Hasta La Gadget!

Dear Johnny Depp and Amber Heard: You’ve airlifted your two Yorkies back to their American homeland because, as Australia’s Agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce warned you in no uncertain words, if you didn’t arrange for them to “bugger off,” he’d order them seized and euthanized. You understood, albeit a bit late, that Australia’s laws about importing dogs are very strict and that in violating them, you risked fast-tracking Pistol and Boo over the Rainbow Bridge.

Make no mistake: the Australians weren’t bluffing. They are very proud that Australia is free of the deadly rabies virus, and they have worked hard to keep it that way. To refresh your memory, here is a link to what that means in terms of bringing a dog into their territory – and as it makes clear, even dogs rigorously screened in the U.S. must spend a minimum of ten days in quarantine.

The UK only modified its stringent regulations about dogs entering in 2012, in deference to EU standards. Back in 1968, dog-loving actors Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband Richard Burton, opted not to sneak their two Pekinese and two Yorkshire terriers into London while Burton filmed Where Eagles Dare near London. Instead, they rented the 1,200 foot Bolivian luxury yacht Beatriz where Cuthbert, George, Oh Fi and E’en So could tough it out while waiting for periodic visits from Elizabeth and Richard, whose primary residence was a hotel suite.

Don’t think that the English authorities trusted the famous couple not to sneak the dogs into London anyway. A Port of London policeman was assigned to make bi-hourly checks to confirm that the dogs were still on board. Fortunately for all concerned, they were.

The cost for avoiding but not evading the UK’s strict regulations was not cheap. The Beatriz cost $2,400 a week for two months, the equivalent today of $16,187.72. For the Taylor-Burton team, this astronomical sum was a price well worth paying to ensure the safety as well as the proximity of their four dogs.

But this triumph of glamorous entitled film stars over heavy-footed authorities all but obliterates something bleaker: that throughout the world, infected dogs are the carriers of the almost always fatal rabies disease. As they succumb to it, crazed and dying, they bite humans, and those humans, too, will die a horrible death.

Seasoned travelers know that as a rule of thumb, the easier it is to legally transport dogs into a country, the likelier it is that that country has an elevated rate of canine rabies. That’s why, if only they could speak, those dogs would thank Johnny and Amber for calling attention to their plight, no matter in how roundabout a way!

Unlike Australia and Antarctica, other continents are afflicted with rabies, with Asia and Africa the hardest hit. Several animals are carriers, but homeless dogs are a primary conduit for the virus. The majority of the 55,000 people who die each year from rabies, about forty percent of them children less than fifteen years of age, have been bitten by unvaccinated and usually free-ranging dogs.

Because of rabies and the fear that it will spread, an estimated twenty million dogs – 38 dogs every minute – are killed every year in jurisdictions that rely on mass culls, usually in the form of massacres, as the way to stamp out the rabies virus. But massacres don’t work. Vaccinations do. If at least 70 percent of a dog population is vaccinated, the rabies virus will die out.

That’s why Australia requires all arriving dogs to be vaccinated and then blood tested to ensure the vaccination provided adequate rabies anti-body levels. It’s a tightly scheduled regimen, and anyone traveling to Australia with their dogs has to begin it six months earlier, in their home country. By failing to do that, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard offered the world’s dog-loving media the opportunity to speak out for all the dogs who aren’t blessed with caring human families. That includes the millions of homeless dogs who will die because they have not been vaccinated, a few of whom will become infected and sow terror and panic in officials who will retaliate against all dogs and kill as many as they can.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

I don’t know who you are, but you need to let Britney stop.

On Wednesday, Britney Spears dropped a video for her new single “Pretty Girls,” a “Fancy” facsimile with diminishing returns. “Pretty Girls” features “Fancy” auteur Iggy Azalea, the go-to feature du-jour for pop divas in desperate need of some radio heat.

The video finds Spears and Azalea as an alien and as a trashy ’80’s real housewife, respectively. There’s also a convertible, egregious Samsung ad-placement and some pretty sus dialogue, acting and, most notably, dancing. Some of this is bad on purpose, sure, but none of it is funny for the reasons it thinks it is. In short, it’s all another weak installment in what feels like the interminable unraveling of Britney Spears, Pop Icon.

There’s little need to rehash what is, at this point, an indelible and tragic cornerstone of 21st Century Pop Culture. But as is common knowledge, Britney Spears, Person, has not been present with us in any meaningful way for about a decade.

