Writer’s note: Grace Potter grew up in the Mad River Valley.

First, the bad news.

I missed the New Year’s Eve Higher Ground show, in which the Nocturnals vamped as the Royal Tenenbaums.

See photo.

The good news?

I caught Grace Potter and the Nocturnals’ (GPN) December 29 Higher Ground show, two days before, and what a show it was.

The popular Burlington venue was packed to capacity by the time the band took the stage at 10:15 p.m. With a quick welcome for the crowd – “Are you guys ready to have a good time tonight?” - Grace Potter, resplendent in knee high boots and a black mini skirt, promptly picked up her triangle-shaped cutaway electric guitar, laid down some growling blues chords, and lit into “Watching You,” backed by smoking riffs from fabulous-fingered Scott Tournet, the solid drumming of Matthew Burr, and the low-end speed bass of Bryan Dondero.

The evening took off from there.

All of the band’s best original rockers made the cut: “Mastermind,” “Treat Me Right,” and “Joey,” as well as a new tune I didn’t recognize, something about “Apples Off My Tree.” Sign me up.

My first thought, while listening: this is a band that has clearly been honing their chops with plenty of good hard touring on the road. The extended “road trip,” of course, as any traveling musician will tell you, is not nearly as glamorous as the movies and popular imagination make it out to be, but it is vital for a band seeking to cultivate a larger audience and a tighter musical groove. The Nocturnals sounded tighter and more together than they ever have, despite a few technical difficulties at various moments during the show.

My second thought: after several years of touring, Grace Potter has established herself as a multi-talented instrumentalist and stage performer. Throughout the course of the sixteen song Higher Ground set, she moved fluidly from one instrument to another - electric guitar, the Hammond organ and keyboard, the tambourine (a much harder instrument to play than it looks) the acoustic guitar and back again, comfortably and with a playful sense of the possible. Her voice has matured, as well – she channeled the blues, funk, soul and folk traditions with equal ease, though this listener would love a few more slow ballads mixed into the set – the “jam band” thing, which the band does well, could benefit from occasional more quiet interludes, which would also offer Grace a chance to show off both her voice and her remarkable word smithing chops. (For listeners who want to keep up with GPN’s exploits, check out the web site www.thisissomewhere.com - you can hear and watch some great live stuff, and you can find acoustic live versions of some of the band’s tunes, as well.)

All in all, the show proved spectacular. By the time the Nocturnals slipped into “Ah Mary” (their set’s ninth song and Potter’s most brilliantly lyrical – a critique of U.S. Empire disguised as an “out-of-control” woman story), I was hooked. They followed this up with the wonderfully hooky tunes “Some Kind of Ride” and “Stop The Bus,” but the band’s “come to Jesus” movement – a transcendental tour-de-force – came at the show’s climax, with “Big White Gate” and the “Water” double-shot from their “Nothing But The Water” project – masterful. Throw in a really funky cover of Steve Miller’s “Big Old Jet Airliner” to round things out, and the evening proved magical.

To top it off, as we left the theater, the snow started to come down, blanketing Burlington in some much-needed white stuff for the journey back to Mad River. The warmth of the music stayed with me and my companions, though, and I thought how fortunate we are to live in a place and in a community that nurtures and supports its young people as they spread their wings, in so many different ways.

Here’s to more music in 2009!

It is always appropriate, in my mind at least, to write one’s last media column of the year about the most interesting media text one has discovered over the past year.

For me, that media text would have to be Secession.

Charlotte, Vermont’s Thomas Naylor is a former international businessman, professor emeritus of Duke University (in economics), and the chair of the Second Vermont Republic, a think tank devoted to advancing the radical but very American idea that the state of Vermont should nonviolently secede from the United States and govern itself as an independent republic once again, as it did from 1777 to 1791.

He’s outlined the case for secession, Vermont-style, in a book with the same title (see above) and, to this reader, it is worth a close read.

Full disclosure.

As the editor and publisher of Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence news journal, I believe (as Naylor does) that the idea of secession merits serious exploration. And, while he and I differ in terms of our tone and tenor, style and strategy, I submit that the idea of secession is an idea whose time has come.

Before you scoff, consider a few facts, to be submitted (as Jefferson suggested) to a candid world.

