An Outstretched Hand to Haiti


Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010 the strongest earthquake in more than 200 years hit Haiti, destroying thousands of structures. The quake measuring 7.3 on the Richter Scale, has killed an estimated 45,000-50,000 people, according to the Red Cross federation, Thursday (1/14/10).

My cousin’s husband cannot get in contact with his family in Haiti. Needless to say, he and his family here are on pins and needles. The US State Department has provided a phone number for Americans seeking information about family: 1-888-407-4747 or 202-647-5225. As communication in Haiti is very difficult at this time the State Dept. warns that due to heavy volume, some callers may receive a recording. "Our embassy is still in the early stages of contacting American citizens through our Warden Network."


I’ve also provided 15 organizations that are helping in the Haitian Earthquake relief.

Haiti Outreachhttp://www.haitioutreach.org/

Help Haiti Now
http://www.helphaitinow.org

Unicef
https://secure.unicefusa.org/site/Donation2?df_id=6680&6680.donation=form1

Catholic Relief Services
https://secure.crs.org/site/Donation2?df_id=3181&3181.donation=form1

Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, Inc.
http://www.catholiccharitiesadm.org/

American Red Cross
http://www.redcross.org/

The Salvation Army
https://secure20.salvationarmy.org/pages/makeDonation/usa/makeDonation.jsf


Americares
http://www.americares.org/newsroom/news/deadly-earthquake-strikes-haiti-2010.html

Beyond Borders
https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=28276

Doctors Without Borders
http://doctorswithoutborders.org/news/allcontent.cfm?id=31

Haitian Health Foundation
http://www.haitianhealthfoundation.org/

Operation USA
http://www.opusa.org/

Yele Haiti
http://www.yele.org/

Mercy Corps
http://www.mercycorps.org/

Lutheran World Relief
http://www.lwr.org/

From: Stanley A. Miller II of the Journal Sentinel

As the good intentions of supporting the aid effort continue, be mindful that these fundraising projects are inevitably threatened by scammers, spammers, hackers and other villains looking to cash in by creating fraudulent sites. So whether you are donating online or via a mobile device, make sure your money is going to a source you trust.

The Value Out Of The Year

Every year, I start out focusing on one thing or another, and for the most part, I’m a pretty disciplined person. Last year my focus was more on writing than anything else. I had decided early in the year (unfortunately not exactly at the very start) that I was going to submit to three competitions a month. I pretty much stuck to that with the exception of great big writing projects that required much more time and energy on my part. I was pretty proud of myself when by the end of the year I had submitted my work into 27 competitions. But then I thought, so what? I didn’t win anything (yet).

This is where doubt creeps in and become the attrition of my motivation. Despite the lack of recognition. I do have to acknowledge that my work is getting better. And should I really invest all of my emotion in whether someone gives me a prize or not? I think not. What has made me feel the greatest is on Christmas day, when I took a friend of mine, and my daughter to a homeless shelter to feed homeless women, showing my child what the season is supposed to be about.

I think I’ll be doing more of that this year. It feels so good… I just came across this article by Michael Masterson from my favorite newsletter, Early to Rise (ETR). It’s not Pekid, but it’s a great exercise to start at the beginning of the year.

Figuring Out Your Core Values
By Michael Masterson

Before you can jump feet first into changing your life with a set of long-term goals, you have a job to do: Figure out what's really important to you.

Most people you meet don't like their jobs, are unhappy with their family life, and want more money. Winning the lottery would make it all okay. At least that's what they think. But the truth is... unless you live your life according to your core values, no amount of money will be enough to bring you joy.

What do I mean by core values? I mean the feelings you have about good and evil that are buried deep within your heart.

What does goal setting have to do with core values? It's all about insuring your long-term happi-ness. If you set goals that contravene your core values, you will wake up one day and say, "I did everything I said I wanted to do. But so what?"

You don't want to end up being yet another highly successful but fundamentally miserable person -- a fate so common it's become a cliché. Here's how to make sure that doesn't happen...

