Apparently, July 4th ain’t got nothing on Chinese New Year in Beijing. This video was recorded on an airplane that was landing in Beijing at midnight of Chinese New Year and it shows all the fireworks going off at once across the city. It looks like every corner is firing off explosions at the same time.
(Photo by: Grady Brannan of FilterlessCo)
He’s worked with several of rap music’s elite, including Wiz Kalifah and 2 Chainz, and now he’s headlining his first nationwide tour. But before Bay Area based rapper/producer IAMSU hits the road, he and his crew, the Heartbreak Gang, wanted to do something special for their day-one fans.
(Photo by: @stspittin)
HBK Day, a day for IAMSU and the HeartBreak Gang to connect with fans, started with a handful of eager teenagers in San Francisco’s Haight District camped out for a meet and greet with the members of HBK Gang, advanced copies of IAMSU’s new mixtape, “Eyes On Me”, and to buy new HBK merch made in collaboration with Pink Dolphin.
(Photo by: Grady Brannan of FilterlessCo)
The night of this weekend’s meet and greet, the mob of teenage fans found their way to The Chapel in the Mission District for a special free show featuring all of HBK. “I didn’t think anybody was gonna come. This was super last minute,” said IAMSU (who, full disclosure, learned music production at Youth Radio, and who is still the homie. But I digress).
(Photo by: Grady Brannan of FilterlessCo)
The planning of HBK Day was last minute, with only about a week of promotion (aka IG posts of the flyer), but by 9 p.m., the 500-person venue was packed with real fans of not only IAMSU, but the Heartbreak movement.
(Photo by: Grady Brannan of FilterlessCo)
Following a grassroots indie band formula, HBK releases music, performs and sells merchandise without any outside assistance. It also sort of operates as a label. Which means not everyone in the Gang is a musician. Some are personal managers, security guards, and others handle merch… but the various pieces being in place allows the HBK Gang to operate like a well oiled machine.
(Photo by: Grady Brannan of FilterlessCo)
You can’t really define HBK as pure indie, with platinum-selling artist Sage the Gemini signed to Republic Records (whose artist roster includes Taylor Swift and Drake, just to name a few).
The savviness of HBK’s model is that it’s leveraged the status of its artists, and the devoted fanbase, to gain the freedom to move however they see fit. For now, catch IAMSU in a city near you, starting next month.
WASHINGTON — The American electorate is more diverse than ever, which means Republicans will have to attract a record percentage of minorities to win the presidency in 2016, a GOP pollster said Tuesday.
About 70 percent of the Americans eligible to vote are white, a decline of 15 percentage points since 1980, according to a new report co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution. The report estimates that white eligible voters will become a minority in the next 45 years.
“The fundamental challenge for my side is the seemingly inexorable change in the composition of presidential electorates,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres, whose clients include Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), said during a panel discussing the report. “And there’s no reason to believe that that’s going to stop magically.”
The demographic change poses little problem for the GOP in midterm elections, when young and minority voters are far more likely than older, white voters to stay home. But in the run-up to 2016, the demographic trend has some Republicans citing a need for change.
In 2004, Republicans’ most recent presidential victory, George W. Bush won 58 percent of the white vote, and 26 percent of the non-white vote — numbers that would lose him the White House today, Ayres said.
‘”That’s the stunning part for me in running these numbers — to realize that the last Republican to win a presidential election, who reached out very aggressively to minorities, and did better than any Republican nominee before or since among minorities, still didn’t achieve enough of both of those groups in order to put together a winning percentage” for 2016, Ayres said.
Ayres isn’t the first Republican pollster to stress the demographic challenges facing the party.
“Winning in a non-presidential-turnout year, when older and white voters make up a larger percentage of the electorate, should convince no one that we’ve fixed our basic shortfalls with key electoral groups, including minorities and younger voters,” GOP pollsters Glen Bolger and Neil Newhouse wrote in The Washington Post last fall. “To win 50.1 percent of the popular vote, we estimate, Republicans will need nearly 64 percent of the white vote — which would be a record for a non-incumbent Republican presidential candidate.”
But Ayres rebutted the idea that Republicans are facing an existential crisis. “The fact is that the Republican Party is one candidate and one election away from resurrection,” he said, naming Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as candidates with the potential to win.
Matt Barreto, co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions, also named Bush as a possible candidate to bridge the gap with Latino voters.
“There’s very good reason to believe Jeb Bush has an opportunity to rebuild the GOP image if he can stay true to his message and get through the Republican primary,” Barreto said at the panel Tuesday.
On the flip side, Barreto said, Hillary Clinton has an opportunity to pick up a record number of Latino votes and solidify Latinos as a Democratic voting bloc for years to come.
