Michael Jackson: 1958-2009
"King of Pop" Was Entertainment World's Most Influential Performer - And Tabloid World's Most Disturbing Celebrity
Michael Jackson: 1958-2009
The "King Of Pop" had a life full of number one hits and personal scandals
Stories
NJ Promoter Sues King Of Pop
Jackson Recruits Old Pal For Tour
(CBS/ AP) Michael Jackson, the moonwalking former child star who became known the world over as the "King of Pop" before his life and career deteriorated in a freakish series of scandals, has died. He was 50.
A person with knowledge of the situation says Jackson died Thursday in a Los Angeles hospital. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.
His death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music's premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered the race barrier on MTV, dominated the charts and dazzled even more on stage.
Jackson's 1982 album, "Thriller" still is the top-selling album of all time, and Michael Jackson was the top performer in the world through much of the 1980s. But somewhere along the way, Jackson went from the king of pop to wacko Jacko.
Some say it started with an accident during the filming of a TV commercial that burned his scalp severely and led to a dependence on prescription pain killers. He became an increasingly reclusive and odd figure.
He was married briefly to Elvis Presley's daughter, then to his skin doctor's assistant. Jackson was a father of three, despite ongoing speculation that they could not be his natural children. He sparked one of his many scandals when he dangled one of the children over a balcony, causing concern of his parenting skills.
All of those scandals paled to the ongoing suspicion of child abuse. He paid one boy more than $20 million to make his allegations go away, but it happened again one day in November 2003.
The charges stemmed from a documentary in which Jackson stated again his belief that having young boys in his bed was completely natural.
"It's very right. It's very loving. That's what the world needs now," Jackson said at the time.
Much of the world saw it differently. Jackson was arrested, handcuffed, booked and eventually stood trial. The court case was a surreal spectacle befitting Jackson's bizarre way of life, including dancing on top of SUVS, pajamas worn to court, and a string of celebrities walking in and out of the courthouse in Santa Maria, California.
"Please keep an open mind and let me have my day in court," Jackson said.
But the inconsistent testimony from the boy and his family members, including a truly bizarre five days on the stand from the boy's mother, convinced the jury Jackson was not guilty. Still, the acquittal never completely put to rest the questions surrounding Michael Jackson., a curious figure who leaves behind a legacy of staggering musical genius, and stunningly bad judgment.
Jackson has kept a largely low profile in recent years but in March, he announced he would perform a series of London concerts scheduled for July.
Jackson was a master of memorable performances and a man whose real life remains a mystery. Michael Jackson also leaves legions of fans with an ongoing fascination with the one-time and some would say forever king of pop
I think I’ve figured it out. There’s something in public health called the “prevention paradox”: measures of disease prevention that offer great benefits to populations at large (such as fluoridation of water sources, wearing seatbelts, lifestyle changes, smallpox vaccinations, etc) offer little benefit or personal incentive to individuals.
But research shows that health education geared toward individuals (counseling on reducing salt intake for hypertension, exercise for diabetes, etc) are less effective when geared only toward individuals and/or used in a short-term approach. People are motivated to act for immediate gain and substantial personal benefits, but “the medical motivation for health education is inherently weak. Their health next year is not likely to be much better if they accept our advice or if they reject it. Much more powerful as motivators for health education are the social rewards of enhanced self-esteem and social approval.” (Geoffrey Rose, Sick Individuals and Sick Populations.)
Physicians also prefer individualized health education because with population interventions (such as anti-smoking campaigns), their success rates are low and results take a long time to achieve.
The US is such an individual-centric society that people have no cultural reason to care about population health as a whole. Most Americans do not see that universal access to healthcare means that problems are detected and treated early (which is less costly), and that sometimes preventive medicine can encourage life-saving behavior change. That the person going into the ER for stomach pain because s/he does not have health insurance is costing the taxpayer literally thousands more dollars than s/he would if s/he’d gone to a primary care physician.
