Election Season is Here! Make Sure You Know the FACTS!

FACT CHECK: Ryan takes factual shortcuts in speech

By JACK GILLUM and RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Laying out the first plans for his party's presidential ticket, GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan took some factual shortcuts Wednesday night when he attacked President Barack Obama's policies on Medicare, the economic stimulus and the budget deficit.

Sen. Rob Portman, a former U.S. trade representative, glossed over his own problems when critiquing Obama's trade dealings with China. A day earlier, the convention's keynote speaker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, bucked reality in promising that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will lay out for the American people the painful budget cuts it will take to wrestle the government's debt and deficit woes under control.

And former senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum stretched the truth in taking Obama to task over his administration supposedly waiving work requirements in the nation's landmark welfare-to-work law.

A closer look at some of the words spoken at the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla.:

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RYAN: "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. ... So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama."

THE FACTS: Ryan's claim ignores the fact that Ryan himself incorporated the same cuts into budgets he steered through the House in the past two years as chairman of its Budget Committee, using the money for deficit reduction. And the cuts do not affect Medicare recipients directly, but rather reduce payments to hospitals, health insurance plans and other service providers.

In addition, Ryan's own plan to remake Medicare would squeeze the program's spending even more than the changes Obama made, shifting future retirees into a system in which they would get a fixed payment to shop for coverage among private insurance plans. Critics charge that would expose the elderly to more out-of-pocket costs.

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RYAN: "The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal."

THE FACTS: Ryan himself asked for stimulus funds shortly after Congress approved the $800 billion plan, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Ryan's pleas to federal agencies included letters to Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis seeking stimulus grant money for two Wisconsin energy conservation companies.

One of them, the nonprofit Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corp., received $20.3 million from the Energy Department to help homes and businesses improve energy efficiency, according to federal records. That company, he said in his letter, would build "sustainable demand for green jobs." Another eventual recipient, the Energy Center of Wisconsin, received about $365,000.

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RYAN: Said Obama misled people in Ryan's hometown of Janesville, Wis., by making them think a General Motors plant there threatened with closure could be saved. "A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: 'I believe that if our government is there to support you ... this plant will be here for another hundred years.' That's what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year."

THE FACTS: The plant halted production in December 2008, weeks before Obama took office and well before he enacted a more robust auto industry bailout that rescued GM and Chrysler and allowed the majority of their plants — though not the Janesville facility — to stay in operation. Ryan himself voted for an auto bailout under President George W. Bush that was designed to help GM, but he was a vocal critic of the one pushed through by Obama that has been widely credited with revitalizing both GM and Chrysler.

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RYAN: Obama "created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way and then did exactly nothing."

THE FACTS: It's true that Obama hasn't heeded his commission's recommendations, but Ryan's not the best one to complain. He was a member of the commission and voted against its final report.

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CHRISTIE: "Mitt Romney will tell us the hard truths we need to hear to end the torrent of debt that is compromising our future and burying our economy. ... Tonight, our duty is to tell the American people the truth. Our problems are big and the solutions will not be painless. We all must share in the sacrifice. Any leader that tells us differently is simply not telling the truth."

THE FACTS: Romney has made a core promise to cut $500 billion per year from the federal budget by 2016 to bring spending below 20 percent of the U.S. economy, and to balance it entirely by 2020.

His campaign manifesto, however, is almost completely devoid of the "hard truths" Christie promises. In fact, Romney is promising to reverse $716 billion in Medicare savings achieved by Obama over the coming decade and promises big increases in military spending as well, along with extending tax cuts for everyone, including the wealthiest.

The few specifics Romney offers include repealing Obama's health care law, cutting federal payrolls, weaning Amtrak from subsidies, cutting foreign aid and curbing the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled.

But it'll take a lot more than those steps for Romney to keep his vague promises, which are unrealistic if he's unwilling to touch Medicare and Social Security in the coming decade. Even the controversial budget plan of his vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., largely endorsed by Romney, leaves Medicare virtually untouched over the next 10 years.

