man who converted him to socialism, Moses Hess.
Friedrich Engels helped to financially support Marx and his family. Engels gave Marx the royalties of his recently published book, Condition of the Working Class in England and arranged for other sympathizers to make donations. This enabled Marx the time to study and develop his economic and political theories. Marx spent his time trying to understand the workings of capitalist society, the factors governing the process of history and how the proletariat could help bring about a socialist revolution. Unlike previous philosophers, Marx was not only interested in discovering the truth. As he was to write later, in the past "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it".
In July 1845 Marx and Engels visited England. They spent most of the time consulting books in Manchester Library. Marx also visited London where he met the Chartist leader, George Julian Harney and political exiles from Europe.
When Karl Marx returned to Brussels he concentrated on finishing his book, The German Ideology. In the book Marx developed his materialist conception of history, a theory of history in which human activity, rather than thought, plays the crucial role. Marx was unable to find a publisher for the book, and like much of his work, was not published in his lifetime.
In January 1846 Marx set up a Communist Correspondence Committee. The plan was to try and link together socialist leaders living in different parts of Europe. Influenced by Marx's ideas, socialists in England held a conference in London where they formed a new organisation called the Communist League. Marx formed a branch in Brussels and in December 1847 attended a meeting of the Communist League' Central Committee in London. At the meeting it was decided that the aims of the organisation was "the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the domination of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society based on class antagonisms, and the establishment of a new society without classes and without private property".
When Marx returned to Brussels he concentrated on writing The Communist Manifesto. Based on a first draft produced by Friedrich Engels called the Principles of Communism, Marx finished the 12,000 word pamphlet in six weeks. Unlike most of Marx's work, it was an accessible account of communist ideology. Written for a mass audience, the book summarised the forthcoming revolution and the nature of the communist society that would be established by the proletariat.
The Communist Manifesto begins with the assertion, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx argued that if you are to understand human history you must not see it as the story of great individuals or the conflict between states. Instead, you must see it as the story of social classes and their struggles with each other. Marx explained that social classes had changed over time but in the 19th century the most important classes were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. By the term bourgeoisie Marx meant the owners of the factories and the raw materials which are processed in them. The proletariat, on the other hand, own very little and are forced to sell their labour to the capitalists.
Marx believed that these two classes are not merely different from each other, but also have different interests. He went on to argue that the conflict between these two classes would eventually lead to revolution and the triumph of the proletariat. With the disappearance of the bourgeoisie as a class, there would no longer be a class society. As Engels later wrote, "The state is not abolished, it withers away."
The Communist Manifesto was published in February, 1848. The following month, the government expelled Marx from Belgium. Marx and Engels visited Paris before moving to Cologne where they founded a radical newspaper, the New Rhenish Gazette. The men hoped to use the newspaper to encourage the revolutionary atmosphere that they had witnessed in Paris.
After examples of police brutality in Cologne, Marx helped establish a Committee of Public Safety to protect the people against the power of the authorities. The New Rhenish Gazette continued to publish reports of revolutionary activity all over Europe, including the Democrats seizure of power in Austria and the decision by the Emperor to flee the country.
Marx's excitement about the possibility of world revolution began to subside in 1849. The army had managed to help the Emperor of Austria return to power and attempts at uprisings in Dresden, Baden and the Rhur were quickly put down. On 9th May, 1849, Marx received news he was to be expelled from the country. The last edition of the New Rhenish Gazette appeared on 18th May and was printed in red. Marx wrote that although he was being forced to leave, his ideas would continue to be spread until the "emancipation of the working class".
Marx now went to France where he believed a socialist revolution was likely to take place at any time. However, within a month of arriving, the French police ordered him out of the capital. Only one country remained who would take him, and on 15th September he sailed for England. Soon after settling in London Jenny Marx gave birth to her fourth child. The Prussian authorities applied pressure on the British government to expel Marx but the Prime Minister, John Russell, held liberal views on freedom of expression and refused.
