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- buy this bike here
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So what's wrong with cheap food and cheap meat...? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don't receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories — some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s — but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it's no surprise we're so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.
....When (fertilizer) runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what's known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year...
...So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It's clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down — a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones...
....Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work." ...
...The economic development created over 3,000 residential units, 800 of which are considered affordable for people of average or modest incomes.
..."It's been fabulous for urban commercial development," she said of the streetcar. "It's been a very positive impact on the community and the city."
...streetcars create "nodes of activity" that will benefit small businesses in the long term.
John Miller, the executive director of HOST, an affordable housing non-profit, hopes that future streetcars will actually help people of more modest incomes because they won't have to rely on their cars as much....
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... they asked, “This is where you live? This is your neighborhood? Your streets are designed to kill people.’’ They said that the thin painted white lines at the intersection could not be seen at dawn, nor was there a raised bump to or a narrowing of the road to demarcate the intersection and slow down traffic. They said the speed limit should be ... less if we wanted pedestrians to have much of a chance of surviving. They also said traffic lights increased the number of deaths because people often speed up when the light turns yellow...From here. More here.
... these deaths were not “accidents’’ but were predictable and preventable. And they set out to prove it.
...Most people think we are doing all that can be done to keep our roads safe. They are wrong. Road traffic injuries kill more than a million people a year worldwide, including 40,000 a year in the United States. ... we can change our roads so they help protect both drivers and pedestrians...
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Article from Wall Street Journal requires a subscription to view in its entirety.
It's time to accept that home ownership is not a realistic goal for many people and to curtail the enormous government programs fueling this ambition. By Thomas J. Sugrue
...Surveys show that Americans buy into our gauzy platitudes about the character-building qualities of home ownership—at least those who still own them. A February Pew survey reported that nine out of 10 homeowners viewed their homes as a "comfort" in their lives. But for millions of Americans at risk of foreclosure, the home has become something else altogether: the source of panic and despair....
... One third of respondents don't believe that they will ever be able to own a home. And 42% of those who once purchased a home, but don't own one now, believe that they'll never own one again.
...In France, Germany, and Switzerland, renting is more common than purchasing. There, most people invest their earnings in the stock market or squirrel it away in savings accounts. In those countries, whether you are a renter or an owner, houses have use value, not exchange value.
... the story of how the dream became a reality is not one of independence, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurial pluck. It's not the story of the inexorable march of the free market. It's a different kind of American story, of government, financial regulation, and taxation.
We are a nation of homeowners and home-speculators because of Uncle Sam.
It wasn't until government stepped into the housing market, during that extraordinary moment of the Great Depression, that tenancy began its long downward spiral. Before the Crash, government played a minuscule role in housing Americans, other than building barracks and constructing temporary housing during wartime and, in a little noticed provision in the 1913 federal tax code, allowing for the deduction of home mortgage interest payments.
Until the early 20th century, holding a mortgage came with a stigma. You were a debtor, and chronic indebtedness was a problem to be avoided like too much drinking or gambling. The four words "keep out of debt" or "pay as you go" appeared in countless advice books. As the YMCA told its young charges, "If you can't pay, don't buy. Go without. Keep on going without." Because of that, many middle-class Americans—even those with a taste for single-family houses—rented. Home Sweet Home didn't lose its sweetness because someone else held the title.
In any case, mortgages were hard to come by. Lenders typically required 50% or more of the purchase price as a down payment. Interest rates were high and terms were short, usually just three to five years....
...Herbert Hoover signed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act in 1932, laying the groundwork for massive federal intervention in the housing market. ...Frankin Roosevelt created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation... created the Federal Housing Administration, ...instituted 25- and 30-year mortgages, and cut interest rates...and created the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) which created the secondary market in mortgages...
Easy credit, underwritten by federal housing programs, boosted the rates of home ownership quickly. By 1950, 55% of Americans had a place they could call their own. By 1970, the figure had risen to 63%. It was now cheaper to buy than to rent. Federal intervention also unleashed vast amounts of capital that turned home construction and real estate into critical economic sectors. By the late 1950s, for the first time, the census bureau began collecting data on new housing starts—which became a leading indicator of the nation's economic vitality.
... Tens of millions of Americans owned their own homes because of government programs, but they had no reason to doubt that their home ownership was a result of their own virtue and hard work, their own grit and determination—not because they were the beneficiaries of one of the grandest government programs ever. The only housing programs prominently associated with Washington's policy makers were underfunded, unpopular public housing projects...
