You may have stumbled across the infomercial for this product in the last couple of months.  The Obama Presidential Coin Collection is a classic example of infomercial marketing.   Take coins that are in reality worth no more than their face value, feed on the emotion and glee of those excited by our new president, add a worthless overlay image of our illustrious new prez and start making collectibility claims.  Oh, “only” make a few million of ‘em so they can be defined as limited edition and charge bamboozled consumers $19.99 worth of “Change” for the honor of owning the mementos.  Include a half-dead looking celebrity shill like Montel Williams to make speculative claims as to the coins’ future value as collectibles, and stir briskly.

Susan Headley on About.com quotes Scott A. Travers, author of The Coin Collector’s Survival Manual about the future value of (more…)

This is part 7 of a 10-part series on how changing ones eating habits may be the most accessible and impactful way to improve the world.

In case preventing Earth from becoming another hot potato in the universe isn’t enough motivation to reduce your consumption of meat and animal products, I’m going to serve you some more insight into why these businesses dish out so much environmental havoc.

For the main course, we have #2 Stew – a dish representing runoff from factory farms that harnesses 160 times the pollution strength as raw municipal sewage.

With the sludge entering our waterways at 250,000 pounds per second (American humans produce 12,000 lbs/sec) and completely bypassing sewage treatment facilities, it has caused the E.P.A to declare it a greater polluter to our waterways than all other industrial processes combined. This is easily (more…)