With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty. In March 1850 they were ejected from their two-roomed flat in Chelsea for failing to pay the rent. They found cheaper accommodation at 28 Dean Street, Soho, where they stayed for six years. Their fifth child, Franziska, was born at their new flat but she only lived for a year. Eleanor Marx was born in 1855 but later that year, Edgar became Jenny Marx's third child to die.
Marx spent most of the time in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he read the back numbers of The Economist and other books and journals that would help him analyze capitalist society. In order to help supply Marx with an income, Friedrich Engels returned to work for his father in Germany. The two kept in constant contact and over the next twenty years they wrote to each other on average once every two days.
Friedrich Engels sent postal orders or £1 or £5 notes, cut in half and sent in separate envelopes. In this way the Marx family was able to survive. The poverty of the Marx's family was confirmed by a Prussian police agent who visited the Dean Street flat in 1852. In his report he pointed out that the family had sold most of their possessions and that they did not own one "solid piece of furniture".
Jenny helped her husband with his work and later wrote that "the memory of the days I spent in his little study copying his scrawled articles is among the happiest of my life." The only relief from the misery of poverty was on a Sunday when they went for family picnics on Hampstead Heath.
In 1852, Charles Dana, the socialist editor of the New York Daily Tribune, offered Marx the opportunity to write for his newspaper. Over the next ten years the newspaper published 487 articles by Marx (125 of them had actually been written by Engels). Another radical in the USA, George Ripley, commissioned Marx to write for the New American Cyclopaedia. With the money from Marx's journalism and the £120 inherited from Jenny's mother, the family were able to move to 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town.
In 1856 Jenny Marx, who was now aged 42, gave birth to a still-born child. Her health took a further blow when she contacted smallpox. Although she survived this serious illness, it left her deaf and badly scarred. Marx's health was also bad and he wrote to Engels claiming that "such a lousy life is not worth living". After a bad bout of boils in 1863, Marx told Engels that the only consolation was that "it was a truly proletarian disease".
Marx published A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859. I the book Marx argued that the superstructure of law, politics, religion, art and philosophy was determined by economic forces. "It is not", he wrote, "the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." This is what Friedrich Engels later called "false consciousness".
By the 1860s the work for the New York Daily Tribune came to an end and Marx's money problems returned. Engels sent him £5 a month but this failed to stop him getting deeply into debt. Ferdinand Lassalle, a wealthy socialist from Berlin also began sending money to Marx and offered him work as an editor of a planned new radical newspaper in Germany. Marx, unwilling to return to his homeland and rejected the job. Lassalle continued to send Marx money until he was killed in a duel on 28th August 1864.
Despite all his problems Marx continued to work and in 1867 the first volume of Das Kapital was published. A detailed analysis of capitalism, the book dealt with important concepts such as surplus value (the notion that a worker receives only the exchange-value, not the use-value, of his labour); division of labour (where workers become a "mere appendage of the machine") and the industrial reserve army (the theory that capitalism creates unemployment as a means of keeping the workers in check).
In the final part of Das KapitalMarx deals with the issue of revolution. Marx argued that the laws of capitalism will bring about its destruction. Capitalist competition will lead to a diminishing number of monopoly capitalists, while at the same time, the misery and oppression of the proletariat would increase. Marx claimed that as a class, the proletariat will gradually become "disciplined, united and organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production" and eventually will overthrow the system that is the cause of their suffering.
Marx now began work on the second volume of Das Kapital. By 1871 his sixteen year old daughter, Eleanor Marx, was helping him with his work. Taught at home by her father, Eleanor already had a detailed understanding of the capitalist system and was to play an important role in the future of the British labour movement. On one occasion Marx told his children that "Jenny (his eldest daughter) is most like me, but Tussy (Eleanor) is me."
Marx was encouraged by the formation of the Paris Commune in March 1871 and the abdication of Louis Napoleon. Marx called it the "greatest achievement" since the revolutions of 1848, but by May the revolt had collapsed and about 30,000 Communards were slaughtered by government troops.
This failure depressed Marx and after this date his energy began to diminish. He continued to work on the second volume of Das Kapital but progress was slow, especially after Eleanor Marx left home to become a schoolteacher in Brighton.
Eleanor returned to the family home in 1881 to nurse her parents who were both very ill. Marx, who had a swollen liver, survived, but Jenny Marx died on 2nd December, 1881. Karl Marx was also devastated by the death of his eldest daughter in January 1883 from cancer of the bladder. Karl Marx died two months later on the 14th March, 1883.