“If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, she has this serious opportunity to hit and eclipse the 80 percent mark with Latino voters,” Barreto said. “Now, if that happens — which I think between these two scenarios there’s a better likelihood of — I think you are now starting to talk about a more permanent realignment in the Latino vote.”
The Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee was “remarkably open to many aspects of criminal justice reform” during a White House meeting on Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told The Huffington Post.
Booker, in a HuffPost Live interview immediately following the meeting, said the discussion among a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers and President Barack Obama was “phenomenal.” He said he told those at the meeting that criminal justice reform would have to be led by the House chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.).
“I believe — and, God willing, I’m gonna go see him — that he’s gonna be a leader on significant reforms,” Booker said.
He acknowledged that Goodlatte and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) were resistant to some proposals. But he said the “conversation was changing” as Democrats and Republicans alike have embraced reform.
“There’s a profound zeitgeist. There’s nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Well, this idea is coming and that power I think is gonna push something good through Congress,” Booker said.
According to Booker, the group at the White House discussed proposals to reform mandatory prison sentences and to better reintegrate individuals into society once they are released from prison.
“So the question will always come down to the details, and I think there’s some red lines for some folks in the Senate,” Booker said. “But the potential now for getting something significant done is really encouraging.”
Booker has been working with Republican Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), John Cornyn (Texas) and Mike Lee (Utah) and Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) and Dick Durbin (Ill.) to find ways to reduce the number of Americans in prison, on parole or on probation. The Koch brothers have given the effort a boost on the Republican side.
Watch Booker’s full interview on HuffPost Live here.
On an absolute frigid February Monday night in New York, a
young singer / songwriter began her international music career in the
neighborhood that gave birth to the singer / songwriter genre. Inside a packed
Red Lion in the West Village, Northern Ireland’s Janet Devlin made her New
York City debut and her first concert ever in the United States. If you are reading
this from the U.K., you know who she is, but here she is an unknown, yet, that
is about to change.
This Article Also Appears on Officially A Yuppie
Former congressman and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel won the most votes in Tuesday’s Chicago mayoral election, but he failed to receive the degree of support needed from voters to avoid a runoff election in April.
In his quest for a second term as Chicago mayor, Emanuel won 46 percent of the vote with 80 percent of precincts reporting. Election law states that should the winning candidate in a municipal race fail to win more than 50 percent of the overall vote, he or she must face off with the second-place challenger in a separate runoff election.
That election will take place April 7 between Emanuel and Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who outperformed recent polling on the race to win 34 percent of the vote Tuesday. The Associated Press confirmed Emanuel is heading to a runoff.
In the 20 years since Chicago’s mayoral elections have consisted of one election potentially followed by a runoff, an incumbent mayor has never before been forced into runoff.
Among the three other candidates, entrepreneur Willie Wilson won 10 percent of the vote, Chicago alderman Bob Fioretti won 7 percent and perennial candidate William “Dock” Walls won roughly 3 percent.
Two years ago, Emanuel’s paltry approval rating seemed to indicate that the mayor was vulnerable as he looked toward reelection. Criticism of Emanuel only increased after the school board he appointed voted, in May 2013, to close 49 of the city’s public schools, largely in minority neighborhoods, all at once. It was the city’s largest mass public school closure on record.
Violent crime and controversy over the city’s red-light cameras further angered many residents, but critics of Emanuel had difficulty fielding a candidate with a high enough profile to defeat the mayor. Early favorites, like Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, ultimately opted not to enter the contest, while Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, who had all but declared her candidacy, abruptly withdrew from the race in October 2014 after she was diagnosed with a serious illness.
Lewis later threw her support behind Garcia, who says the fiery labor leader essentially talked him into running.
Challengers to the mayor also struggled with fundraising. While Emanuel raised some $15 million in his campaign, almost half of which he spent on TV ads, the next best funded candidate was Wilson, who raised more than $2 million, most of it his own money.
The barrage of ads, in addition to a last-minute visit from President Barack Obama, appear to have helped Emanuel’s approval rating climb significantly in the weeks leading up to the election. The latest pre-election poll showed the mayor inching toward the 50-percent-plus-1 mark he would have needed to hit to avoid a runoff.
However, Garcia and his fellow challengers had some success painting Emanuel as out of touch with Chicago’s neighborhoods and obsessed instead with the city’s central business district and tourism reputation. Garcia was particularly critical of Emanuel for not hiring 1,000 new city police officers, as he had said he would do during his 2011 campaign. Garcia has insisted he would make good on that promise but has offered few details on how the cash-strapped city would finance it.
Garcia tweeted Tuesday night on the heels of the runoff news:
This win proves that a movement of people like you can beat a political machine backed by billion-dollar corporations. On to April 7th.
