Hasta La Gadget!

SiriusXM Radio on Tuesday suspended talk show host Glenn Beck after Beck spoke with a guest who expressed hope that a “patriot will step up” to remove Donald Trump from office, should he win the presidency. 

The satellite station suspended Beck’s program for the coming week and implied that the future of the show may be in doubt, based on comments from Beck that have been interpreted as an endorsement of anti-Trump violence should the presumptive Republican nominee win in November. 

The controversy erupted when Beck agreed with conservative author Brad Thor, a frequent guest, as he fretted about the danger Trump poses to democratic institutions.

“This could bring down incredible heat on me, because I’m about to suggest something very bad. It is a hypothetical I am going to ask as a thriller writer,” Thor said. “With the feckless, spineless Congress we have, who will stand in the way of Donald Trump overstepping his constitutional authority as president? If Congress won’t remove him from office, what patriot will step up and do that if he oversteps his mandate as president, his constitutional granted authority as president?”

“I would agree with you on that,” Beck said.

The comments were irresponsible, according to SiriusXM.

“SiriusXM encourages a diversity of discourse and opinion on our talk programs,” reads a statement from the company. “However, comments recently made by a guest on the independently produced Glenn Beck Program, in our judgement, may be reasonably construed by some to have been advocating harm against an individual currently running for office, which we cannot and will not condone.”

“For that reason, we have suspended The Glenn Beck Program from our Patriot channel for the coming week and are evaluating its place in our lineup going forward,” the statement continues. “SiriusXM is committed to a spirited, robust, yet responsible political conversation and believes this action reflects those values.”

Trump, unsurprisingly, ridiculed Beck via Twitter on Tuesday.

Beck’s show is independently produced and airs on the channel SiriusXM Patriot. A spokesperson for Beck told Politico that the suspension coincided with a previously scheduled vacation for Beck. Beck’s website on Tuesday republished an excoriating article by the conservative pundit Erick Erickson titled “SiriusXM Proves To Be Run By Cowards.” The article originally appeared on The Resurgent, Erickson’s website.

Thor, meanwhile, denied in a lengthy Facebook post on Tuesday that he’d made a direct threat against Trump. Rather, Thor said, he’d simply started a conversation about a what-if scenario involving an autocrat in the White House. 

“Clearly establishing that I was putting my thriller writer hat on and positing a hypothetical scenario, I asked what would happen if Donald Trump did turn out to be an American caudillo? What if he suspended the Constitution and a cowed Congress was too afraid to move against him — i.e. impeachment?” Thor wrote. “In such a scenario, where the American president had become a full-on dictator, a tyrant, I asked what patriot would step forward to help remove him from office? Never once did I suggest assassination, but sadly, that’s where some have taken it.”

Beck left Fox News under acrimonious circumstances in 2011. His show scored high ratings, but also suffered when advertisers bolted from his program after he made controversial comments about President Barack Obama. 

Listen to Beck’s interview with Thor below:

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Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has been recognized as a progressive town in North Carolina and the U.S. South. Home to one of the oldest public universities in the nation, this town has played an important role in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and other social justice movements.

The town of Chapel Hill welcomed Syrian refugees, in response to Gov. Patrick McCrory’s call to halt the future resettlement of Syrian refugees in North Carolina. Chapel Hill’s progressive character was on display during Memorial Day commemoration on May 30, 2016. Titled “Hearing the Voiceless: Refugees at Home and Abroad,” this event commemorated the sacrifices of the veterans, as well as, the suffering of the victims of wars, including the refugees.

Monday’s event brought together members from many peace and social justice organizations gathered under the umbrella of Orange County Peace Coalition (OCPC). Jan Broughton is co-chair of the OCPC and the president of the American Ethical Union, a national organization that pursues secular humanism. She has connected issues of the death and destruction in the wars to “bread-and-butter” issues at home, including housing needs, livelihood for people and re-settlement of refugees. Jan has participated in informational events exploring the costs of war. North Carolina legislator, Rep. David Price, has attended one of those events. Jan is currently dedicated to the cause of raising the minimum wage in the Triangle area of North Carolina.

Wes Hare co-chairs the OCPC. He was active in the campaign against poverty in the 60s and the 70s. He became acutely aware of the toxic mixture of poverty, racism and war that reinforce each other. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously referred to racism, economic exploitation and militarism as “triple evils” that need to be defeated, during his famous Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church in New York in 1967. Wes became active in the peace movement after the 2002 Iraq war and the impeachment movement against President Geroge W. Bush. Wes is also inspired by the Palestine freedom work by his fellow congregants at the Church of Reconciliation in Chapel Hill and by the work of Chapel Hill-based organization called AIME (Abrahamic Initiative on the Middle East).