Secession is as American as apple pie. The United States was born out of secession, as the thirteen English colonies left Great Britain’s imperial orbit and crafted a new republic for themselves (Vermont, of course, beat them to the punch – establishing itself as an independent republic fully seven years before the 1783 Treaty of Paris was signed, creating the new United States.) The 1776 Declaration of Independence’s central theme is, of course, secession – and the very first verb Jefferson and the first Continental Congress use is “dissolve.”

Contrary to what we learned in school, the first region of the U.S. republic to seriously consider secession was not the South (mention the word “secession” to most Americans, and, assuming they can spell the word correctly, their first impulse is to conjure images of plantations, slaves, and mint juleps). But it was 18th century New Englanders (Vermonters included, as Vermont joined the United States in 1791) who seriously considered secession on no fewer than six occasions between the 1787 signing of the U.S. Constitution and the so-called “Civil War” of 1861-1865 (really a “War to Prevent Southern Secession,” but Lincoln’s radical re-invention of the U.S. Constitution won the day, with the help of Union bayonets and the lives of hundreds of thousands).

Why is secession worth another look in this new century?

In his short and accessible book, Naylor suggests that the United States is no longer a republic but an Empire that is essentially ungovernable and unsustainable. In what he calls an “endgame for America” scenario, he sees the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union as an omen for the United States, and points to the scourge of “bigness” as the chief problem facing Americans today – big government, big business, and big militarism – and explains that the problem with the United States is ultimately one of size and scale, beyond the range of one person, party, platform or program to fix (“hope and change” rhetoric notwithstanding.)

But the strongest part of the book, in my mind, is Naylor’s celebration of Vermont’s unique virtues as one of the tiniest and most decentralized states in the U.S. Our Vermont communities, Naylor suggests, offer an ailing United States a new way forward, a new metaphor: of small schools, small businesses, small towns, and small communities. It is this decentralized and small scale model that provides the blueprints. What if Burlington became the music capital of the northeast, with its network of concert halls, studios and recording talent? Could Vermont cheesemakers set high artisanal standards for the continent (they already do, in my book)? What of our syrup, farm and forest industries? What if, Naylor suggests, Vermont becomes the Switzerland of North America?

At a time when the United States seems to be teetering on the edge of the abyss, Vermont independence is an attractive notion. The book’s biggest weakness, however, is its refusal to specifically grapple with the kinds of economic changes that will move Vermont from here to there. 21st century Peak Oil realities, for example, demand that we in Vermont re-invent the ways we power our homes and businesses, feed our communities, and transport ourselves from place to place. Naylor shies away from confronting specific “nuts and bolts” questions like these – which is too bad, because his business and scholarly experience would no doubt prove invaluable.

But Naylor’s Secession, a celebration of Vermont’s past, present and potential vis-à-vis a crumbling United States, is the single best book-length starting place for considering a conversation about what Vermont could be in the 21st century and beyond.

An independent republic? An “Untied States?” A new metaphor for a new millennium?

Time will tell.

In honor of Waitsfield Elementary School’s Scholastic-Free book fair going on over this next week, in which parents and teachers bypass the corporate commercial marketers to deliver books of their own selection to our school for affordable purchase by students and families, let’s cut to the chase.

The 21st century United States is now home to 52 million kids under the age of twelve.

Folks who work with these kids - parents, teachers and health care professionals - are deeply concerned about ever-increasing rates of bipolar disorder, depression, type II diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. All recent trends brought on, in part, by our kids’ unhealthy “media diet.”

But for Big Media advertisers, these kids represent the most profitable demographic in marketing history, as they spend or influence the spending of (can you say “nag factor?”) 40 billion dollars a year.

The bottom line - marketers targeting kids now spend an annual $17 billion to try and reach our little ones.

What the heck is going on?

This is the question explored in an important new film by the Media Education Foundation called “Consuming Kids.” The film is a provocative look inside the deeply twisted world of corporate commercial children’s marketing, and features a wide-ranging cast of parents, scholars, educators, authors, and citizen activists, all of whom have spent years defending kids from the voyeuristic predations of corporate marketers.

“Voyeuristic predations?” Certainly, you exaggerate.

Nope. In the film, Boston University Born to Buy author/scholar Juliet Schor (a parent of two) details how marketers routinely conduct focus groups with little kids splashing around in showers and bathtubs. Why? To make close and careful observations about how kids interact with products as banal as bath soap, so these marketers can better enhance the marketing power of their emerging wares.

Now that’s creepy. Yet it happens routinely in the world of children’s marketing.