Nor do they understand the concept of herd immunity- if a large proportion of a population is immune to or vaccinated against a particular disease, the likelihood that one individual will get that disease is far less.
The focus on the individual and the apathy toward the well-being of communities and populations is by no means restricted to health alone. The same can be said about the current financial crisis. Individuals who borrowed more than they could pay back, and their unscrupulous lenders have created a global downward spiral of hundreds of economies, with the bottom billion hit the hardest.
I find it ironic and deeply saddening that 30 million more people have been pushed into starvation thus far due to the financial crisis while bankers are taking hefty bonuses and governments are bailing out businesses that were failing even before the crash (GM, Chrysler, etc…)
The video titled A Vision of K-12 Students Today by B. Nesbitt has been floating around the Internet for some time now. In case you have not seen it, it is embedded below. Any thoughts, reactions, comments?
All media can be previewed online. Audio clips are mp3 files. Videos are downloaded in a zipped folder containing mp4 video, Windows Media Video, and a transcript in MS Word.
A stipend of $1000.00 and a free registration to the 2010 MACUL Conference, March 10-12, 2010 will be awarded to 10 selected educators to produce high-quality enhanced or video podcasts in one subject area to be posted at MI Learning on iTunes U. Visit www.macul.org > MI Learning on iTunes U > MI Learning Information for application details. Application window: April 1 - May 26, 2009.
They Call them "the Tokyo Two" Check out their story and please sign the petition to stop this injustice!
The link to their story is...
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/so-help-me-greenpeace190309
Please go to http://www.greenpeace.org/international to read more about this and many other fascinating stories of people standing up to save our planet and its inhabitants! This is OUR planet, it's within our power to open the eyes of others around us! Please help out in any way you can!
If Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki have committed a crime by opposing the scandal and corruption of the Japanese whaling programme, you must arrest me for assisting them.
All of us who have supported efforts to save the whales with time, money, or by lending our name to letter writing campaigns, petitions, virtual marches, or e-cards are complicit in Junichi and Toru's actions.
If you are going to start rounding up political prisoners for the crime of defending whales, you will need to arrest a great many people around the world.
What videoconference opportunties did you find? Where you pleased or disappointed? Did you find someone or some place you’d like to connect with in the future?
Many Michigan tech-using educators and students are gearing up for the annual MACUL conference this week. Some speaker handouts can be accessed online. On Thursday the Opening Keynote will be provided by Alan November, a thinker who is familiar to many educators in Lenawee County. A student RoboFest will be on Thurs. March 19 from 1:00 to 5:00. The conference Program Book (pdf) can be downloaded.
Many Michigan tech-using educators and students are gearing up for the annual MACUL conference this week. Some speaker handouts can be accessed online. On Thursday the Opening Keynote will be provided by Alan November, a thinker who is familiar to many educators in Lenawee County. A student RoboFest will be on Thurs. March 19 from 1:00 to 5:00. The conference Program Book (pdf) can be downloaded.
The southern and western states are in the forefront of educational development in India. Now it is reaching such a flashpoint that higher educational institutes are popping up everywhere. Is this going to create heavy migration of students?
Hemali Chhapla writes in The Times of India “A common wisecrack among engineering aspirants in Andra Pradesh is that every second building in the state is an engineering college. It may cease to be a joke when institutes dishing out management and engineering degrees start mushrooming all over the country.
Global depression may have taken the wind out of campus placements but the rush for starting professional institutions is at an all time high. Data from the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) shows that the dash to start professional colleges is more pronounced when it comes to engineering and management as compared to other streams like pharmacy, hotel management and catering technology or architecture.
AICTE has received 886 applications for starting engineering colleges and 1,084 applications for new anagement institutes. Fie states – Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh, Maharastra, Karnataka and Kerala – account for 69% of engineering graduates , implying that they also have most of India’s engineering colleges
Rush year
States Engineering MBA
Existing Fresh Existing Fresh
Maharashtra 239 85 216 160
MP 161 50 63 80
Tamil Nadu 352 144 158 41
AP 527 176 255 209
UP 241 83 213 214
Haryana 116 38 66 47
Across India 2388 886 1516 1084
Source: AICTE. Fresh applications are for colleges from academic year 2009-10
Five Indian sties – Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala – account for almost 69% of the country’s engineering graduates, implying that these states also have most of India’s engineering colleges.