What's left for Romney to cut is benefit programs other than Medicare and Social Security, which include food stamps, welfare, farm subsidies and retirement benefits for federal workers. The remaining pot of money includes the day-to-day budgets of domestic agencies, which have already borne cuts under last year's budget deal. There's also widespread congressional aversion to cutting most of what remains on the chopping block, which includes health research, NASA, transportation, air traffic control, homeland security, education, food inspection, housing and heating subsidies for the poor, food aid for pregnant women, the FBI, grants to local governments, national parks and veterans' health care.

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PORTMAN: "Take trade with China. China manipulates its currency, giving it an unfair trade advantage. So why doesn't the president do something about it? I'll tell you one reason. President Obama could not run up his record trillion-dollar deficits if the Chinese didn't buy our bonds to finance them. Folks, we are as beholden to China for bonds as we are to the Middle East for oil. This will end under Mitt Romney."

THE FACTS: Portman is an expert on commerce, having served as President George W. Bush's trade representative from May 2005 to May 2006. But he didn't fare particularly well in stemming China's trade advantage, either.

Under Portman's watch, the U.S. trade deficit with China soared by 25 percent in 2005, and the next year it climbed more than 15 percent. By contrast, the deficit rose 10 percent over the first three years of Obama's presidency, according to U.S. government figures.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations have launched unfair trade cases against China at the World Trade Organization, but neither has been able to rebalance the relationship.

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SANTORUM: "This summer (Obama) showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare. Now, I helped write the welfare reform bill. We made a lot crystal clear. No president can waive the work requirement, but as with his refusal to enforce our immigration laws, President Obama rules like he is above the law."

THE FACTS: The administration did not waive the work requirement. Instead, it invited governors to apply on behalf of their states for waivers of administrative requirements in the 1996 law. Some states have complained those rules tie up caseworkers who could be helping clients directly.

In a July 18 letter to congressional leaders, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that to be eligible for a waiver, governors must commit that their plans will move at least 20 percent more people from welfare to work. Moreover, states must show clear progress toward the goal within a year, or lose the waiver.

"We will not accept any changes that undercut employment-focused welfare reforms that were signed into law fifteen years ago," Sebelius wrote.

Ron Haskins, a former senior Republican House aide who helped write the welfare-to-work law, has said "there is merit" to the administration's proposal and "I don't see how you can get to the conclusion that the waiver provision undermines welfare reform and it eliminates the work requirement."

Haskins, now co-director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families, says the administration was wrong to roll out its proposal without first getting Republicans to sign off on it. But he said the idea itself is one both parties should be able to agree on, were it not for the bitter political divisions that rule Washington.

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Associated Press writers Tom Raum, Andrew Taylor, Henry C. Jackson and Bradley Klapper contributed to this report.

EDITOR'S NOTE _ An occasional look at claims made in political campaigns and how they adhere to the facts.

Chad and Evelyn...Until Drama Do Us Part?

By now you all have heard the story of Chad Johnson a.k.a .'Ochocinco' and Evelyn Lozada of 'Basketball Wives' fame and the domestic incident that led to a gash and stitches, then the loss of Chad's job with the Miami Dolphins.

Now-there are all sorts of stories out there about the genesis for the fight that led to the 'gash' on Lozada's forehead, but  I wasn't in the car with them-so I don't know if it was really over a receipt for condoms or what. But what I do know is that while this may lead to the decline of one person's career, it may be a major stepping stone for another. Let me explain...

First of all, let me state emphatically that I do not condone domestic violence of any kind-regardless of the perpetrator  man or woman. Physical and/or verbal abuse are both no-goes in my book.

Here we have Chad, who by various accounts is a laid-back, easygoing guy. We've witnessed his silliness, philanthropic ways  and willingness to be self-deprecating at times. He doesn't drink, and has not been known to have any off the field issues of any sort.

Then we have Evelyn, who rose to 'stardom' via 'reality-television' as a basketball 'wife'. I use the term 'wife' very loosely in this case due to the fact that she was never married and neither are majority of the women featured on the show. She was the hot and feisty Latina(that's not stereotypical at all!) who had a quick temper and would curse you out or throw a glass at you if she was upset.

Hmm...