Indeed, ever since her public breakdown in the mid 2000s, the Britney with whom we first fell in love, Britney 1.0, has effectively vanished before our eyes. Britney had always been a product, perhaps the last big-budget music industry creation of the Roaring ’90s. But Britney 1.0 was an electric dancer and live performer, equipped with the best pop tunes money could buy. Manufactured or not, the original Britney incarnation owned every aspect of what it meant to be Britney Spears. Her status as a cipher mattered little in the glare of some pretty great entertainment, performed with aplomb by the ephemeral glitterball at its center.

But as could be expected from a young woman thrust into the spotlight before she could legally operate a car, Britney 1.0 could not sustain. Her public undoing in 2005 and 2006 displayed the dark underbelly of superstardom in the starkest fashion since Michael Jackson’s molestation trial and experiments with cosmetic surgery. During this meltdown, we got a one-off album from what we’ll call Britney 1.5, Blackout, ironically her best, most revealing and indeed unnerving work.

Beginning with 2008’s Circus, however, Britney 1.0 had been completely replaced by Britney 2.0, a tentative, robotic rendering of the girl we once knew. She was still blessed with the best hooks culled from the top writers in the biz. But whoever created Britney 2.0 was not immediately clear. Was it her label? Her manager? Her dad? In fact, the only thing that was obvious was a palpable sense that Britney 2.0 wasn’t steering, or even willfully riding, the ship.

Beginning with the video for Circus’ lead single “Womanizer,” Britney appeared listless, utterly afraid to move her body in the way that was once her calling card. Her videos themselves, once the primary platform for her talents, were made to obscure her as much as possible. Her voice, never a powerful instrumental but a highly distinctive coo, became so anonymous under mountains of tuning that many questioned whether she was even showing up to the studio at all.

More disturbing than her lack of any discernable virtuosity, though, was the fact that Britney didn’t really seem happy to be there. “There” could be anywhere – singing on a track, dancing in a video, performing on her still very profitable tours or engaging in interviews and promotion. She looked uncomfortable, going through the motions of a dance routine with the timidness of a dress rehearsal or spewing canned sentences to the press while trying to force a smile when it seemed painful to do so.

Given how far Britney had fallen as a performer between 2004’s “Toxic” and “Womanizer,” along with how desperately unhappy she seemed with being a pop star at all, it is perhaps most astounding just how long the Britney Machine was able to maintain relevance. Indeed, Britney Inc. continued to top the charts through 2013’s “Scream & Shout,” all while each passing single, video, tour and album showcased an artist in sharp decline.

This chasm between chart performance and the state of the artist herself was almost unprecedented, especially considering how many of Britney’s far more able late ’90s peers like Christina Aguilera had been wholly dismissed by the public long before. But even the hit machine faltered with 2013’s much derided Britney Jean, her first post-breakdown album without a top-ten hit and by far the lowest selling offering in her discography. It represented the moment when Britney, the Industry, finally caught up with Britney, the Artist.

All of which brings us to back “Pretty Girls,” her first single since Britney Jean and, along with the well-documented sleepwalking featured in her multiple year residency in Las Vegas, a long-coming nadir in a career that has perhaps gone on for too long.

Aside from the general lack of ingenuity of the song itself – it’s Britney’s most desperately trendy single to date – the video once again features an obviously disengaged Spears. She mimes through her dances and her forced smiles and canned laughter have never seemed more pronounced.

Most tellingly, despite “Pretty Girls” featuring the opening line, “Australia all the way down to LA,” an overt reference to Britney and her duet partner Iggy’s home-bases, a recent interview to promote the song with Z100 had Britney feeling unsure of where Iggy originated. “I think Iggy is Australian?” she blurted. Current Britney, Britney 3.0, doesn’t even know what the lyrics in her song mean or why they’re coming out her mouth in the first place.

And that’s where I think it’s time to stop.

The problem is that Britney doesn’t seem to have the ability to pull the brake lever herself. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t know a life other than churning out musical product, keeping the numerous leeches who feed off her industry employed since she was confirmation age. Maybe it’s more overt financial pressure thrust on her by her team. I don’t know.

But whoever does have the ability to stop this train needs to stop it. Britney deserves to be happy. She is clearly neither passionate, nor able to be a pop star anymore. I mean what 16-year-old knows who they want to be for the rest of their lives? I sure didn’t.

