This afternoon I’ll be leaving to study in Berlin. Before I go, I thought this would be the perfect time to let my friends know how much they have meant to me. This year, each morning, coffee in hand, I began my day posting a daily bloom on the Kierkegaarden, often before sunrise. Next I began reading and sharing the news on various topics that I found interesting on Twitter, Friendfeed & Facebook. Apparently, many others shared my interests and found my posts to be of value and followed them.

Since I posted so frequently, I avoided posting too many personal comments, but that did not stop me from getting to know you. I’ve read yur posts and enjoyed them immensely. I’ve learned so much from you. Many of you responded to me and we got to know each other via DM’s and email. I really appreciate the connection and thought you should know . I hesitate to mention names here for fear of missing someone, but @ YOU and I know who you are. Some of you greeted me with a sun filled hello every morning. Some of us communicated personally by phone & email. Many of you sent tweets of gratitude and encouragement, confirming the value of my efforts by oh so frequent retweets. You have brought me great joy, and it has been a pleasure to ferret through the news and choose from a plethora of headlines to determine what may be of mutual interest and import. We’ve shared so muc together.

While I am away, although I will have internet access, I’m unsure how much time I wil have to continue as it has been my custom. However, I do plan to keep in touch as I can and take up where I left off upon returning. I’ll be taking my camera and Flip Mino with me and intend to blog about my travels.

I hope that you will stay and virtually join me on my European Journey. This represents a lifelong dream for me and has been a long time coming. I’m so excited, I can hardly breathe. I’m looking forward with great anticipation not only to the travel and study experience, but to meeting new friends and reuniting with those I’ve had the privilege of meeting on my last brief visit. I can’t wait to see them! That’s the best part of all.

Meanwhile, don’t let anyone tell you that Social Media is silly or meaningless. I’ve made some wonderful and VERY meaningful business and personal relationships here. It’s whatever you make it. My two cents to newbies… be honest, be open, be yourself, be kind & considerate. There are wonderful people in the world just waiting to get to know you.

Again, many, many thanks. Hang in there with me. Soon I’ll be greeting you from the other side…of the Atlantic, that is!!! Have a lovely summer. I’m sure I’ll be having a blast. Life is good.

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Photo courtesy of Starbucks

by Jim Donald, former CEO of Starbucks and Pathmark

“Good morning, general store managers, assistant store managers, VPs and all 26,000 employees…Jim here…

It’s Wednesday morning and the merchandising message today is–and you are not going to believe it– but I am telling you that it is OK to steal.”

It was 5:30 a.m., and I was on the phone, in my kitchen, sending out my daily voicemail. As I paused for effect, I was thinking that the supermarket industry has one of the strictest employee honesty codes in the world.  Because of the large number of employees, the vast number of items and the low profit margins, it’s an absolute necessity to have zero tolerance for employee theft. I hadn’t informed my senior team that I would be sending out this message…hmm…better think about how to handle that one…

“You heard correctly…despite what you might think about controlling losses and theft, I am saying to all of our associates, it’s now time to start stealing…stealing market share, that is.“

Call it hokey, but this is how I needed to deliver my message to my 26,000 associates. I wanted to convey that the power of the company comes associate by associate, item by item… and it’s up to them to translate that power into sales. So I finished my broadcast this way:

“That’s my message for today…it’s OK to steal…steal market share, that is. Thanks, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

That’s how I communicated though a crisis almost a decade ago when I was CEO of Pathmark Supermarkets. The economic crisis back then wasn’t as bad as today’s. But Pathmark was barely hanging on, just like a lot of companies now. Once the giant grocery chain in the New York metro area, it was one the longest living LBOs from the 1980s and still strapped with $1.6 billion in loans and junk bonds. Employee morale was at an all-time low. It was no longer a price leader. And our suppliers worried that we wouldn’t be able pay the bills.