The Unsavory Aspects of Farmed Shrimp

For the past several years, I’ve increasingly recommended avoiding most seafood due to widespread contamination, primarily by mercury, PCBs and other environmental pollutants.
Shrimp, however, due to their small size, have generally been considered to be one of the safer kinds of seafood. But a recent article¹ may make you think twice about eating shrimp, unless you know it’s wild-caught from a clean source.
A major part of the problem is farmed shrimp which, like farmed fish, tends to be far more contaminated than its wild-caught counterparts. Aquatic farms of all kinds also pose grave dangers to ecological systems. Another problem is lack of inspection and oversight of imported seafood.
According to the featured article:

“90 percent of the shrimp we eat has been imported, but less than two percent of that gets inspected by US regulatory agencies. What's the big deal?

Imported shrimp, more than any other seafood, has been found to be contaminated with banned chemicals, pesticides... and it skirts food-safety authorities only to wind up on your plate. The number one reason for all that: the dirty conditions in which farmed shrimp are raised.”

What You Need to Know About Farmed Shrimp

As a result of declining seafood stocks of all types, aquatic farms of various kinds have become big business. Unfortunately, aquatic farming has turned loose all sorts of environmental hazards, all of which ultimately threaten your health.
The featured article highlights several disturbing facts about farmed shrimp:

1. Contamination is rampant. Farmed shrimp can contain a wide variety of contaminants, including chemical residues from cleaning agents, pathogens like Salmonella and E.coli, along with other contaminants like mouse and rat hair. According to Food and Water Watch, imported shrimp “accounts for 26 to 35 percent of all shipments of imported seafood that get rejected due to filth.”
Another concern relates to chemicals purposefully used on shrimp. Back in 2009, scientists discovered that 4-hexylresorcinol, a preservative used to prevent discoloration in shrimp and other shellfish, acts as a xenoestrogens and can increase the risk of breast cancer in women and reduce sperm counts in men. Xenoestrogens have been associated to a number of human health effects.
A toxicology study² by the University of Surrey School of Biological Sciences showed that 260 mg/kg of 4-hexylresorcinol was lethal to all cats used in the study, and they also found it was carcinogenic in both the 13-week and two-year long studies. It also caused a high incidence of nephropathy (an autoimmune disease that affects your kidneys) in mice.
While astaxanthin is one of the most profoundly effective antioxidants, farmed shrimp have very little to no astaxanthin and are given synthetic astaxanthin,³ to provide the right color because astaxanthin-deficiency in shrimp produces specimens that look blue rather than pink.

In fact, so-called “blue shrimp syndrome” was a persistent and alarming problem of earlier shrimp farms. It is important to know that synthetic astaxanthin is made from petrochemicals that are not approved for human consumption.

2. Shrimp-packing plants are filthy. As reported by Rodale:

“A report published in the November 2012 issue of Bloomberg magazine⁴ revealed some truly disgusting facts about the conditions in which shrimp are packaged and shipped.

At one particular facility in Vietnam, the magazine's reporters found processing-plant floors littered with garbage, flies buzzing around, and shrimp that wasn't being stored at proper temperatures.


The shrimp itself was packed in ice made from local tap water, which public health authorities warned should be boiled before using due to microbial contamination, potentially exposing the shrimp (and eaters) to more bacterial contamination.

According to Bloomberg, FDA inspectors have rejected 1,380 loads of seafood from Vietnam since 2007 for filth and salmonella, including 81 from the plant the reporters visited.”


3. Imported shrimp may contain hazardous antibiotics. Scientists from Texas Tech University's Institute of Environmental and Human Health recently tested 30 shrimp samples for the presence of three classes of antibiotics. The shrimp were obtained from US grocery stores. Two samples of farm-raised shrimp imported from India and Thailand tested positive for nitrofuranzone.⁵
This drug can promote overgrowth of fungi, and has been found to cause breast cancer in female rats when given orally in high doses. Disturbingly, the shrimp were found to contain levels 28 and 29 times higher than allowable limits set by the FDA.
The antibiotic chloramphenical was also detected in some shrimp samples. Chloramephenical is banned in food production in the US due to potentially severe side effects, including aplastic anemia and leukemia. Shrimp may also be contaminated with penicillin, which can trigger allergic reactions in susceptible individuals who might never suspect shrimp as a potential source.