The one thing that has always been true about Britney, even in her current embodiment, is her sweetness. She genuinely seems like a good-hearted and simple soul whose life has played out under extraordinary circumstances.

So whoever you are, the person who has the ability to help Britney live the best life for her, you needs to let her go live that life. Or at least present her with the choice to leave the pop game behind which, I’d take a gander, isn’t necessarily an obvious option to her. I say this as a fan of Britney’s, who grew up worshiping her and loving her music: it’s time to let Britney stop.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Nalandabodhi sponsored the final stop of HH the Karmapa’s US tour last weekend, and the 1,200 people who attended his public teachings last Saturday had the rare and auspicious opportunity to spend some time with a revered young global spiritual leader. In order to be one of those people, you had to be among the relatively more affluent elite as tickets were priced from a maximum of $500 to a minimum of $40. And nowhere did anyone see the often used Buddhist / New Age slogan “no one will be turned away due to lack of funds,” which assures that teachings are available to everyone.

We know that the Buddha never charged for his teachings, and I have no doubt that the HH the Karmapa and Nalandabodhi’s Spiritual Leader Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche had nothing to do with what Nalandabodhi management decided to do with their leg of the Karmapa’s two-month American tour. In many of his presentations, tickets were given away free of charge, but in Seattle the 1,500 seats were quite pricy with the “cheap” $40 seats selling out in the first day of sale.

I strongly believe that anyone who wants to get into such a spiritual teaching should be allowed to participate unless the event is sold out, and this event was far from sold out. I estimate that there were at least 300 – 500 empty seats at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall, which is designed to be an exhibition area and not a place for large performances or lectures as happened with the Karmapa.

Not that all those seats had a good view of the stage. The flat rather than banked layout of the site as well as the enormous columns that blocked the view for many people left some participants wondering why they paid to be in the room rather than watching a livestream at home. Granted, Nalandabodhi management did provide several large screen monitors so that the majority of the audience could see because so many were too far away to see or simply sitting behind the columns.

Still, had the Nalandabodhi management been concerned enough to inform participants about the seating issues beforehand, people could have watched the same thing they saw on the big screens from the comfort of their homes at no charge (thanks to the Karmapa’s office which live streamed the event and many of his other teachings at no charge, which is how dharma is supposed to be shared). Of course, if everyone had done that Nalandabodhi would not have made money.

Which reminds me of what my teacher and mentor Buckminster Fuller often told audiences about making money. Bucky said, “You can make money or you can make sense because the two are mutually exclusive.”

Nalandabodhi management and its sister organization Nitartha Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies (where Nalandabodhi teachers recommend people for advanced studies) have always done their best to make as much money as possible, often pricing their events out of the range of ordinary working people, and this Karmapa tour stop was no exceptions. At least a couple hundred volunteers put in numerous hours preparing and producing the event and for their efforts Nalandabodhi management gave them – the chance to purchase tickets to the event at full price a day before the general public. That’s right, they didn’t even provide seats for their own volunteers, and the least expensive ticket was $40 plus fees and taxes.

Then, there is the fact that there were no discounts for students or seniors or monastics. Buddhist Nuns and Monks had to pay full price just like anyone else.

When I attended HH the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Vancouver last October, Nuns and Monks were provided with great seats at no charge and also given lunch between sessions. In fact, at that event and most others where HH the Dalai Lama teaches, many Buddhist Nuns and Monks sit on stage with the Dalai Lama, but there was no such honoring their service at the Nalandabodhi event.

In addition to the 1,200 people paying between $40 and $500 for a ticket (do the math to figure out how much they took in for this one event), Nalandabodhi also requested that members donate money to support this visit. Their plea read,

You are here with us and we wish to give you the opportunity through this fundraiser to offer your personal gift of support for His Holiness’ visit in Seattle. Your gift will help with all aspects of his visit such as nourishment, flowers and physical gifts of value to His Holiness, and the 8-10 people traveling with him, while he is in Seattle.

Imagine watching the live webcast feed of the public talk and seeing the beautiful arrangement of flowers next to His Holiness Karmapa, and knowing that your donations helped place them there. Or, perhaps the dinner that His Holiness eats after the evening talk is supported by your donation. Maybe your gift will make a special welcoming or a special farewell possible to offer His Holiness Karmapa. Your donations will go toward making all of these wishes and more come true.

All proceeds will go to Nalandabodhi in support of His Holiness the Karmapa’s visit to Seattle.

