1.Wigging out when your kids won’t eat

There is this ad where the kid won’t eat the lovely balanced meal the mom cooked for him so the plain-Mom-like-person-wearing-slacks hands him a PediaSure milkshake and then proceeds to stare at him while he drinks his hydrogenated vegetable oil ambrosia; all googley eyed, happy and relieved having achieved the prime directive. Whoa. Children will eat when children are hungry. Don’t sabotage yourself by giving them lots of snacks. Embrace the idea of hunger as a metaphor for striving and for anticipation. A child that never knows hunger will never know satiation either. Do your best to make something healthy and tasty and then let it go.

2.Lying to your friends

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First of all, I'd like to thank my journalistic colleague Cathy Resmer of Seven Days for her wonderful coverage of the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility conference in Burlington the other day.

Vermont Commons has been a dues-paying VBSR member for several years now, and I always learn so much when in the presence of some of Vermont's finest entrepreneurial minds. She also mentioned my "aggressive twittering" at the conference - and it is true, Vermont Commons entered the...

The other day, my dad asked me if I was planning on taking the kids to Disney World. I said no and he asked if it was due to financial or philosophical restraints. I mumbled something about it being very low on a very long list of priorities but I wasn’t philosophically opposed to it. This question stuck with me though. Disney is fun and fun is good, right? Not so fast.

First off, I do not like crowds. I won’t even go to the grocery store on a weekend if I can avoid it. Masses of humanity in a state of nervous excitement make me feel ill at ease in the best of circumstances so imagining myself under the blazing Florida sun jockeying for position in line for Pirates of Caribbean surrounded by sweaty adults and cranky kids...

David Cay Johnston is a rare breed.

An honest, enterprising, truth-telling investigative journalist, a registered republican (as in "paleo-pre-Reagan republican"), and a graceful and accessible writer when it comes to matters financial. His books are "must reads" for anyone wishing to understand how current U.S. financial systems are rigged against most of us.

Thanks to Seven Daze' Kevin Kelley for this wonderful interview.

You can hear David Cay Johnston delier a keynote on Tuesday, May 5 at ...

I think I found our new organizing strategy for Vermont independence.

This is gonna be great.

We need a choreographer - anyone?

My Turn: Reclaim Vermont's resource sovereignty

By Gary Flomenhoft

What would you do if the following happened to you? The first thing you noticed was the emergency cash...

“We suffer from a fiscal cancer,” explains U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. “It is growing within us. And if we do not treat it, it will have catastrophic consequences for our country.”

So begins I.O.U.S.A. – one of the most disturbing documentaries of the past year.

The film spotlights...

Two views of Texas secession.

The first from Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress - "If Texas Seceeds, Don't Mess With It." (And yes, he deliberately mispelled "secede.")

The second, courtesy of YouTube, from the AndyCobbonUTube page. Durn funny.

I blogged last week about the "untold stories" that went missing in the national MSM (mainstream media) about those dreaded Somali "pirates." (Somalia, the country without a government since 1991, where other nations have been illegally fishing and dumping barrels of toxic waste for years now).

True to form, Vermont Daily Briefing's Philip Baruth masterfully ties together the MSM's obsessive worship of hostage-turned-hero Underhill, Vermont's Captain Richard Philips with some emerging truths about the true nature of those dreaded "pirates."

Read on...