“Former Eagles speak highly of new ND football coach and St. John's ... - Gloucester Daily Times” plus 4 more |
- Former Eagles speak highly of new ND football coach and St. John's ... - Gloucester Daily Times
- Train Cars Blocking View Of Lake Superior To Be Moved - Northland's NewsCenter
- Cultural Trends this decade - Chud.com
- Our Maniacal Optimism Is Ruining the World - ZNet
- Yo-Yo Ma To Consult With CSO - CBS 2 Chicago
| Former Eagles speak highly of new ND football coach and St. John's ... - Gloucester Daily Times Posted: 14 Dec 2009 07:52 PM PST Brian Kelly was introduced as the 29th head football coach at the University of Notre Dame last Friday afternoon. Most college football fans are familiar with Kelly's work at the University of Cincinnati. In just three seasons as the Bearcats' head coach, he led the team to a 34-6 record — including a perfect 12-0 mark this fall and a No. 3 national ranking — as well as back-to-back Big East titles and Bowl Championship Series (BCS) berths. Just last week, he was named the ESPN Home Depot Coach of the Year. But few probably know that the 47-year-old Kelly got his start at St. John's Prep. A native of Chelsea, Kelly played football for the Eagles, lining up at offensive guard and either inside linebacker or nose guard on the gridiron. He went on to graduate from St. John's Prep in 1979. "He was quite undersized for these positions even through his senior year," recalled former teammate Mike Smerczynski, who captained the 1977 Prep team and was a year ahead of Kelly in school. "During his four years at St. John's playing under coaches Fred Glatz, Brother Linus, Pat Yanchus, John Westfield, and Brian Flatley, he was exposed to a unique culture. Those coaches were ahead of their time. They required a year-long training commitment and prioritized starting seniors who fulfilled that work regimen. They also disciplined the team to self-motivate internally; all of our big games were preceded by silent calisthenics, showing that hype was not needed to play well. They preached the obligation of starters not only to perform, but to do so at the level where they could get their teammates into the games." Smerczynski believes Kelly learned those lessons well — and they helped him to become the highly successful coach he is. In his 19 years as a head coach at three different schools: Grand Valley State University (48-35-2), Central Michigan (19-16), and Cincinnati (34-6), Kelly took over losing programs and built them into winners. Overall, his coaching record is 171-57-2. "He didn't play much his sophomore or junior years, but saw a lot of time as a senior," Glatz said of Kelly. "People don't talk much about guards and defensive middle guards, but he was a gutsy, hard-nosed player. Because he wasn't very big — around 5-foot-9 by his senior year, and even smaller before — he made up for lack of size with determination and guts." Keen understanding of the game Current Prep football coach Jim O'Leary was in his first year as an assistant coach under Glatz, working with the offensive line when Kelly was a senior with the Eagles. "He was a kind of kid who was in (the Prep football program) all four years and knew the ropes about football," said O'Leary. "He was a city kid who was a little undersized. He was a backup, but also a leader who was always helping some of the younger kids when they were struggling trying to understand what they were supposed to do. "Even back then he understood the mental part of the game. Some of the most successful coaches, like (New England Patriots head coach) Bill Belichick, are the same way: defensive guys who are offensive geniuses because they see what can beat you." Kelly is the first three-time winner as Big East Coach of the Year (2007, 2008, 2009), and is ninth among active coaches in NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision victories. (The Bearcats are going to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans next month to face Florida, but Kelly will not be there to coach them after taking the Irish job). Less than two weeks after Charlie Weis was fired after five seasons at Notre Dame, the school signed Kelly to a five-year contract. The Fighting Irish are counting on him to turn the program around and get it back on track. Glatz set example O'Leary said that Kelly has certainly paid his coaching dues. "We first saw him (coaching) on television at Grand Valley when they played for the (Division 2) national championship, and of course Cincinnati games are on all the time," said O'Leary. "He's been at places not the best in the world to coach, but he always develops winners. Central Michigan is right down the road from Ann Arbor (home of the University of Michigan), but he was successful there, and Cincinnati is not in the best neighborhood; the facilities are dated and the stadium is very small. But he made it all work there — and now he's going to be in the spotlight." Kelly was a political science major in college and worked as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts State House for two years before deciding politics was not for him. He returned to his college alma mater as the softball coach and later became as assistant football coach. He has always credited his high school coach for giving him a strong base to develop his own coaching philosophy. In the Spring 2004 edition of "SJP Today," Kelly's success story was highlighted. In particular, a quote he had given to The Salem News was used. "You hear of people in coaching who were influenced by Bear Bryant and Joe Paterno. Coach Glatz fits that bill for me. Today my teams have the same discipline that Coach Glatz had in terms of discipline and stressing the importance of being a student-athlete," Kelly stated. "I'm happy he got the job at Notre Dame," said Glatz. "I'm sure he'll tackle it with that same kind of determination he faced every situation when he played for me." fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