This leads me to wonder, was Chad really the aggressor in this situation? Unfortunately, in cases of domestic violence it is automatically assumed that the male is the guilty party, though that is not always the case. According to many scientific studies, about two in five victims of domestic violence are men. Let's give this some thought. Evelyn has a history of violence, at least we've seen some of her aggressive acts on TV, why didn't the media jump to Chad's defense? Why did the Dolphins act so swiftly to release him without all the facts? Apparently, the Dolphins didn't want all of the 'drama' that accompanied Chad and his new wife. VH1 dropped their reality wedding show. VH1? Haven't they recently built their brand off of physical attacks on shows?

Today, Lozada released a statement saying that Chad needed 'help' and no woman should be subjected to domestic violence. I agree, however, I have a difficult time embracing this from someone who has built their relative 'career' off of aggressive acts and intimidation all of sudden turning about face to what she's well known for. Not saying it can't be done, just saying.

Chad's career might be over now, none of us are quite sure. The justice system has to run it's course first.Then there's Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL. He may suspend Chad as well. This can be done when the player is without a team. Who knows where Chad goes from here.

Evelyn's star may actually be rising though. Maybe she uses this as an opportunity to re-brand herself or get another show. Who knows? One thing is for sure, people are wondering if the couple can work through this. Will we ever get the truth? If Chad is guilty will he own up to it, will Evelyn if she is?

What I do know is this; violence cannot be accepted in any form. Whether it's domestic. Whether it's a man attacking a woman. Whether it's a woman attacking a man; or whether it's a woman attacking another woman with a drink or grabbing her hair and calling her a b*tch because it makes for good ratings on a TV network.

One of My Favorite Speeches

I wanted to share this speech with you. It's made by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director and lawyer at the Equal Justice Institute in Alabama. Worth watching.

The AIDS Frenzy(Or Relative Lack Thereof)

The other evening, my girlfriend and I sat watching the 6'o clock news which is pretty customary for us during the week. The news was highlighting Washington D.C.'s hosting of the 19th Annual International AIDS Conference. The conference bills itself as the 'premier' gathering for those working in, studying and living with  AIDS coming together in search of ways to end the pandemic. It provides a structured dialogue for those with scientific knowledge of new and groundbreaking studies aimed at creating a more unified global response to the disease. This is all well and good, but there was something stated, or perhaps understated by one of the anchors that chilled my girlfriend and I to the bone. The statement was the fact that *60% of gay black males will have contracted the HIV virus by the age of 40.

What?

Now, I didn't know whether or not that statement was fact so I did some digging myself. Here's what I did find:

• Each year, nearly 3% of gay black men become infected with HIV, a 50% higher rate than among their white counterparts.
• The new-infection rate in gay black men under 30 is even higher, at 6% a year
• The majority of the men in the study identified themselves as black. Not all the men identified themselves as gay or bisexual, but all the participants were having unprotected sex with men. More than 97% of men enrolled were willing to have an HIV test, and the results suggest that many men are not fully aware of their HIV risk: among those who thought they were HIV-negative or didn’t know their status, 12% tested positive.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that from 2006 to 2009, HIV infections among black gay and bisexual men under 30 increased 48% and that African Americans are overall disproportionately affected by HIV. Blacks make up 14% of the U.S. population, but account for 44% of all new HIV infections. According to 2009 data, 73% of new infections in black men are in gay and bisexual men.

The numbers come from the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN), a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The study, conducted between 2009 and 2011, involved 1,553 gay and bisexual men from Atlanta, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

I ask again, why? Not only that, but what could be the ramifications for this outside of the gay community?

I'm quite sure there are many reasons, and this is course is not meant to solely single out Black gay males. What it's meant to do is call out all of us. We all play a part in this. How you may ask?

It's obvious there's an epidemic in our community of Black men who sleep with not only other men, but women as well. They hide their true selves in an attempt to be accepted, because they know that being a Black male and gay leads to ridicule at best, maybe death at worst. Why have we made it so hard for these men to come out? (That could be a topic for another time) Do we not realize that such behavior hurts our entire community? It's led to Black women being the highest amount of new HIV cases among any group. Women as a whole account for 1/25th of new HIV cases, with Black women accounting for 66% of that total. Black women are only 14% of the female population, but 66% of new HIV cases among women! Look at that awful disparity! WAKE UP!!!

