May 5, 2008: I am delighted to announce that my book, The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships and Our World, has been selected as a finalist for the 14th Annual San Diego Book Awards in the category of health and wellness.

For book award details visit: http: www.sdbookawards.org/finalists_2008.php

You can view a two minute video about the book below.

According to Arthur Brooks, an economist at Syracuse University and author of the just-published Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America—and How We Can Get More of It, "happy people treat others better than unhappy people do. They are more charitable than unhappy people, have better marriages, are better parents, act with greater integrity, and are better citizens.

One of the effects of living in times when political correctness is over-emphasized is that hate is driven underground. Another way of saying this is that being PC doesn't eliminate hate; it only drives hate into finding new and more sophisticated avenues of expression.

Hate needs somewhere to go. A new kind of socially accepted hate has emerged, now that is has become utterly unacceptable to utter anything that even remotely resembles hatred toward ethnic-cultural groups, races, religions, genders, various ages and those with various impairments.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 16, 2008: In the most recent debate between the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton responded to a question concerning her misstatements about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire in 1996. Her response was, "I may be a lot of things but I'm not dumb. On a couple of occasions in the last weeks, I just said some things that were not in keeping with what I knew to be true."

April 17, 2008, San Diego, California: The San Diego city council turned something into an integrity issue that in and of itself shouldn't be. They voted to raise their own salaries by 24% to $93,485 (and the mayor's salary by 28%). Council President Scott Peterson stated that the intention was to attract a higher caliber of candidates to run for city council. On balance, I don't take issue with this intention.

April, 2008, San Diego, California: There is an open judicial seat on the San Diego Superior Court. Two of the candidates for that seat brought one another to court over what each wrote in his official candidate statement. They are Robert Faigin, the chief lawyer for the San Diego County Sheriff ,and Evan Kirvin, a San Diego deputy district attorney.

Read it and wretch -- the judge they appeared before, Jay Bloom, ruled that:

April 14, 2008: Home financing and credit have been tightening in response to the crisis that began with the massive lack of integrity in the subprime mortgage market that led to the creation and collapse of the housing bubble in the United States. This is now mutating into a contagious economic slowdown that is spreading around the globe, with property analysts are now predicting that some countries will face an even more wrenching adjustment than that of the United States, including the possibility that the downturn could become a wholesale collapse.

Barack Obama's latest remarks are being turned into more ammunition to keep dumbing down the American public.

April 10, 2008: As a youth, Eli Estrada was in trouble, nearly homeless and extremely desperate. Last month, at 40, as he and his business partner were in the midst of working hard to keep their fledgling landscaping and artificial grass business going, Estrada found $140,000 cash laying in the street, all of it in unmarked untraceable $20 bills.

Speaking of politics, my friend Scott Kalechstein, who is a particularly talented satirist, has posted three hilarious videos on YouTube.

The second half of the video below is about Eliot Spitzer, the now-former governor of New York who resigned due to being discovered over his profound lack of integrity. I talked about the Spitzer incident in a more serious way in a few of my previous posts. Scott reminds me, and hopefully us all, that there is a time to be serious and there is a time to remember that it's all much too serious to be serious about.