I learned a lot at Pathmark—and during my time at Albertsons, Safeway, Wal-Mart (WMT) and Starbucks (SBUX), where I was the CEO until January of last year. Since I have some experience in crisis and now I have some distance, too, let me share just a few ideas with you:

Communicate, communicate, communicate. Especially at a time of crisis, make sure your message reaches all levels, from the very lowest to the uppermost. When Pathmark was in dire straits, I began to send out my daily message to all employees. Make sure too that you give them an opportunity to reply.

Reach deep for answers. Sam Walton once said to me, “Jim, if you ever want to know what is troubling your business, ask your front-line employees. They know, and they will tell you.” It’s true, your people on the front line are your real marketing experts. Take advantage of the fact that they’re closest to your customer everyday.

Beware the success trap. Success breeds risk aversion. And what happens when we become risk averse? We stop innovating. And we lose our best people because they become restless and even bored. Various studies by McKinsey and others lists three things that employees want from a company today: an open and honest work environment, the opportunity to be stretched and valued, and the ability to make decisions. Especially today, when so many companies are frozen by risk aversion, giving your people freedom to fail could be your competitive advantage. Complete Story….

Guest Post: Former Starbucks CEO’s tips for tough times – Postcards.

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Roland Martin says rules in the U.S. should be loosened to encourage adoption of American children.

(CNN) — Pop star Madonna is back in the news; this time, heading back to the African nation of Malawi to adopt her second child.

You might remember all of the drama a few years ago when Madonna adopted a Malawi boy. Now she wants to adopt a girl, and a judge has said she will have to wait until Friday to see if she will get the go-ahead.

Madonna has been quoted in the Malawi newspaper Nation as saying, “Many people, especially our Malawian friends, say that David should have a Malawian brother or sister. It’s something I have been considering, but would only do if I had the support of the Malawian people and government.”

It seems that anytime we hear about celebrities like Madonna adopting, the children are from another country. I’m not at all opposed to children being adopted from Africa, China or any other country, but it does raise the question: What’s wrong with adopting American children?

Now I’m not against anyone providing a secure, loving home for a child, but it seems to me that these stories often reinforce a growing public image of adoption for many Americans: that of a rich, famous individual going to a developing country to adopt a child.

According to various adoption and governmental agencies, more than 500,000 American children are under foster care, and many of them are waiting for adoption. From coast to coast, babies to toddlers to teens are desperately looking for a home where they can be loved, nurtured and provided for.

Now, it would be easy to blast these celebrities by saying it’s the hip thing to walk around with an international child, but truth be told, we’ve got a serious adoption problem in this country.

Single mothers have a difficult time adopting a child, and several I know personally have gone overseas. And let’s not even talk about the red tape and bureaucracy!

American parents are made to jump through enormous hoops, and the process takes years, instead of months. And all too often, single people and married couples simply grow disenchanted with the process.

We can sit here and criticize Madonna all day, but enough with ripping her. Our energy should be put into a call for massive adoption reform. Don’t just bang out an e-mail or blog and get caught up in the celebrity hype.

If you think it should be easier to adopt American children, demand that your local, state and federal election officials clear the pathway to make the process easier. And let’s have more consistency. Having 50 different states set their own policy, is frankly, nonsense. With so many rules, no wonder folks throw their hands up and move on.

The goal of adoption is to put children in loving homes and not have them be the responsibility of the state. Making it harder to adopt affects you in your pocketbook because taxpayer money is spent to care for the children. So changing the laws not only helps the child, but also is fiscally prudent.

So what are you prepared to do?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland Martin.

Commentary: Why aren’t celebrities adopting U.S. kids? – CNN.com.

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REMEMBERING The historian John Hope Franklin took pains to remind us of how much of his and our history we would like to forget.

When he was a boy in segregated Oklahoma, where he was born in 1915, John Hope Franklin used to indulge in a subversive bit of wordplay like a small act of public and private theater.