— Jesus Chuy Garcia (@garcia4chicago) February 25, 2015
While voter registration was up in Chicago leading up to the election, compared to 2011 numbers, voter turnout on Tuesday was expected to be on par with the 33 percent record low turnout set in 2007, RedEye reported.
What if the nature of the employee’s job is to be creative and innovative? This requires that an employee be willing to take risks and make mistakes. Should you still manage that employee closely? Should you still tell him what to do and how to do it? Should you still monitor, measure and document? Won’t that inhibit the employee’s creativity and innovation? Won’t that make the employee less likely to take the necessary risks and make the necessary mistakes?
First, don’t conflate reinventing the wheel with innovation. The wheel has already been invented. You do nobody any favors by keeping them in the dark about it. Real innovation builds on what has already been invented. Real innovation takes the next step. So if you want to promote innovation, you need to make sure the employee understands the state of the art. Spell out all that has already been invented, so the employee has real stepping-stones from which to launch.
Second, if the employee’s job is to be creative, the biggest favor you can do for that employee is be very clear about what is not within the employee’s discretion. Spell out all the guidelines and specifications. Make it clear that any creativity must occur within those parameters.
What if you want the employee to be creative in the most freeform way? You don’t want to hold the employee back in any way? No guidelines. No parameters. Really? That’s a very rare assignment. Like… Jackson Pollock rare.
But maybe you have that very rare assignment. OK. Is there a time limit? Or will you pay the employee to brainstorm ad infinitum? How will you know when the employee is “done”? How will you recognize a finished “result”?
Third, if you want an employee to feel free to take risks and make mistakes, then what you need to do is spell that out as a concrete assignment: “I want you to go take risks and make mistakes.” Maybe you need to tell the employee how many risks to take and how many mistakes. Maybe not. But you have to find a way to create a space in which risk taking and mistakes are safe—maybe a padded room. And you have to find a way to create a timeframe. And if you want to be kind, you should find a way to define some parameters.
What some firms do, when creativity and innovation are real business drivers, is they define a percentage of time and set it aside for creativity. Let’s say 20%. They tell people, “We want you to use 20% of your time on projects that are not your official tasks and responsibilities… Use that time to pursue your own creative projects.” That kind of allowance usually comes with a caveat, “By the way, whatever you invent during that time is our property.” Or if they are very smart, “Whatever you invent during that time is 75% our property.” Of course, some people will use that time to invent. Others won’t.
Fourth, there are numerous management tools designed to get employees to take risks, make mistakes, be creative, and innovate. Maybe you pose a set of questions? Or challenges? Fill a room with toys. Or finger paint. Or clay. Or music. Incense? You get the idea.
Fifth, what most managers do with “creatives” working on a creative assignment is they provide rough guidelines for a rough draft. They set a deadline for a rough draft. Then they let the creatives do their thing. Once the manager has a rough draft, the manager works with the creative employee(s) to come up with a plan for moving the rough draft to a final draft.
Here’s a corollary of the managing creativity question: Sometimes a manager doesn’t have clear expectations—a clear goal with clear guidelines—just yet. Sometimes a manager doesn’t know, at the outset of a project exactly what success will look like. The manager doesn’t know what she is looking for… yet. Maybe this is a project of first impression. Sometimes the manager needs an employee to “take a crack at it” so the manager has something to look at. Then the manager has a better idea of what the final product should be. This is a case where managers end up using employees to work out the early stages of the manager’s own creative process. Sometimes this can be very frustrating for the employee because the employee works hard on a project that feels very creative only to have the manager send the employee back to the drawing board several times until the manager finally takes over the project and totally reworks it. The employee feels like all of his own work has been for nothing and/or the manager has hijacked the project. What is a manager to do in this situation?
Be very clear and very honest with the employee from the outset of the assignment. Explain to the employee that you don’t have a clear goal with clear guidelines: “I don’t know what success will look like. I don’t know what I’m looking for. What I really need is for you to ‘take a crack at it’ so I have something to look at. Let me be clear. This is really my project and I’m asking you to help me jump-start my own creative process. I am really asking you to come up with a very rough draft. I will probably send you back to the drawing board several times. Then at some point I’ll take over the project and totally rework it. This is still a very important project to me. This assignment is very important and very difficult. Do you think you are up for it?” By saying this, you are spelling out your expectations as best you can. If there are parameters you do know about, try to articulate them. And don’t forget to attach a deadline on the first very rough draft… and every time you send the employee back to the drawing board.
Liberal hero Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Tuesday that she’s waiting to see how progressive a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would be.
Asked by the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” whether Clinton would be a “progressive warrior,” Warren didn’t exactly give a ringing endorsement.
“You know, I think that’s what we gotta see,” Warren said. “I want to hear what she wants to run on and what she says she wants to do. That’s what campaigns are supposed to be about.”