4. Domestic shrimp may be tainted with oil and/or Corexit. The 2010 BP oil spill temporarily closed down shrimp fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, but the fact that shrimp fishing has resumed does not mean the shrimp are 100 percent safe to eat. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) now oversees the Gulf seafood testing program,⁶ along with the FDA and Gulf states, to prevent tainted seafood from reaching the marketplace. NOAA and FDA developed a chemical test to detect oil and the oil dispersant Corexit in seafood, and claim that over 99 percent of samples have no detectable residue.
However, as reported by the featured article, scientists from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have raised concerns about the residue limits used, warning that they’re not low enough to protect pregnant women and their unborn children.

5. Non-native shrimp farms contribute to climate change. How’s that, you might ask? When farmed in non-native waters, shrimp are raised in underwater pens built along the coastlines, where native mangrove forests are frequently sacrificed to make room for them.
Mangroves serve many important functions in the environment, including providing a buffer against hurricanes and flooding, absorbing carbon dioxide (mangroves absorb more carbon dioxide than rainforests), and serve as the native habitat for a variety of fish, including snapper, tilapia, sea bass, oysters and crab. According to the featured article, as much as 80 percent of mangroves in the top five shrimp-farm areas (Thailand, Ecuador, Indonesia, China, Mexico and Vietnam) have been destroyed as a result of non-native shrimp farming.

If from a Clean Source, Shrimp Are an Excellent Food

Barring contamination, shrimp, just like fish, can be an excellent nutritious food. The trick is finding wild shrimp harvested from the cleanest cold-water sources possible. For example, shrimp⁷ are a good source of:

Tryptophan (an essential amino acid)	Vitamin B12	Healthful fats, including omega-3, saturated fat and cholesterol
Selenium	Protein	Astaxanthin

Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch⁸ rates various seafood sources based on sustainability and other parameters. While some of their “Best Choice” shrimp⁹ include farmed shrimp, which I cannot in good conscience recommend, some of the wild-caught shrimp on their good-to-best list include:¹⁰

• Northern shrimp, caught in US/Canadian Atlantic
• Pink shrimp from Oregon
• Wild-caught rock shrimp from the US
• Spot prawns from British Columbia (Canadian Pacific)
• California coonstripe shrimp (caught using submerged pots. To determine this, talk to your fishmonger or the fishery in question)

Buying Local Increases Food Safety and Food Security

Ideally, you’ll want to buy wild-caught seafood. However, with environmental tragedies like the BP oil spill in the Gulf, and the still-leaking nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan,¹¹ not to mention the general pollution in waterways across the globe, merely being “wild-caught” is certainly not a guarantee of safety. If you want to eat seafood, I strongly suggest taking the extra step or two to determine how, and from where it was procured. If at all possible, get your seafood from a source that can guarantee its purity through independent lab testing.
I believe that if you choose wisely, the health benefits of fish and other seafood can still outweigh the potential risks from contamination.
Disease in farm animals is one of the biggest sources of epidemics in humans, and fish farms are the aquatic version of a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO), which is why I simply cannot recommend farmed seafood of any kind. Just like their land-based cattle and chicken farms, aquatic CAFOs are a breeding ground for disease and toxic waste, and produce food animals of inferior quality. Due to the dramatically increased disease risk—a natural side effect of crowding—these animals are further contaminated with drugs.
Remember that farmed shrimp are also given synthetic astaxanthin¹² made from petrochemicals. When you eat wild shrimp, you get the benefit of natural astaxanthin, but not so with farmed shrimp... In the latter case, you end up eating a chemical that is not even approved for human consumption!
In all, the ramifications of our large-scale, mass-producing, chemical-dependent food system are incredibly vast, which is why I urge you to become more curious about your food: Where, and how was it raised, grown, or manufactured? These things do matter; for your health, and the health and future of our planet. When it comes to seafood, whether we’re talking about fish or shrimp, there’s no doubt that aquatic farms are responsible for environmental damage of massive proportions while simultaneously producing inferior food animals, which is why, as a general rule, I recommend avoiding them.

