It probably looks higher from up there

It probably looks higher from up there

When we find ourselves on the edge of a precipice, looking down at the depths of the chasm below, it's easy to think that this time we went too far, that our plan is far too risky, that our product is way too bizarre, that our behavior is just too weird...

The funny thing about perspective is that most bystanders don't see you standing on a precipice at all. They see someone doing something a little edgy, but by no means nuts.

Just about all commercial behavior is banal. Even in movies that deal with businesspeople, the characters don't dream nearly big enough about one's ability to change the culture or the enterprise.

You're far more likely to go not-far-enough than you are to go too far.

Internal monologue amplifies personal drama. To the outsider, neither exists. That's why our ledge-walking rarely attracts a crowd. What's in your head is real, no doubt about it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can see the resistance you are battling (or care about it).

Speaking in public: two errors that lead to fear

Speaking in public: two errors that lead to fear

1. You believe that you are being actively judged

2. You believe that the subject of the talk is you

When you stand up to give a speech, there's a temptation to believe that the audience is actually interested in you.

This just isn't true. (Or if it is, it doesn't benefit you to think that it is).

You are not being judged, the value of what you are bringing to the audience is being judged. The topic of the talk isn't you, the topic of the talk is the audience, and specifically, how they can use your experience and knowledge to achieve their objectives.

When a professional singer sings a song of heartbreak, his heart is not breaking in that moment. His performance is for you, not for him. (The infinite self-reference loop here is that the professional singer finds what he needs when you find what you need.)

The members of the audience are interested in themselves. The audience wants to know what they can use, what they can learn, or at the very least, how they can be entertained.

If you dive into your (irrelevant to the listener) personal hurdles, if you try to justify what you've done, if you find yourself aswirl in a whirlpool of the resistance, all you're providing is a little schadenfreude as a form of entertainment.

On the other hand, if you realize that you have a chance to be generous in this moment, to teach and to lead, you can leave the self-doubt behind and speak a truth that the audience needs to hear. When you bring that to people who need it, your fear pales in comparison.

Media you choose to do is always about the audience. That's why you're doing it. The faster we get over ourselves, the sooner we can do a good job for those tuning in.

Putin: Kiev protests have nothing to do with Ukraine-EU relations, prepared ahead of elections

Participants in a rally for EU integration by the Presidential Administration building on Kiev's Bankovaya Street on December 1, 2013. (RIA Novosti / Andrey Stenin)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that riots in Kiev have no direct relation to Ukraine and the EU deal, but rather it's an attempt by the opposition to undermine the country's legitimate government.

“As far as the events in Ukraine are concerned, to me they don’t look like a revolution, but rather like 'pogrom'. However strange this might seem, in my view it has little to do with Ukrainian-EU relations,”Putin said. 

Speaking in Yerevan during his official visit to Armenia, Putin argued that the protests in Ukraine had been prepared by the opposition in advance to undermine the legitimate government of the country. However, it is “apparent” that the opposition had meant them to take place during the Ukrainian presidential campaign in March 2015, the Russian President said.

“What is happening now is a little false start due to certain circumstances… This all has been prepared for the presidential election. And that these were preparations, in my opinion, is an apparent fact for all objective observers,” Putin stressed.

He has said that now the Ukrainian opposition is either not in control of the protests, or it may serve as a cover-up for extremist activities. 

The footage from Kiev clearly shows “how well-organized and trained militant groups operate,” the Russian President said. 

Nobody seems to be concerned with the actual details of the Ukrainian-EU agreement, Putin said. 

“They say that the Ukrainian people are being deprived of their dream. But if you look at the contents of the deal – then you’ll see that the dream may be good, but many may not live to see it,” he argued. 

Putin then explained that the deal offered to Ukraine by the EU has “very harsh conditions".

The Russian government presumes that the situation in Ukraine will be back to normal, and that the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people will determine their future on their own.

“I want to stress that, regardless of the choice of the Ukrainian people, we will respect it,” Putin said. 

‘Kiev riots show signs of coup’ – Ukrainian PM

The Ukrainian authorities see “signs of a coup” in the attempts to block the government agencies by the protesters, but are exercising restraint, Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov said during a meeting with ambassadors from EU states and the US in Kiev.