Warren’s comments follow her private meeting with Clinton in December, when Clinton asked Warren for policy recommendations, The New York Times reported.
Warren has repeatedly insisted that she’s not interested in a presidential run, and has said publicly that she hopes Clinton will make a White House bid. Her statements haven’t stopped some progressive groups from trying to persuade her to change her mind.
STEPHENVILLE, Texas (AP) — A former Marine was convicted Tuesday in the deaths of the “American Sniper” author and another man at a shooting range two years ago, as jurors rejected defense arguments that he was insane and suffered from psychosis.
The trial of Eddie Ray Routh has drawn intense interest, in part because of the blockbuster film based on former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle’s memoir about his four tours in Iraq. Since prosecutors didn’t seek the death penalty in the capital murder case, the 27-year-old receives an automatic life sentence without parole in the deaths of Kyle and Kyle’s friend, Chad Littlefield.
The prosecution painted Routh as a troubled drug user who knew right from wrong, despite any mental illnesses. While trial testimony and evidence often included Routh making odd statements and referring to insanity, he also confessed several times, apologized for the crimes and tried to evade police.
Criminal law experts said the verdict hinged on whether the defense could prove Routh was insane and did not know the killings were wrong at the time they were committed. Jurors had three options: find Routh guilty of capital murder, find him not guilty, or find him not guilty by reason of insanity. If found not guilty by reason of insanity, the court could have initiated proceedings to have him committed to a state mental hospital.
Kyle and Littlefield had taken Routh to the shooting range at Rough Creek Lodge and Resort on Feb. 2, 2013, after Routh’s mother asked Kyle to help her troubled son. Family members say Routh suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from serving in Iraq and in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake.
A forensic psychologist testified for prosecutors that Routh was not legally insane and suggested he may have gotten some of his ideas from television. Dr. Randall Price said Routh had a paranoid disorder made worse by his use of alcohol and marijuana, calling his condition “cannabis-induced psychosis.”
Defense attorneys noted that Kyle had described Routh as “straight-up nuts” in a text message to Littlefield as they drove to the luxury resort.
Among evidence entered by prosecutors was a recorded phone call between Routh and a reporter from The New Yorker magazine in which Routh said he was annoyed Littlefield wasn’t shooting, but instead seemed to be watching him.
“Are you gonna shoot? Are you gonna shoot? It’s a shooting sport. You shoot,” Routh said in the phone call. “That’s what got me all riled up.”
Defense attorneys said Routh, who had been prescribed anti-psychotic medication often used for schizophrenia, believed the men planned to kill him.
“I had to take care of business. I took care of business, and then I got in the truck and left,” Routh said in the phone call.
A resort employee discovered the bodies of Kyle and Littlefield about 5 p.m.; each had been shot several times. About 45 minutes later, authorities say Routh pulled up to his sister’s home in Kyle’s truck and told her he had killed two people.
She called police, who later located Routh sitting in front of his home in the truck. A police video shown by prosecutors showed officers trying to coax him from the truck while he makes comments including: “I don’t know if I’m going insane” and “Is this about hell walking on earth right now?”
“He told us he’d taken a couple of souls and he had more souls to take,” Lancaster police Lt. Michael Smith testified.
Routh later took off and led authorities on a chase before the truck became disabled and he was arrested.
You know it’s always fascinating to watch the beginning of the next really big thing. Well, that’s what it was like at the Watermark Conference today when Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, took the stage.
To put it into perspective, the number of attendees, tech sponsors and Silicon Valley glitterati at this formerly Bay Area tech conference for women was staggering. Over 5,000 attended, albeit predominantly woman, but what did one expect. The price point was set to allow open the flood gates to open, and they came: young and old across race and diversity. This was not a meeting of solely older, affluent white women talking among themselves behind closed doors. Nope, it was a large, interesting and diverse crowd that commandeered the use of the men’s bathrooms – gutsy; young and more mature shall we say; and from mixed ethnicity and race. The cherry on the cake, for wonks like me, was the attendance by an equally wide swatch from the major national press corps. Go figure. It seemed that everyone was there to see Madame Hillary and boy, oh boy she delivered.
Hillary was big, bold and energized in a way that we, party loyalists, had not seen for way too long. It was sublime for those of us that hungered for her words – sort of like a yummy piece of good chocolate. She hit issue after issue from wage and gender equality, to rebuilding the Middle Class, and onto her vision for the role of technology for the future of America with a bit of foreign policy mixed in. We got to watch the emergence of her platform for 2016 in real time, and it was a real treat made even better by the proverbial fireside chat with Kara Swisher, the tech pundit. Frankly, there is no waiting for Hillary — clearly, she is ready to go.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.