The Importance of Your Daily Ritual

Nearly every weekday morning for a year and a half, I got up at 5:30, brushed my teeth, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write about how some of the greatest minds of the past four hundred years approached this exact same task— that is, how they made the time each day to do their best work, how they organized their schedules in order to be creative and productive.
By writing about the admittedly mundane details of my subjects’ daily lives— when they slept and ate and worked and worried— I hoped to provide a novel angle on their personalities and careers, to sketch entertaining, small- bore portraits of the artist as a creature of habit.
“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once wrote. I say, tell me what time you eat, and whether you take a nap afterward.
Daily Rituals is about the circumstances of creative activity, not the product; it deals with manufacturing rather than meaning. But it’s also, inevitably, personal. (John Cheever thought that you couldn’t even type a business letter without revealing something of your inner self— isn’t that the truth?)
My underlying concerns in the book are issues that I struggle with in my own life:
How do you do meaningful creative work while also earning a living? Is it better to devote yourself wholly to a project or to set aside a small portion of each day? And when there doesn’t seem to be enough time for all you hope to accomplish, must you give things up (sleep, income, a clean house), or can you learn to condense activities, to do more in less time, to “work smarter, not harder,” as my dad is always telling me? More broadly, are comfort and creativity incompatible, or is the opposite true: Is finding a basic level of daily comfort a prerequisite for sustained creative work?
I don’t pretend to answer these questions — probably some of them can’t be answered, or can be resolved only individually, in shaky personal compromises— but I have tried to provide examples of how a variety of brilliant and successful people have confronted many of the same challenges. I wanted to show how grand creative visions translate to small daily increments; how one’s working habits influence the work itself, and vice versa.
The book’s title is Daily Rituals, but my focus in writing it was really people’s routines. The word connotes ordinariness and even a lack of thought; to follow a routine is to be on autopilot. But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices.
In the right hands, a daily routine can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self- discipline, and optimism. A solid routine fosters a well- worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.
This was one of William James’s favorite subjects. He thought you wanted to put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, he said, we can “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.” Ironically, James himself was a chronic procrastinator and could never stick to a regular schedule (see page 80).
As it happens, the idea of writing Daily Rituals was an inspired bout of procrastination that led to the creation of this book.
One Sunday afternoon in July 2007, I was sitting alone in the dusty offices of the small architecture magazine that I worked for, trying to write a story due the next day. But instead of buckling down and getting it over with, I was reading The New York Times online, compulsively tidying my cubicle, making Nespresso shots in the kitchenette, and generally wasting the day. It was a familiar predicament.
I’m a classic “morning person,” capable of considerable focus in the early hours but pretty much useless after lunch. That afternoon, to make myself feel better about this often inconvenient predilection (who wants to get up at 5:30 every day?), I started searching the Internet for information about other writers’ working schedules. These were easy to find, and highly entertaining. It occurred to me that someone should collect these anecdotes in one place— hence the Daily Routines blog I launched that very afternoon (my magazine story got written in a last- minute panic the next morning) and, now, this book.
As much as possible, I’ve let my subjects speak for themselves, in quotes from letters, diaries, and interviews. In other cases, I have cobbled together a summary of their routines from secondary sources. And when another writer has produced the perfect distillation of his subject’s routine, I have quoted it at length rather than try to recast it myself. I should note here that this book would have been impossible without the research and writing of the hundreds of biographers, journalists, and scholars whose work I drew upon. I have documented all of my sources in the Notes section, which I hope will also serve as a guide to further reading.
Compiling these entries, I kept in mind a passage from a 1941 essay by V. S. Pritchett. Writing about Edward Gibbon, Pritchett takes note of the great English historian’s remarkable industry— even during his military service, Gibbon managed to find the time to continue his scholarly work, toting along Horace on the march and reading up on pagan and Christian theology in his tent. “Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”
What aspiring writer or artist has not felt this exact sentiment from time to time? Looking at the achievements of past greats is alternately inspiring and utterly discouraging. But Pritchett is also, of course, wrong.
For every cheerfully industrious Gibbon who worked nonstop and seemed free of the self- doubt and crises of confidence that dog us mere mortals, there is a William James or a Franz Kafka, great minds who wasted time, waited vainly for inspiration to strike, experienced torturous blocks and dry spells, were racked by doubt and insecurity.
In reality, most of the people in this book are somewhere in the middle— committed to daily work but never entirely confident of their progress; always wary of the one off day that undoes the streak. All of them made the time to get their work done. But there is infinite variation in how they structured their lives to do so.
This book is about that variation. And I hope that readers will find it encouraging rather than depressing.
I often thought of a line from a letter Kafka sent to his beloved Felice Bauer in 1912. Frustrated by his cramped living situation and his deadening day job, he complained, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straight-forward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”
Poor Kafka!
But then who among us can expect to live a pleasant, straightforward life? For most of us, much of the time, it is a slog, and Kafka’s subtle maneuvers are not so much a last resort as an ideal. Here’s to wriggling through.
[Ed. Note. Excerpted from Daily Rituals by Mason Currey. Copyright © 2013 by Mason Currey. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.]

