Obamaville March 24, 2015 - Obama Blasts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for Campaign Promises

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In a further sign of the deterioration of relations between the Obama Administration and Israel, the President took the unusual step of blasting the Israeli Prime Minister in news conferences for statements the PM made on the eve of the Israeli elections.

The stunning and decisive victory by Netanyahu seemed to fuel the attacks by Obama who is still outraged that the PM addressed the United States Congress without the approval of the president.

Obama called the promises by Netanyahu "cynical" and 19 times in one news conference, said they would lead to a reassessment by the United States of our relationship with Israel.

Now something is very wrong with the righteous attack by Obama.  This is the same Obama, who made 508 promises in his own 2008 campaign for president and only managed to fulfill 38% of them, and then added more in 2012 he is yet to fulfill.

Therefore, Obama can fail to deliver 62% of the time himself but thinks an election campaign in another country should be free of any campaign promises, and only deal in campaign facts.

Get real Mr. President, it seems all politicians are foot loose and fancy free when it comes to delivering campaign promises.

We do not need to encourage the terrorist world by alienating our only true friend in the Middle East over nonsense such as campaign promises.

For those of you suffering from memory loss, the following are two articles by left-leaning news outlets detailing the failure of Obama to deliver on his own campaign promises.

Do Promises Matter Anymore? Countdown Day 36

Posted: 10/01/2012 7:55 pm EDT Updated: 12/01/2012 5:12 am EST

Howard Fineman, Editorial director, Huffington Post Media Group

WASHINGTON -- In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama was full of promise -- 508 of them to be precise. He was the harbinger of hope in the last dark months of the George W. Bush years.

But with just six weeks to go until Election Day 2012, President Obama has made few new promises and is not repeating many of the original ones. By PolitiFact's accounting, he has delivered on 38 percent of them -- a lousy shooting percentage in the NBA.

Instead, Obama is selling himself based on what he isn't: Mitt Romney. And rather than trying to convince voters that great days surely lie ahead -- a tough sell to a skeptical electorate -- he often offers a litany of reduced expectations, grim economic realism and rueful lamentations about the gridlock in Washington that he, in his innocence, did not expect. His slogan, "Forward," can sound less like an invitation to a glorious Elysium and more like a military command on a bloody battlefield.

The candidate who won on the high-octane power of optimism is now running on the cautious notion that the future ain't what it used to be.

The message, rarely overtly expressed, is that we are facing a tough grind (in terms of tax increases, slow job growth and entitlement cutbacks), and it's better to have a compassionate, user-friendly communitarian in the Oval Office than a wealthy, spreadsheet-and-shredder CEO who was born with a silver foot in his mouth.

The president now leads in this war of attrition and lowered sights.

Despite what the polls say, though, it is not clear the Obama strategy will hold up all the way to Election Day. There are three inherent risks: Voters prefer campaigns of dreams to those of realism. A chance, admittedly slight, remains that Romney will find his voice and a message at the last minute. And voters may yet choose to take one last look at the details of the president's record.

What they will find is that the Obama that is often isn't the Obama that wanted to be. This is not an observation confined to the Rush Limbaugh right; many on the progressive left have said the same thing.

That's where the past promises come in -- and the question of whether they mean much in our promiscuously promissory age.

Only once in any direct and sharp way has the president been confronted with tough questions about a failed promise. When Univision news anchors asked him why he had not won comprehensive immigration reform, or even pushed for it, Obama seemed both surprised and confused that he had been pressed on such an obvious point. The answer he gave -- that the pressures in Congress were just too daunting -- was less than convincing.

The president has kept promises No. 1 and No. 2: He calmly led the fight to bring the United States back from the brink of economic catastrophe (including a workable bailout of the auto industry), and he got a version of a national health care system passed and, as it turned out, sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But he hasn't come close to reducing unemployment to the levels his aides envisioned and predicted, poverty is at an all-time high, and the annual deficit has certainly not been cut in half.
Here's a short list of other, more specific promises compiled by PolitiFact:

• Establish a mortgage foreclosure prevention fund. (Deemed a "colossal failure" by a special inspector general.)

• Close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. (Punted.)

• Create a cap-and-trade system with interim goals to reduce global warming. (Punted.)

• Sign the Employee Free Choice Act, making it easier to unionize. (Couldn't get a must-pass bill through a Democratic Congress.)

