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Thought for the Day…11/12/25

Austin Tang — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:15:06 +0000

Age only becomes a limitation when we stop growing, stop contributing, or stop aspiring toward something greater. Why confine ourselves with pity titles about age and self-worth? Live with vitality at every stage – giving our best, focusing on what we can control, inspiring, and serving. Blessings, Marc

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GoodNewsLetter: Labor Day Doesn’t Stop OUR PEACE EFFORTS, JOIN US…September 19, 20, 21….Moment/Meditative Minute of Silence for Peace & Plant Peace Pole, DOGS in PAIN?

Austin Tang — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 20:44:28 +0000

https://youtu.be/g-JieNLhctc

Dear Friends and Members, NOTE: NEW www.pausetheworldforpeace.org website, check it out!

Extra, Extra 2025 International Day of Peace & NYC Climate Week NEW POSTER is growing, as we just added a Peace Pole in the middle of the world. May Peace Prevail on Earth. We also have a NEW QR Code to go directly to our www.plantpeace.worldpeace.org page to plant your Virtual Peace Tree. Note: We are still tweaking the page.

We will email you the poster and appreciation certificate for free, a SPECIAL INVITATION TO THE STEPS OF NYC CITY HALL on Friday September 19^th, for a HISTORIC RINGING OF THE PEACE BELL BY MAYOR ADAMS, HOLD SIGNS OF PEACE AND MOTHER EARTH, PRAY THAT OUR NYC SCHOOLS TAKE A MOMENT/MEDITATIVE MINUTE OF SILENCE FOR PEACE. Your tax-deductible donation to our UNITED Peace & Mother Earth Movement can surely help us pay for this very expensive production weekend. IMPORTANT NOTE: A few donor/sponsor opportunities are still available, and our goal is $19,000 in total, which is a tax-exempt deduction, for direct production expenses to create our NETWORK QUALITY LIVE CLEAN ENERGY BROADCASTS.

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

UN International Day of

Peace 2025,

September 21,

Expands to a Global Weekend To

Pause the World for Peace

Worldwide, Moment/Meditative

Minute of Silence, Plant Peace

Pole Virtually/Physical at Noon

in 24 Regions (Time Zones).

A World Cease Fire, Peace Acts,

Unity, Music, & Climate Week

Action. New York City Leads the

Call.

YOUR DOG MIGHT BE IN PAIN

Subtle Signs to Watch For & How

to Help September is Pain

Awareness Month

Lastly, if you care about your money, please tune in to WOR 710 Radio on Sunday at 10:30 AM. Here you can listen and call in to Legal Expert and Elder Care Lawyer, 14 Year NYS Representative and Dr. Phil, ET, Good Morning America…Guest Lawyer, Ann-Margaret Carrozza, ESQ.

Ann is BRILLIANT, AND YOUR MONEY IS BRILLIANT, AND YOU ARE BRILLIANT IF YOU ARE SMART ENOUGH TO PROTECT IT.

Paul Sladkus is Ann’s Co-Host. Email me paul.sladkus1@gmail.com if you want me to ask her a question, or just call in (800-321-0710) and listen; it might be one of the most important programs in you and your family’s life.

Ann-Margaret Carrozza,

Asset Protection Lawyer,

STAY WELL

LET’S GROW TOGETHER. GOOD NEWS MOTTO: “All we are is what we are with each other.” Zeal

With Respect. Love and May Peace Prevail on Earth, For Information Contact:

Reverend Paul Sladkus, All Faiths and Spiritual,

Founder, Good News Corporation 501 C 3 212 647 1212 paul.sladkus1@gmail.com and our Good News and Peace Worldwide Team who make our Peace Day 9/21 happen.

www.pausetheworldforpeace.org,www.goodnewsplanet.TV, www.youtube.com/goodnewsbroadcast

Social Networks: www.Facebook.com/PaulSladkus, LinkedIn Paul Sladkus, Twitter/X Good News to Go, Instagram PausetheWorld

LET’S GROW TOGETHER. GOOD NEWS MOTTO: ALL WE ARE IS WHAT WE ARE WITH EACH OTHER. ZEAL

For more information contact:

Reverend Paul Sladkus, All Faiths and Spiritual 212 647 1212

New York, NY, Montauk, NY

PS – SPECIAL OPPORTUNITY FOR OUR FRIENDS AND MEMBERS: Looking for a vacation rental, SHORT TERM, in Montauk, this year and or entire summer in 2026, here is our listing https://pausetheworldforpeace.org/2025/04/16/36000-2br-one-of-a-kind-summer-rental-opportunty-historic-montauk-manor-montauk/ call me. Paul 917 687 1790

The post GoodNewsLetter: Labor Day Doesn’t Stop OUR PEACE EFFORTS, JOIN US…September 19, 20, 21….Moment/Meditative Minute of Silence for Peace & Plant Peace Pole, DOGS in PAIN? appeared first on Good News!.