Consider the following few examples:

• “American Idol,” with its seamless merging of product placement (Coke, anyone?) and entertainment, is one of the country’s most watched show for kids between the ages of 2 and 11.
•
• Marketers routinely conduct MRIs on children – tracking their neurophysiological responses to various ad messages to better refine and sharpen the persuasive power of these messages.

• Contrary to what you might think, “Seventeen” magazine – with its relentless “hair, clothes, make-up = life” message, is not read by teenagers. Instead, the magazine (and dozens just like it) is read by “tweens” – girls between the ages of 8-12.

• In 2006, fast food restaurants in the United States sold more than 1.2 billion children’s meals with toys to children under 12.

• What about Baby Einstein? The film suggests that this $20 million for-profit “educational” enterprise is nothing more than a scam – as there is absolutely no research proving the effectiveness of the device.

When did this relentless marketing assault begin? The film rightly notes that, while advertising to kids has been with us for decades, the commercial “carpet bombing” of our young people began in earnest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sanctioned by a Congress that “defanged” the Federal Trade Commission (the FTC is the federal agency charged with regulating advertising to kids) and the deregulatory environment ushered in by the Reagan administration.

The numbers tell part of the story. During the early 1980s, marketers spent $100 million a year to reach kids. Today, the numbers are astronomical, contributing to a kids culture that emphasizes, according to one observer, “self indulgence, instant gratification, obsessive materialism, and a “this is about me in these things now” attitude.

Our brave new world of immersive media technologies – the Internet, mobile phones (5 million American kids between 5 and 12 years of age have ‘em), text messaging, mp3 players and the like – offer unprecedented opportunities for marketers to access the hearts, minds and wallets of kids like never before. Anyone who has ever seen a Webkinz at work knows how marketers use a $15 stuffed animal to drive kids online (visit the web site and enter your secret code, so you can meet ad shop with other owners!) where corporate marketers can gather personal information to continue their marketing game.

The bottom line? “We have become a nation that places a lower priority on teaching our children how to thrive socially, intellectually, even spiritually,” Juliet Schor concludes, than it does on training them how to consume.”

Indeed.

What can we do about all of this? Cradle-to-grave media education in our classrooms and communities is a good place to start, and is making inroads in schools and communities around the country. Organizing community campaigns to regulate marketing in our schools and other public spaces is another useful strategy. And educating parents is vital, as well. Ultimately, as parents, teachers, and citizens, it is our collective job to take a stand against the corporate predations of media marketers – for the health of our children, our families, our communities, and our culture.

Rob Williams is a Waitsfield School Board member who is deeply grateful to all the parents, teachers and administrators who make the independent book fair happen every year.

Onion River Exchange, Central Vermont’s bustling local currency system, is hosting a New Member Orientation on Thursday, Dec. 11 from 6:30 to 8:00 in Montpelier City Hall. Explore the ORE website (http://www.orexchange.org/)or attend the informational meeting if you are interested in sharing services such as transportation, tutoring, cooking, sewing, yard work, computer help, dance lessons, proofreading and editing, childcare, business services, personal finances, car repair, pet care, carpentry, yoga and wellness, music lessons, entertainment for parties, sports, word processing, graphic design, phone calls, providing food for potlucks…

Enjoy~

Kate

If you haven’t joined ORE yet, I encourage you to do so.  It may seem a bit complex at the very beginning, but once you get signed up and oriented, and have done your first exchange, you’ll think: why didn’t I do this sooner???  I personally have benefitted from having my lawn mowed and raked, and I’ve earned time (called “Community Credits”) by helping at local events, giving career counseling, and mending worn mittens!  And I’ve met good new people in the process.  

If you’re on Facebook, you can become an Onion River friend.

Next Local Currency workgroup meeting:  Friday, December 5th, 8am at the Big Picture Theater.  I hope to start planning for ORE information sessions in the Valley.  Please come, at least for donuts and coffee!

Cheers~Kate

After the talk, folks gathered downstairs for refreshments and talking in a circle (actually several concentric circles), which is another part of the transition process.  Unfortunately I couldn’t stay because I had a kid to get to bed, but I’d love to hear from others what that was like.  Naresh’s point that transition is both an external and an internal process was especially poignant, I thought.  He said that we have unsustainable inner psychology and we need to transition in that sense as well.  I couldn’t agree more.

