Benjamin Netanyahu is my President.

This is on shofar, but I think it is definitely worth everyone watching so I'm posting it here, too.



Does anyone want to help make a cooler t-shirt than this one?

this is pretty + some thoughts on work

sam told me about him. i love the tunes and this art, now, just as much as the tunes. 

i wish i could make stuff like this.

Praise the L-rd, He provided for me to audit an Adobe Dreamweaver class for free shortly after I was pricing the classes on my own. He is the networker of networkers! So, 8 hours a day for today and the next 2 days will be spend learning this web design software. What an amazing world web design is. i have new-found appreciation for the many sites i frequent on a daily basis.

If i were a professional web designer making an average industry rate, i could theoretically make in 1-2 days what i now make in 2 weeks. The ideal of the liberal arts degree is at this moment looking just that: ideal. The older i get, the more bills i have to pay, the more of a capitalist i become.

“Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.” -Winston Churchill

Can one break the curse on humankind having to work for a living? Then i could remain a liberal idealist libertarian advocate of a theocratic republic and sleep 8 hours a night.

News Blog Research

If you don't mind and you have a couple extra minutes, please take a moment to answer a few questions on http://shofarsofar.tumblr.com/ . This will help a lot in developing what the blog will be. Thanks much!

Don't feed poison to your skin.

I thought about posting this on shofar but decided that it was a little too "topic-y" for the news.Plus, the article is older than a mug.

This article by this New York Times op-ed author talks about the toxicity in many cosmetics and personal care products.

Then I found about The Campaign For Safe Cosmetics.This site has a lot of info, including a searchable database of companies who have signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics. In order to meet the requirements for the compact, companies have to:

1. Comply with the EU Cosmetics Directive.
2. Disclose all ingredients.
3. Publish and regularly update product information in EWG's Skin Deep database.
4. Comply with ingredient prohibitions and restrictions under the Compact for Safe Cosmetics and substitute ingredients of concern with safer alternatives.
5. Substantiate the safety of all products and ingredients with publicly available data.
6. Participate in the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

There is a more in-depth explanation of everything on the site. Those of you who want to avoid poison absorption via skin, check it out.

I may try to find local retailers of some of these products. But hey, there's always Whole Foods. They're not necessarily guaranteed to be free of green washing, but it's a start.

In the realm of lotion, I personally have become a fan of straight-up coconut oil. It's solid until emulsified which makes it easy to apply (unless your house if hot, then it starts to morph into chunky liquid which gets messy). Can't beat pure plant.

I am the type that needs emotional motivation and like-minded community to affect personal change usually, as opposed to people who are astonishingly able to act purely on principle (e.g. raw foods diet- I was strong when I was doing it with friends and had the excitement and passion. Now I've slacked off big time due to lack of discipline. Ah! The guilt! Repentance is coming...). I say this to say, if anyone is interested in digging more into this with me, feel free to lend your support and involvement.