You Can’t Stop the Waves—But You Can Remember What’s Beneath Them 🌊

Austin Tang — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 17:57:00 +0000

There’s a quote I return to often–especially when life feels full, fast, or just plain hard:

“You can’t stop the waves. But you can learn to surf.”

–Jon Kabat-Zinn

Lately, I’ve been adding a quiet postscript of my own:

“And you can also remember the stillness beneath.”

Because here’s what I know–both in my life and in my work with leaders navigating pressure, change, and uncertainty:

Life will bring waves. Emotions will rise. Change will crash.

But there’s always a current of calm.

And we forget that at our own expense.

Sometimes, it’s not about finding the perfect still moment–

But simply remembering it’s there.

Even in motion. Even in complexity. Even when it feels just out of reach.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as a single breath.

Stillness, I’ve learned, isn’t passive.

It’s not stagnation.

It’s presence. Discernment. Deep-rooted clarity.
It’s the ability to pause in a world that rewards urgency.
And it’s the capacity to remember yourself–and the values you want to lead with–before reacting to the noise.

It’s the part of us that doesn’t flinch at the swell–because it remembers:

This, too, is movement.

And this, too, will pass.

In coaching sessions, leadership trainings, and meditations at Calm & Connect, I’ve seen this truth land again and again:

Sometimes, life and leadership are about surfing–knowing when to move, when to pivot, when to ride the momentum.

Other times, it’s about dropping beneath the surface–refusing to be pulled by urgency and anchoring into something quieter, wiser, more enduring.

The magic is–they’re not opposites.

The ability to surf well often comes from knowing the stillness.

And the ability to be still comes from having surfed enough to trust:

I can ride this, too.

Questions to Reflect On:

When was the last time you let yourself truly be still? What did it reveal?
What part of you wants to rush right now—and what might happen if you didn’t?
Can you recognize when you’re paddling too hard—and give yourself permission to float?

In a world that prizes speed, complexity, and constant forward motion, this is leadership:

The courage to pause.

The ability to discern.

The wisdom to act–not from urgency, but from truth.

I created Calm & Connect for this kind of remembering.

And I weave it into every keynote, every retreat, every training room I step into.

Because no matter how ambitious the goal–

none of us can lead clearly from a stormed-out nervous system.

So if you’re navigating waves of your own, here’s your reminder:

The storm isn’t all there is.

Stillness is always available.

And the more we return to it, the more clearly we lead.

Calm & Connect. Sunday, June 15th.

And if you’re a leader ready to bring this work into your organization– keynotes, workshops, or weekly mindfulness sessions–this is the work I’ve done for over a decade.

Helping high performers slow down enough to come alive again.

Helping organizations become more human.

JoinCalm & Connect

Explore1:1 Coaching or Corporate Support

MY ORGANIZATIONS NEED THIS—I’D LIKE TO LEARN MORE!

DOWNLOAD YOUR INFORMATIONAL DECK

https://ixgf7r.fg14.fdske.com/e/c/01jxd1f6bwcamh2z3gjk5j9qnv/01jxd1f6bwcamh2z3gkc70mebh

Eastside
Nashville, TN 37206, United States

The post You Can’t Stop the Waves—But You Can Remember What’s Beneath Them 🌊 appeared first on Good News!.

He’s Got a Plan for Cities That Flood: Stop Fighting the Water

Austin Tang — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:29:01 +0000

A landscape architect in China has a surprising strategy to help manage surges of water from storms supercharged by climate change.

Kongjian Yu at his office in Beijing. “We’ve been using the conventional drainage infrastructure for 200 years and we haven’t solved the flooding problem,” he said.Credit…Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

By Richard Schiffman
Published March 28, 2024
Updated April 3, 2024

Cities around the world face a daunting challenge in the era of climate change: Supercharged rainstorms are turning streets into rivers, flooding subway systems and inundating residential neighborhoods, often with deadly consequences.

Kongjian Yu, a landscape architect and professor at Peking University, is developing what might seem like a counterintuitive response: Let the water in.

“You cannot fight water,” he said. “You have to adapt to it.”

Instead of putting in more drainage pipes, building flood walls and channeling rivers between concrete embankments, which is the usual approach to managing water, Mr. Yu wants to dissipate the destructive force of floodwaters by slowing them and giving them room to spread out.

Mr. Yu calls the concept “sponge city” and says it’s like “doing tai chi with water,” a reference to the Chinese martial art in which an opponent’s energy and moves are redirected, not resisted.

“It’s a whole philosophy, a new way of dealing with water,” he said.

Through his Beijing-based company, Turenscape, one of the world’s largest landscape architecture firms, Mr. Yu has overseen the development of hundreds of landscaped urban water parks in China where runoff from flash floods is diverted to soak into the ground or be absorbed into constructed wetlands.

