Hasta La Gadget!

There are 50,000 runners and 2 million spectators in this Sunday’s New York City Marathon. If around half of those have a smartphone and use the Charity Miles app they can feed millions of hungry children.

The Charity Miles app keeps track of your running, walking and biking distances. Every mile you cover donates a meal to a hungry person or to another cause. You simply select a charity, your workout type, and click start.

When you are finished exercising you log your workout and a sponsor like Humana, Lifeway Foods and others make a donation to the charity of your choice. It’s totally free for you. The corporate sponsor takes care of the payment.

With Charity Miles you have the role as an ambassador. You can post your workout results and the impact to twitter and facebook.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is one of the charities you can select using the app. WFP is the largest food aid organization in the world, fighting hunger in over seventy countries.

One of its ambassadors is former NYC Marathon champ Paul Tergat. He received WFP school meals as a child, which allowed him to realize his potential. Now Tergat speaks around the world advocating school meals for all children.

Charity Miles donations support WFP school meals around the world. This Sunday would be a great opportunity for NYC runners and spectators alike to use the app and raise funds for WFP. This would allow more people, like Tergat has, to reach great heights.

WFP provides the school meals in countries leveled by war, disasters and extreme poverty. The food can prevent child malnutrition but also adds the benefit of increasing class attendance and performance.

So it’s a very effective food aid tool with lasting implications. In fact, school meals were a major part of the U.S. strategy to secure peace and reconstruction in Europe after World War II. Today, it remains imperative for other areas in need.

So far Charity Miles has provided almost 200,000 school meals via WFP. This Sunday’s marathon is a chance to greatly increase this number and inspire more users and corporate sponsors for the app.

Charity Miles is so easy to use. A spectator or runner could carry the app with them in their pocket or hand and be racking up the miles.

With millions of people at the NYC marathon what a great opportunity this would be to fight world hunger. WFP is so short on resources right now, they have been forced to cut back on school feeding for Syrian refugees. Let’s restore this program and others.

Once you start using Charity Miles it can be a part of every day. It’s that simple. You can help WFP as well as other causes including Stand up 2 Cancer and Feeding America.

Charity Miles is actually based in New York City. So this is perfect timing. The NYC Marathon has a number of charity teams running including one representing UNICEF, a WFP partner. Team UNICEF has raised over $200,000 for Ebola victims.

Using the Charity Miles app is a great way to continue helping others around the world. Millions of children could receive meals with just one race on Sunday. So let’s make it happen. Go to the Charity Miles web site to download the app. Good luck to all the runners!

Just when you thought Rush Limbaugh had insulted women enough.

During an Oct. 30 segment of “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Limbaugh responded to the viral video of a woman being harassed while walking in New York City with a chain of decidedly offensive comments.

“Most of it was just men being polite,” he said, adding he didn’t think the bulk of the comments were particularly aggressive. “You see a pretty woman; you react to it.”

He went on to deem street harassment the failure of modern feminism.

“What we are living here in the middle of is the failure — a massive failure — of modern day feminism,” he said. “Modern day feminism was going to protect women from this kind of mean-spirited, extremist, boorish, predatory behavior, and it hasn’t.”

And then declared his “love” for the women’s movement with this: “People misunderstand me and the women’s movement,” Limbaugh said. “I love the women’s movement, especially when walking behind it.”

In addition, when a woman called in to share her experience, Limbaugh — who said he’d never catcalled a woman because he thinks it’s “cheap” — asserted he was skeptical of the frequency of street harassment in the city.

“I’ve walked a couple of feet in New York, now and then,” he said. “I may have even walked a whole block once … I didn’t see it happening to any other woman, is my point. I’ve never seen it. I’m not denying that it happens. Don’t misunderstand.”

No words.

H/T Media Matters

Big nose, black hat, green face, horrible wart… all of it.

I saw her last night perched on a broom in front of her classroom door, handing out candy in full knowledge of what it would do to my 5-year-old and our evening. I didn’t fully grasp the cackle as she dumped handfuls of processed sugar into his bag.