Begin by imagining a funeral. It is taking place in an elegantly appointed room. The room is full of friends and family members who have assembled to talk about the deceased. You look around. You begin to recognize faces. "Who is the deceased?" you wonder. You look at the casket. Good God, it's you!

So what are the people at your funeral saying about you?

Imagine real people: a relative, a neighbor, a business associate, and even a stranger. And imagine them making very specific comments.

It's not enough to imagine your nephew saying something like, "She was a generous woman." You need to imagine a second, qualifying sentence, such as, "She always sent me expensive birthday presents."

And be honest. Don't sugarcoat the pill. Say it like it is. For example, your next door neighbor might be saying, "I thought he was a very inconsiderate person. He never picked up the mess when his dog crapped on my lawn."

Imagine everything the people at your funeral could truthfully say about you -- and then think about the way their words make you feel.

If you don't feel good, it means that -- in those relationships, at least -- you are not living your life ac¬cording to your core values.

Now, for every negative statement you just imagined, ask yourself, "What would I like this person to be saying about me?" The an¬swer to that question will reveal one of your core values.

Let's say you imagined someone saying, "He was always struggling to make ends meet."
That statement would make you feel bad, right? So then you imagine what you would like that person to say about you. You might come up with, "He struggled for a while, and then everything changed. He became very successful and died a wealthy man." If that statement makes you feel good, it's reasonable to say that acquiring wealth is a core value for you. And you would write it down like this: "I believe that financial success is a valuable and admirable accomplishment."

Got it?

Negative Statement: "He was always struggling to make ends meet."

Positive Statement: "He struggled for a while, and then everything changed. He became very successful and died a wealthy man."

Core Value: "I believe that financial success is a valuable and admirable accomplishment."

The goal of this exercise is to come up with about a dozen statements that indicate what you think is impor¬tant in all the major areas of your life.

I recommend that you shoot for about a dozen statements. Why? Because you want to address what you think is important in all the major areas of your life.
Your core values should determine your goals. And your goals have to be comprehensive.

Most goal-setting programs are not comprehensive. They focus on just one thing. Making more money. Or losing weight. Or being happy (whatever that means). Setting such singular goals can sometimes be effective, if you have the flexibility in your schedule to focus on them. But most people don't. And that creates a problem. They start out enthusiastically and make progress for a while. But before long, life's many urgencies push their way in. Good habits are neglected. Bad habits return. Before long, the goal is abandoned.

You are going to avoid that very common problem by considering not just your health or your wealth, but also your hobbies, relationships, social obligations, and so on.
Here's what you should do now:

1. Take out a piece of paper and divide it into four boxes.
2. At the top of those boxes, write Health, Wealth, Self-Improvement, and Personal Relationships/Social Obligations.
3. Inside each box, write down statements in that category that you would like to have said about you at your funeral.

For example...

Under Health:
• "He was the fittest 80-year-old I ever saw."
• "He could run a mile in eight minutes."
• "I once saw him lift up a car by its bumper."

Under Wealth:
• "Of all the people who graduated from Riverdale High School in 1972, she turned out to be the wealthiest."
• "She had a huge mansion in Laguna Beach."
• "She left $4 million to charity when she died."

Under Self-Improvement:
• "He was the best chess player I ever knew."
• "He was also a published poet."
• "He knew more about home decorating than Martha Stewart."

Under Personal Relationships/Social Obligations:
• "She was the world's kindest mom."
• "She was also a very generous friend."
• "She was a strong supporter of breast cancer research."

Write down at least two such statements in each of the four categories. The purpose of writing them down is twofold: to fix them in your mind, and to have something specific you can refer to later.

You will be referring to these core values many times in the coming years. They should be a source of continuous inspiration. Treat them seriously. They are the crux of your plan for the life you really want to live.

A Secret Society's Agenda

A lot of people know this already. Their existance is no secret. The secret is only the plots they've tried to keep hushed. The Bilderberg Group is a group of 130 (or so) people who control or heavily influence the world in the ways of banking, business, media and politics; who meet annually to discuss matters dedicated to usurping sovereignty in the United States and throughout the world.

