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Day 2 of NYFW and another round of shows were presented on the runway on Friday Feb.7. My favorite collection was definitely from Trina Turk because lets face it who can resist to a retro chic fest?
That day I was wearing "my bittersweet colours", a simple ensemble, sporting these two brights coats, shiny top and pants and as always one bold print was on the menu :)





                                                                           Coats: Zara and Joe Fresh/ options Here and Here 
                                                                           Top: Harlyn/ Here 
                                                                           Pants: H&M (old)/ similar style Here, Here and Here 
                                                                           Bag: Sophie Hulme/ Here
                                                                           Brogue shoes: Jeffrey Campbell/ options Here and Here
                                                                           Sunglasses: Ralph Lauren/ Here



                                                                         

                             

Tacos examines the Long Island Crusader Chris a.k.a. barnone11970:

The following chart shows the retail sales at food services and drinking places divided by the sales at food and beverage stores.


Click to enlarge.

Our service economy apparently requires us to grow the amount we spend at restaurants compared to the amount we spend at food and beverage stores. Put another way, our service economy requires ever increasing amounts of service lest we slip into recession.

I know what you may be thinking. It was very cold. People stayed home. Okay, let's go with that and try a thought experiment. I shall be your consumption guinea pig. Buckle in. It's going to be an laboratory adventure!

I'm sitting at home. The weather is too awful to leave the house. I'm a consumer, and man have I got some pent-up consumption demand. I'm sipping my hot chocolate. I'm looking over at my computer. I take a few more sips. I look at my computer again. I take another sip. I see a smart phone on the coffee table. I drink the last sip from a now empty mug. Empty! Bah! Say it isn't so! I can't stand it! I'm going to make a purchase and have it delivered to me! Snow be damned! It's the only way to end the agony!

The following chart shows the annual growth in nonstore retail sales. We should definitely see the cold weather surge in all its glory! It must be there!


Click to enlarge.

Hmmm. There's a Christmas surge within a declining trend channel and a hangover to go with it. That's not quite what we were looking for with our optimistic cold weather theory. Oh, well. Can't say we didn't try!



Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart #1
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart #2

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle


From The Gatestone Institute

As a strong supporter of the two state solution and a critic of Israel's settlement policies, I am particularly appalled at efforts to impose divestment, boycotts and sanctions against Israel, and Israel alone, because BDS makes it more difficult to achieve a peaceful resolution of the Mid-East conflict that requires compromise on all sides.


The BDS movement is highly immoral, threatens the peace process and discourages the Palestinians from agreeing to any reasonable peace offer. Here are ten compelling reasons why the BDS movement is immoral and incompatible with current efforts to arrive at a compromise peace.

1. The BDS movement immorally imposes the entire blame for the continuing Israeli occupation and settlement policy on the Israelis. It refuses to acknowledge the historical reality that on at least three occasions, Israel offered to end the occupation and on all three occasions, the Palestinian leadership, supported by its people, refused to accept these offers. In 1967, I played a small role in drafting UN Security Council Resolution 242 that set out the formula for ending the occupation in exchange for recognition of Israel's right to exist in peace. Israel accepted that Resolution, while the Palestinians, along with all the Arab nations, gathered in Khartoum and issued their three famous "nos:" No peace, no negotiation, no recognition. There were no efforts to boycott, sanction or divest from these Arab naysayers. In 2000-2001, Israel's liberal Prime Minister Ehud Barak, along with American President Bill Clinton, offered the Palestinians statehood, and the end of the occupation. Yasser Arafat rejected this offer—a rejection that many Arab leaders considered a crime against the Palestinian people. In 2007, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians an even better deal, an offer to which they failed to respond. There were no BDS threats against those who rejected Israel's peace offers. Now there are ongoing peace negotiations in which both parties are making offers and imposing conditions. Under these circumstances, it is immoral to impose blame only on Israel and to direct a BDS movement only against the nation state of the Jewish people, that has thrice offered to end the occupation in exchange for peace.

2. The current BDS movement, especially in Europe and on some American university campuses, emboldens the Palestinians to reject compromise solutions to the conflict. Some within the Palestinian leadership have told me that the longer they hold out against making peace, the more powerful will be the BDS movement against Israel. Why not wait until the BDS strengthens their bargaining position so that they won't have to compromise by giving up the right of return, by agreeing to a demilitarized state and by making other concessions that are necessary to peace but difficult for some Palestinians to accept? The BDS movement is making a peaceful resolution harder.