A few simple rules:

• Always wear protection with your partner
• Ask your partner to be tested, as a matter of fact-go together and look at the paperwork, if they throw a fit-then they aren't worth sleeping with. Simple as that.
• Ladies, if you suspect your dude is 'suspect', ask questions-it's your health and your right.

There are many gay men that live their lives out in the open and should be congratulated for it, I'm sure it's not easy. But there are many males who do not, who wear a mask in order to be accepted or to fit in. We have to find ways to make people feel okay to be themselves. It's a matter of life and death.

*a black gay man has a 1 in 4 chance of becoming infected by age 25; by age 40, he has a 60% of becoming HIV positive. ( I found the real fact, they had misspoken apparently, or maybe it wasn't an accident...)

Fixed Gear Bike Frenzy!!!

So for my 35th birthday I had a fixed-gear bike made for me. My boy Frank has been working on it for awhile under my 'creative direction' and control. It was made to resemble Iron Man's Mark 7 armor. Obviously, I'm a big Iron Man fan and this build was exciting and turned out great! Do you know what a fixie is?

From Wiki:

Fixed-gear bicycle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A fixed-gear bicycle (or fixed-wheel bicycle, sometimes known as a fixie) is a bicycle that has no freewheel, meaning it cannot coast, because the pedals are always moving when the bicycle is in motion.In Australia, "fixed-wheel" is the normal term for the subject of this article—meaning the opposite of freewheel, and "fixed-gear" usually refers to a single-speed bicycle.

The sprocket, or cog, is threaded or bolted directly to a fixed rear hub. When the rear wheel turns, the pedals turn in the same direction.^[1] This allows a cyclist to stop without using a brake, by resisting the rotation of the cranks, and also to ride in reverse.

As a rule, fixed-gear bicycles are also single-speed bicycles—bicycles without derailleurs, with a single sprocket attached to the rear hub, and a single sprocket attached to the crank. Most fixed-gear bicycles only have a front brake, and some have no brakes at all.

The track bicycle is a form of fixed-gear bicycle used for track cycling in a velodrome. But since a fixed-gear bicycle is just a bicycle without a freewheel, a fixed-gear bicycle can be almost any type of bicycle.^[3]

In urban North America fixed-gear bicycles have achieved tremendous popularity, with the rise of discernible regional aesthetic preferences for finish and design details.^[17]Some road racing and club cyclists used a fixed-gear bicycle for training during the winter months, generally using a relatively low gear ratio, believed to help develop a good pedalling style.^[4] In the UK until the 1950s it was common for riders to use fixed-gear bicycles for time trials. The fixed-gear was also commonly used, and continues to be used in the end of season hill climb races in the autumn.

Dedicated fixed-gear road bicycles are being produced in greater numbers by established bicycle manufacturers. They are generally low in price^[18] and characterized by relaxed road geometry, as opposed to the steep geometry of track bicycles.^[19]

Fixed-gear bicycles are also used in cycle ball, bike polo and artistic cycling.

My bike was even featured on fixedgeargallery.com! This is an international site where people submit pics of their bikes.

Would You Consider This?...

Why You Should Love Grasshopper Tacos and Kelp Pasta

How overcoming the yuck factor can help save the world.

By Josh Schonwald|

Florentino Azpetia, chef at Girasoles restaurant in Mexico City, prepares a grasshopper taco (taco de chapulines), a typical Mexican delicacy, in the restaurant's kitchen on Oct. 19 2001

Photograph by Jorge Uzon/AFP/Getty Images.

Read more from Slate’s special issue on the future of food.

About 200 years ago, the lobster was regarded by most Americans as a filthy, bottom-feeding scavenger unfit for consumption by civilized people. Frequently ground up and used as fertilizer, the crustacean was, at best, poor people’s food. In fact, in some colonies, the lobster was the subject of laws—laws that forbade feeding it to prisoners more than once a week because that was “cruel and unusual” treatment.