• Allow importation of prescription drugs. (Bargained away to big pharma.)

• Sign the Freedom of Choice Act, guaranteeing abortion rights against state legislative encroachments. (Never pushed it.)

• Include a "public option" in the health care plan. (Punted.)

• Bring in the dawn of a new bipartisan era. (Not.)

To that list, I would add one more failure: Public schools in general are not noticeably improving the education of students.

Perhaps lists such as these don't matter anymore. After all, most focus on expansions of federal power that the president was not able to achieve -- failures that Romney has no standing to criticize, given his conversion to Tea Party libertarianism.

It is true that Republicans have opposed the president at every turn, even though their truculence also exposed Obama's lack of deal-making skills.

As for Romney, he isn't making many specific promises, and the ones he is making tend to be of the negative variety: abolishing Obamacare, abolishing the Dodd-Frank bank regulation law, cutting tax rates, abolishing unspecified tax loopholes. His "promise" to "create 12 million jobs" is a laughable non-event, since that is the number of jobs the economy is predicted to produce over the next four years regardless of who is president.

But maybe voters, as cynical as they are these days, have just given up on expecting elected leaders to deliver on their promises. If that is so, how will voters decide whether a president deserves reelection -- or a challenger deserves to replace him?

It's not a promising development.

What Obama Promises To Do Next

Posted: 11/07/2012 1:44 pm EST Updated: 11/07/2012 4:11 pm EST

Dan Froomkin, Joe Van Brussel

WASHINGTON -- Now President Barack Obama has some promises to keep.

His 2012 campaign wasn't nearly as full of measurable commitments as his first one in 2008, but there were still plenty -- some of which are due in a matter of weeks, not months or years.

The most immediate deliverable -- and the one for which he has the clearest mandate -- is a tax hike for the rich.

Obama can deliver that fairly easily because the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year. Without doing anything, he can restore the top marginal tax rate to 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent, restore the estate tax, and raise the capital gains tax cap from 15 percent to 20 percent.

But in that process, Obama also has repeatedly vowed to strike what is often referred to as a "grand bargain" -- a bipartisan deal that would link tax increases for the rich to budget cuts, possibly involving Social Security, in order to start along the path to long-term deficit reduction.

In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Obama restated his biggest promises. "In the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together: reducing our deficit; reforming our tax code; fixing our immigration system; freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do."

But there's no way for Obama to fulfill any of those major promises unless he gets House Republicans to go along. So he has essentially promised to deliver Republicans, starting very soon. 

Of course, he promised to do that in 2008, too.

Post inauguration, Obama's first big deliverable is comprehensive immigration reform providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. In September, Obama told a Miami audience that his inaction on immigration was the "biggest failure" of his first term. In October, he told the Des Moines Register, he is confident he can deliver because he has new leverage.

"Should I win a second term, a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community," he said. But his assumption -- that the GOP will realize it can't afford to keep its hard line position on immigration any longer -- is unproven.

Obama can keep some of his promises even with an obstructionist GOP if he's willing to take bold, unilateral steps that he shrank from in his first term. For instance, Obama has talked about addressing the continued housing crisis; the obvious next step would be to allow principal reductions for troubled borrowers whose mortgages are owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama is expected to start soon by firing acting Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Ed DeMarco.

Obama has promised to reduce air pollution and other environmental hazards, and a more muscular approach to agency rule-making could go a long way in that direction.

But if second-term Obama is focused on establishing a historic legacy, then he's going to have to take on the issue of climate change -- going far beyond the innovation agenda of his first term, and establishing some a carbon tax or emissions caps.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney mocked Obama for having "promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans” in 2008. Environmentalists, by contrast, are hoping the president will now act on that promise. The path to such an agreement is far from clear, however.

Similarly, it's hard to see how Obama can deliver on his most frequent campaign promises, which related to the middle class and job creation. Underlying those promises is his vow to invest in education, research, but most of all infrastructure -- and he can't do that without Congress.

In the same town hall where he discussed his failure to achieve immigration reform, Obama said "the most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.” He seemed to be suggesting that the American public help him pressure Congress.

But it's not just Congress. Progressive activists have learned the hard way that Obama himself is best at keeping his own promises when he is held to them by organized and mobilized grassroots campaigns.

Here are some of the major promises made by the Obama 2012 campaign in ads, the Democratic Party platform, Obama's major speeches, debates, and other sources.