• Post to Facebook
• Post to Twitter
• Post to Google+
• Add to LinkedIn
• Post to Pinterest
• Send via E-mail program

This Is The Life...

I am pointing out to Charlie and Zoe that there is nothing in this paper worth reading, it also appears that we are getting ready to go to church.  The weather is fabulous. 

Charlie and Zoe love to help Grandma trim the leaves to the bushes that surround our building that house 22 units.  It is not Mary's job and she receives no remuneration for her work.  She takes pride in her surroundings and the other people benefit from having a nice apartment building and beautiful surroundings.  There are a couple of other ladies who from time to time water a few pots,

Walk Your Way to Better Health

Walk Your Way to Better Health

I Will Never Trade My Amazing Friends...

  
I would never trade my amazing friends, my wonderful life, and my loving family for less grey hair or a flatter belly. As I've aged, I've become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself. I've become my own friend. I don't chide myself for eating that extra cookie, or for not making my bed, or for buying that silly cement gecko that I didn't need, but looks so avante garde on my patio. I am entitled to a treat, to be messy, to be extravagant.
I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon, before they understood the great freedom that comes with ageing. 
Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until 4 AM and sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 60 & 70's, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love....... I will.




I will walk the beach in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body, and will dive into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set. They too, will get old. 

I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And I eventually remember the important things. 
Sure,  over the years my heart has been broken.  How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody's beloved pet gets hit by a car?  But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and compassion.  A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.






I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning grey, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face.
  So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.


As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think.  I don't question myself anymore..  I've even earned the right to be wrong. 
 

So, to answer your question, I like being old.  It has set me free. I like the person I have become..  I am not going to live forever,  but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been,  or worrying about what will be.  And I shall eat dessert every single day (if I feel like it).

MAY OUR FRIENDSHIP NEVER COME APART, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART!






   
 

           

Know Thyself

There are a lot of good people who are into self-examination or as the Oracle of Delphi calls 'knowing thyself'.  I already however, know thyself.  I don't have to go down to the river to find myself, I know where I am at right now.  Here, at the computer, wasting time writing on my blog.  In fact, there is nobody who I know better or even as well as myself.

I like fried chicken, I don't like brussel sprouts.  It is not about what is good for me or what is not.  Nor is it about why it should be one way or the other. I know what I like and that is about knowing thyself.

One day I woke up and realized I don't have to know anything remotely close to 'everything.  I don't have to have all the answers.  "I don't know" is legitmate to me. That is thyself.

I like the color red, I don't like the color pink.  I don't need to know why.  That's knowing thyself.

If I get angry because of what you did to me, then I got angry at you because of what you did to me.  I  don't have to go seven generations back and discover what a prior self experienced at the hands of their mother, or father. That's knowing thyself.  If you make me angry who really needs to know myself is you and what consequences you have just acquired and you won't have to go seven generations back.

Knowing thyself, to me, is being comfortable with myself.  I can play a pretty good role in a play.  I've done it.  But I don't have to play a role in life.  I don't have to 'fake it, to make it.'  I am not a corporate CEO nor an imbecile, somewhere in between I'd say.  I don't need to act any different around either one.  That's knowing thyself.

In a recent radio program they were talking about characteristic traits of soldiers who were coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq.  One of the traits was being overly observant.  Whats wrong with that?  I have the same trait from my years in prison.  I want to know everything that is going on around me.  My wife thinks I don't make enough eye contact with her when we dine out because I am always looking around.  That's knowing thyself.