This year, too, most applications for starting new institutes have come from these states, making educationists worry about a high regional imbalance creepin in; states like UP, Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Orissa together account for a measly 14% of Indian’s technological colleges.
Colleges that receive a nod by June 30 will be allowed to start classes this academic year itself; so officials expect even more applications to pour in.
Several academicians feel quality is losing out in the race to expand seats. “Can the country boast of even 100 engineering colleges that impart cutting-edge education?” asked a principal of Pune engineering college.
“So what is the point in a thousand new colleges every year? He asked. Part of the problem lies in the fact that most trusts running professional colleges are backed by politicians who pay little attention to quality, he added.
But the AICTE feels that meeting the massive demand for professional education is imperative. Twenty years ago, merely one per cent of a aspiring engineers got a seat.
Now nearly 70% manage to find a place, note AICTE officials, “It may come as a surprise but very few engineering seats wee left vacant last year”. AICTE chairman R.A.Yadav told TOI. “There is also a yawning gap between management aspirants and the number of seats in Indian B-schools.
“But how many management schools boast of full campus placement? And are even 30% of MBA institutes accredited by the NBA (National Board of Accreditation) asked an IIM-Bangalore faculty member.
Increasing the existing number of professional colleges is a must. In a view of the galloping population and raising educational aspirations of people more availability of higher educational institutes are must. But not by compromising the quality of the education offered.
Guesses were in the air. Whether Pranab Mukherjee, the acting Prime Minister and finance minister will unveil a voter populist interim budget? Contrary to the popular expectations he just presented the economic scenario and expenditure statement. In the past most of the heavy loaded interim budgets got backfired. The government which presented voter-centric interim budgets got defeated. This may be the dampener on the UPA dispensation. Nevertheless the politics of budget presentation was much stronger than any astrological calculations.
Sudipto Mundle writes in The Times of India (17.2.2009, p.20), reacting to the great bull run in US markets a few years ago, Allan Greenspan famously remarked that the market displayed ‘irrational exuberance’. Today it is tempting to misquote Greenspan that our our markets are suffering from ‘irrational pessimism’. The sensex dropped by about 3 per cent and the Nifty too headed down, while Pranab Mukherjee was still reading his Budget speech.
The Interim Budget is more a stock taking, along with expenditure proposals for parliamentary approval to keep the government running till the regular Budget by the next government. But even in such an exercise, which is by design underwhelming, there are a few important points worth noting. We had hoped in these columns earlier, as had others, that the government would temporarily shelve the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act. This has been done. The government has provided a huge fiscal stimulus during the fiscal 2008-09 amounting to over Rs.1,93,000 crore or 4.5 per cent of GDP over and above what was envisaged in last year’s Budget, which already provided for a deficit of over Rs.1,33,000 crore.
The true fiscal stimulus must include not only what was announced under the two packages in December 208 and January 2009, but also the expenditure under the two supplementary demands for grants approved by Parliament last September and December. It is another matter that these supplementary demands made up for the creative under provisioning of some known items of expenditure in last year’s Budget to remain within the fiscal parameters of the FRBM. The total consolidated deficit for 2008-09, including the actual budget deficit of the central government (6 per cent), the state governments (3.5 per cent) and some off-budget items such as the additional contingent liability for oil and fertilizer bonds (1.8 per cent), amounts to over 11.5 per cent of GDP or nearly Rs.6,26,000 crore.