Federal housing policies changed the whole landscape of America, creating the sprawlscapes that we now call home, and in the process, gutting inner cities, whose residents, until the civil rights legislation of 1968, were largely excluded from federally backed mortgage programs. Of new housing today, 80% is built in suburbs—the direct legacy of federal policies that favored outlying areas rather than the rehabilitation of city centers. It seemed that segregation was just the natural working of the free market, the result of the sum of countless individual choices about where to live. But the houses were single—and their residents white—because of the invisible hand of government.
But by the 1960s and 1970s, those who had been excluded from the postwar housing boom demanded their own piece of the action—and slowly got it. The newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development expanded home ownership programs for excluded minorities...
During the wild late 1990s ...New tools, including the securitization of mortgages and subprime lending, made it possible for more Americans than ever to live the dream or to gamble that someone else would pay them more to make their own dream come true..
... If there's one lesson from the real-estate bust of the last few years, it might be time to downsize the dream, to make it a little more realistic. James Truslow Adams, the historian who coined the phrase "the American dream," one that he defined as "a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank" also offered a prescient commentary in the midst of the Great Depression. "That dream," he wrote in 1933, "has always meant more than the accumulation of material goods." Home should be a place to build a household and a life, a respite from the heartless world, not a pot of gold.
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...Having followed the coverage in the Philadelphia media, I have lingering questions about how much of that incident was race and how much was social class. Urban working-class and suburban middle-class children often have quite different styles of play -- as I know from present observation as well as from my Syracuse youth, when I regularly biked to the public pool in Thornden Park. Kids of all races from downtown Syracuse neighborhoods were much rougher and tougher, and for self-preservation you had to stay out of their way! Otherwise, you'd get knocked to the concrete or dunked when they heedlessly jumped off the diving board onto our heads in the crowded pool.
In general, middle-class children today are more closely supervised at pools because the family can afford to have a non-working parent at home -- a luxury that working-class kids rarely have. What happened at the Valley Swim Club, whose safety infrastructure was evidently also overwhelmed by too many visiting kids who were non-swimmers, may have been a clash of classes rather than races. Were the mothers who pulled their kids out of the pool that day really reacting to skin color or what they, accurately or not, perceived to be an overcrowded, dangerous disorder? The incontrovertible offense in all this, which went unmentioned in the national media, was the closure for budgetary reasons by the city of Philadelphia this summer of 27 of its 73 public pools. There is no excuse for that kind of draconian curtailment of basic recreational facilities for working-class families, sweltering in the urban summer heat.
....parking is the big short-term issue facing the market. He said weekend crowds consistently fill the 723 spaces on surrounding streets and 155 spots in a city-owned lot north of the market....building a streetcar system that runs past the market would help...
...
Then, there’s the matter of more than 40 vacant buildings in the blocks surrounding Findlay Market. The buildings are owned by the city and the corporation, which has development rights but no money to spearhead a project. Three attempts to recruit developers have produced no results.
“We need a local residential population to secure the market’s future,” Pickford said. “If you look at it’s history, the market survived because it was surrounded by a densely populated neighborhood until 20 to 25 years ago.”
-Today's Cincinntati Business Courier
The size of newly built homes fell in 2008 for the first time in almost 15 years. Is the McMansion era on the wane?
... "A new ethic is arising right now that will become commonplace -- as commonplace as is recycling today, when just a few decades ago it was rarely, if ever, done," said Sarah Susanka, author of the book, "The Not So Big House."
...She believes the current shrinking trend mimics one of 100 years ago, when simple bungalows supplanted elaborate Victorian homes as the design choice for many Americans...
Raising Healthy Kids in a Super-Size-It World
...Juice Plus experts will share practical, every day simple solutions for a lifetime of improved health habits. Smoothies and healthy snacks will be served.
Sat., Sept. 12th @ 11:15 - 12:15, Free!
Baby Food: Made At Home, Made Simple
Sat., Sept. 26th @ 11:15-12:15, Free!
Mom-to-Mom
....support, encouragement, understanding, and answers to your “new mom” questions?
...Group meets Thursdays (Sept. 3rd-24th) @ 10:30 & Sept. 19th @ 11:30, Free!