Things obviously changed for the one-time prisoner’s grub. It’s a gastronomic delicacy, the star of festivals, subject of odes to New England summers, a peer of prime rib.

I’m telling the story of the rise of lobster (as described in David Foster Wallace’s brilliant Gourmet piece “Consider the Lobster”) because it’s a tale of hope, a shining example of triumph over the yuck factor.

Much of the conversation about how to solve the coming food crisis caused by soaring population, diminishing resources, and a warming planet focuses rightly on technology, reducing waste, and improving food access and distribution methods. But equal urgency needs to be devoted to simply broadening our appetites. Two food sources that strike many as unpalatable—insects and seaweed—could play a critical role in not only feeding the 2.5 billion extra humans expected by 2050, but doing so in a green, climate-friendly way.

With the exception of honey (bee vomit), insects pretty much reside in Fear Factor andBizarre Foods country. If you’re not familiar with the bug-food phobia, consider March’s Frappuccino incident. A barista revealed that Starbucks was using cochineal beetles to color its strawberry frap, prompting headlines like “Starbucks Lovers Bug Out Over Creepy Frappuccino Incident.” Within weeks, Starbucks apologized, replacing the beetle juice with tomato-extract coloring. The point: Insects are overwhelming viewed as filthy, creepy, dangerous, inedible—and not just to vegans.

But this prejudice against eating insects—four-fifths of all known organisms on earth—is slowly starting to change. A growing number of people are beginning to recognize that bugs, such as mealworms, grasshoppers, and crickets, may be the ultimate sustainable protein source. In fact, in January 2012, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization held an insect summit of sorts—37 international experts gathered in Rome to discuss the role of insects in achieving global food security.

Many insects are what you might call superfood—rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol, high in essential vitamins and minerals like calcium and iron. More important, insects are green super-foods. Bugs are cold-blooded (they don’t waste energy to stay warm), so they’re far more efficient at converting feed to meat than cattle or pigs. Ten grams of feed produces one gram of beef or three grams of pork, but it can yield nine grams of edible insect meat, according research from Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University. Yet insects still have virtually the same amount of protein as beef or pork. A 100-gram portion of grasshopper meat contains 20.6 grams of protein, just 7 grams less than an equivalent portion of beef.

If the protein numbers and energy efficiency don’t move you to try a grilled locust, consider this: Insects use a fraction of the water and land of conventional livestock, plus they’re climate-friendly. According to van Huis’ research, breeding edible insects, like locusts and crickets, emits just 10 percent of the methane from livestock and about 0.3 percent of the nitrous oxide. Insects are also natural recyclers that thrive on paper and industrial wastes—stuff that would normally be trashed.

Insect-eating doesn’t have a yuck factor in most of the world. Venezuelans eat French-fried ants. Ghanaians eat bread made out of termites. Thailand has more than 15,000 locust farmers. As pro-bug people like to point out, 70 percent of the world's population eats more than 1,400 insects.

Fear of insect eating is peculiar to North Americans and Europeans. Advocates of a global surge in “micro livestock”—that’s the euphemistic term some like to apply to insect farming—are trying to challenge the phobia.

The European Union has offered 3 million euros to member states that promote the use of insects in cooking. The Dutch government has given $1.3 million to support insect-husbandry research. A barbecued ant-eating festival in the Netherlands in 2006 attracted more than 20,000. You can now buy mealworms, buffalo worms, and locusts—as well as products containing insects, like Bug Sticks and Bug Nuggets—at Sligro, the Dutch equivalent of Costco.

For years, a small group of American entomologists have been tireless promoting bug-eating with books like Creepy Crawly Cuisine and The Food Insects Newsletter, but now the foodies and entrepreneurs are helping. José Andrés, last year’s James Beard Outstanding Chef winner, serves a popular chapulin taco stuffed with Oaxacan-style dried grasshoppers at his D.C. restaurant Oyamel. Andrés raves about not only the mouthfeel of young crispy grasshoppers, but also their sustainability and benefit to humanity. Insect-dishes are starting to show up on daring restaurant menus—flatbread made out of roasted cricket, pan-fried locusts, stir-fried silk worm larvae, and chocolate-covered scorpions. Others take a different approach: The Chicago start-up Entom Foods aims to deshell insects with a pressurization technique, so that insect meat is in cutlet form. The idea is that Americans will be more willing to embrace grasshoppers and ants if they’re unrecognizable. Get ready for mealworms shaped as hamburgers and shrimp.