| Train Cars Blocking View Of Lake Superior To Be Moved - Northland's NewsCenter Posted: 14 Dec 2009 07:30 PM PST Posted by Melissa Burlaga Travelers along I-35 in Duluth have probably noticed a long line of train cars parked on the side of the road. The 1,200 coal cars belong to Detroit Edison Corporation. They usually spend the winter parked on the Scenic North Shore Railroad's line near Two Harbors. The parking fee goes to the organizations in the Duluth Depot. This year, the Knife River Bridge is being repaired so the cars are wintering in Duluth. That has raised an uproar among folks who think the cars are blocking the view of Lake Superior. The uproar has been heard and the cars will be moving. The director of the Scenic Railroad says it's a win win situation. "The money is significant and it'll help the museums and arts and culture in our community and yes, the view comes back." The cars will be backed into the gulch near the Rose Garden on London Road. They will be moved on December 24th. fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
| Cultural Trends this decade - Chud.com Posted: 14 Dec 2009 06:40 PM PST
I remember watching Patton Oswalt's last standup special and saying that if you traveled back to 1997 and told them what the future would be like they would be amazed... -The death of the traditional music industry because of piracy/I-Pods. (and the possibility of the death of the publishing industry with Amazon's Kindle.) -The decline of newspapers, the evening news (especially after "memogate") and the personalization of your news. (I tend to just go on liberal news sites like Huffington Post. Most conservatives go on Drudgereport.com) -The rise of liberalism in the country after 20 years of conservative dominance. (This was aided by liberal websites like Daily Kos, Liberal documentaries like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, and MSNBC deciding to hire progressives in 2005.) -The decline of the major networks and the rise of cable channels due to less restrictions in content. (HBO, FX, Showtime. Sons of Anarchy beat NBC in the ratings last month.) fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
| Our Maniacal Optimism Is Ruining the World - ZNet Posted: 14 Dec 2009 07:23 PM PST
"Many people are not getting by. The human species faces dire ecological threats. Pretending everything will be OK helped get us into this mess, and it won't get us out."
In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan/Holt, October 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials. Manufactured optimism has become a method to make the poor feel guilty for their poverty, the ill for their lack of health and the victims of corporate layoffs for their inability to find worthwhile jobs. Megachurches preach the "gospel of prosperity," exhorting poor people to visualize financial success. Corporations have abandoned rational decision-making in favor of charismatic leadership. This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders -- assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers -- made very bad decisions. In These Times recently spoke with her about our penchant for foolish optimism. Anis Shivani: Is promoting optimism a mechanism of social control to keep the system in balance? Barbara Ehrenreich: If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault because they haven't had a positive enough attitude? However, I don't think that there is a central committee that sits there saying, "This is what we want to get people to believe." It took hold in the United States because in the '80s and '90s it became a business. You could write a book like Who Moved My Cheese?, which is a classic about accepting layoffs with a positive attitude. And then you could count on employers to buy them up and distribute them free to employees. AS: So this picks up more in the early '80s and even more so in the '90s when globalization really took off? BE: I was looking at the age of layoffs, which begins in the '80s and accelerates. How do you manage a workforce when there is no job security? When there is no reward for doing a good job? When you might be laid off and it might not have anything to do with performance? As that began to happen, companies began to hire motivational speakers to come in and speak to their people. AS: Couldn't this positive thinking be what corporate culture wants everyone to believe, but at the top, people are still totally rational? BE: That is what I was assuming when I started this research. I thought, "It's got to be rational at the top. Someone has to keep an eye on the bottom line." Historically, the science of management was that in a rational enterprise, we have spreadsheets, we have decision-trees and we base decisions on careful analysis. But then all that was swept aside for a new notion of what management is about. The word they use is "leadership." The CEO and the top people are not there so much to analyze and plan but to inspire people. They claimed to have this uncanny ability to sense opportunities. It was a shock, to find the extent to which corporate culture has been infiltrated not only by positive thinking, but by mysticism. The idea is that now things are moving so fast in this era of globalization, that there's no time to think anymore. So you increasingly find CEOs gathering in sweat lodges or drumming circles or going on "vision quests" to get in touch with their inner-Genghis Khan or whatever they were looking for. AS: The same things are happening in foreign policy. We've abandoned a sense of realism. You had this with Bush and also with Obama, although he is more realistic. Is there a connection between optimism and the growth of empire? BE: In the '80s, Reagan promoted the idea that America is special and that Americans were God's chosen people, destined to prosper, much to the envy of everybody else in the world. Similarly, Bush thought of himself as the optimist-in-chief, as the cheerleader -- which had been his job once in college. This is very similar to how CEOs are coming to think of themselves: as people whose job is to inspire others to work harder for less pay and no job security. AS: Would you say that Obama is our cheerleader-in-chief? BE: I haven't sorted it out. He talks a lot about hope. And as a citizen I'd rather not hear about "hope," I'd rather hear about "plans." Yet he does strike me as a rational person, who thinks through all possibilities and alternatives. AS: You write about the science of positive thinking having taken root at Ivy League universities. It's amazing to me that a course in happiness at Harvard would draw almost 900 students. BE: That was in 2006. And these courses have spread all over the country -- courses in positive psychology where you spend time writing letters of gratitude to people