“My mother and I used to have a game we’d play on our public,” Dr. Franklin said not long ago, his voice full of artful pauses, words pulled out like taffy. “She would say if anyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro president of the United States. And just the words were so far-fetched, so incredible that we used to really have fun, just saying it.”

Even in a country where the far-fetched, for better and for worse, so often becomes reality, few historians achieved the stature, both as scholars and as moral figures — and as combinations of the two — that Dr. Franklin did. When he died last week, at the age of 94, an American epoch seemed to vanish with him.

Dr. Franklin was first and foremost a major historian, whose landmark book, “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” first published in 1947, was a comprehensive survey that sold more than three million copies. The book also permanently altered the ways in which the American narrative was studied.

“What distinguishes his history or historiography is that he, like few other historians, wrote a book that transformed the way we understand a major social phenomenon,” said David Levering Lewis, the New York University historian, who like Dr. Franklin studied under Theodore Currier at Fisk University in Nashville.

“When you think of ‘From Slavery to Freedom,’ there’s before and there’s after, there’s the world before and then we have a basic paradigm shift,” he said. “Before him you had a field of study that had been feeble and marginalized, full of a pretty brutal discounting of the impact of people of color. And he moved it into the main American narrative. It empowered a whole new field of study.”

Dr. Lewis and others argue that Dr. Franklin’s work helped empower not just African-American studies, but the whole range of alternative stories — of women, gays, Hispanics, Asians and others — now so much a part of mainstream academia.

Dr. Franklin accomplished this not through advocacy but rather through the traditional means of scholarly inquiry. In his discussion, for instance, of the intersection of race and imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Franklin observed: “The United States, unlike other imperial powers, had a color problem at home and therefore had to pursue a policy with regard to race that would not upset the racial equilibrium within the United States. In Puerto Rico, for example, approximately one-third of the population was distinctly of African descent, and many so-called white Puerto Ricans had sufficient black blood in their veins to qualify as African-Americans in the United States.”

Complete Story Here…

John Hope Franklin, Scholar and Witness – NYTimes.com.

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Jeremy and Christy Nueman used YouTube to find their adopted baby, Caleb.

Amanda, a college student seven months pregnant, scrolled past a YouTube video of a young California couple seeking adoption.

The couple, Jeremy and Christy Nueman, wanted to adopt a baby after struggling with infertility for five years. But instead of relying solely on newspaper ads or bulletin board fliers to increase their chances of connecting with a birth mother, they created a short YouTube video to show who they are.

Upon watching the video online, Amanda immediately connected with a snapshot of the Nuemans’ adorable miniature pinscher named Penny. She giggled when she saw video of Jeremy Nueman dancing happily in his kitchen, which reminded her of her own father.

She played the video over and over again.

“The video was comforting, and I could relate to them” said Amanda, who picked the Nuemans to become the adoptive parents of her baby boy out of hundreds of profiles she viewed online and through adoption agencies. Amanda chose to keep her last name anonymous for privacy reasons. “It’s so hard when you are just reading a letter to figure out what are these people like.”

With a high demand for domestic infants, adoption experts say the wait for a baby can be months or years. To gain a competitive edge, a growing number of adoption-minded couples are using Web sites like YouTube and Facebook to sell themselves as parents. Going online is cheaper, faster and reaches a wider audience than using just on print advertisements and word of mouth, they say.

Some wannabe parents are uploading YouTube videos featuring a hodgepodge of photos, home tours and interviews. Others are writing on blogs and personal Web sites to give birth mothers a glimpse of their adoption journey. To help spread the word, prospective parents also are utilizing social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook in the hope that their friends may know of a potential birth mom.

“Today’s teens and young adults looking for adoptive parents are more tech savvy than before,” says Jeff Siler, who owns ParentGallery.com, a free site created in 2007 where couples wanting to adopt can post pictures and video online. “Even before teens talk to an adoption agency, they may already be trying to Google for an answer online.”