Middle class/Taxes

·                                 Return to Clinton-era tax rates for families earning above $250,000.

·                                 Give middle-class families and folks trying to get into the middle class some relief.

·                                 98 percent of families will not see a tax increase.

Job creation/Business/Manufacturing

·                                 Close loopholes that allow companies to deduct expenses when they export jobs.

·                                 Tax breaks for companies that are investing in the United States.

·                                 97 percent of small businesses will not see a tax increase.

·                                 Reduce corporate tax rate to 25 percent, while eliminating many deductions.

·                                 Create a million new manufacturing jobs in the next four years.

·                                 Help big factories and small businesses double their exports.

·                                 Invest in advanced manufacturing.

Energy/Gas/Environment

·                                 By the middle of the next decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas.

·                                 Open more land for oil-and-gas exploration.

·                                 Cut oil imports in half by 2020.

·                                 Develop new sources of energy in America.

·                                 Reduce carbon pollution.

Education

·                                 Hire 100,000 new math and science teachers.

·                                 Create 2 million more slots in our community colleges so people can get job training.

·                                 Cut tuition increases in half over 10 years.

Health care

·                                 When Obamacare is fully implemented, costs will go down.

·                                 Lower Medicare health care costs.

·                                 Improve benefits, cut payments to hospitals and other providers by $700 billion.

Deficit

·                                 Put U.S. on path to cut deficits by $4 trillion over 10 years.

Immigration

·                                 Pass comprehensive immigration reform.

·                                 Give young people a path to citizenship.

Foreign policy

·                                 Transition out of Afghanistan by end of 2014.

·                                 Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.

Gun control

·                                 Keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those who are mentally ill.

·                                 Increase enforcement of current laws.

·                                 Reintroduce assault weapons ban.

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The NCAA March Madness - the greatest sports event in the world - amateur or professional - in terms of money that is!

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In spite of the fact college basketball is an amateur sport, there is nothing amateur about the way money is generated from the NCAA playoffs.  So massive is the revenue that it far surpasses even the Super Bowl.

Perhaps a better gauge of popularity is the amount people bet on the games and here Las Vegas knows the winner.  For every dollar bet on the Super Bowl, at least seven dollars are bet during March Madness, well over $7 billion.

In fact, if you combine revenue from the entire NFL playoffs including the Super Bowl, it is one third less than the NCAA playoffs.  If you combined all the revenue from the professional NBA, Major League Baseball, and National Hockey League playoffs, it is still one third less than the NCAA playoffs.
    

King Midas is alive and well in NCAA country.

When it comes to college basketball, one might be driven crazy by all the constant changes in conference members, the odd television broadcast schedules, the incessant drive for perfection, and the big business aspects.

There is a reason for these things as big business is big bucks.

Of course in spite of all the billions of dollars spent during March Madness, the players, those gladiators in the ring, get nothing.

But ad revenue is just a small part of the story. Investopedia identifies four more extremely lucrative ways the tournament makes money, none of which goes to the players:

1) Broadcast rights: In April 2010, the NCAA inked a deal with CBS that made the network its exclusive March Madness outlet. The contract lasts for 14 years and is worth a whopping $10.8 billion. This contract alone is projected to generate $771 million per year for the NCAA.

2) "The basketball fund": The NCAA's annual March Madness revenue is divided among the different basketball-playing schools and conferences (i.e. the Pac-12, SEC, etc.) based on factors such as schools' numbers of sports teams, scholarships awarded and tournament performances.

Conferences also have a hand in divvying up these large money pots (between 2005 and 2011, the top-earning Big East conference made $86.7 million) either evenly amongst schools or based on March Madness performance and revenue generated. According to Forbes, a team's trip to the Final Four earns its conference $9.5 million.

3) Ticket sales and sponsorships: During March Madness, tickets and sponsors generate about $40 million in revenue. Combined with the money from the broadcast rights, this accounts for 96% of the NCAA's total annual revenue.

4) Wagers: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, especially if it involves an unlucky March Madness bet. Americans wager an estimated $7 billion a year on the tournament. That is $1 billion more than the Super Bowl.

Also, consider the average ticket price at face value for the final four in Indianapolis is about $1,400 per person with fees up to $500.  Of course if Kentucky gets in, from the neighboring state, the scalped price may have no ceiling.

Finally, the economic impact of the NCAA tournament for host cities generates millions and millions of dollars in local revenue not to mention the Friday through Monday night schedule for the Final Four, meaning people will spend four days to see two games.