As several of us have already noted, the array of projects that happen under the umbrella of “transition town” reflects very closely the one we’ve got underway in the Valley.  The one exception for us that I’ve noted is “health.”  As a registered nurse and a certified nurse-midwife, I think about the waste and carbon-dependence that’s built into our healthcare system as it stands now, and I anticipate that we will also need to relocalize our sources for health care and wellness.  Perhaps something for VFN to talk about supporting?  

Transition Town Montpelier is beginning a study group of The Transition Handbook this winter.  I hope that our group will get going soon too!

Also, a friend of mine named Chris Colt will be teaching a course this winter at Champlain College for which the texts will include The Transition Handbook and something by Bill McKibben, if anybody’s interested in a more formal approach.

Cheers~Kate

If you haven’t immersed yourself in the “Madagascar” experience, you may be missing one of the most entertaining animated treats of the past decade.

And the good news here is that the new sequel is on par with the 2005 original.

Be forewarned – if you are planning to bring “the littles” to this film, know that the movie moves incredibly quickly, contains hilarious adult-aimed highbrow humor that will go over the heads of most children, and has some moments of action and violence that may be inappropriate for younger audiences. The good news – very few fart jokes or other gratuitous potty humor, and the music and dance track will get you up out of your seat. Plus, the animation is wonderful to behold on the big screen.

Like the original, “Madagascar 2” revolves around the adventures of four animal friends who grew up performing for big crowds as captives in a New York City zoo. This time, they leave their lemur-infested island home of Madagascar via airplane, and end up crashing down in – yep, you guessed it – Africa. From there, they find themselves involved in a whole crazy series of events that actually button up themselves quite neatly by the end of the movie.

Alex (affably voiced by Ben Stiller) is a lion who loves to shake his groove thing for the enjoyment of the audience. Here, he ends up being reunited with his father and mother, but must prove himself to the rest of the pride or suffer banishment.

Jada Pinkett Smith’s hilarious hippo hip-shaking hipster Gloria discovers a whole group (gaggle? flock? posse?) of African hippos, including a muscle-bound monster male named Moto Moto (voiced by Will.I.Am) who takes a liking to her. Their courtship is borderline inappropriate for the littles, who will find themselves lost in the joke, but quite comical for the older crowd.

As it turns out, Gloria’s close friend Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer as a convincing New York City neurotic) has feelings for her, and how the two of them work out this wrinkle in their relationship over the course of the film I leave for you to discover.

Chris Rock’s Marty the Zebra has the least interesting time of it, running with a herd of his own and providing occasional comic foil relief to Alex’s “roaring” dilemma.

And then, of course, there are all the wonderful supporting characters in this film. Yes, the four commando penguins are back – Kowalski, Skipper, Private and the top dog – and of course, if they are not busy hijacking jeepfuls of savannah tourists for parts to rebuild their downed aircraft, they are busy making wisecracks or sorting through the finer points of labor contracts with their simian work force.

And yes, the lemurs return, too (and they are ring tailed lemurs, not sifakas lemurs, my six-year-old neighbor Carl Kellogg, a Valley expert on this pro-simian creature, would have you know). Sacha Baron Cohen of “Borat” fame voices King Julien with his usual trans-gendered goofiness, ably supported by Maurice, his trusty sidekick (Cedric the Entertainer.)

And the surprise character? An older retired female tourist named Nana (voiced by Elisa Gabrielli), who sports a handbag, spectacles, and an aggressive attitude (she is, we learn, a Yonkers native and learned martial arts as a Brownee) to match. Apparently, she and Alex the lion have had run-ins before, but watching her beat the stuffing out of Alex in one early scene is a bit over-the-top. As she and her other Big Apple tourist neighbors “go native,” younger viewers may be a bit dismayed, though older audience members will appreciate (perhaps) the references to “Lord of the Flies” and other dystopian novels we were force-fed in junior high school.

Is Madagascar 2 fun? You bet – but you might have to do some explaining to the kids afterwards.

There should be a Special Place in Hell for Multi-Level Marketers and Those Who Falsely Paint Themselves Green

By Bob Ferris

It is a sad fact of life that charlatans prey on those that need to believe most and are least able to protect themselves.  In times past it was the unwashed and rural, but on today’s landscape it is those who turn an open eye and unprepared brain to infomercials and the most bold of the internet advertisers.  So our economically and intellectually challenged are further burdened by ozone air cleaners that pollute more than they clean, atmospheric water generators that are nothing more than repackaged dehumidifiers, and now in the shadow of high priced gas and diesel a veritable plethora of HHO generators and Brown’s gas boondoggles.