Social media like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are also gaining traction among private adoption agencies. Bethany Christian Services, one of the nation’s largest adoption agencies, which completed more than 730 domestic infant adoptions last year, advises its couples — including the Nuemans — to create a YouTube video. Video & More on CNN:

Adoption seekers using YouTube, Facebook to find birth moms – CNN.com.

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In high doses, ultraviolet light can damage skin and DNA molecules, but the body does need some UV light to help us produce vitamin D. Our bodies use melanin to regulate how much UV light our skin lets in.

Courtesy George Chaplin

Ultraviolet Light And Pregnancy

Because women build babies in their wombs, they need more vitamin D to produce extra calcium for the baby’s bones. Could that explain this difference: When scientists look at the underarm skin of men and women in every color group of humans, the women on average are always lighter than the men. Are the ladies lighter to produce a little extra Vitamin D for the babies?

• Listen: Dr. Nina Jablonski describes the “Under Arm” test.

To begin, please point your elbow to the ceiling.

Then imagine yourself naked.

Then look at the patch of skin on the inside of your upper arm, the part of you that almost never sees the sun.

Whatever color you see there is what experts call your basic skin color, according to professor Nina Jablonski, head of the Penn State Department of Anthropology.

And that color, the one you have now, says Jablonski, is very probably not the color your ancient ancestors had — even if you think your family has been the same color for a long, long time.

Different Place, Different Color

Skin has changed color in human lineages much faster than scientists had previously supposed, even without intermarriage, Jablonski says. Recent developments in comparative genomics allow scientists to sample the DNA in modern humans.

By creating genetic “clocks,” scientists can make fairly careful guesses about when particular groups became the color they are today. And with the help of paleontologists and anthropologists, scientists can go further: They can wind the clock back and see what colors these populations were going back tens of thousands of years, says Jablonski.

She says that for many families on the planet, if we look back only 100 or 200 generations (that’s as few as 2,500 years), “almost all of us were in a different place and we had a different color.”

Over the last 50,000 years, populations have gone from dark pigmented to lighter skin, and people have also gone the other way, from light skin back to darker skin, she says.

“People living now in southern parts of India [and Sri Lanka] are extremely darkly pigmented,” Jablonski says. But their great, great ancestors lived much farther north, and when they migrated south, their pigmentation redarkened.

“There has probably been a redarkening of several groups of humans.”

Why We Change Color

The repigmenting process is increasingly well understood.

“Humans started in Africa,” Jablonski says, the part of Africa near the equator where it is intensely sunny with lots of ultraviolet light.

Ultraviolet light, or UV, in high doses can age the skin and damage the DNA molecule, which makes it harder to build a fetus. Not to mention that ultraviolet light can sometimes cause skin cancer.

On the other hand, if a human is plopped down in, say, Norway, where the days can be short and there is precious little ultraviolet light, this creates problems, too. All vertebrate animals need ultraviolet light to help produce vitamin D. Vitamin D helps us absorb calcium from our food to build strong bones. If we don’t get enough ultraviolet light, we’re less likely to survive to reproductive age to produce strong-boned babies.

Thus the dilemma: People who live in sunny climes around the equator have too much UV. People who move away from the equator eventually have too little UV.

Hooray For Melanin

The solution is what Jablonski calls “a really cool molecule”: melanin. In different concentrations, melanin makes skin lighter or darker. Kind of like a Venetian blind, it can let UV light in or keep it out.

Melanin has evolved in many different animals. Humans have had it for a long, long time and what Jablonski and others have learned is that when early humans migrated from the equator, their melanin levels changed.

That doesn’t mean they lost their tans. It means they had very specific genetic changes that allowed them to live and successfully reproduce in less sunny places. Darwin teaches that these changes began randomly. Somebody in the population at some point had a baby, and that baby, just by chance, had a little change in its DNA that made her skin, for example, a little lighter. When that baby moved north to Europe, lighter skin gave her an advantage as a grown-up, because it helped her produce strong-boned babies who could survive and have babies of their own.