It is this massive fiscal stimulus combined with sustained monetary stimulus measures from the RBI, that have kept the Indian economy chugging along at 6-7 per cent growth, even as most of the developed world has gone into a deep recession. It has also helped to arrest the free fall of stock market and the depreciation of the rupee. Conventional wisdom suggests that to be successful, such stimulus packages have to be timely, targeted and temporary. With these measures having come within a few weeks of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, and with much of the stimulus directed at the worst affected sectors – exports, infrastructure, real estate, transport – the government and the central bank have clearly passed the first two tests.
But what does the Interim Budget have to tell us about the future? It provides for a central government deficit of 5.5 per cent in 2009-10, though Mukherjee indicated that this could rise by a further 1 per cent. Adding to that 3.5 per cent deficit of state governments, and possibly some further off-budget provisions, 2009-10 could also end up with a massive deficit of 10-11 per cent. Coming on top of the huge stimulus this year, this could indeed go a long way in pump priming demand, compensating for the loss in export demand from developed countries. Moreover, much of the additional spending is targeted at infrastructure, employment programmes and education and health programmes.
However, the question is how this massive deficit will be financed. The large government borrowing this year has crowded out the private sector. This is why interest-rates have not come down substantially, and banks are still shy of lending to private borrowers despite all the policy measures taken by the RBI. If next year’s deficit too is to be financed by market borrowing, that could be bad news for the private sector, and severely put at risk the recovery of private investment.
It is important, therefore, that a large part of the deficit be monetized .e financed by government borrowing from the RBI which prevents RBI financing of government deficits. The finance secretary did indicate that something of this kind may be in the offing. Low inflation minimizes the risk of inflationary pressures arising from the consequent increase in money supply. The shelving of the FRBM and the putting on hold of the MoU with RBI would set aside the two key anchors of prudence that have guided fiscal policy in recent years However, exceptional times require exceptional measures.
That being, said, it has to be added that abandoning fiscal prudence is fraught with risk, as we have learned to our cost in the past. Hence the third test of the stimulus, that it must be temporary. The fiscal and monetary stimuli are like major shocks being applied now to revive the economy. Research shows that the lag generated by such shocks being applied now to revive the economy.
Research shows that the lag generated by such shocks can last for years, making the recover itself fragile. It is imperative that the fiscal and monetary breaks be applied as soon as the economy returns to a high growth path. As Mukherjee indicated, strong fiscal and monetary compression, return to the FRBM regime and the MoU with RBI must remain high priorities. Hopefully, recovery will occur by 2010, so the fiscal consolidation can be initiated within the first half of the next government’s tenure, before the compulsions of the next electoral cycle take over.
Wisely the UPA government had presented the economic scenario as the interim budget. Without stirring the hornet’s nest it has moved to face the electoral battle. It is true that major decisions can be announced few days before the election code of conduct comes into force. In that sense one has wait for the last minute to see the government’s mood to restructure the economy. Anyway, decision without many controversies affecting public lives with adequate coalition arithmetic can win elections. One can assume that the government is steering the no controversy ship rather than high pro activity with controversies. This cool and calm may win another term for UPA not its ability to put the economy on the high speed track.
Everyone is in a hurry. No one knows where they are heading. This speed breaker free world is dangerous. Money, career, achievements, promotions ----- there is no end to the human desires. But at the end of the day those high end chasers are not happy. They are anywhere and everywhere but without happiness. After the recession they have added financial worry to their kitty of troubles. Are we in the right direction?
Sadhu Vishwamurtidas writes in The Times of India (17.2.2009 p.20)“ The best of countries and corporations are so because they have the best of budgets. Hence the concern over the national budget. However, if people spent as much time worrying about their domestic budget as they did about the national one, globally, things would be different. How many focus inwards to analyse how exactly they have budgeted their own hard-earned money.
Many of us continue to spend well beyond our income, inviting debts. Bhagwan Swaminarayan advises in his Shikshapatri, “One should keep a daily record of one’s expenditure and income and should always live within one’s means. All of us, rich or poor, should give something to charity”.
Still fewer people have worked out a ‘life’ budget for themselves. A life budget includes committing time to self, family, society and God. The lives of those who do this get enriched not just financially, but also socially and spiritually.