While all of them make my blood boil a little, I suspect the later water for gas schemes insult my scientific sensibilities the most.  Perhaps it is because I finally realize why every child should take physics and higher math.  And that reason manifests itself best in the $1200 Hydro-4000 electrolysis machine marketed by some geniuses in Jupiter, Florida calling themselves Green Machine Solutions (http://www.hydro4000.com/aboutus.htm).  Green Machine is a business unit of Diversified Energy Group (http://www.degoil.com) which is a company run by David Havanich Jr. and Carmine Dellasala Jr. who seem to launch and then abandon businesses as a hobby (check out their various listings in http://www.sunbiz.org/corioff.html).   

This machine justifies its significant price tag by claiming that the hydrogen gas captured as a result of excess energy produced by your underworked car alternator will displace 20-60% of your gasoline or diesel.  Spectacular!  I want one.  But is this possible?  The answer is: a resounding No. 

What we are talking about here is a device that takes distilled water and passes electricity through it to break it into its constituent parts—hydrogen and oxygen—through a process known as hydrolysis.  (Is this ringing a bell from high school chemistry or biology?)  This is wonderful and logical as far as we have gone.  Hydrogen is a zippy fuel with more power per pound than gasoline or diesel.  But here is where it gets tricky and to keep this easier we are going to convert everything to British Thermal Units (BTUs). 

So let’s start with the alternator.  Car alternators generally operate in the range of 14 or so volts and 50 amperes or amps.  These simple units when multiplied give you watts; in this case 700 watts in an hour’s time.  Since one watt yields 3.41 BTUs each hour our little alternator is producing the equivalent of 2387 BTUs.  While all of this is not really available to make hydrogen because the alternator is also charging the battery, providing juice to the sparkplugs or glow plugs, and generally running all the fans, lights, and the radio for your car—we will be generous and assume that all of it is available to the whiz-bang Hydro-4000.

Hydrolysis is not 100% efficient and we see conversions efficiencies—electricity into hydrogen power—of between 40 to 60%.  But since the Jupiter folks say their unit beats everyone and has efficiencies in the 80-94% range, we again will give them the benefit of the doubt.  So the potential energy drawn off the now-gainfully employed alternator in the form of hydrogen represents 80% of 2387 BTUs or 1910 BTUs.  Pretty darn good.  No one says the machine does not produce hydrogen.

Now let’s go to the car end of this equation.  Here again for ease of analysis we will go with a simple vehicle and a simple situation: A car that gets 30 miles to the gallon driving 60 miles an hour for 60 minutes.  During this hour our fairly efficient car will burn two gallons of gasoline.  Gasoline contains 125,000 BTUs so the energy budget for this trip is 250,000 BTUs.  So if we are looking to save 20 to 60% of that—as the Sunshine State boys claim—our car would be looking through its fuel resources for 50,000 to 150,000 BTUs to make up the difference.  It gets 1910 from the Hydo-4000, on a good day.

Debates about this device are flying around the internet, but has anyone conclusively tested this device and others?  The answer to that is: Yes and no.  There was a TV station in Florida that installed the device on one of their news vans.  They claimed in a broadcast news story that their rig went from getting 9 miles to the gallon to getting 23 miles to the gallon—more than a 200% increase in mileage.  While many in the world were incredulous, sister stations around the country rebroadcast this story and it became gospel.  This story wrote large on the air and on the internet—It Works—while the follow-up story of a retest by an engineering professor and his students that basically greatly scaled down the findings of the first was released with a whimper.  Interesting.

One who watched the original broadcast was Sheriff Ken Mascara in St. Lucie, Florida.  So he dug into confiscated drug funds and installed one of the devices on a patrol car and one on a test car owned by an undisclosed person.  Here again, the announcement that they were going to do that test and that taxpayer dollars were not used in the purchase of the devices was aired widely (Note to Ken: Confiscated drug monies are taxpayer dollars).  But when the testing was complete and the sheriff’s department basically said the Hydro-4000 didn’t do anything and might have decreased performance, this news did not hit the TV screen or YouTube, it was covered by a few paragraphs on the St. Lucie Sheriff’s website:

http://www.stluciesheriff.com/news_article.php?news_id=143. 