The event on Monday displayed hard work by Jan, Wes and dozens of organizers ranging from organizations like Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – Triangle, Veterans for Peace – NC Triangle Area, Charles M. Jones Peace and Justice Committee of the Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist, Balance and Accuracy in Journalism, Coalition for Peace with Justice, Peace and Social Concerns of Chapel Hill Friends Meeting, and Elders for Peace. The event featured proclamations by the towns of Chapel Hill and Carboro that honored the lives of men and women of the armed forces who sacrificed their lives. These proclamations also called for building a peaceful society and helping the victims of war, including the refugees fleeing from violence and the aftermath of war. Speeches were interspersed by cultural performances and eulogies for the victims of war. Triangle chapter of the Raging Grannies offered powerful performances to highlight the sufferings caused by wars and occupations.

Source: Manzoor Cheema

The highlight of the event was the focus on refugees and a rise in Islamophobia. A relatively peaceful and progressive town of Chapel Hill became a global headline when three Muslim students were murdered there last year. Institutional forms of oppression against Muslims and other marginalized communities, including the LGBTQ community, have increased in North Carolina in the recent years. North Carolina General Assembly passed transphobic law, House Bill 2, earlier this year that also robs such municipal powers as increasing the minimum wage. North Carolina General Assembly passed anti-Sharia law in 2013. A version of that bill was tied to legislation on women’s reproductive health.

These developments have emphasized the need to build an intersectional movement that connects campaigns against Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, anti-immigrant attacks, anti-worker attacks and other oppressions. Participants rallied to the idea of connecting local social justice movements to the global movement for ending militarism and wars. In the words of MLK, Jr.,

“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war!”

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Our home galaxy is a star-studded monstrosity, measuring some 100,000 light years (587,849,981,000,000,000 miles) across.

Calculating the weight of something so colossal seems beyond the realm of possibility. But not for Gwendolyn Eadie, a Ph.D. student in physics and astronomy at McMaster University in Ottawa, Canada.

Eadie and her team presented new research at a Canadian Astronomical Society conference Tuesday that shows the Milky Way has a mass equivalent to about 700 billion suns.

Trying to measure the weight of a galaxy is no easy feat, especially when peering from the inside out. Previous estimates about the Milky Way’s mass have ranged from 100 billion to 1.6 trillion times that of our own Sun.

But Eadie and William Harris, a professor of physics and astronomy at McMaster, approached the query from a new angle by devising a novel way to measure the galaxy’s dark matter — that which is invisible and undetectable. To arrive at their current estimate, the team studied the positions and velocities of numerous globular star clusters that orbit the Milky Way. As the authors note in a release, “the orbits of globular clusters are determined by the galaxy’s gravity, which is dictated by its massive dark matter component.”

According to early reviews, their approach is one of the most thorough analyses to date.

“With our estimate, it seems that dark matter makes up about 88% of the Milky Way’s mass,” Eadie told The Guardian. 

The rest of the weight are the things you might expect — stars, planets, gas, moons and dust.

Ultimately, determining the Milky Way’s total mass could provide scientists with clues about its long and mysterious history.

“People who study the evolution of galaxies look at how the mass relates to its evolution,” Eadie told National Geographic. “If we have a better handle on what the mass of the Milky Way is, we can understand how it and other galaxies form and evolve.”

Until then, rest easy knowing that the sun has a mass roughly 330,000 times that of the Earth, and the Milky Way has a mass some 700 billion times that of the sun.

And you, little Earthling, are not the center of the universe. 

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Southwest Airlines faced a potential disruption early in its operation–it was forced to sell one of its four airplanes. The implications are obvious–selling the airplane generates cash for operations and completely disrupts the company’s capacity to serve customers and generate future revenue.

The Southwest CEO responded by asking a better question: What can we do to maintain the same number of flights with 25 percent fewer airplanes without a loss in service to our customers or revenue to the company?

The potential solutions were limited. The planes couldn’t fly any faster, take off any earlier, or land any later at the airports served. The one thing the company could control was the length of time an airplane was on the ground between flights. That solution–to turn an airplane in 25 minutes or less–plays an important role in Southwest’s continued success today.

Much is made of the importance of asking “why.” Equally, if not more, important to flourishing in the future is the willingness to ask three very specific “what” questions

Asking these three questions on a regular basis minimizes the risk that you will be disrupted or displaced with the customers you serve. They are: what else, what next, and what if.

Start with What Else.

Asking What Else focuses your attention on the problem or opportunity at hand.
What else can you do to create more value for customers? What else can you do to help your organization stand out in a crowded marketplace? What else can you do to help your team be more effective? What else do you need to learn to succeed in your job?