We know that almost all the services listed here were “staffed” by volunteers. The cooking was done by volunteers, the transporting of people was done by volunteers, the flowers were done by volunteers, the laundry and cleaning were done by volunteers, etc., etc. So, where did all that money go? More important, did the Nalandabodhi management make money or make sense?

I’m not saying that HH the Karmapa or Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche had any intention to keep poor people from attending or use this occasion to make as much money as possible. In fact, I doubt that either of them had any knowledge of what the Nalandabodhi management has done.

One only need to compare the Nalandabodhi way to what will be happening in a couple weeks when Mata Amritanandamayi (a.k.a. Amma) begins her North American Tour here in the Seattle area. Amma’s people take donations at all her public events, and that money is transparently used for the enormous amount of charity she provides to the poor. However, all Amma’s events and teachings are provided free of charge to everyone.

Amma’s people have to rent space, feed people, transport people, etc. just like Nalandabodhi, but they manage to do so without $500 tickets or pleas for financial contributions from members. They make sense, and people contribute generously to their work.

Not so much with Nalandabodhi, which is known to produce very expensive Buddhist teaching programs and to constantly demand more and more from their members. Perhaps its time for the same sense of oneness and giving found in the Amma community to be manifest at the Nalandabodhi sangha. Then, the Buddha’s teaching would truly be available to all people who come to Nalandabodhi and Nitartha Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies.

May all people be fully welcomed into all spiritual teachings and groups in order to support their full awakening.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

You don’t have much to say to someone who has found out the truth about themselves.

-Jack Burden, All the King’s Men

Day Two of Rise of the Rest included a tour through Raleigh-Durham, a city clearly on the rise.

Steve Case opened the day with a breakfast conversation with Governor Pat McCrory pointing out the great history of North Carolina, and the role the state played in the founding of the country. He reminded us how America was once a startup, and how today, “American communities are like startups. Everyone’s trying–some are succeeding, some are failing, but Raleigh-Durham is clearly on the right track.”

The entrepreneurship scene in Raleigh-Durham (more commonly referred to as “the Triangle” by locals) has been succeeding at a rate faster than maybe any metro area outside of DC, New York, and Boston. Companies in the region raised $700 million in funding for growing enterprises in the last year, and in the last 24 months, a square foot area of 200 yards in downtown Durham generated $1 billion in returns for investors. And the government is a great partner–the best idea I’ve heard of in a while is the state government’s “Try Before You Buy” startup software demo initiative.

We’ve seen technology entrepreneurs creating prosperity in other communities. Today, though, we saw something different. Leaders are engaging in daily conversation and critical thought around a topic we don’t typically hear discussed in startup hotbeds (including Silicon Valley): how this growth can work for everybody in the community.

One of the major questions about entrepreneurship in this country remains: will “The Rise” include everyone? Whether it’s battles in San Francisco over whether tech company shuttles can stop at public bus stops, or the lack of affordable housing in fast-growing “high-tech” districts, or the miniscule numbers of venture-backed companies run by women or under-represented minorities, it’s critical that the growth of the country through entrepreneurship includes everyone.

In my experience, almost nobody in the startup world talks about inclusion. In the past decade, the only San Francisco Bay Area startup investors I have heard even talk about issue are Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, whose work at the Level Playing Field Institute is leading the industry, and Dave McClure and the team at 500Startups, who are often viewed as iconoclasts for their views. These folks’ discussions are viewed as “different” and “distinguishing,” but if our country’s growth in entrepreneurship is going to include everyone, they need to be the norm.

Entrepreneurship advocates promote job creation, and rightly so: but they don’t talk about what kind of jobs they are creating or for whom: startup jobs need to employ more than well-educated engineers to increase social mobility and economic opportunity for the country. Investors say “the best way to get funded by us is through a warm introduction,” without recognizing that introductions happen through social networks–and the relationships of people who are well-educated, have capital, and come from fortunate backgrounds are usually other people who are well-educated, have capital, and come from fortunate backgrounds. The growth of social networking through technology has in many ways widened the gap between those who have information and resources, not closed it.

This can’t be the future. As Steve Case said today, “If we want to remain the most entrepreneurial nation in the world, we have to level the playing field.” Why does the Triangle engage with the issue of inclusion differently than other cities?