Why wasn’t the “news” here about a gullible sheriff who used public funds to buy a fraudulent device for the department and a private party?

What did hit YouTube was a video of a straight test of the hydrogen making potential of the device (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBVbKXE7NWE).  This industrious fellow attached the Hydro-4000 to a battery to simulate what would happen in a car.  In his test he ran 11 volts at basically 7 amps and it took him eight minutes to generate one liter of Brown’s gases (hydrogen and oxygen).  Doing the math on this fellow’s experiment indicates that while the battery pumped roughly 35 BTUs into the apparatus, the single liter produced during that time period contained only 9.54 BTUs.  That means that the conversion efficiency of the Hydro-4000 in this experiment was not 80-94% as claimed but rather 27%. 

In spite of the fact that the process cannot physically offset 20-60% of your gas or diesel use and the device does not perform as claimed, this contraption is becoming an internet phenomenon.  Part of this is that dealerships are being sold to the gullible around the continent and each dealer has a website with more and more outlandish claims about this dubious product.  I visited one site from Alaska called Alaskan Green Machines LLC (of course it is an LLC because these folks want to walk away with the money and not get nailed when some regulatory hammer drops).  Here is a quote from the FAQ section (http://www.alaskagreenmachines.com/FAQ’s.htm):

Why buy from Alaska Green Machines?

We have the best hydrogen generators available. The GMS HYDRO-4000 contains an all stainless steel apparatus which creates far more hydrogen and oxygen than products that appear to be similar. The output is 2.3 liters per minute of hydrogen at 12v and 7 amps with 0 vacuum. Other units may look like ours, but theirs are just two rods in a plastic container that put a charge through the water, like a kid’s science experiment. They require using distilled water and an electrolyte solution such as lye to create electrolysis. With these products energy in must equal energy out, so they just don’t work! Don’t be fooled into buying a cheaper product. You get what you pay for! The GMS HYDRO -4000 are built to the highest standards.

OK.  Let’s look at this statement.  (I know, again with the math).  Twelve volts at 7amps produces 84 watts.  And since each watt produces 3.41 BTUs, we know that in one hour we are going to get 286.44 BTUs out of the alternator.  Doing the same sort of math for the hydrogen claimed to be produced, we get 138 liters (these are not pressurized so this is lighter than the same volume of air).  Since each liter contains 9.54 BTUs, we are looking at total of 1362.52 BTUs.  So they are telling us not to be fooled and at the same time fooling us by telling us that while everyone else’s hydrolysis machines work at roughly 40-60% percent efficiency, theirs is cranking away at nearly 500%.  Let’s bring on the Nobel Prize folks.

The above said, since we know that gas has about 125,000 BTUs per gallon, their greatly exaggerated generator is only displacing about half an ounce of gasoline per hour of use. This is a far cry from the 20-60% gas savings that they are claiming.   But it is right in line with what we have come to expect from multi-level marketing schemes: pseudo-science to fool the uninitiated and lies stacked upon lies.

As many of us are working tirelessly to solve our environmental and energy issues for little or no pay, I get really steamed when folks inappropriately paint themselves green and try to make big bucks out of the misery of their fellow citizens.  My blood pressure rose so high that I felt like giving these Alaskans a piece of my mind.  So I went to the contact section of their website and found this:

                        Email:  info@alaskagreenmachines.com

Phone:  907.373.5585

Address:  PO Box 872331, Wasilla, AK 99687

Perfect.  Although I felt like picking up the phone and screaming “thanks, but no thanks” to these folks, I thought that I’d write this piece instead and make these three points: 

Point One:  The fact that these types of devices exist and their purveyors prosper means that we need a better educated populace that will be able to do these simple types of analyses for themselves.  Education is key to our surviving our current crises.  Clearly, millions have been left behind and we need to invest in fixing our education gap.

Point Two:  Somewhere, through some agency or entity, we have to do a better job of vetting these devices and warning the public to be wary of these sorts of claims and about the predatory tactics of those who make them.

Point Three: We all have to speak up and help those who are most vulnerable to these predatory marketing practices.   Pass this piece around and help others to understand.

 Let’s put our efforts and our monies towards legitimate endeavors.  There are certainly plenty out there to choose from!  Shred On my friends (www.carbonshredders.org)

His lecture is full of useful ideas - follow the link below to the whole talk.