Because of the complexity of the money trail, I am including an excellent report done by Bloomberg Business on the business of money and the NCAA March Madness.  You would do well to review it in detail.

March Madness Makers and Takers

The way the NCAA distributes the staggering revenue from the basketball tournament has created a polarized system where some schools make money and others just take it.

By David Ingold and Adam Pearce | March 18, 2015

Twenty five years ago, the NCAA decided something had to be done about March Madness money. The year before, CBS agreed to pay a record $1 billion to broadcast the 1991-1997 tournaments. That was fine with the powerhouse basketball schools that routinely made it into the postseason: Under the rules at the time, they divided most of the revenue based on the number of games they won.

Conference officials feared that without a change, a handful of schools would get rich while others got nothing, and the student athletes competing in the tournament would face increasing financial pressure to win games.

Annual TV revenue from NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament $800 million CBS and Turner Broadcasting begin $10.8 billion , 14-year deal Basketball Fund goes into effect after CBS nearly triples annual revenue to $143 million ,TV rights switch to CBS from NBC Source: NCAA reports Note: Chart shows the average annual rate over the course of a contract.

The Basketball Fund Is Born

So in 1990 the NCAA created the “basketball fund,” a plan intended to more fairly divvy up tournament revenue and parcel it out among the country’s Division I schools.

The new plan cut the amount of the payout that’s directly tied to teams’ wins and losses. Most of the tournament’s TV revenue is now earmarked for things like academic programs and financial assistance for student athletes. Even schools that don’t play in the postseason get a cut.

The remaining amount makes up the basketball fund—and it’s no small pot. Last year the fund totaled about 28 percent of the tournament’s TV revenue, or about $194 million. These coveted dollars are won or lost on the basketball court, and the battle among schools to claim them accounts for a lot of the Madness each March.

The tournament TV contract brought in $700 million in 2014… $498 million went to Division I schools… with $194 million given via the basketball fund… $199 million this year … and that amount keeps growing.

How It Works

Teams earn a “unit” for every tournament game they play up to the championship game. So a team that makes it to the final four will earn five units. Each unit is worth a specific amount each year. Instead of paying schools directly for the units they win, however, the NCAA now gives the units to a team’s conference, and the conference is responsible for distributing the money to its members. A conference can divide up the money however it wants, but the NCAA suggests schools evenly split the payout, and most conferences follow the recommendation.

The End of the $300,000 Free Throw

One goal of the basketball fund was to reduce the financial impact of individual wins and losses. Under the old system in which schools were paid each year for their wins, a player who missed a single game-winning free throw cost his team $300,000 or more. The fund changed that by spreading out the tournament payments over six years; and since that money is also split among the dozen or so teams in a conference, the dollar value attached to any single game is diluted.

Every unit won in 2015 will be worth at least $1.6 million over six years. For a strong team like Kentucky, which might earn as many as five units if it makes it to the final four, that once meant a massive payout at the end of the tournament. Under the basketball fund, those units will be split with the other 13 schools in the Southeastern Conference—dropping the per-school value of its units earned this year to about $560,000 over the next six years.

Conferences Are Key

One big effect of the fund is that it shifts the emphasis from winning teams to winning conferences. All 350 Division I teams will get a cut of this year’s $200 million basketball fund—but strong conferences with many winning teams will rack up more units and take home a much bigger share of the pile.

The nation’s top basketball programs have historically been in one of six major conferences: the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-12, Big 12, and SEC. These conferences only account for 20 percent of the teams in Division I, but they’ll likely receive about 60 percent of the basketball fund payout this year.

The fund is supposed to be about rewarding performance, and it’s fitting that the top programs will receive the largest cut of the money. But the strongest conferences also include schools with weak basketball programs—and they get an equal cut of the winnings even if they didn’t play a single game in the tournament.

Basketball Fund earnings by conference, 1991 - 2015

A System of Makers and Takers

This focus on conferences instead of teams has resulted in a system of makers and takers, where colleges in a conference lean on a few key schools with powerful basketball teams to earn money for everyone else.

