Ideas, Actions, and Inspiration for a Better Tomorrow - October 25 Edition

Positive Habits, Personal Development

10 Positive Habits That Will Immediately Make Life Better

“I am a firm believer in the power of positive habits. It's so easy to point at the clouds and say, "This is where I want to be." Anyone can do that. The challenge is to get your hands dirty and do what you need to do each and every day in order to turn those dreams into a reality.

1. Keep your first promise of the day.

The first promise all of us make to ourselves every day is what time we're going to get up. And you know what? A large majority of us break that promise. The alarm goes off. You hit snooze. And without even meaning to, you've already started the day on the wrong foot. You made a promise the night before that you decided not to keep.

Get in the habit of practicing making a promise to yourself and keeping it. This is about more than just "waking up." This is about the habit.

2. Dress for success.

Look good, feel good. 

Part of your morning routine should involve embodying the energy you want to bring into the world. This has less to do with "looking professional" and more to do with getting yourself in a positive frame of mind. When you feel comfortable in your own shoes, you carry yourself with a different energy. It's the energy that matters.”

Click on the title of the article to read the other 8.

Foreign Policy, North Korea

The Korean Missile Crisis: Why Deterrence Is Still the Best Option

“It is time for the U.S. government to admit that it has failed to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the United States. North Korea no longer poses a nonproliferation problem; it poses a nuclear deterrence problem. The gravest danger now is that North Korea, South Korea, and the United States will stumble into a catastrophic war that none of them wants.

The world has traveled down this perilous path before. In 1950, the Truman administration contemplated a preventive strike to keep the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear weapons but decided that the resulting conflict would resemble World War II in scope and that containment and deterrence were better options. In the 1960s, the Kennedy administration feared that Chinese leader Mao Zedong was mentally unstable and proposed a joint strike against the nascent Chinese nuclear program to the Soviets. (Moscow rejected the idea.) Ultimately, the United States learned to live with a nuclear Russia and a nuclear China. It can now learn to live with a nuclear North Korea.

Doing so will not be risk free, however. Accidents, misperceptions, and volatile leaders could all too easily cause disaster. The Cold War offers important lessons in how to reduce these risks by practicing containment and deterrence wisely. But officials in the Pentagon and the White House face a new and unprecedented challenge: they must deter North Korean leader Kim Jong Un while also preventing U.S. President Donald Trump from bumbling into war. U.S. military leaders should make plain to their political superiors and the American public that any U.S. first strike on North Korea would result in a devastating loss of American and South Korean lives. And civilian leaders must convince Kim that the United States will not attempt to overthrow his regime unless he begins a war. If the U.S. civilian and military leaderships perform these tasks well, the same approach that prevented nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War can deter Pyongyang until the day that communist North Korea, like the Soviet Union before it, collapses under its own weight.”

Elections

NYC Voter Purge: “City Board of Elections Admits It Broke the Law, Accepts Reform”

WNYC:

“The New York City Board of Elections is admitting it broke state and federal law when it improperly removed voters from the rolls ahead of the presidential primary last spring, including more than 117,000 voters in Brooklyn.

That’s according to a draft consent decree announced Tuesday— nearly a year after the Board was sued in federal court for violating the National Voter Registration Act and state election law.

The Brooklyn voter purge was first reported by WNYC just days before last spring’s primary election.

As a part of the settlement, the Board agreed to a series of remedial measures that will be in place at least through the next presidential election, November 2020 — pending court approval.

The deal restores the rights of improperly purged voters and establishes a comprehensive plan to prevent illegal voter purges in future elections.”

  

Travel, Children

How to Entertain Your Kids on a Flight or Road Trip

“Kids may say the darndest things, but they’re actually quite predictable.

According to a psychologist, most kids younger than 12 can only wait 49 minutes and 47 seconds before asking the dreaded four words: “Are we there yet?”

On long-haul flights, this means that parents are likely to experience hours of boredom with their children — unless they come prepared.”

Breast Cancer

Breast Cancer Screening And Research

“In the U.S., at least 250,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in women this year, according to the American Cancer Society. So, when it comes to screening for that cancer, there are a number of options to consider.

Dr.Karthik Ghosh, director of the Mayo Clinic Breast Diagnostic Clinic Clinic Breast Diagnostic Clinic, says mammogram isstill the best test to screen the breast for women an average risk of breast

cancer."It has really been one of the long-standing tests, with a lot of research showing that there is a decrease in mortality."

Dr. Ghoshsays the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Preventive Services Task Force recommends that women 40 to 49 consider screening after discussion with their health care provider. For women 50 to 75, mammograms should be performed every other year. Dr. Ghosh adds there can be downsides to a mammogram, which include callbacks for further testing, false positives and the anxiety related to those events.”