in your family, letters of forgiveness (whether or not you send them doesn't matter), getting in touch with your happy feelings, and I don't think that's what higher education should be about. People go to universities to learn critical thinking, and positive thinking is antithetical to critical thinking. AS: You have written a lot about Calvinism. Is it correct to say you have a deep problem with Calvinism? BE: In exploring why America became the birthplace of positive thinking, I come up with an explanation that is quite sympathetic to the early positive thinkers. Positive thinking initially represented a revolt against the dominant Calvinist stream of Protestantism in America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. That kind of Calvinism was driving people crazy, literally. To think that you were a sinner, that your entire existence for all eternity would be one of torment in hell. It caused depression. It caused physical ailments. It was a nightmare. So you got some people in the early- and mid- 19th century that said, "Wait a minute, things aren't so bad." Ralph Waldo Emerson would probably be the best known example. AS: Couldn't you go back farther to the Enlightenment -- the ultimate optimistic philosophy? Our founding fathers were very informed by that. Is that a kind of optimism that you endorse? And ultimately what's different between the pursuit of happiness as a manifestation of optimism and the current optimism that you're talking about? BE: When the founding fathers undertook the Revolutionary War, they didn't say, "We are going to win because we are visualizing victory." They knew perfectly well that they could lose and be hanged as traitors. It took existential courage to say: "We are going to undertake this struggle without knowing whether we will win, but we're just going to damn well die trying." AS: So, where does this shift come from? BE: The shift had a lot to do with down-sizing, when corporations grabbed onto it as a means of soothing their disgruntled workforce. The alternative is realism. Let's think about what's actually going on: let's get all the data we can; see what our options are; and figure out how to solve this problem. It sounds so trite and simple-minded, but that's not how the thinking has been. AS: Is the progressive movement infected by bright-sidedness? BE: Progressives are not immune to this. I remember Mike Harrington [a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America] as a public speaker and he always, always ended on an upbeat note. No matter what was going on, he would end by saying there was a huge opening for the left. Today, I don't know if we can do it. But we have no choice but to try. AS: You mean we need to have optimism, but grounded in reality? BE: I don't call it optimism. I call it determination. One of the things I've devoted so much time to has had to do with poverty, class and inequality. Those things are not going to go away in my lifetime, but it won't be for my lack of trying. And that's a different kind of spirit than optimism. AS: Some will say your approach is rational, incremental and just not exciting. How would you respond to that? BE: I don't think mine is an arid, overly intellectual approach. Consider what we're up against on the economic and environmental front. Huge numbers of people are not getting by. There are the ecological threats to the human species. Let's do something about it. What could be more irresponsible than to say, "If we just think it's going to be alright, it's going to be alright." fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
| Yo-Yo Ma To Consult With CSO - CBS 2 Chicago Posted: 14 Dec 2009 07:45 PM PST Yo-Yo Ma To Consult With CSO
Just hours before being named Musician of the Year by Musical America at a Lincoln Center event in New York, Muti announced Monday afternoon that Ma would begin a three-year term next month as the CSO's first Judson and Joyce Green creative consultant, working with the orchestra and its education programs in almost every area from classrooms to community centers and juvenile detention facilities to Orchestra Hall itself. "Yo-Yo and I have played together many times for so many years," Muti said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times Monday. "We have always found our collaboration a pleasure and an easy dialogue. "But perhaps even more importantly, we have the same idea that merely giving concerts and making music is not enough. In a world that is increasingly complex, we need to tear down artificial walls and bring music to a wider array of people and bring those people and communities to music." A performer and educator who circles the world commanding top fees and selling out halls wherever he appears, Ma said, "I have a deep affection for Chicago. The chance to work with Maestro Muti in a city that was the culmination of so much of my 10 years of work on the Silk Road Project and which is in many ways its own multi-ethnic, multigenerational and multi-experiential cultural capital is a great honor and very exciting." In addition to helping to develop and advance existing CSO education programs, Ma will work with multiple new aspects of its institute, including a series for pre-schoolers, intensive workshops for high school and college-age musicians and programs in collaboration with Muti for incarcerated and at-risk youth.Ma also will lead Symphony Center Presents thematic chamber music residencies in engaging fellow international artists with college and pre-college-age musicians. Details of how and where Ma spends his time will be worked out as his appointment begins. "We have to rehearse," Ma, 54, said. "As in rehearsing music, you read passages, find new ways, try different gestures. And we have to learn about different communities — as we did along the Silk Road — by meeting people as guests and not as hosts, and truly participating in an exchange with them." "Chicago is a great engine, for the country and the world," said Muti, 68. "And it is a cultural engine as well. Together with the management and staff and the orchestra itself, Yo-Yo and I look forward to driving this to new places and in new ways." (Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2009. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.) fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
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