Take Michigan State, a Big Ten school that’s earned 21 units during the current six-year payout period. That translates to about $5.1 million for the Big Ten in 2015 alone. After its earnings are lumped together with the rest of the conference and equally doled out, MSU will get back one-third of the amount it’s put in. Other top makers include Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

This effect is magnified in smaller conferences, where a single team could be responsible for the bulk of tournament appearances. Gonzaga University plays in the West Coast conference and is responsible for half of its revenue. It gets back an even smaller share, roughly 20 percent of what it contributes.

The inverse can be true for weak programs in strong conferences. An extreme case would be Northwestern University, which also plays in the Big Ten. Unlike Michigan State, Northwestern has never made it to the NCAA tournament – not once since 1939.

Despite contributing zero units over the last 30 years, Northwestern has received an estimated $24.5 million from the fund. This year, the school will receive roughly $2.2 million, the same amount as Michigan State.

The chart below compares how much schools have earned for their conference and how much they've gotten back. It assumes conferences equally split their basketball fund revenue like the NCAA suggests. Looking at all the schools together, it's clear that some are getting back a lot more than they put in.

Makers and takers by conference, 1991 - 2015

Movers and Shakers

Schools are continually changing conferences, typically to improve their financial situation. Though football-related money is the biggest motivator, all that jumping around also has a big impact on the basketball fund, since schools rely heavily on one another for units. Conferences with multiple earners can tough out the loss of a powerful team. But the departure of a breadwinner can mean a huge financial hit for weaker conferences.

Take the Horizon League, a mid-sized conference with schools from the Midwest that doesn’t have the depth of the ACC or Big Ten. Twice the conference has lost its top earner to the Atlantic 10, a more financially attractive conference. Xavier left in 1995, Butler in 2012. The last of the units Butler earned for the Horizon League expire in 2016, and if another program doesn't step up, the League’s revenue could drop to $1.6 million in 2017 from $5 million in 2011.

The West Coast conference now faces a similar situation with Gonzaga University. Located in Spokane, Washington, Gonzaga earns more than half the conference’s units and is a #2 seed in the tournament. A strong March Madness showing could increase its attractiveness to more powerful conferences. The school is already rumored to be a contender to join the new Big East. That leaves West Coast schools to cheer Gonzaga's success, count the millions it brings them, and pray everything stays the same.

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Pythagoras & Aristotle Report on March Madness - How peculiar those Americans - The Sweet Sixteen

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Enough from the sports analysts, arm chair point guards, loud mouth fanatics, news and entertainment personalities, geeks and computers, after two or three rounds, the first of many odd math facts attached to March Madness, we have sixteen teams left.

The bracket says three rounds were played but reality says we went from 64 to 32 teams (1st round), then 32 to 16 teams (2nd round).  My math says two rounds.  We have left 16 to 8 (3rd round), 8 to 4 (4th round), 4 to 2 (5th round), and the championship (6th round).  Since when did a play in by a couple of teams constitute a tournament round?

Clearly, no one involved in the billion dollar March Madness money machine worries about details like accuracy, math, or specifics, just the bottom line.  Well the bottom line started out with Kentucky the favorite and after two or three rounds, nothing has changed.

The first rounds destroyed the East coast, or specifically the Northeast, as a perennial powerhouse of teams which seems a logical shift, but that is part of the analysis to come.

For insights free of the often-hysterical outbursts by all our specialists, I have channeled Pythagoras, ancient Greek mathematician, and Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher, to get their analysis of what is going on.

First, they offered as background a review of the definition of "Madness", as used in the made-for-TV phrase March Madness.  Does the term "Madness" contribute to the branding of the NCAA championship?

Here is their composite definition:

mad·ness

noun

Madness

The definition of madness:

1. insanity, mental illness, dementia, derangement, lunacy, instability

2. folly, foolishness, idiocy, stupidity, insanity, lunacy, silliness 

3. frenzied or chaotic activity

The synonyms for various states of madness:

1. mania, psychosis,

2. craziness

3. bedlam, mayhem, chaos, pandemonium, craziness, uproar, turmoil, disorder, all hell broken loose, (three-ring) circus

According to my learned ancients, it would appear the term indeed describes the state of chaos resulting from March Madness.

Pythagoras was most interested in the mathematical puzzles, assumptions, thesis and hypothesis involved in seeding, results, conferences, and all the other trivia associated with the payoffs.  Some of his observations included conference power rating, note the numbers represent the conference standings of the tournament teams, not the NCAA seedings.

So far through the first two or three rounds here are conference results.

