Organic Lifestyle Group
In honor of Rap artist, Drake’s Club Paradise Tour, he has encouraged fans to post music videos to songs from his newest album, Take care. The first video to hit the web publicly from Drake’s official blog is the practice ”official” video. Watch ’till the end, it might surprise you, Word.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stands next to NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who has just been appointed global cultural ambassador on behalf of the State Department.
“I look forward to meeting with young people all over the world and discussing ways in which we can strengthen our understanding of one another through education, through sports and through greater cultural tolerance,” he said.
For the first time since they entered the league in 1995, the Carolina Panthers are altering their logo. The updated logo intends to be more aggressive and contemporary, according to the Panthers website.
The organization also changed the accompanying logo font. They decided to make the change from the older, virtually unreadable one to one that is much simpler and easier to read.The team claims that the font was chosen because it was “inspired by the swift, sleek nature of a panther.”
Check out the new logo below. [Read more...]
You asked the questions, and President Obama answered in the first-ever completely virtual interview from the White House, presented by YouTube and Google+.
R.I.P to Don Cornelius (September 27, 1936 – February 1, 2012) who was found dead at his home today, February 1st. Love, Peace and Soul to you Don Cornelius, Wo.
Amsterdam designer Winde Rienstra’s latest collection for Fall 2012 entitled “11:11″ has the utmost channeling look of all time,(well in my eyes). Featuring 3-D construction from sustainable materials has left this leading lady with first place in the 2007 Dutch Designer Idol. Her vision for style is simply proportion and rhythm; shapes are taken advantage of as well as different textures. The cages placed around the waists of her glamorous models and their curvy areas are constructed by HAND. Rienstra took part in ” The Green Fashion Competition” in 2010 according to the principles of the use of sustainability in her collection which soon became looked upon as “Green Haute Couture”.
Etta James, whose assertive, earthy voice lit up such hits as “The Wallflower,” “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” and the wedding favorite “At Last,” has died, according to her longtime friend and manager, Lupe De Leon. She was 73.
She died from complications from leukemia with her husband, Artis Mills, and her sons by her side, De Leon said.
She was diagnosed with leukemia in 2010, and also suffered from dementia and hepatitis C. James died at a hospital in Riverside, California. She would have turned 74 Wednesday.
” This is a tremendous loss for the family, her friends and fans around the world,” De Leon said. “She was a true original who could sing it all — her music defied category. via
Mealbreaker (n.): a nasty, non-edible surprise found in food while it is being eaten; often lawsuit-provoking, sometimes fabricated, always disgusting.
Karruim Demaio, a former McDonald’s employee, shot a cell phone video of a mouse trapped in a bag of Big Mac buns at a Philadelphia McDonald’s. In the video below, the frantic mouse tramples across many different buns. According to the Demaio, the manager ordered the employees to serve the buns, and has previously wiped off mouse droppings from buns and then served them. When Fox 29 asked the manager, she denied the claims.
“I was working there from October of 2010 to January of this year. There hasn’t been a time when we couldn’t go in the back and see mouse droppings on the bread,” Demaio told Fox 29.
According to the Philadelphia Health Department, this particular McDonald’s is not in satisfactory compliance with health standards; the owner is investigating the claims.
Via: Grist.org
By Jane Black
It could have been a turning point in America’s war on obesity. Tuesday morning on the Today show, Food Network star Paula Deen — the queen of deep-fried Twinkies — admitted that she had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. But when asked whether fans should cut back on the “yummy, fattening” recipes she promotes, she told Al Roker: “Honey, I’m your cook, not your doctor.”
Deen’s position is hardly a surprise. This is a woman known for fried chicken and broccoli “salad” that includes sugar, mayonnaise, cheese and bacon. Deen knows that even a mention of healthy, responsible eating could undermine her multimillion-dollar television-and-cookbook empire built on the glories of sugar and lard.