Ideas, Actions, and Inspiration for a Better Tomorrow - October 6 Edition

Las Vegas, Remembrances

Lives lost in Las Vegas, remembered by loved ones

“And let’s continue now our remembrances of the 58 people who were murdered when the shooter began firing into the crowd at a country music concert.

As stories of heroism emerge, so do clearer pictures of the victims’ lives. Here now, 12 more.”

Child Poverty, Public Policy

America's Child-Poverty Rate Has Hit a Record Low

"The economy is nearing full employment. The stock market is at record highs. The expansion keeps continuing. Add to that one more very good piece of economic news: The child-poverty rate fell to a record low in 2016.

That finding comes from a new analysis of government and academic data by Isaac Shapiro and Danilo Trisi, both researchers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan, Washington-based think tank. The child-poverty rate declined to 15.6 percent in 2016, the researchers found, down from a post-recession high of 18.1 percent in 2012 and from 28.4 percent in 1967. That means that roughly 11.5 million kids were living in households below the poverty threshold last year. “The figures were actually a little surprising to us, and might be surprising to those who are following the poverty debate,” said Shapiro. “The argument, at least on the conservative side, is that we have poured a lot of money into safety-net programs and poverty hasn’t gone down. But it has.”

The most recent drop in the child-poverty rate is due to a tighter labor market, the researchers found. More parents are back at work, with competition among employers starting to drive wages up even for very low-income workers. That has helped to push the overall poverty rate down to 12.7 percent. That said, the near-halving of the child-poverty rate over the past half-century is not primarily due to improvements in the economy. In fact, stagnating wages, reduced bargaining power, automation, and offshoring have held down the earnings of families in the bottom of the income spectrum, and spiraling income inequality has meant that most of the gains of economic growth have gone to families at the top. Instead, it is the expansion of the safety net—in particular through the food-stamp program and provisions like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit—that has been most responsible for moving millions of kids above the poverty line over time, the researchers found."

Technology, Data, Privacy

The Threat of Big Tech Is Real

Isaac Chotiner: We tend to think of existential threats as being things like global warming or nuclear weapons. Why should we be thinking of technology in these dire terms?

Franklin Foer: I’m not arguing that we should think about technology per se in these dire terms. I’m arguing that we need to think about our present course with technology in those terms, because our lives are increasingly dominated by a series of big companies that have achieved something close to the state of monopoly. They have a vision for humans, and they’re trying to lead us to that vision, which they’re able to do because of their enormous economic power. What concerns me about this trajectory is that we’re giving up a lot. We’re getting a lot. There’s no doubt that we’re getting a lot. The iPhone is an incredible invention. Google is arguably one of the greatest inventions. The search engine is one of the greatest inventions in human history. But we’re also sacrificing enormous things. The magical qualities of these pieces of technology are things that we enjoy, but they also tend to blind us, so we don’t apply all the skepticism to these companies and to these trends that we would apply to other significant institutions in our lives.

The stakes are extremely high, whether it’s in regard to privacy or certain institutions that we hold and that we consider essential for democracy. We’ve maybe arguably always been in the process of merging with machines. We’ve always had tools, and those tools have been an extension of us, but what we’re automating right now are mental processes. These sites shape and filter our world, and they’re going to create virtual realities that we’re going to inhabit eventually. The problem is that we’re not just merging with our machines: We’re merging with the companies that operate those machines.

Nobel Peace Prize, Nuclear Weapons

The Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Anti-Bomb Idealists

“The dreamers won. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is still so green that, when the call came from the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the group initially thought it was a prank. But, in the middle of two brewing crises over nuclear weapons, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to a global coalition of young activists who defied the United States and the eight other nuclear powers this summer to win support at the United Nations for the first treaty to ban the world’s deadliest weapon.

With dogged determination, ican, which was formed just a decade ago, generated support from more than a hundred and twenty countries for the landmark accord. Fifty-three nations have signed it since the formal process began, on September 20th.

The Trump Administration led a boycott of talks on the ican initiative at the United Nations last spring. “There is nothing I want more for my family than a world with no nuclear weapons,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., told reporters. “But we have to be realistic. Is there anyone who thinks that North Korea would ban nuclear weapons?”

The Nobel committee cited ican, which is based in Geneva, for “its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.””

Entertainment, Movie Review

  

My Little Pony: The Movie Is a Movie for Our Times

“The rules are right there in the title of the series: Friendship is magic, which is to say that friendship is the Ponyverse’s equivalent of the Force, the source of power and the engine of narrative resolution. According to the series’ rules, magic depends on the bonds among the Mane Six—which means that the obstacles on a quest are less likely to be physical than emotional. The endpoint of a My Little Pony adventure is not “Collect all the different-colored gemstones,” as in the Marvel Universe; it’s “Listen to one another, resolve the hurt feelings, apologize, help, and celebrate.””

“Tempest’s story ends with a twist, one that might be especially meaningful to kids with disabilities or visible markers of difference.”