Successive mutations created successive generations of lighter and lighter people as they moved north.

“This, in short, really created the gradation of skin color that we see in modern humans today,” says Jablonski. Her map of UV radiation levels on Earth closely mirrors the array of skin colors on Earth.

Skin Color Is A Fleeting Thing

The big surprise is how fast these changes can occur.

“Our original estimates were that [skin color changes] occurred perhaps at a more stately pace,” Jablonski says. But now they’re finding that a population can be one color (light or dark) and 100 generations later — with no intermarriage — be a very different color.

Figuring 25 years per generation (which is generous, since early humans walked naked through the world — clothes slow down the rate), that’s an astonishingly short interval.

It’s “a blink of an eye,” she says.

Audio & More available at NPR (Click Below)

Your Family May Once Have Been A Different Color : NPR.

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At 100, NAACP fights to keep struggle alive – Race & ethnicity- msnbc.com.

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Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama paid tribute to his hero, Abraham Lincoln, at a celebration for the reopening of the theater where he was slain.

“Despite all that divided us — North and South, black and white — he had an unyielding belief that we were, at heart, one nation, and one people,” Obama said last night at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. “And because of Abraham Lincoln, and all who carried on his work in the generations since, that is what we remain today.”

Obama, the nation’s first black commander-in-chief, often invokes the name and symbols of the assassinated president who ended slavery and brought the U.S. through the Civil War. Both men rose from the Illinois state legislature to the highest office in the land and both built reputations as skilled political orators.

The reopening of Ford’s Theatre after an 18-month refurbishment coincides with a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Obama, 47, who took the oath of office on Lincoln’s bible, will travel to Springfield, Illinois, today to mark the bicentennial.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, joined politicians and Ford’s Theatre donors to watch a series of songs, readings and speeches performed by celebrities such as Ben Vereen and Kelsey Grammer.

The theater also unveiled a videotape, to be shown at its museum, in which the four living past-presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, accompanied by Matthew Brady’s Civil War images.

Empty Presidential Box

The Obamas watched from the front row alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. None of the nation’s leaders have sat in the presidential box since John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln there during a performance of “Our American Cousin” on the evening of April 14, 1865.

The event was a retrospective of Lincoln’s life, from his humble beginnings described by James Earl Jones’s baritone to Vereen’s impassioned reading of the Emancipation Proclamation without the prompter, which broke mid-show.

The highlight for the audience of about 650 was classical violinist Joshua Bell’s “Variations on Yankee Doodle,” which was by turns playful and mournful.

Broadway singer Cheryl Freeman gave an electrifying rendition of a song from the play “The Civil War,” followed by Audra McDonald, Jessye Norman and Joshua Bell for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which earned a standing ovation.

Host and actor Richard Thomas called the facility the most-famous theater in America, which had morphed from a scene of tragedy into a symbol of Lincoln’s legacy.

Lincoln Medal

The gala event included the presentation of the Lincoln Medal given each year to someone whose work, accomplishments and attributes “exemplify the lasting legacy and mettle of character embodied by the most beloved president in our nation’s history,” Ford’s Theatre said. This year, the recipients were filmmaker George Lucas and actor Sidney Poitier.

In the aftermath of the assassination, the government bought the theater, which dates to 1861, from Ford for $100,000 and gave it to the War Department for use as storage space and an Army Medical Museum.

At one point, the interior collapsed, so now only the exterior walls are original. In the 1960s, the theater was rededicated as a memorial to Lincoln, and the National Park Service used historic photographs and contemporary accounts to reconstruct the box and the theater as it looked that night. Almost a million visitors pass through every year.

Red Upholstery

The theater has just 658 seats, done up in red upholstery. Lincoln’s box sits just above stage left. On the balustrade is one of the few surviving artifacts from that time, an engraving of George Washington.