Myopically focused on what I would be removing for personal consumption, my Amygdala prevented my Cerebral Cortex from putting 2 and 2 together.

22! Now give me the Snickers.

Charm fully worked, our boy would eventually wind up hanging from the ceiling fan, high on Milk Duds and Candy Corn, products I didn’t realize were still on the market because Halloween hasn’t been a thing for us since hatching him out. But this is his first year of school, and school has “Fall Festival” so there we were, tiny dragon in hand.

It was 6:30 on a Thursday night, and the witch had been in the building 12 hours, carving pumpkins, hanging artwork, and stirring various pots in preparation for a full day of school followed by a solid 2 hours of children trick-or-treating in the building.

Witches, ghouls, goblins, astonishingly real zombies, the teachers were in full gear, dressed to distress the children they’d spent all day with. The principal and staff were there as well, greeting parents, shaking hands, occasionally jumping out of darker corners to the delight of students and parents alike.

The mainstream media would have the American public believe that teachers are THE problem with our public schools. That they are the witches conjuring up the destruction of America’s competitive edge.

I’d say the people to fear are the banksters, and if you want to scare the bejeepers out of thinking adults this year dress up as one of those. You’ll need a suit and a deck of cards. When people ask about the cards tell them you are gambling with their pensions. Tell them you’ve been “all in” since the beginning.

What that mainstream media doesn’t figure into the “teachers are the monsters” narrative are the actual stories of teachers themselves. Of getting into the building at the crack of dawn to prepare for the day, of leaving the building well after dark to get home to their own children and an hour or two of “life” beyond the care of the boys and girls who will one day run this purported democracy.

The actual stories of hardworking teachers don’t fit into the narrative of “the schools are failing!” Followed by “we have to close them to save them!”

We have to burn the village to save it.

Do you remember that logic? It hasn’t left us. It’s the party line of Democrats and Republicans alike when it comes to educational “reform.”

You can’t move the American public to action without scaring them. There’s no invasion of Iraq without us believing that a guy who sheltered in a hole…who lived in a literal hole in the ground…had nuclear weapons.

But if you repeat Mushroom Cloud enough times people will believe that cloud is right around the corner, and we’ll send our children to war hunting down the ghosts of mass destruction. Then we will bring them home until another “threat” rears its ugly head and armchair generals can beat the drums of war again.

It’s hard to process seeing children dressed up on Halloween as soldiers, not fully cognizant of what the soldier’s life really is. All sacrifice, some honor, not enough respect once the mission is accomplished. But don’t believe me, ask the vets living on the street. Certainly don’t ask the profiteers sending them off to foreign shores. (Scary costume number 2 on my list.)

“The schools are failing!”

“The unions are coming!”

“The Chinese are going to eat us!”

In the 50s it was Russia. In the 80s it was Japan. In the 90s it was Europe. Today it’s China and India. There has always been a spooky “other” just about to crush us economically, and it has always been the fault of the schools. Schools run by monsters who only work from 8 to 3 and get summers off, or so the story goes.

My son’s teacher worked all summer getting ready for the school year. She is there at 6:30 prepping for the day, and she was there last night at 6:30 handing candy out to kids, hundreds of them.

While she dressed the part, I’m not afraid of the witch. She can’t cover love and care in green and black, and I can forgive her for dosing my kid with sugar. We did, after all, send cupcakes in a few weeks ago, and I can only imagine what sorts of carnage 18 Kindergarteners unleashed in her classroom after eating them.

No, I’m not afraid of the witch, but the people peddling fear of teachers scare the life out of me. If their voices continue unchallenged, we shouldn’t expect our best and brightest to enter the profession. You can’t spend millions of dollars hating on teachers and expect future prospects to want to become one.

And if we continue to pile on the hate, to invoke “fear of teacher,” we will truly have something to be afraid of, a nation where the most qualified avoid teaching like the plague because we’ve made teachers the enemy.

Time to stop doing that don’t you think?

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