Still, it was a grand disappointment. While everyone from Anthony Bourdain to Frank Bruni have called Deen a menace to a healthy society, I always believed that Deen, or someone like her, might be the key to change. Everyday Americans, including a large number that struggle with weight and diabetes, like Deen. They listen to her. As I wrote in a piece for The Atlantic in August, Deen, despite herself, might just be the secret ingredient to changing the way Americans eat.
If that sounds ridiculous, think again about the power of celebrity-awareness campaigns. Magic Johnson single-handedly changed the debate about the AIDS virus when he went public with his diagnosis of HIV. (It’s worth noting, too, that the move hasn’t damaged his career as a broadcaster and endorser.) Christopher Reeves, aka Superman, raised money for research on spinal cord injuries and public empathy for people with disabilities. Lance Armstrong, despite all the controversy over doping, has made supporting cancer research eminently cool.
Deen has chosen a different path. Three years after her diagnosis, she’s signed on as a paid spokeswoman for diabetes drugs — her way, she says, of bringing something to the table. Moreover, she denies that her sugar-and-fat-laden recipes have any role to play in the skyrocketing rates of Type 2 diabetes. Fans may see her on TV twice a day swooning over cream pies and “Uncle Bubba’s wings,” but she only cooks and eats that kind of food while filming, or “30 days out of 365 days — and it’s for entertainment.”
In the end, Deen told Roker: “You have to be responsible for yourself.” It’s advice that the fatty-food diva clearly and cynically has decided to follow.
Beyoncé Knowles has been lambasted for looking Caucasian.
The singer has just released her newest promotional ad for her album 4.
Beyoncé’s bright blond hair and bleached eyebrows in the promo are simply too blanch for some critics.
“I think in a lot of ways [Beyoncé is] culpable because there’s history there,” founder of blog ThisIsYourConscience.com Lincoln Anthony Blades told the Daily News. “She’s not saying explicitly you have to lighten your skin, but it does carry that inherent message.”
Beyoncé has been criticized before for looking like a white girl. In a 2008 ad for cosmetics company L’Oréal, the singer’s skin appeared abnormally light.
Filmmaker D. Channsin Berry who helmed Dark Girls, a documentary exploring discrimination faced by dark-skinned black women, thinks the singer’s neutralized ethnicity is a requisite for successful marketing.
“[Beyoncé is] doing what she needs to do to be accepted worldwide and keep those sponsors happy,” D. contends.
Skin color in the black American community has been a contentious issue since early members of the African diaspora crunched their feet in the dirt of the state of Virginia in the 17th century.
Mixed race house Negroes got to serve the master in the comfort of his Deep South Confederate mansion while the plantation’s darkies were bloodying their hands picking cotton in the grueling heat outside.
An obsolete dialogue that still rages without addressing the issue.
Who are black Americans?
The descendants of African tribesman, Native American tribesman, European slave owners. Partially, in between and wholly all of these.
What is being whitewashed? Were the first members of the African diaspora not sanitized of their heritage when slave owners ripped tongues from the mouth at the sound of a native utterance?
America has been bleached since the Indians dwindled from small pox.
Now, with tanning beds at the peak of popularity, there is an opportunity to change the hue of pop culture.
Blackwash: bust out the Sharpie.
Wikipedia will lead the protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) tomorrow.
The online encyclopedia is putting its services on lockdown, making English language webpages inaccessible for one full day.
SOPA and PIPA are bills intent on eradicating online piracy and copyright infringement. The ordinances would grant the US government with the right to ban any foreign website it deems nefarious.
Wikipedia will be joined by leading websites Reddit and Boing Boing in solidarity against the proposed legislation. These companies have been vociferous about their bitter opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills. They claim that if these acts become law, the government may erroneously terminate legitimate websites and impede free speech, creating the potential to stunt online commerce.
Senators who penned SOPA and PIPA argue that the acts will protect trade. They contend that Internet pirates devalue intellectual property, thereby endangering jobs in the creative industries.
The Obama Administration is not a fan of the current verbiage.