The renovation was part of a larger $50 million fundraising effort known as the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign that’s also supporting the building of a new education center. The campaign benefited from a $5 million donation from Exxon Mobil Corp. and $2.5 million from the State of Qatar, the theater said.

Other donors included AT&T Inc., BP America Inc., General Dynamics Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., AMR Corp.’s American Airlines and Lockheed Martin Corp., according to Ford’s Theatre.

Bloomberg.com: Arts and Culture.

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Hands on: Vincent Dotoli started his school with one classroom and 12 first graders.

Zina Mingo has lived in Harlem for all her 40 years and now teaches in a Harlem public school. But committed as she is to the community, she wasn’t willing to subject her son, Devon, now 8, to the educational system she works for. “Most of the schools in Harlem are failing schools, and that’s just not an option to me,” she says.

Instead, Mingo is pinning her hopes for Devon on Harlem Academy, a four-year-old not-for-profit school just north of Central Park. With its small classes, focus on rigorous academics, required parental involvement and long school day, the school gets results; 90% of third graders score above the national median in reading and math. Students arrive at 7:30, begin sports at 3:45 and leave at 5 or 6, depending on whether they want homework help after sports. For that, parents pay as little as $400 a year and as much as $16,000, depending on income.

Harlem Academy is the passion of headmaster Vincent Dotoli, 39, whose lawyer father and cpa mother could afford to buy him a private school education at Far Hills Country Day in New Jersey. After college he taught in rural Maine and Rhode Island and then for four years at Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a well-endowed 125-year-old private school in Cambridge, Mass. But he didn’t feel his efforts there made much of a difference. “Those students were going to be successful whether I was there or not,” he says.

So in 2001 Dotoli enrolled at Columbia University to earn a master’s in education administration. His thesis was on a model for a private urban school that could skirt the public school bureaucracy dragging down big city schools, while involving parents, who are too often treated as a nuisance in those same schools. Edmund W. Gordon, director of Columbia’s Institute for Urban & Minority Education, joined Dotoli in meeting with prospective students and parents. Harlem Academy opened in September 2004 with 12 first graders in one room rented from an arts group. In 2005 it moved to bigger quarters and now has 74 first-through-fifth graders.

Country Day In Harlem – Forbes.com.

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Cutting the Unemployment Line

Even in this economic chaos, some jobs remain recession resistant

There are three options government can pursue when the economy goes south. First, the Fed can cut interest rates, buy up assets, and extend credit, all of which the central bank has already done. Second, Congress can cut taxes on businesses and consumers in the hope they will spend more. The first effort—last year’s tax rebates—didn’t have the intended effect since consumers used much of the windfall to pay down debt or save. The substantial tax cuts that will be part of the Obama stimulus package would likely have a similarly muted effect. Businesses and consumers, facing a tough credit environment and needing to repair their balance sheets, will likely use proceeds from the tax cuts to tide themselves over. The third option is for the government to directly purchase goods and services, to substitute the demand that consumers and businesses aren’t providing.

The Washington remnant of the Republican Party—40 senators and 178 representatives—is all for Options 1 and 2, cheap money and tax cuts. But they’re having great difficulty with Option 3. They have forgotten Richard Nixon’s famous line that “we’re all Keynesians now.” To them, spending government funds to goose the economy is unacceptable, not just because of the possibility of poor execution —i.e., pork. No, many are rejecting it as a matter of principle. Even though several Republican governors are pleading for assistance in the form of federal spending, Washington Republicans are saying no.

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele laid down the party line on CNN: “Let’s get this notion out of our heads that the government create jobs. Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.” Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina succinctly summed up his opposition: “We can’t keep spending and borrowing to get us out of a recession.” Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri concedes that some government spending—such as spending on highways—can create jobs but thinks that spending on mass transit or alternative-transit infrastructure isn’t stimulative.  Read More…

Will the Stimulus Plan Create Jobs? | Newsweek Voices – Daniel Gross | Newsweek.com.

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