One final point, and I know this will bring on a barrage of protestations.  I, who have experienced plenty of bad situations in my past, do not need to go back and dig them up and play with them like silly putty to redeem them in my life.  It is enough that God has redeemed them as only He can, I can't and don't need too.  That's knowing thyself.

I Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Stayed On Jesus

I Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Stayed on Jesus, performed by Indigo Choral Society, Georgetown, SC, in Winyah Auditorium, April 28, 2012.
Thomas Martin, director. Jan Fort, soloist.

Not a bad rendition at all.  In a year's time since this posting they have only had 519 views, so let's give them their props.  

 And then from that glorious wake up, I read the news.  Not a recommended beginning to any day.  6 month old baby shot 5 times in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood, an area I grew up in 58 years ago.  Of course the shooter probably didn't know a baby was in the car when he pumped 10 shots into the vehicle.  Still, at 1pm or so when the shooting occurred its a brazen disregard for human life at any time. Recent visits from the President and his wife will not alter this killing rampage that continues to plague the streets of Chicago.

Watching "The Bible" one sees that history is replete of violence from throughout.  Even Christianities heroes are less heroic as evidenced by their actions.  Even after the flood it only got worse.  What is one to think about the wars of today and violence in our streets, if even a man after God's own heart, David, sends a man off to war knowing his imminent death awaits him so he, David, can take the man's wife.  

I don't have many days in the week to take care of busy stuff so I better get busy.  This, that and the other will occupy pretty much most of my day.  Look on the bright side, God has given us another day to make a difference.

Putting All Your Eggs In One Basket Leaves Your Basket Crowded

Vaulting into my new writing practice I put all my eggs in one basket, a text, a poem, a song, and two, "On This Date in History" articles.  My post looks very crowded.  So, come tomorrow I am going to sort out my subjects according to their own kind.  Diversity has its limitations when it comes to writing. 

Speaking of eggs, a friend of mine recently posted on Facebook a couple of tips on cooking hard-boiled eggs.  I run the risk of being named in a law-suit if I repeat these tips primarily because they didn't work.  A woman had to throw out her batch of undercooked eggs which she was hoping to include in her egg salad.  Now my friend is a very consoling type of gentleman and told her "sometimes its better to just take the loss."  No refund on his foiled advice, no nothing. 

Bubba says nothing from nothing leaves nothing.

I've only been up 3 hours and this day is moving much to fast.  The two 'darlings when they're asleep' will be up soon and my peace and quiet will turn to chaotic and loud.  I'll add to this as the day progresses but I think its going to be my new mode of posting to facebook.  That way I won't annoy those who think I post to much.  I can type on here all day long and it will appear as one post to facebook and believe me you really have to be my friend to come back and read the rest.  That is just fine, I can amuse myself all by myself.
Forgot to bring the chocolate doughnuts from DD, "I promise I'll get them this afternoon."  I said. 

I see I have to tell you that this is Celine Dion singing "All By Myself"
Maybe it's just me, but Callie Bergeron sure has Celine's eyes, and Callie can sing too.

I have much to do but I so feel like procrastinating.

On This Day March 11, 1941 – World War II: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act into law, allowing American-built war supplies to be shipped to the Allies on loan.

Did You Know: Lend-Lease was signed into law on March 11, 1941, a year and a half after the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939. This was nine months before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941.

A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $647 billion today) worth of supplies were shipped: $31.4 billion to Britain, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and smaller sums to other Allies. Reverse Lend-Lease comprised services such as rent on air bases that went to the U.S., and totaled $7.8 billion; of this, $6.8 billion came from the British and the Commonwealth.
...See More

On This Day March 11, 1945 – World War II: The Imperial Japanese Navy attempts a large-scale kamikaze attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet anchored at Ulithi atoll in Operation Tan No. 2.

Did You Know: Operation Tan No. 2 was a long-range Kamikaze mission directed at the main Allied naval fleet anchorage at Ulithi atoll in the western Pacific on March 11, 1945 during the Pacific campaign of World War II. The Japanese hoped to take the U.S. Pacific fleet by surprise and sink or damage a significant number of the fleet's aircraft carriers or other large ships.

Remember Those Who Served
The Greatest Generations Foundation