Azarov said that some political forces have “an illusion” that they can topple the government, adding that the opposition is developing a plan, which involves taking the Ukrainian parliament building by force. 

“Things have changed. On the one hand, we aren’t exonerating the law enforcement agencies, but on the other hand, politicians who are joining the action now are dramatically radicalizing the situation. The mass character of the action became uncontrollable or rather controlled by certain political forces,” the Ukrainian Prime Minister was cited as saying by RIA Novosti.

He then assured the diplomats that the government guarantees that force won’t be used against peaceful demonstrators in the capital, and that the necessary orders to the police not to use such force have been given. The Ukrainian authorities are expecting that the opposition will also abstain from provocation, he added.

Azarov told the diplomats that Ukraine has proposed some changes to the association agreement with the EU.

“We’d like to discuss the provisions, which bother us. We’d like our initiative to be treated attentively and maybe we’ll be able to achieve compromise,” the Ukrainian Prime Minister stressed.

He explained that some of the Ukrainian industrialists have appealed to the government with request for the changes, as the deal would otherwise “make the Ukrainian market too open”.

As the Ukrainian officials assured the EU that they had not given up on the bilateral deal, President Viktor Yanukovich on Monday stressed that he “was, is, and will be a supporter of European democratic values and standards.” 

Silk Road’s rival offline, another black drug mart mulls shutdown

Sheep Marketplace, one of the leading anonymous websites, after Silk Road’s closure, allegedly selling drugs, has gone offline claiming it was robbed of $6 million worth of bitcoins. Another dark net, Black Market Reloaded, announced it may also quit.

The Sheep Marketplace website – which allowed people to anonymously buy narcotics and other illegal items - went offline over the weekend, blaming the theft for the closure. The dark net claimed that it was robbed of 6 million dollars’ worth of bitcoins after one of its random sellers managed to find a bug in the security system.

The website’s administration left a short message for users, which reads: 

“We are sorry to say, but we were robbed on Saturday 11/21/2013 by vendor EBOOK101. This vendor found a bug in the system and stole 5400 BTC – your money, our provisions, all was stolen.”

After the FBI closed Silk Road in October - a black market bazaar where illegal goods, including drugs, and other illicit services were bought and sold – the void left was soon filled by a similar website. The Sheep Marketplace quickly grew into a replacement of the popular bazaar. The dark mart managed to keep many users even after Silk Road 2.0 – an exact copy of the closed website – resurrected in November.

However, now users allege that Sheep Market place was just a “scam”. The owners of the site used the theft to justify the closure without returning the bitcoins stored in the market by users, despite assuring that they would redistribute the virtual crypto currency to users’ “emergency addresses”, wrote Forbes.

According to Sheep’s users who have been briskly discussing the topic on Reddit, the black market had been acting strangely for at least a week prior to going offline. First concerns were raised by the administration’s decision to stop allowing vendors to withdraw their bitcoins from the market. Users suspect that the illicit virtual drug mart folded potentially absconding with as much as 44 million dollars. They point to a movement of 39,900 bitcoins visible on Blockhain – a website that tracks bitcoin transactions.

The current largest player in this illegal online business, the Black Market Reloaded (BMR), responded to the developments by announcing that it may also go offline - at least temporarily. The administrator of the site, known as Backopy, said in a forum post the site would not be able to guarantee anonymity to its customers with the influx of new users since Tor – software that hides the identity of the site’s users and owners – is not designed to handle a large user base.

“SR is down, The Black Flag ended up as a scam, Atlantis ended up as a scam and now The Sheep Market follows that dark path. This puts BMR at the edge of the blade. Tor can't support any site to be too big,” Backopy wrote.

The drug market then blocked new registrations, closed access to inactive accounts and announced the site “will remain for a while until the deals and escrow complete, at least most of them, following which it will go to a complete shutdown. Without competition the wisest thing to do is to shut down the market, doing it in a timely and orderly manner,” he said, adding that an alternative would be “to smash the market into tiny bits that could spread the load between nodes and servers, but that would take a while to do”.

According to Forbes, the closure of Sheep and BMR are only the latest events in the “widening crisis” of the dark web drug industry. Earlier, Atlantis market folded citing security reasons.