Atlantic Coast Conference

Conference champion (1) Virginia lost

(2) Duke, (3) Notre Dame, (4) Louisville, (5) North Carolina, (7) North Carolina State won

Pac 12

One team lost

(1) Arizona, (2) Utah, and (4) UCLA won

Big East

Top five teams lost

Only (6) Xavier remains

Big Ten

Five teams lost

(1) Wisconsin and (3) Michigan State remain

Big 12

Five teams lost

(3) Oklahoma and (4) West Virginia remain

SEC

Four teams lost

(1) Kentucky remains

Missouri Valley

One team lost

(1) Wichita State won

West Coast

One team lost

(1) Gonzaga remains

Pythagoras is also curious about the relationship between tournament seedings, and actual results to date, so here are the stats.

Seeds Surviving

 1.        three teams  Kentucky, Wisconsin, Duke

 2.        two teams     Arizona, Gonzaga

 3.        two teams     Notre Dame, Oklahoma

 4.        two teams     North Carolina, Louisville

 5.        two teams     West Virginia, Utah

 6.        one team       Xavier

 7.        two teams     Wichita State, Michigan State

 8.        one team       North Carolina State

11.        one team       UCLA

Other Pythagorean factoids to bear in mind:

No team whose name began with a "V" survived the opening rounds, four teams lost.

Three teams whose name began with a "N" and three whose name began with a "W" made the Sweet Sixteen, along with two whose name began with "U".

North Carolina was the state with the most teams, three, while Kentucky and California had two teams each.

Roughly speaking, the geographic distribution of teams is:

Northeast - 1

Southeast - 3

Midwest - 8

West - 4

Of those from the Midwest, six were east of the Mississippi River, and two were west of the Mississippi River.

As far as mascots, which interested Aristotle, here are the teams, seeding and mascots.  As you can see, there are two Wildcats, Kentucky and Arizona, and little else in common among the schools.  Aristotle seemed most interested in the Spartans of Michigan State.

1 Kentucky Wildcats       

1 Duke Blue Devils      

1 Wisconsin Badgers    

2 Arizona Wildcats       

2 Gonzaga Bulldogs ('Zags)        

3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish   

3 Oklahoma Sooners     

4 Louisville Cardinals      

4 North Carolina Tar Heels      

5 Utah Utes        

5 West Virginia Mountaineers    

6 Xavier Muskeeters          

7  Michigan State Spartans     

7 Wichita State Shockers  

8 NC State Wolfpack       

11 UCLA Bruins

 

   

Of course one stat that is not in the formula is the fan intensity and the cheerleader impact and we can thank the lowest seeded team for bringing along the highest rated cheerleaders to the tourney, eleven seeded UCLA.

So what do my friends Pythagoras & Aristotle think of this unique American past time? 

Stay tuned.

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Happy Spring Equinox Fellow Earthlings

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Today is the Spring Equinox beginning at 6:45 pm eastern time, one of the most ancient of all celebrations.

This morning a spectacular total eclipse of the Sun took place if you lived in Northern Europe and there will not be another like it for 27 years.

There is magic in the air as we move to spring, the season of birth or rebirth, the winter may have come to an end, spring officially begins, and if the weathermen do not get it right this time they will be banished from ever lying to us about the weather again.

Be kind to Druids today - they help protect Mother Earth from us, and be sure to hug an Oak tree, the most sacred of all trees.

If you are really enlightened, you can jump into the inter-dimensional portal, shift frequencies, and sail off into the universes.

Here are photos of people in England watching the solar eclipse.

Here are also photos of us in the 1950's with the same 3D glasses.

Has nothing changed in the past 60 years?  

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CPT Spirits in the Sky - Another Star Lights up the Legends in the Sky

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What Goes On!

Kim Fowley: 1939–2015

MOJO pays tribute to the LA producer, songwriter and svengali who passed away on January 15.

By MOJO Staff January 16, 2015

KIM FOWLEY NEVER stopped. Only a few months ago, while undergoing painful treatment for bladder cancer, he was in discussion with a brace of MOJO journalists about a possible life-spanning feature. At the same time he was completing the second instalment of Lord Of Garbage, his two-part biography intended to be released after his death, and recording his SiriusXM Radio show on Little Steven Van Zandt’s Underground Garage. In November he made an appearance in Beyoncé’s Haunted video. Self-promotion, right up to the end. It’s what he would have wanted.

