What?!! Grouchy Minneostans?!!

Courtesy of Mpls. Star- Tribune.

So what did you expect me to blog about today, other than the weather? For cripe's sake,  I'm a Minnesotan, and  another snowstorm is on its way to these parts in the next 24 hours. Sir Paul Douglas, our favorite meteorologist in the northland, reports as follows:

Many Minnesotans were already grouchy about last year's abbreviated summer, now this.

Here, let me cheer you up. A Blizzard Warning is posted just south of the Twin Cities Thursday. A plowable snowfall is expected, maybe as much as 2-4" in the metro, with heavier 6"+ amounts east of the St. Croix. An even bigger concern is 25-40 mph winds, capable of blowing/drifting, especially from Mankato and La Crosse to Eau Claire. If you plan on driving south/east of MSP Thursday into early Friday expect treacherous travel.

The Twin Cities metro is in a Winter Storm Warning, but latest guidance still keeps the heaviest snowfall amounts to our east. I suspect travel conditions will get worse as the day goes on tomorrow, with the worst conditions east of St. Paul Thursday night into early Friday.

By the way, I got caught out on the highway the other day in heavy snow. As usual someone was tailgating me on the exit ramp when my car started to slide back and forth. I credit mindfulness meditation for keeping me calm in this situation: I did not panic or over correct. I glanced in my rearview mirror and noted the tailgater had fallen back. My front right tire gained traction on the edge of the ramp, and I straightened my vehicle out. Despite poor visibility, I made it safely home.

Wouldn't you think by now that Minnesotans would know how to drive in poor weather conditions and would forgo the hazardous practice of tailgating a driver on icy pavement?

"The wondrous diversity of mindfulness practitioners"

Image courtesy of YouTube via Huffington Post.

In her piece at the Huffington Post the other day addressing "the mindfulness revolution," Carolyn Grigoire is obviously annoyed by Time Magazine's recent cover using a "beautiful, white, blond woman" to represent mindfulness practitioners.

Grigoire writes:

2014 has been called the "year of mindful living," and talk of a mindful revolution seems to be everywhere from Davos to Silicon Valley. Most recently, mindfulness was the subject of a controversial cover of TIME Magazine.

TIME's "Mindful Revolution" cover in January stirred up debate among the online mindfulness community, in part for featuring a beautiful, white blonde woman meditating on the cover. As some commentators pointed out, this wasn't the first time that the magazine has portrayed mindfulness this way: Its last cover on the "science of meditation" also featured an image of a beautiful white model.

"It's one thing to feature a young, fertile white girl on the cover of TIME and promote it as 'mindfulness,'" wrote Joanna Piacenza, web manager of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, in a HuffPost Religion blog post. "It's another to do it twice over the course of a decade."

It's undeniable that there is a mindful revolution going on, and that more people than ever before are embracing the well-documented physical and mental health benefits of meditation. But unfortunately, a homogenous representation of mindfulness practices isn't uncommon in the media -- especially in the case of yoga, which is often depicted by a thin white woman with a "Gwyneth Paltrow body." But the image of the serene, young white woman closing her eyes and breathing deeply doesn't come close to telling the whole story of how mindfulness is beginning to transform lives.

Despite the often-exclusionary media representation of mindfulness, the "mindful revolution" is spreading everywhere.

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Democratic women in the Senate: "It's time to raise the minimum wage"

A letter from Elizabeth Warren on the importance of raising the minimum wage:

Virginia, When I was in junior high, my daddy had a heart attack. The medical bills piled up, and we lost our family station wagon. So my mother did what she had to do: She went to work answering the phones at Sears. The job paid only minimum wage, but it was enough to make sure we could keep our home. If minimum wage had kept up with productivity gains since that time, it would be $22 an hour today. But it didn't – and today millions of hard-working moms and dads work full-time and still live in poverty. No one should work full-time and live below the poverty line. That's why the Democratic women of the Senate have joined together to say it plain: It's time to raise the minimum wage. Please stand with us now, and urge Congress to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. To me (and probably you), raising the minimum wage is a no-brainer. We know that if hard-working families have money in their pockets they will be able to help grow the economy. Why should people work two or three jobs and still struggle to make ends meet? Why should people who work full-time have to count on food stamps to feed their families? This is the answer: Raising the minimum wage would cut into the profits of those who have already made it, and they have an army of lawyers and an army of lobbyists to make certain that the system stays rigged in their favor. Powerful interests might need to be dragged kicking and screaming to raise the minimum wage, but I'm going to keep fighting – and so are the rest of the Democratic women in the United States Senate. Please stand with the Democratic women of the Senate now – and urge Congress to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. When I was growing up, full-time work would keep your family out of poverty. Now, the game is rigged against working families. Raising the minimum wage is one way we can start to level the playing field. Change like this is hard, and I can't guarantee the success of our efforts. But I know this: If you don't fight, you can't win. So let's fight. Thank you for being a part of this, Elizabeth