The yuck isn’t the only challenge to industrial-scale insect farming. You’d have to eat roughly 100 grasshoppers to equal the amount of protein in a 12-ounce steak. But at a time when 1 billion people are chronically hungry, and when the raising of livestock already takes up two-thirds of the world’s farmland and generates 20 percent of greenhouse gas emission, class Insecta, subphylum Hexapoda needs to be more aggressively explored as a food source.

Another vastly underexplored food source, with yuck factor issues, is kelp. Now the idea of farming plants in the oceans isn’t new. In 1973, Soylent Green portrayed a world in which people eat wafer-like rationssupposedly made from plankton (emphasis on “supposedly”). In the post-World War II era, some idealistic scientists enthused about the idea of solving human food needs with a fast-growing, protein-packed algae calledchlorella. Plankton soup, the food historian Warren Belasco reports, was even served at a Venezuelan leper colony.

Plankton soup and algae burgers didn’t take hold, and I didn’t seriously consider the possibilities of marine plants until an aquaculture consultant named John Forster pointed me to an eye-opening essay he authored called “Towards a Marine Agronomy.” Forster revives the argument that, given demographic projections, the sea must play a much greater role in food security.

Oceans are the slackers of food production—they cover more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface, yet yield 2 percent of our food. Two percent. And it's not because we haven't done a good job catching or growing fish.

Forster, an aquaculture veteran, argues that the greatest promise of sustainable aquaculture isn’t in efficiently raised finfish or shellfish. Nor is it in lower-on-the-marine-chain seafood, like sardines or anchovies, as sustainability-mind chefs like Barton Seaverand Bun Lai have advocated. The panacea is at the very, very bottom of the marine food chain: phytoplankton.

The virtues of phytoplankton (which include algae and seaweeds) as a primary food sources are many. Kelp, a type of seaweed, is nutrient-rich, low in fat, and grows at turbo-speed. Often described as the tree of the sea, kelp grows nine to 12 feet in three months—without freshwater, deforestation, or fertilizer. And because it’s the one of the fastest-growing plants on earth, kelp draws down a lot of carbon. In fact, a World Bank study showed that the production process of seaweed farms could actually have a negative carbon footprint, absorbing 20 percent more carbon dioxide than it emits per cycle. In another study, Ronald Osinga of Wageningen University in the Netherlands estimates that just 1 percent of the Earth's ocean surface—an area roughly the size of the state of Washington—would be needed to grow an amount of seaweed equal to all of the food plants currently farmed on land.

Marine agronomy is not a novel concept in Asia, where seaweed has long been a staple crop. But Asian countries have increasingly recognized that the long strands of red, green, and brown seaweed found on beaches could play a much greater role in their food production. As Brendan Smith reported in the Atlantic last year, Japan and South Korea have invested millions in kelp farming, while the Philippines has increased sea farming by more than 100 times in recent years.  

In the United States, though, seaweed is still largely off the menu, save for an appearance as an appetizer at Japanese restaurants. That’s changing.

Seaweed is starting to appear under the more palate-pleasing names like “sea vegetables” or “sea lettuce.” Two Maine companies, Maine Coast Sea Vegetables andOcean Approved, are paving the way, introducing a host of seaweed derived products—kelp noodles, kelp energy bars, kelp pickles, seaweed-flavored tortilla chips. And they’re starting to show that is not a monolith—there’s a stunning of diversity of sea flora, with names such as Irish Moss and Digitalia, Lave, and Bladderwrack.

Although plankton soup is not likely to appear soon, marine agronomy will inevitably contribute a larger role in the world’s food production—whether it’s as “sea vegetables,” as livestock feed, or as ingredients in processed foods.

