Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

  I've been a proponent of goal-setting for a long time. At least 20 years ago, I read the late Zig Ziglar's work on goals, and I intuitively knew that he got it right. So I've been using his basic goal - setting strategy for a long time.  Up until now, what with technology, the only thing missing from the equation was some sort of app specifically designed to track it all, provide reminders, and so on. And I think I've found it. I don't normally endorse products or services, but in this case I make an exception. The app is called "Lifetick" and it works on the web or in your iOS or Android phone: Lifetick has features that closely mirror Zig Ziglar's system, making it a snap for me to decide to use it. I'm not talking about New Year's resolutions here, I don't make any because I have a goal system that works daily and is in almost constant revision. You have Core Values that represent areas of your life, then individual Goals wi...

A level of propaganda I don’t recognize, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. 2014 has been the year of utter nonsense. It just finished in fine form with a 5% US GDP growth number, just to name one example. Really, guys? 5%? Really? With all the numbers presented lately, the negative Thanksgiving sales data – minus 11% -, the so-so at best Christmas store numbers to date, shrinking durable goods in November and all? Plus 5%? The FBI says that it was North Korea that did the Sony hack. Propaganda. Pull apart all the stuff the FBI has been saying - it doesn't compute. Same with the ridiculous 97 percent "consensus" on global warming. Horseshit! 31,000 scientists signed the Oregon Petition stating they don't believe that manmade greenhouse gases are making the earth heat up. The satellite data shows that there hasn't been any warming in over 17 years. But hey - consensus, right? It really doesn’t matter what I say, does it? You have enough people believ...

Upon returning from Israel where I lived and worked on Kibbutz Na'an, I chose to spend several weeks in France, both in Paris and surrounding smaller cities including the countryside in Bordeaux. What I found is that once one gets out of Paris, where Parisians are not particularly fond of Americans, the people are extremely friendly and appreciative of Americans. My aunt Ruth is French, and so my cousins all were exposed to the language at an early age. I grew into French peripherally, and speak enough to get along. There are ten major wine growing regions in France, plus a number of smaller areas. There is commercial wine production in every region of France, except for the five regions bordering on France's north coast. The appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC), which translates as "controlled designation of origin", is the French certification granted to certain French geographical indications for wines, cheeses, butters, and other agricultural products, all...

Fact 1: The racial percentage of those killed by police hasn't changed. In other words, police are not more (or less) likely to shoot and kill blacks than they were 15 years ago. (In more academic terms, there is no correlation between year and race, from 1998 to 2012, selecting for whites and blacks). Fact 2: Blacks are more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police, but probably less so than you'd suspect. 34 percent of those killed by police are African American. But put another way, 62 percent of those killed by police are white. Fact 3: UCR data on justified police-homicides are notorious incomplete. These numbers are an undercount. But given the data we have, as reported (or not) to the DOJ by local police departments, police kill at least one person a day (426 in 2012, to be exact, 30 percent were black, 63 percent were white). In 2012, police killed a total of 426 people. Of those: white men: 267 black men: 128 white women: 6 black women: 4 "Asia...