According to Bilderber.org, American Free Press editor crashed a secret meeting and uncovered some horrifying plans. I've just plucked a few for you here:

http://www.bilderberg.org/2008.htm#bb09

Major goals remain exploiting the global recession and an imaginary “swine flu pandemic” to establish global departments of treasury and health under the United Nations. But at the May 14-17 meeting in Vouliagmeni, Greece, near Athens, Bilderberg took a keen interest in persuading the United States to surrender sovereignty to the International Criminal Court, or ICC.

Bilderberg found President Obama at its June, 2008 meeting in Chantilly, Va. near Washington. They were reassured when he chose their boy, Harold Koh, a strong advocate of the U.S. accepting the ICC, as the State Department’s top lawyer.

In the Penn State Law Review, Koh wrote sneeringly of “nationalists” who oppose surrendering sovereignty to international institutions, including the ICC. He praised the “transnationalist faction” on the Supreme Court and the wisdom of the jurists for their rejection of the “nationalist faction.”

“Generally speaking, the transnationalists tend to emphasize the interdependence between the United States and the rest of the world, while the nationalists tend instead to focus more on preserving American autonomy,” Koh wrote. “The transnationalists believe in and promote the blending of international and domestic law, while nationalists continue to maintain a rigid separation of domestic from foreign law.”

Carl Bildt, Sweden’s minister for foreign affairs, made a pitch for two other major Bilderberg goals: creating a global Department of Treasury and Department of Health, with all nations surrendering sovereignty over these issues to the UN. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to become the Treasury Department and the World Health Organization the World Health Department. But Bildt seized on an old Bilderberg issue, global warming, to make the case for WHO. Bilderberg propaganda over a “swine flu pandemic” has fallen victim to facts: On average, 300,000 Americans develop flu each year and 30,000 die. Only a few have died or even been seriously afflicted by “swine flu.”

The world economic meltdown is a “once-in-a-generation crisis while global warming is a “once-in-a-millennium challenge,” Bildt told Bilderberg. Sources inside Bilderberg said Bildt’s speech mirrored an address he gave to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Carnegie’s president, Jessica Mathews, is a long-time Bilderberg participant.

Bildt then turned to selling global warming as the gateway to a World Health Department under the UN. Bilderberg boys, including David Rockefeller and others who inherited great wealth as the sons of smokestack industrialists, grabbed global warming as an issue more than a decade as a means of generating huge profits with investments to “save the planet.” Now, global warming has a new role.

Bildt called for world (UN) solutions to virtually all problems. He cited the European Union as “model of integration, saying, “ the EU is emerging as a global actor.” He advocates expanding NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere to create an “American Union.”

There is much MUCH more…

Unwrapping the Gift of Spare Time

Friends get on me quite a bit for “spreading myself too thin.” I get it. When pursuing my many interests, I’m setting myself up to becoming “a jack of all trades and master of none.” I have no qualms with these clichés because in essence, they’re true.

Each year I work on chiseling at the marble that is my life. Pairing down my most developed passions to focus on the bare minimum. It’s hard when you love so much! My attention span seems to be short, so when I have down time, I pick up something I haven’t done in a while, justifying this action while procrastinating on some other project at the same time. It’s a tug of war with me.

A friend of my mine, I’ll call “ML” - doesn’t have this problem. She is going to school full time for a double major, for her BS (Bachelor’s of Science, not Bull S***). ML also holds down one full time and two part time jobs. One of her passions is science. She’s a biology and psychology major. Her other passion is math which is what she tutors. Her downtime usually consists of hanging out with me or one of her other close friends. This, she says, is so that she doesn’t have complete melt down. Socializing keeps her sane. She still will hit the wall soon, but right now, she totally rocks.

Today I ran across this short entry from my favorite newsletter – ETR:

Cheating Yourself in Your Spare Time
By Michael Masterson

There's a young man I know -- someone I'm mentoring -- who has great potential but no obvious advantages. He doesn't have an impressive education, has no money to speak of, and has only one beneficial business connection -- me.
He has good natural talents, a good mind, a good attitude, the willingness to work hard, and good values.