“[The White House will] not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet,” officials released in a statement over the weekend.
SOPA and PIPA are currently being reviewed in the House of Representatives.
Twitter and Facebook will remain active tomorrow.
The Environmental Working Group (How much sugar should kids eat?) conducted a study on 84 popular children’s cereal brands and found that three-fourths of them failed to meet the federal government’s proposed guidelines on what makes food nutritious enough to be marketed to kids.
Here are the EWG study’s top 10 sugar-bomb kids’ cereals, ranked by percent weight in sugar:
And if you’re interested in giving organic options a shot, check out the recommended brands below:
VIA Huffington Post
UPDATE: Since yesterday afternoon, the FDA has lowered the alarm level somewhat. FDA officials clarified their announcement by saying that there is no reason to think that the trace levels of fungicide in the OJ supply constitute a health threatat this time, and that the testing regime is borne out of extreme caution rather than knowledge of present danger.
Also, the FDA announced that it had started clearing some orange juice shipments, including some from Canada, for entrance into U.S. borders. Mostly that raises the question, who knew you could grow oranges in Canada?
Meanwhile, food safety officials from abroad have started reacting to the American move. EU officials said they would take a fresh look at their orange juice importation polices next week, but noted that they were unlikely to make drastic changes. Australian orange juice importers, on the other hand, said that they had no plans to stop importing Brazilian juice.
EARLIER: The FDA announced Wednesday that it would temporarily halt all imports of foreign orange juice. The blockade was prompted by fears that some foreign orange juice — especially juice imported from Brazil — contains traces of carbendazim, a fungicide banned in the United States. The import ban is set to last until the FDA has finished conducting a thorough investigation of fungicide levels.
The news of the OJ import ban comes just one day after it was revealed that the FDA would ramp up testing for the illegal additive.
Once that news broke, though, many in the orange juice market began to fear that an import ban was at hand. As a result, prices for OJ futures briefly spiked to an all-time high of $2.07 per pound. Today’s trading brought that price down to $1.88 as speculators began to think that fears of FDA action had been overblown. Today’s late-breaking news of the import ban likely portends another heavy day of trading tomorrow.
Carbendazim was banned relatively recently; it was used to kill black fungus on Florida oranges as recently as 2008. It is still legal in Brazil, however, and the EU allows foods to contain up to 200 parts per billion of the fungicide. But studies linking carbendazim to increased rates of cancers and infertility prompted an outright ban of its use on American oranges.
The FDA has said that it will move forward on measures to take tainted orange juice off supermarket shelves if its testing uncovers unsafe levels of carbendazim.
The overwhelming majority of orange juice consumed in the United States is produced from domestic oranges, though most of the imported juice comes from Brazil. To find out where your favorite brand gets its oranges, read the HuffPost Kitchen Daily guide to OJ.
Article By Mark Fischetti
(Click here for original article.)
A little snow and rain are falling in a few states today, but the 2011-12 winter has been extremely warm and dry across the continental U.S. Meteorologists think they have figured out why.
First, a few records: The initial week of January was the driest in history. And more than 95 percent of the U.S. had below-average snow cover — the greatest such percentage ever recorded — according to some intriguing data maps generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. During December, approximately half of the U.S. had temperatures at least 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average, and more than 1,500 daily record highs were set from January 2 to 8. Europe has seen similar extremes.
The chief suspect behind the mysterious weather is an atmospheric pressure pattern called the Arctic Oscillation, which circles the high Northern Hemisphere. Its lower edge is known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Together, the related features influence the path and strength of the jet stream. The jet itself is an air current that flows west to east across the northern latitudes of the U.S., Europe and Asia, altering temperature and precipitation as portions of it dip southward or crest northward. A strong jet stream that flows in a somewhat straight line from west to east, with few southward dips, prevents cold arctic air from drifting south. “The cause of this warm first half of winter is the most extreme configuration of the jet stream ever recorded,” according to Jeffrey Masters, a meteorologist who runs the Weather Underground, a Web site that analyzes severe weather data.