Perhaps it’s because we who grew up in the South is painfully aware of some dark periods in our history with race–and its relationship to inequality and exclusion. Yet acknowledging any problem is the first step towards a solution. I grew up in Atlanta, where we’ll be attending Thursday, and my wife grew up outside the South. One of the most noticeable things to her about moving to the South, she said, is how often and openly people talked about race, compared to other parts of the country where she had lived. Perhaps the stark memory of a painful past better equips the South to engage on an issue that the future of entrepreneurship must get right than other regions.

To paraphrase today’s line from the Southern writer Robert Penn Warren, we didn’t have much to say to folks in the Triangle on the front of inclusion, because this is a community that is amazingly self-aware. Today, we saw a community appreciating and celebrating its growth, but additionally, making sure its growth includes everyone. Chris Gergen, an amazing advocate for entrepreneurship in the region since founding Bull City Forward (one of the first entrepreneur support organizations I know of in a Rise of the Rest city) nearly a decade ago, has encouraged Raleigh-Durham’s growth, but spent his time and resources over the past several years supporting other areas of the region through his Forward Cities Initiative.

Today, Chris showed the Rise of the Rest tour a glimmer of hope as he took Sheila Herring and Erich Broksas of the Case Foundation to a corner of Durham they call the “60-60”: a corner of Durham that had 60% unemployment and 60% high school graduation rate. Forward Cities built free housing for entrepreneurs (who don’t have the personal cash to “bootstrap”), a co-working space for enterprises that need, but can’t afford an office, and a leg forward.

Another impressive initiative we saw today was the American Underground, an office building/development built on top of the old tobacco mills of Durham. A five-story building employs 1200 people in companies such as tech rockstars like Windsor Circle, a company Steve Case invested in last year and is one of the fastest-growing companies in the region. Adam Klein, the entrepreneurial leader of the American Underground, has led the development of this remarkable community, and their next initiative is bringing on Talib Graves-Manns as an entrepreneur-in- residence focusing on under-represented entrepreneurs building companies. As Adam and Talib said on the bus, “Investors say that lack of inclusivity in entrepreneurship is a pipeline problem. Well, you can’t solve the problem if you don’t do anything to build a better pipeline.”

In Raleigh-Durham, we saw a community that appreciates the growth it has had, but still recognizes it has a long way to go. Building companies in communities with high unemployment, with entrepreneurs who you don’t typically see at technology pitchfests, and with workforce practices that grow quality jobs is not something that Silicon Valley has been excellent at–yet. But we saw the start of this in Raleigh-Durham today, and if these leaders are successful, they can show us how entrepreneurs can bring the rest of the country along with them.

And for the skeptics who think that this can’t be done, Steve Case had these parting words that were fitting for the lofty ambitions of Raleigh-Durham: “When startups pitch, don’t think about why they’ll fail: think about why they’ll succeed.”

Note: This blog was cross-posted from Southern/alpha, which is the premier publication covering startups, entrepreneurship and innovation in the South with a focus on high-growth companies and the founders, engineers, investors, team and culture around them.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Nebraska is primed to end the death penalty, which would bring the number of execution states down to 31.

In the waning days of the spring legislature, lawmakers advanced a bill to repeal the death penalty in a 30-16 vote. The bill now faces one more vote on the final reading, expected early next week.

The final vote is largely considered a formality, and if it stands, the legislature will have a veto-proof majority. Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts — who has already vowed to repeal the bill if it passes his desk — could lobby to get lawmakers to change their vote.

But the bill likely won’t even need the governor’s approval, says Stacy Anderson, executive director of Nebraskans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. She told The Huffington Post immediately after the vote that Friday’s count is expected to hold.

“I think the senators have made up their minds,” Anderson said. “They’ve studied the issue and they’re ready to get this bill through.”

Still, Governor Ricketts has procured more lethal injection drugs to ensure the state can continue executions. The governor has five days to veto the bill, and the legislature has another five days to vote to override the his veto.

If the bill ultimately succeeds, Nebraska will be the first state to repeal the death penalty since Maryland eliminated the punishment in 2013. The last state with a conservative majority to repeal the death penalty was North Dakota in 1973.

A coalition of Republican lawmakers behind the push to end the death penalty in Nebraska are part of a growing movement among conservatives who are turning away from capital punishment. Abolitionists have criticized the death penalty as being out of step with conservative values of fiscal responsibility, protecting life and limiting the role of government.

Nebraska’s bill would replace the death penalty with life without parole as the highest punishment. The bill, however, is not retroactive and will not apply to the 11 inmates currently on Nebraska’s death row.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.