Circle of Life - Belly Dancing
... Women at all stages of life welcomed
Saturdays (Sept. 12-26) 11:30-12:15pm. $50/5-class package or $13/class.
CLASSES/EVENTS FOR FAMILIES
Whale of a Tale , interactive story time
September Story Time Themes:
9/1 & 3: What Flower is Taller than You? Sunflowers!
9/8, 10 & 12: It’s Fall! Where are all the Birds Going?
9/14, 17 & 19: Mr. Bear Says all he wants to do is Sleep!
9/22, 24 & 26: Bubbles - not just Summer Time Fun!
9/29: Bzzzzzz!
Ages: Birth to 5 years @ 10:30am, Free!
Jammin' in our Jammies! musical play for families
Thursdays, Sept. 3-24 @ 6:00pm
Ages: families with children 1-3 years, $100 for 10-classes or $13/class.
Little Sprout Yogis baby & me yoga
Sundays, Sept. 12-27 @ 1:30, $100/10-class package or $13/class.
Family Fiesta Spanish for the whole family
Tuesdays,, Sept. 1-29 @ 9:30 & 10:30, $100 for a 10-class package or $13/class
Ages: 19 months - 12 years
CLASSES FOR KIDS - BIRTH TO 5 YEARS
TummyTime!
...facilitated open-play sessions you’ll discover creative ways to stimulate your infant’s senses, learn simple play activities to promote motor development, as well as practice infant massage and reflexology techniques which promote brain development, lessen colic symptoms, enhance sleep patterns, and promote infant bonding and attachment.
Thursdays, Sept. 3-24 @ 9:30, $100/10-class package or $13/class
Tiny Tunes musical play
9:30, 10:30 & 11:30, Birth to age 5 on Mondays, Sept. 7-28 or Wednesdays, Sept. 2-30
$100/10-class package or $13/class.
Head & Shoulder, Knees & Toes Brain Play
Our infant behavioral specialist will share specific techniques to promote your baby’s awareness and thinking skills, as well as activities to enhance sensory development and promote the brain-body connection, all through “play”!
Thursdays, Sept. 3-24 at 10:30, $100/10-class package or $13/class
Movers & Shakers, crawler-toddler developmental play
Tuesdays, beginning Aug. 11th @ 9:30, $100/10-class package or $13/class.
The Next Step
...let’s clap our hands, stomp our feet, and explore fun ways to fine-tune your child's motor skills and enhance their language development.
Tuesdays, Sept. 1-29 @ 10:30, $100/10-class package or $13/class
TOT (Time Out Together) - parent-Infant/toddler enrichment
...focus on increasing young children’s attention spans. Each class will include themed “learning times” during which we’ll engage in hands-on learning activies and practical life skills, focus on cognitive and motor skill development, and promote language and social skills. During our healthy snack time our facilitator will discuss topics like nutrition, discipline, sleeping issues, & preschool preparation.
Wednesdays, Sept. 2-30 @ 9:30, ages: 12-35 months
$250/10-class package or $30/class.
Signing Safari
Join your child in singing, signing, playing, & rhyming! ...Children can “talk” with their hands as early as 9 months. Why whine when you can sign?!
weekly @ 9:30 & 10:30am
ages 6 months to 5 years, on Mondays, Sept. 7-28 or Saturdays, Sept. 12-26
$115/10-class package or $13/class and includes a Signing Safari DVD.
Imagination Station , artistic play
...We’ll explore with a wide variety of mediums, such as paint, clay, sand, products from nature, and everyday recyclable items.
weekly @ 9:30 & 10:30am
ages 19 mo-12 yrs, Fridays, Sept. 4-25, Cost: $100/10-class package or $13/class.
CHILDREN’S CLASSES - 6 TO 12 YEARS:
A Signing Safari
...The ASL alphabet and number system will also be learned and reinforced through real-life role-play. Deaf culture awareness will be emphasized, as well.
Saturdays, Sept. 12-26 at 11:30am, 6-12 year olds, $100/10-class package or $13/class.
African Drumming
.. the drum beat is heard every day for communication, celebration and fun. We’ll even learn how to make our own drum. Let’s celebrate our global citizenship!
Tuesdays, Sept. 1-29 @ 4:30 & 5:30, 6-12 year olds, $100/10-classes or $13/class.
For all the classes: rsvp at website or call 513-591-2332.
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