3. The BDS movement is immoral because its leaders will never be satisfied with the kind of two state solution that is acceptable to Israel. Many of its leaders do not believe in the concept of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. (The major leader of the BDS movement, Marwan Barghouti, has repeatedly expressed his opposition to Israel's right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people even within the 1967 borders.) At bottom, therefore, the leadership of the BDS movement is opposed not only to Israel's occupation and settlement policy but to its very existence.

4. The BDS movement is immoral because it violates the core principle of human rights: namely, "the worst first." Israel is among the freest and most democratic nations in the world. It is certainly the freest and most democratic nation in the Middle East. Its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than Arabs anywhere else in the world. They serve in the Knesset, in the Judiciary, in the Foreign Service, in the academy and in business. They are free to criticize Israel and to support its enemies. Israeli universities are hot beds of anti-Israel rhetoric, advocacy and even teaching. Israel has a superb record on women's rights, gay rights, environmental rights and other rights that barely exist in most parts of the world. Moreover, Israel's record of avoiding civilian casualties, while fighting enemies who hide their soldiers among civilians, is unparalleled in the world today. The situation on the West Bank is obviously different because of the occupation, but even the Arabs of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Tulkarim have more human and political rights than the vast majority of Arabs in the world today. Moreover, anyone—Jew, Muslim or Christian—dissatisfied with Israeli actions can express that dissatisfaction in the courts, and in the media, both at home and abroad. That freedom does not exist in any Arab country, nor in many non-Arab countries. Yet Israel is the only country in the world today being threatened with BDS. When a sanction is directed against only a state with one of the best records of human rights, and that nation happens to be the state of the Jewish people, the suspicion of bigotry must be considered.

5. The BDS movement is immoral because it would hurt the wrong people: it would hurt Palestinian workers who will lose their jobs if economic sanctions are directed against firms that employ them. It would hurt artists and academics, many of whom are the strongest voices for peace and an end to the occupation. It would hurt those suffering from illnesses all around the world who would be helped by Israeli medicine and the collaboration between Israeli scientists and other scientists. It would hurt the high tech industry around the world because Israel contributes disproportionally to the development of such life enhancing technology.

6. The BDS movement is immoral because it would encourage Iran—the world's leading facilitator of international terrorism—to unleash its surrogates, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, against Israel, in the expectation that if Israel were to respond to rocket attacks, the pressure for BDS against Israel would increase, as it did when Israel responded to thousands of rockets from Gaza in 2008-2009.

7. The BDS movement is immoral because it focuses the world's attention away from far greater injustices, including genocide. By focusing disproportionately on Israel, the human rights community pays disproportionately less attention to the other occupations, such as those by China, Russia and Turkey, and to other humanitarian disasters such as that occurring in Syria.

8. The BDS movement is immoral because it promotes false views regarding the nation state of the Jewish people, exaggerates its flaws and thereby promotes a new variation on the world's oldest prejudice, namely anti-Semitism. It is not surprising therefore that the BDS movement is featured on neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial and other overtly anti-Semitic websites and is promoted by some of the world's most notorious haters such as David Duke.

9. The BDS movement is immoral because it reflects and encourages a double standard of judgment and response regarding human rights violations. By demanding more of Israel, the nation state of the Jewish people, it expects less of other states, people, cultures and religions, thereby reifying a form of colonial racism and reverse bigotry that hurts the victims of human rights violations inflicted by others.

10. The BDS movement will never achieve its goals. Neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli people will ever capitulate to the extortionate means implicit in BDS. They will not and should not make important decisions regarding national security and the safety of their citizens on the basis of immoral threats. Moreover, were Israel to compromise its security in the face of such threats, the result would be more wars, more death and more suffering.

All decent people who seek peace in the Middle East should join together in opposing the immoral BDS movement. Use your moral voices to demand that both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority accept a compromise peace that assures the security of Israel and the viability of a peaceful and democratic Palestinian state. The way forward is not by immoral extortionate threats that do more harm than good, but rather by negotiations, compromise and good will.

It was clear from the comments on yesterday's post that we are all in need of some fresh new magazines.

via

We all know the classics, House Beautiful, Elle Decor, House and Home etc. But what else is there?