Fowley was born in Los Angeles in 1939. The son of Singin’ In The Rain actor Douglas Fowley and ’40s noir actress Shelby Paine, Kim Fowley arrived into a world of performance, attending Los Angeles’ University High School with Ryan O’Neal, James Brolin, Sandra Dee, Nancy Sinatra and Jan & Dean. He started out as a survivor, and continued in like style: diagnosed with polio at the age of 18, he would check himself out of hospital to become the manager of a local rock band, The Sleepwalkers.

“Kim Fowley is a big loss to me. A good friend. One of a kind. He’d been everywhere, done everything, knew everybody.”

Steve Van Zandt

Fowley charmed, hustled and beguiled his way into the LA studio scene as a producer, promoter, publisher and songwriter. He was still a teenager when, in 1960, he co-produced the Number 1 novelty doo-wop hit Alley Oop for The Hollywood Argyles. He also wrote the novelty number Nut Rocker for B. Bumble And The Stingers, discovered Bread’s David Gates while hitchhiking through California and worked publicity for P.J. Proby’s controversial trouser-splitting British career in the mid-’60s. Instrumental in the nascent careers of Slade, Soft Machine and Ritchie Blackmore, Fowley saw out the ’60s producing Gene Vincent and Warren Zevon, and writing for The Byrds with his friend Skip Battin.

Although his own recording career was regarded by many as a joke footnote to his management skills, Fowley’s sinister psych-pop recordings such as The Trip, Night Of The Hunter, Wildfire and Animal Man later became cult collectables, with Sonic Youth covering Bubble Gum on their 1986 LP, Evol.

However, it was on the Sunset Strip in the mid-’70s that Fowley’s career came into its own. Production work continued with Kiss, Alice Cooper and an early incarnation of The Modern Lovers. Then, in 1974, Fowley placed an advert in Greg Shaw’s Who Put The Bomp fanzine to find female performers for an all-girl group. There were no takers, but Fowley’s Sunset Strip recruitment policy led to a meeting between Joan Jett and Sandy West, and with the addition of Cherie Currie, Lita Ford and Jackie Fox, the birth of The Runaways. Fowley managed the band and co-wrote their biggest hit, Cherry Bomb. Although Fowley’s management paperwork led to a series of legal tussles with the band down the years, in 2008 Fowley and Cherie Currie buried the hatchet and last August Currie moved Fowley into her LA home to help with his care.

There were a few other attempts at Runaways-style projects in later years, but if Fowley largely faded from the pop foreground he continued to make friends in the background, extending his myth by way of his own word-of-mouth. MOJO regularly received letters and compilation CDs in the post from Fowley, introducing us to new bands and new songs and we would occasionally be on the other end of long-distance phonecalls, one-way conversations detailing Fowley’s ongoing pop philosophy, delivered in that inimitable style that hovered somewhere between the charming and the sinister.

Kim Fowley. “Charmed, hustled and beguiled his way into the LA studio scene.”

On her Facebook page yesterday Cherie Currie wrote, “Just before 8am this morning, January 15, 2015, Kim Fowley passed away at his home with his wife, Kara Wright, by his side after a long and hard battle with cancer. He was 75 years old. I am so blessed that I got to get to know you again Kim… really get to know you on a personal level and that we became friends. Mostly that you spent time here at my home. It’s a time I will never forget. The last record you made is in good hands and I am so glad that record is mine. It was a pleasure. Thank you for starting my career when I was a just a child. You were instrumental in so many getting started in this crazy world of music. You are a genius… you are loved. You will be so missed.”

Bandmate Lita Ford tweeted: “My first manager, my start in the music industry, my first band put together by Kim. Sometimes I wonder if there would ever have been a Lita Ford without Kim Fowley.”

“Kim Fowley is a big loss to me,” said Steve Van Zandt. “A good friend. One of a kind. He’d been everywhere, done everything, knew everybody. He was working in the Underground Garage until last week. We should all have as full a life. I wanted DJs that could tell stories first person. He was the ultimate realization of that concept. Rock Gypsy DNA. Reinventing himself whenever he felt restless. Which was always. One of the great characters of all time. Irreplaceable.”

Ariel Pink, who Fowley collaborated with on 2014’s Pom Pom tweeted, “RIP Kim Fowley. no words. prayers go out to his wife, kara. his music, life, and spirit will continue to be an inspiration.”

 For more information about his career, head to www.kimfowley.net.

PHOTO: Getty Images/ Alamy

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