And that was followed by the arrest of the alleged owner of the infamous Silk Road dark marketplace - Ross Ulbricht - with authorities seizing cocaine and approximately 26,000 bitcoins worth about 4 million dollars. The website was shut down and Ulbricht was accused of engaging in money laundering, drug trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking, and also for placing contracts for six murders.

Obamacare site still needs to fix 200 bugs

The Obama administration declared on Sunday that the troubled HealthCare.gov website is now functioning smoothly for most users, but problems persist even two months after its initial launch.

Since the HealthCare.gov’s disastrous unveiling on October 1, President Barack Obama and his health care team have scrambled to stabilize the $630 million website for a relaunch on December 1. According to the White House, the website can now handle 50,000 simultaneous users, as well as 800,000 daily visitors.

As ABC News noted, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stated in a new report that unscheduled outages continue to crash the website around five percent of the time, and heavy traffic could still slow operations down significantly. On Saturday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius suggested that people still visit the site at off-peak hours – mornings, evenings, and the weekend – to avoid traffic-related problems as much as possible.

Notably, HealthCare.gov crashed as CNN reporters tested it on television. Though reporters noted that logging in, choosing your state, and entering your information worked “a lot more smoothly” than before, the site still delivered error messages as it tried to process all the data and failed to progress to the next step. According to the New York Times, there are still problems with much of the website “back end” that calculates personal information and enrollment data – such as exactly what kind of subsidies an individual qualifies for – and files transactions with insurance companies.

 

Still, the White House considers the current state of HealthCare.gov much more stable. In its report, HHS stated the website was down 60 percent of the time in October, whereas it is now online 90 percent of the time.

"HealthCare.Gov on Dec. 1 is night and day from where it was on Oc. 1," said Jeffrey Zients, the former Obama administration official now managing the repair effort, according to the Washington Post."While we still have work to do, we've made significant progress with HealthCare.gov working for the vast majority of consumers."

The administration also said that 90 percent of users can now create an account, though at least one technology expert told Yahoo News the statistic could be misleading, since only those implementing website fixes will know the true numbers.

"It prevents anyone from the outside from contradicting them," said Jonathan Wu, the co-founder of the financial website ValuePenguin.

As the Times noted, the number of items that needed repair on HealthCare.gov ballooned to more than 600, and some administration officials even considered ditching the entire operation and starting over. Ultimately, it was decided the website could be salvaged, and during a conference call Zients told reporters that about 400 items on the list have been fixed.

Although March 31 remains the cut-off date for enrollment into the Affordable Care Act – failure to enroll by that point will result in fines – those looking to have insurance plans kick in on January 1 must be enrolled by December 23. If problems with the website continue to plague users, however, some Congressional Democrats have voiced support for extending the final enrollment deadline past March.

According to a report by Bloomberg news, about 100,000 Americans signed up for health insurance plans through the federal exchange in November, an increase over the 26,794 people who enrolled in October. Originally, administration officials expected around 800,000 enrollments during the first two months the marketplaces

Absolute majority of Americans want GMO food to be labeled

Polling suggests that an absolute majority of Americans favor laws forcing foods containing genetically modified ingredients to be labeled as such. Despite the support, however, states continue to reject these initiatives.

Late last month, advocates in Colorado filed the preliminary paperwork necessary to land a GMO labeling bill on the ballot in 2014. If voters there agree to mandate appropriate labels on lab-made food products, Colorado will join Connecticut and Maine as being the only locales within the United States to approve such efforts. But while polls conducted during the last several years suggest an overwhelming majority of Americans — close to 100 percent, in some cases — are pro GMO labeling, initiatives across the country have already failed, and supporters of these measures believe it’s because their opponents are investing big bucks to buy the outcome.

A poll conducted by the New York Times this year found that 93 percent of respondents want GMO ingredients to be properly labeled, and a similar survey done by the Washington Post in 2010 clocked in with 94 percent support.

"Surveys have always found 80 to 95 percent of people wanting labeling," Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen told Rodale News back in April." People are paying attention to food, and because of that they're more interested in GMO issues and buying food that's more local and food without pesticides and other added ingredients."