But he fills up his spare moments by surfing the Internet or engaging in similar amusements. There's nothing terribly wrong with that, one could argue. He finishes the tasks he's assigned. He works extra hours when asked. He doesn't complain.
But for him -- and his future -- it's a shame. Because each of those spare moments presents an opportunity for him to move himself forward. Each is a chance for him to learn something new, refine a skill, or make a new contact.

Whether he realizes it or not, he is competing against others who are about his age, have similar skills, and earn similar incomes. From the perspective of his employer and future employers, his value will grow or diminish relative to the rest of these people.

To the degree that he can exceed them, he will become more valuable and his income and his opportunities will expand. If he slips behind -- and he surely will if he gives up too many of his spare moments to fooling around -- he will gradually be thought of as just ordinary and, eventually, expendable.

We are all busy. We all have multiple responsibilities. But success is a result of your behavior. And the way you act when you have spare time is a crucial part of it.
Every 15 minutes invested in your future is a deposit that will grow and compound over time. It may not seem like a big deal now -- whether you spend that time surfing the Internet or updating your Rolodex -- but in the long run, it will make all the difference in the world.

Cheater Stats

Just came across some new disturbing statistics from AMTS Inc. According to president and consultant, Allen Martin, 82% of all married women and 47% of married men cheat at least once.

What? Can that be right?

I asked Martin where he got the statistics:

Every stat or study I quote, I conduct my own study. Those numbers originally came for Essence magazine researchers. They were debating whether or not to print the study out of fear of losing subscribers. I later found out that their motivation was from a UCLA study conducted through the Grad School and University of Michigan also did their version. All with similar results. My sample size was 3,500 - much larger than needed.

Wow. Okay.

I asked Martin how to spot a cheater, since that was one of the topics discussed at the AMTS Relationship Roundtable. He gave me a list of things to look out for:

1. If a person always has a perfect almost pre-rehearsed alibi.

2. New underwear

3. Working late

4. Unexplained absence

5. Extreme behavior i.e. overly attentiveness or lack of interest

6. Slut- pack: toothbrush, condoms, underwear, Massingale, perfume/fragrance in the car

7. Fresh smell of soap when returning home

8. Hotel receipts

9. Unexplained credit card purchases

10. over use of pet names i.e Pumpkin, Beautiful, shorty, baby doll, etc

11. Unexplained marks or stains

12. Lack of eye contact or fidgeting

13. Overly protective or private w/ phone, wallet, purse, address book

14. New friends

Some of these seem so innocent, like “new friends” but I suppose pairing that up with a few other signs like “working late” and smelling like soap and flags and alarms should be going off all over the place. I thought this info was rather interesting so I’m passing it along… and may you never witness another sign in your relationship again. Here’s to the faithful. Cheers!

What is Pekid?

I'm only posting this entry about pekid (pronounced PAY-kid) because I’ve decided to use a pekid approach to my personal 2010 evolution. And just so that we are all on the same page, I wanted to explain exactly what pekid meant.

Pekid is a spiritual progression with the intention of being a more evolved person. This transformation usually includes ritual acts of self discipline and has nothing to do with religion. It is an abstract journey to the center of oneself.

Quoting from the article titled, “The Pekid 7 Step Ritual to Turning Over a New Leaf” (Associated Content, October 2007):

A Pekid ceremony or ritual is a spiritual tribute to different stages of change in a person's life and each ritual is a symbol of growth on our journey. The act of "turning over a new leaf" is one of the critical plot points in a person's history and deserves allotted time for symbolic celebration and intense reflection with it's own seven step ritual.

A pekid approach is quite simply physical acts symbolic of internal change. Such an approach can only have meaning and be beneficial to the pekid seeker if the seeker is in fact serious about their own progress. I don’t mean, simply having a straight face and wanting to do better. Every step of a ritual is absorbed through the pores of the seeker until each step becomes a ritual itself. Pekid requires an almost overwhelming amount of thought over the tempting robotic action of meaningless steps.


In the future, I’ll share some of the ritual with you, and if you are inclined, you might even try one out yourself. Pekid is designed to be light in moments of darkness and your dance in your moments of joy. I’m excited about starting the journey.

Happy 2010!