By “extreme,” Masters means that the jet stream was far north and fairly straight, and stayed that way for an unusually long time. That position allowed warm southern air to prevail over the entire U.S., and prevented cold fronts from descending from the north and clashing with warm fronts, creating large snow- and rainstorms. The jet stream has been locked in that position by the NAO for most of the winter, and Masters says it has sustained the largest pressure gradient since tracking began in 1865.
Conversely, December 2010 set record snowfalls in many parts of the U.S. Sure enough, the NAO at that time had some of the lowest pressures ever observed, allowing the jet stream to move south and stay there. Arctic air descended, picked up moisture or interacted with warm fronts, and dropped snow. “The December Arctic Oscillation index has fluctuated wildly over the past six years,” Masters notes, “with the two most extreme positive and two most extreme negative values on record.” Data for the trends is available at the Weather Underground site.
Meteorologists are not certain what causes the oscillations to vary so dramatically. Some scientists say the loss of Arctic sea ice due to global warming is causing the Arctic Oscillation to drop in pressure. Others have noticed a correlation with sunspot activity, which was very low in December 2010 and very high during December 2011, although they haven’t proposed a mechanism whereby sunspots would directly alter the Arctic Oscillation.
Of course, winter has many weeks to go, so the oscillations, and U.S. weather, could shift. But if plentiful precipitation does not fall, complications could arise for many more people than ski resort owners and their patrons. A small snowpack often leads to spring droughts in the Midwest and summer water shortages in the West as well as a longer wildfire season in the latter because the soil dries out earlier than usual.
In the meantime if you want snow, hop a flight to Cordova or Valdez, two towns on Alaska’s Pacific coast that are buried under 4.5 to 5.5 meters of snow — with more on the way. They, too, can thank the Arctic Oscillation because, being so high latitude, they lie within the band the jet stream has been stuck in, not south of it.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wants more women to get knocked up.
The former Massachusetts governor and Harvard Law School alumnus played dumb about contraception at last Saturday’s Republican Presidential Debate. Mitt and fellow panelist Rick Santorum have spoken out about the illegitimacy of birth control before. But Mitt seemed reluctant to speak his mind on the subject that night.
In response to debate moderator George Stephanopoulos’ probing of the issue, Mitt went glib.
“George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising,” Mitt said. “States have the right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine that states would want to ban contraception. If I were a governor or a legislator in a state, I would totally oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking — given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so — you are asking could it constitutionally be done? We could ask our constitutionalist [candidate Ron Paul over] here.”
Romney’s opponent Rick Santorum decries the crucial 1965 Supreme Court Griswold v. Connecticut decision that protects the right to sexual and reproductive privacy. This ruling sanctioned the use of birth control and paved the way for later policies legalizing sodomy and all other thrilling late night antics. Roe vs. Wade was born of this decree, decriminalizing abortion.
Rick despises Griswold v. Connecticut, says it’s unconstitutional and should be lifted from the books. Mitt says he’s clueless, but his Harvard Law studies would most certainly have required him to read about the case more than twice.
Rick is more vociferous about his stance, but Mitt’s position can only be extrapolated through an assessment of his desires. Mitt opposes 2010’s President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which covers patients’ reproductive health. He wants to reinstate former President George W. Bush’s “conscience rule,” later repealed by Obama, that makes it difficult for federally funded nonprofit health care providers like Planned Parenthood to offer birth control, abortions or emergency contraception.
Mitt’s policy is clear: don’t have unprotected sex if you don’t want to get pregnant.
Rape victims, one-night stand participants, Dionysian orgy affiliates, committed couples who were practicing Tantra only to find Man blows his load too soon: Mitt Romney says hitting skins bareback is not your right.
Even though the recall only affects the Western United States, everyone should still be aware.
Note: The 750 mL size of Martinelli’s Gold Medal Sparkling Cider is NOT affected and is NOT part of this recall.