Even with polling results backing up Hansen’s assumption, time and time again GMO labeling initiatives up for vote in the US have failed in recent months, even in instances when those measures were previously all but expected to pass.

Last year, for example, a GMO-labeling initiative up for vote in California was favored by 66.9 of likely voters according to a late September poll. As election day neared, however, a high-priced “Vote No” campaign sponsored by the likes of biotech giants Monsanto and Dupont — as well as Pepsico, Bayer, Dow and Syngenta — pulled in a total of $45 million worth of contributions used to power an ad blitz that ultimately allowed the labeling bill to be shot down by a single-digit margin of percentage points.

Then in Washington last month, voters decided by barely a 10 percentage point margin to reject an initiative requiring GMO labeling there that USA Today called “the most expensive” in state history. One month prior to election day, a poll determined that 66 percent of Washingtonians supported that bill, but that number dwindled by 20 percentage points within weeks as Monsanto and company again raised millions towards fighting off the measure.

Meanwhile, the recently-passed labeling laws in Connecticut and Maine might not officially end up on the books anytime soon — if at all — according to Maxx Chatsko at The Motley Fool. As he noted in a report last week, that legislation requires that four other northeastern states with a combined population of at least 20 million enact similar laws first in order for the already-passed measures to be enforced.

“Even if all nine Northeastern states pass GMO labeling laws, the total population of states involved will only represent 18 percent of all United States residents,” Chatsko wrote. “Now, that could very well open the door to a national conversation on GMO labeling, but food manufacturers would likely take issue with such legislation. We could very well see this debate end up in a courtroom.”

‘Radical political party’: The new face of the Left launches in the UK

A political party styling itself as the “new radical force on the left” has launched in the UK. The Left Unity seeks to revive the working class ideal of the Labour party which, it claims, is failing Britain’s poorest communities in the “class war”.

Around 400 people gathered at the new party’s launch conference in Bloomsbury, London on Friday. It was decided at the meeting that the party would represent the “broad left” and be a viable alternative to the Labour Party. 

“The Conservatives and their Lib Dem stooges are launching an all-out class war on the poorest people in this country and Labour is doing nothing about it,” Salman Shaheen, Left Unity National Coordinating Group, told RT correspondent, Tesa Arcilla. 

In addition, Ken Loach, one of the party’s co-founders, told RT that Britain needed a party to represent the values and interests of the Left.  

“Britain is different to Europe in that most European countries have a party on the left. If that’s the best they can do then we can think of a better way,” said Loach.

Left Unity believes that in the light of the financial crisis, drastic action is required to defend the interests of the working classes in the UK. Citing the appearance of new political formations in “Greece, France, Germany and elsewhere,” the party’s founders say a political force needs to challenge the“capitulation of social democracy to neo-liberalism”.

Left Unity has called on its 1,000-odd followers to reject the “rightwards move of Labour” and reject austerity and war.

“Europe is plunging deeper and deeper into crisis. Its governments are continuing with their failed austerity policies which are destroying the social and economic gains working people have made over many decades,” writes the party in its mission statement.

The UK’s coalition government, headed by the Conservative party, has implemented massive austerity measures on public services in the UK. Prime Minister David Cameron hailed the success of the austerity measures and said that they should be a permanent measure rather than a way out of the financial crisis.

“It also means something more profound, it means building a leaner, more efficient state.  We need to do more with less. Not just now, but permanently,” the Prime Minister said at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London’s Guildhall.

Cameron’s austerity measures have made him unpopular among the British working classes who have accused the
Conservative government of being out of touch with the majority.

The 2013 British Social Attitudes Survey revealed that support for the government has plummeted, with around 75 percent saying they do not believe in the British political system. Additionally, the amount of people who approve of the UK’s coalition government has plummeted from 40 percent in 2010 to 28 percent.

The launch of the Left Unity party goes against the recent European trend, where right-wing parties are turning the tide on the continent. The euro skeptical UK Independence Party (UKIP) is currently considered the legitimate third party in Britain.

The Alternative for Germany party nearly made it to the country’s parliament, the Bundestag, this September. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party gained over one-fifth of the votes in September’s general election.

Norway's current conservative government came to power with tough immigration promises and there have also been far-right gains in Sweden and Finland.