Many corporate executives invest all their time and effort in pursuing their careers and climbing the professional ladder. It is at all worthwhile? Most discover that their victory is empty and that they won it at an irreparable loss to their health, family and psyche, incurring obesity, heart disease and fatigue on the physiological front; separated spouse, estranged children and uncared-for-parents on the familial front; frustration, depression and stress on the physio-psychological front.
In many societies, this phenomenon has resulted in a tragic burgeoning of societies and cardiovascular and cancer-related deaths. The Royal bank of Canada devoted one of its monthly letters to this problem with the title, “Let’s Slow Down’, “we are victims of mounting tensions”, it enunciated. “We have difficulty relaxing: we are not living fully”.
For many in India too, life has taken on these contours, and living it is rather like going downhill in a truck without brakes. But it is still not too late. The World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts that stress will be the Number One killer in the world by 2020. And stress is usually nothing more than an individual’s failure to balance his lifestyle.
Living life is a healthy manner and living it fully means we have to maintain regular food habits and follow a sensible diet, regular exercise and rest, going out with family, working for charity and spending some time in reflection, mediation and prayer.
There is only one way to survive overwork or burnout. Be brave and bailout or you will be a loser. Life’s rat race only produces losers. It has no winners. Even if it does, the winner is still a rat. And usually a very large one.
A sage asked a prosperous king, “If you were about to die of thirst and starvation and someone offered you a glass of water and a loaf of bread in exchange for your wealth and kingdom, would you give them to him?” “of course I would”, replied the king. “Anybody would”. “then why”, asked the sage, “have you wasted your entire life amassing all this land and wealth when they are worth no more to you than a glass of water and a loaf of bread?”
Human life is priceless. God has bequeathed this limitless treasure trove to all. And as diversification is one of the secrets to successful investment, so is it the secret to a joyous and blessed life. Reach into your soul, and reach out to your family, society and God. Budget well.
Fast driving on the lifeway without control over the vehicle amounts to suicidal attempt. No one’s live is a straight line. Ups and downs are normal. There is no prediction or forecast which can help us to avoid. Crisis and cyclone can come without prior warning. Knowing this one should slow down and take time out to read the bold signals on the sides. Calm going can help to get rid of the bad consequences and make life ha
There is not a single culprit in the climate change crisis who wants to mend their ways. Every day new pollutants are emerging with more dangerous contributions. From electronic junks to eating habits air, water, soil and other essential common properties are damaged. In this nature destructive game advanced countries are the real villains.
The Times of India (16.2.2009) writes “When it comes to global warming, hamburgers are the real Hummers of food, scientists say. Simply switching from steak to salad could cut as much carbon as leaving the car at home a couple days a week. That’s because beef is such an incredibly inefficient food to produce and cows release so much harmful methane into the atmosphere, said Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Canada.
The livestock sector is estimated to account for 18% of the global greenhouse gas emissions and beef is the biggest culprit. Even though beef only accounts for 30% of meat consumption in the developed world it’s responsible for 78% of the emissions, Pelletier, said.
That’s because a single kilogram of beef produces 16 killograms carbon dioxide equivalent emissions: four times higher than pork and more than ten times as much as a kilogram of poultry. Pelletier said. If people were to simply switch from beef to chicken, emissions would be cut by 70%, Pelletier said.
Another part of the problem is people are eating far more meat than they need to. “Meat once was a luxury in our diet,” Pelletier said. “we used to eat it once a week. Now we eat it every day.”
If meat consumption in the developed world was cut from the current level of about 90kg a year to 53kg a year, livestock related emissions would fall by 44%.
“Given the projected doubling of meat production by 2050, we’re going to have to cut emissions by half just to maintain current levels.” Pelletier said.
No one knows the consequence of beef eating. The awareness about beef and pollution should be spread intensely. Anything excess is detrimental to both people and environment. What affects personally in certain matters undermine the environment too. Unlimited beef eating is dangerous for individuals health and ecology.