The assumption behind What Else is that the marketplace requires us to be faster, better, cheaper, and friendlier every day.

Move to What Next.

Not every idea that emerges from your What Else question will be possible or even appropriate. Likewise, simply asking What Next doesn’t ensure that your answer will be correct.

Blockbuster, as an example, knew that distributing DVDs by mail was a logical next step in providing a service that their customers valued. It missed, however, on correctly answering the What Next question and didn’t move aggressively enough to implement it.

Asking What Next further clarifies your best course of action and focuses your attention, energy, and resources. It also requires you to honestly and accurately evaluate the costs, benefits, and feasibility of your course of action.

If asking What Else opens the door for creativity, asking What Next adds a degree of logic. As Roger von Oech wrote, “Truth is all around you. What matters is where you put your focus.”

Don’t Forget What If.

Once Southwest Airlines decided that its next best course of action was to reduce the time its airplanes were on the ground, the hard work of figuring out how that could occur began.

Someone asked questions such as “What if we changed the boarding process to get people on the plane quicker?” What if the pilots helped clean the plane? What if we asked passengers to help us clean the plane because they value on time departure?

Asking What If isn’t a new idea. This question spurs the uniquely human creativity and innovation necessary to uncover new possibilities.

You are bombarded almost daily with changes and disruptions that transform how you work and live. Winning in this environment requires a combination of focused execution that adds value and improves performance today with creative ideas that offer different possibilities for tomorrow.

To flourish, you and your organization will need to ask better questions. The quality of the answers you receive are in direct proportion to the quality of the questions you ask. Start with What Else. Move to What’s Next, and don’t forget What If.

Randy Pennington is an award-winning author, speaker, and leading authority on helping organizations achieve positive results in a world of accelerating change. To bring Randy to your organization or event, visit www.penningtongroup.com , email info@penningtongroup.com, or call 972.980.9857.

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Do you know what pops up when you use a search engine for “care instructions”?

This is what pops up from the more “neutral” search engine Duck Duck Go:

• care instructions symbols
• care instructions for orchids
• care instructions after tooth extraction
• care instructions signs
• care instructions for peace lily
• care instructions for tattoos
• care instructions for polyester
• care instructions for vera bradley bags

What about “care instructions personal”?

It’s telling that more people are searching for care instructions for Vera Bradley Bags than they are for themselves.

What are your care instructions?

Anna Guest-Jelley is a bit of a hero of mine. She created Curvy Yoga. A yoga practice for those of us who can’t perform a side plank using one finger while wearing size zero Lulu Lemon gear.

I am so grateful for Anna’s vision of self-acceptance, self-love, and now self-care. Do explore the Curvy Yoga site for yourself and the empowerment of those in your care.

Anna wrote a blog post and released a podcast on how to create your own care instructions. You can listen to it here.

Anna had a bit of an Aha! Moment after Daylight Savings Time this year. She was filled with more energy. After some reflection, she realized that this is a pattern in her life – it’s just that Anna – and so many of us – need to relearn it.

Which makes observing patterns on both micro and macro levels key to your own care instructions.

Parents and caregivers are acutely aware of care needs of the children in their lives. But what about ourselves? It’s the old truth about putting on your oxygen mask first.

Self-care is the center of everything we must do and dream of doing.

I recommend we all take some time and write down our personal self-care instructions. But first, listen to Anna’s podcast because she has some wisdom to share.

Here are some takeaways:

• Eating regularly keeps us off the emotional roller coaster and regular “fueling” helps the body cycle into sleep.
• Adjust your care instructions according to seasons. Get a calendar or journal for next year to note reminders of how you’re feeling right now.
• Honor your own temperament…and acknowledge the unique temperaments of those around you. For parents, I highly recommend Carol Tuttle’s The Child Whisperer and for everyone It’s Just My Nature.

Make two lists: What I Need to Thrive and What to Do When I’m Blue.

The first list is the kernel of your self-care instructions. The second is simple activities that can redirect your day when you feel it shifting. Things like having a cup of tea, smelling lavender, going outside barefoot, dancing to a favorite tune, breathing in the sunlight for 6 deep breaths.

What do your children like to do? Can you join them in some creative art project where you all list what you need to thrive and make a list of how to redirect the day? Wouldn’t it be fun to post these reminders around the house?

What if…the refrigerator didn’t have big lists of schedules, but instead had pictures and notes of what the family needs to thrive?

And because Sleepytime Club is all about the bedtime ritual, what special thing can you add to bedtime to find your own calm as you transition to sleep?

The Bedtime Blueprint is one of the best tools to determine when your personal care instructions happen. Download it below.

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