So let's share. What magazines do you read and love? And how do digital magazines fit into your month? Do you love them as much as 'the real thing'?

Spill it.

Mayor de Blasio’s call to the NYPD about a pal’s arrest is a move that was unheard of in the Bloomberg and Giuliani administrations — and was clearly “a wink and a nod” to cops to let him go, sources told The Post.


Separate sources who worked in the two previous mayoral administrations said they couldn’t imagine either Mike Bloomberg or Rudy Giuliani making a call to an NYPD flack to ask about an arrest of a friend, as de Blasio did Monday for pastor Orlando Findlayter, who was busted for driving without a license and had two outstanding arrest warrants.

The politically connected Findlayter — who helped deliver the black vote for de Blasio last year — was spared from spending the night in jail before his arraignment after de Blasio called NYPD spokeswoman Kim Royster.

NYPD officials insisted the decision to free Findlayter was made by Deputy Inspector Kenneth Lehr, commanding officer of the 67th Precinct, where the scofflaw preacher was booked.
Lehr went to the station house and personally released Findlayter, who is the precinct’s “clergy liaison.”

Even if the administration’s version of events is accurate, de Blasio was pushing the police to act favorably by even making his phone call, a Giuliani source said. “Tell me this doesn’t have a chilling effect [on the NYPD],’’ the source said. “That’s what this was — a wink and a nod.”
De Blasio at a budget press conference Wednesday refused to answer questions about his controversial phone call.

But city Comptroller Scott Stringer said de Blasio was asking for trouble in coming to Findlayter’s aid.

“I think the rule is, mayors should not get involved in any way about somebody’s arrest,” Stringer said. “It can only be problematic.”
State GOP Chairman Ed Cox on Wednesday called for an investigation into de Blasio’s “abuse of power.”

“For the mayor of New York City to interfere with law enforcement on behalf of his political allies is ‘telephone justice,’ not American justice,” Cox blasted.


Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson has the authority to open a probe, officials said. A spokesman for Thompson declined to comment.
Findlayter was pulled over at 11:21 Monday night in East Flatbush after he made a left turn in his 2012 Lincoln without signaling. Cops ran a check and found that the preacher had an aggravated suspended license for letting his insurance lapse. He also had two arrest warrants for failing to show up in court after an October arrest at an immigration protest.
Two high-ranking law-enforcement officials called Lehr’s decision to release Findlayter “highly unusual.”
“You’re not supposed to do it that way, particularly when someone has two open warrants,’’ said one. “The person has to be brought to court before he can be released.”
And a former law-enforcement official noted, “I am not aware of any authority the precinct commander has to release someone then and there.”
The ex-official added, “This is arguably a criminal violation. There’s obstruction issues, there’s misconduct issues.
“You’d be taking what is a judicial function and shifting it to a sergeant or a lieutenant at a desk, who’d be deciding what a judge would ordinarily decide,” the official noted. “This is not a gulag — if you’ve got a warrant, you go through the system.”
Meanwhile, the mayor’s political allies — including Public Advocate Letitia James — ducked questions about the issue Wednesday. Brooklyn Councilman and Findlayter pal Jumaane Williams said community leaders deserve special treatment.
“To say that someone shouldn’t call or inquire about an incident is weird,” he said.
“The fact that people call when community leaders are arrested [is] something that occurs — whether it’s the mayor, a council member or another community leader,” he said.
Manhattan Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez also chimed in, noting, “I believe that if someone was arrested and there was no reason why that should have happened, I think that anyone who can make a call should do it.”
Additional reporting by Jamie Schram, Larry Celona, Beth DeFalco and Jeane MacIntosh
FILED UNDERBILL DE BLASIO, NYPD, ORLANDO FINDLAYTER

NY DailyNews reports a stolen truck driven by model/actor Tyson Beckford’s nephew plowed into a city bus early Wednesday, catapulting its veteran driver to his death in Greenwich Village, cops said.

Instragam photos taken in the hours before the death of 17-year transit worker William Pena caught Domonic Whilby partying with his famous uncle and supermodel Shanina Shaik.

By 5:30 a.m., cops had the 22-year-old Georgia man in custody as Pena’s family, friends and co-workers were left to struggle with his sudden and pointless death.

More here

There's more than just a squeeze on.  There's a real storm coming...