Obama's State of the Union: moving on

Peter Beinart at the Atlantic provides a thoughtful overview of Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday night:

Peter Beinart Jan 29 2014, 7:23 AM ET

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Understanding what Tuesday night’s State of the Union address was really about requires first understanding what it wasn’t about: Debt. For the first time since the early days of his presidency, President Obama offered an economic message freed from the crippling politics of austerity.
That becomes clearer when you look at Obama’s past speeches. First year-presidents don’t technically give a “state of the union” address,” but on February 24, 2009, Obama rose before Congress to give the functional equivalent. In it, he began telling the story that he hoped would guide his domestic policy. He said the financial crisis afflicting the nation was the symptom of a deeper malady, which had begun many years before. That malady was America’s failure to foster the kind of widely shared economic growth it had enjoyed in the decades after World War II. “Now is the time to act boldly and wisely,” he declared, “to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.

For a time, “new foundation” looked like Obama’s version of “New Deal” or “New Frontier”: the phrase that summed up his economic vision. Under its rubric in that 2009 speech, Obama proposed not only a stimulus to revive the economy, but big energy, education, and healthcare initiatives designed to lay “the foundation for our common prosperity” once the financial crisis subsided. Although he pledged to cut the deficit too, it was a distinctly lesser theme.

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Winter activities in Minnesota: wind surfing, kite flying, etc. during a blizzard

So what better way to spend a Sunday in the midst of the latest polar vortex to hit the Twin Cities? Why, just  drive out to Lake Calhoun and take photos of a windsurfer, a kite flyer, and the Minneapolis  skyline. My son ventured out into the blizzard and went over to Lake Calhoun to take some pictures that he posted on Capture Minnesota: 

http://www.captureminnesota.com/photos/1372561

http://www.captureminnesota.com/photos/1372567/in/profile,,

http://www.captureminnesota.com/photos/1372576/in/profile

Celebrating the present moment in subzero temps!

My apartment building's courtyard in mid-winter.

 The extreme weather this winter is conducive to counting my blessings.  First on the list are my son and his wife who live nearby and a supportive network of friends and neighbors!

In the meantime, I woke up this morning here in the Midwest to 15 degrees below with a windchill of 38 degrees below. Thankfully my home is warm and cozy, and my kitchen is well stocked with food and yes, a good supply of coffee.

I have a fascinating novel on hand and access online to beautiful classical and meditation music. I've already meditated and worked out this morning, and my apartment building offers long carpeted hallways that serve as an indoor track for walking several times per day. Phone and email are available as needed.

The present moment is rich and full even as I grieve for those not as fortunate as I and pray that our Congress will demonstrate compassion for the unemployed and all those who are struggling to survive this January in arguably the wealthiest country in the world.

MLK Jr. holiday is not a "black holiday"

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author and political analyst, reminds us of the struggle required to establish the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in America, "the land of the free and the home of the brave." Hutchinson vividly recalls the many fronts toward equality for all and world peace that King launched prior to his assassination:

It took years of public protest and finally legislative action before Virginia in 2000 finally separated the state holiday commemorating Confederate generals and icons Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from the Martin Luther King national holiday. But Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi haven't been moved by the protests and still commemorate Lee's birthday along with the King holiday. This is the most glaring example of the still deep ambivalence and even blind eye toward the King holiday. But it's hardly the only example. It's become almost ritual to hear tales of school districts that refuse to close, businesses that refuse to make even a token acknowledgement of the day, or worse commercialize it, and for some GOP politician to say something dumb about King on his holiday.

The blind eye, indifference or even out right disrespect of the King holiday 28 years after the first King national holiday was officially observed shouldn't really surprise. It took decades and hard battles to get the King federal holiday bill enacted in the first place. Along the way the King family and millions of King admirers and devotees had to watch and listen to right-wing talking heads, led by one time North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, heap every kind of slander, slur and abuse on King as a communist, agitator, unpatriotic, plagiarizer, and sexual philanderer. Then in what has to be one of the most galling flip-flops of hypocrisy in living annals, they have to listen to the same right-wing King maligners snatch a few quotes badly out of context from his speeches and writings about self-help and black crime and claim him as one of their own.

It still remains to be seen what effect the repeated public appeals from President Obama and Michelle Obama urging Americans to make the King holiday a day for public service will have. Obama certainly owes a deep gratitude to King and the civil rights movement. It opened the political doors for him and a generation of other black political figures. But his presidential appeals so far haven't been enough to crack the lingering resistance to a full and total acknowledgement of the world altering significance of King and the movement that he led. The reason for that is simple. 

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