About two years ago, I put together my first Perfect Sustainable Meal. It’s intended to be symbolic, an effort to make the simple point: There is no silver bullet. Feeding the world in a sustainable way will require a mix of strategies—some natural and ancient, others high-tech, and, yes, yucky-seeming. So let’s toast to the perfect sustainable meal of the future, version 2.0:

Appetizer: a locally-grown mesclun mix (from a farmers market)

Main course: a grilled barramundi filet (raised in a recirculating aquaculture system) served on a bed of kelp pasta, accompanied with a Hawaiian papaya (genetically engineered)

Desert: a chocolate-covered grasshopper

Kid, you are not special

By LZ Granderson, CNN Contributor

 11:20 AM EDT, Tue June 12, 2012

(CNN) -- When my son was in middle school, I remember attending one of his school band concerts that wasn't very good.

In fact, it sucked.

At times, it sounded as if half the band was playing one song and the other half was playing something totally different. And because I don't want my son to grow up to be a loser, I told him straight out what I thought.

LZ Granderson

"How was it?" he asked.

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"It was pretty bad," I said.

"I know, right?" my son agreed, smiling. "We're not good at all."

And then we both laughed until we had tears in our eyes.

I don't claim to know everything about parenting, but I do know parents do their children a disservice by constantly sugarcoating their shortcomings to protect their feelings. I can't think of a more surefire way to raise a loser than not allowing a child to learn what it really takes to be a winner.

Not that everything in life is a competition. But if children can't handle competition when it's necessary, or take some criticism, or never strive to be better because their parents inadvertently programmed them to believe they are already the best even when they're not, then they are in for some serious shocks and bumps down the road.

That's the part of the discussion that's missing from all the chatter about David McCullough Jr.'s controversial "You Are Not Special" commencement speech. He didn't call the Wellesley High School Class of 2012 a bunch of lowlifes who won't amount to anything. Rather, he was adjusting their lenses so that they could see the world they were about to enter more clearly.

"Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools," McCullough said. "That's 37,000 valedictorians... 37,000 class presidents... 92,000 harmonizing altos... 340,000 swaggering jocks ... 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs. But why limit ourselves to high school? After all, you're leaving it. So think about this: Even if you're one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you."

One man's "ouch" is another man's "right on brother," and you can count me among the latter.

My son is special ... to me.

He is special to his mother, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends.

But he is not special to everyone, and he is not great at everything. None of us are.

If the students at Wellesley didn't know this before their last moments of high school, I am glad McCullough was there to help them out before life taught them that lesson in less forgiving ways.

Some folks have faulted McCullough, an English teacher at Wellesley, for his tough words. Sure, the job of high school teachers is not to tear down students' self-esteem. But it's certainly not to inflate students' sense of self-worth with a bunch of unearned compliments and half-truths.

There is a middle ground where "how things are" and "how things can be" meets. It is at this middle point where growth happens. But if parents, teachers and the other adults in a child's life never acknowledge "how things are" -- no matter how good the intention may be -- then they are denying that child an opportunity to mature, to develop a strong sense of self-confidence that can only be earned by recognizing shortcomings and dealing with disappointments and failures.

"And I hope you caught me when I said 'one of the best,' " McCullough said. "I said 'one of the best' so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You're it or you're not."

Which is why McCullough also talked about the importance of pursuing passions for the sake of passions, rather than seeking accolades or striking off items from an arbitrary checklist. Accolades and lists may tell us about accomplishments, but life is meant to be experienced, not just accomplished. It's like the difference between reading books for the sake of reading and reading books just to get a good grade. Tell me, once you're done with school, are you then supposed to be done with reading books? I sure hope not.

McCullough's point was that students should focus less on being seen as special and instead understand that living life is special in and of itself. As Rudyard Kipling so eloquently stated in his poem "If":

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two imposters just the same;

The synopsis of "You Are Not Special" may seem scathing, but I found the speech to be quite uplifting, and I shared it with my son. He has another three years to go before graduating from high school, but I always like to remind him that his family and friends think the world of him -- and for the most part, just about everyone else on this planet doesn't give a damn about him. That's not mean or cruel, good or bad, that's just the reality of life. And that's OK -- everyone is special to someone, but no one is special to all.