Mr. Yu said growing up in a village in Zhejiang Province toward the end of the Cultural Revolution showed him how earlier generations in rural China had “made friends with water.” Farmers in his region built terraces, berms and ponds to direct and to store excess water during the rainy season.

That stood in sharp contrast to the urban landscapes in modern China. Traditionally, cities in China would set aside areas capable of absorbing floodwaters. But such nature-friendly urban design largely ended with the Industrial Revolution, Mr. Yu said. More recently, millions of acres have been paved over to build cities, some of them rising up virtually overnight.

Shanghai Houtan Park in 2006.Credit…Courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

The same area in 2018.Credit…Courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

“We’ve been using the conventional drainage infrastructure for 200 years and we haven’t solved the flooding problem,” he said, noting that much of China has a monsoon climate subject to extremely heavy bursts of rain that pose an increasing hazard as climate change advances. That’s because warm air can hold more moisture, resulting in heavier rainstorms.

Currently, 65 percent of urban areas in China experience some degree of flooding each year, according to Mr. Yu. The country is currently the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases. The United States is the largest historical emitter .

“The concrete drainage systems that came here from the West just can’t handle it,” Mr. Yu said. “We need a new solution.”

The sponge city program was formally inaugurated by President Xi Jinping in 2015 with pilot projects in 16 Chinese cities and has since expanded to more than 640 sites in 250 municipalities around the country.

You can see the concept in Houtan Park, a mile-long strip of greenery along the Huangpu River in Shanghai that Mr. Yu designed on a former industrial site.

Terraces planted with bamboo and native forbs and grasses are bisected by wooden walkways that zigzag between ponds and constructed wetlands. The wetlands filter water, slow the river’s flow and provide habitat for waterfowl and spawning fish.

The goal, at least on paper, is that by 2030, 70 percent of the rain that falls on China’s sponge cities during extreme weather events should be absorbed locally rather than accumulate in the streets.

Whether enough land can be converted is a key question.

Mr. Yu, who studied landscape architecture in China and at Harvard, with hand-drawn landscape designs. Credit…Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

Edmund Penning-Rowsell, a research associate at the University of Oxford who focuses on water security, said the scale of the sponge city projects would have to be huge to cope with flooding on their own. “Take New York City,” he said. “How many Central Parks would you need to absorb this kind of problem? You’d probably need half of Manhattan.”

Zhengzhou, in northeastern China on the banks of the Yellow River, was an enthusiastic early adopter of the sponge city concept, spending hundreds of millions of dollars building related projects from 2016 to 2021. But torrential rains inundated much of the city in July 2021, creating scenes of destruction and killing hundreds, including at least 14 in a subway tunnel.

Why were the floods so disastrous in Zhengzhou? Mr. Yu said some of the money earmarked for sponge projects was diverted to other programs and that the land set aside for them was insufficient. If permeable surfaces or green spaces make up 20 to 40 percent of a city’s area, he said, “you can virtually solve the problem of urban inundation.”

Niall Kirkwood, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard who has known Mr. Yu for years, acknowledged that it can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to convert land in city centers that have already been densely built. Still, he said, Mr. Yu’s impact as a innovator has been incalculable.

“He’s created a clear and elegant idea of enhancing nature, of partnership with nature that everyone, the man on the street, the mayor of a city, an engineer, even a child, can understand,” Professor Kirkwood said.

Where large tracts of land are not available, sponge city projects are replacing concrete and asphalt with permeable pavement, installing green roofs and creating trenches called bioswales that channel storm-water runoff and use vegetation to filter out debris and pollution.

The sponge city concept is not unique to China. One of Mr. Yu’s projects abroad is the Benjakitti Forest Park, a maze of ponds, trees and miniature islands in Bangkok that was opened to the public in 2022 and occupies more than hundred acres on the site of a former tobacco factory.

Separately, in 2007 the Dutch government began a program called Room for the River that consists of more than 30 projects around four rivers, including the Rhine. The idea is to restore natural floodplains in key areas around sites that need protection. The Danish capital, Copenhagen, is using “floodable parks” that turn into temporary ponds during heavy rains. Philadelphia and Malmo, Sweden, also have projects.

The site of Benjakitti Forest Park in Bangkok in 2020.Credit…Courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

The park, which was rehabilitated by Mr. Yu’s firm, in 2022.Credit…Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times

In addition to flood control, these projects have the advantage of being an inexpensive way to recharge local aquifers and a low-tech adaptation to help overheated city neighborhoods, because evaporating water has a cooling effect.

John Beardsley, the curator of the Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, which was awarded to Mr. Yu last year, echoed Professor Kirkwood, saying Mr. Yu’s impact on policy in China, a country that has been more likely to imprison environmental activists than take their messages to heart, has been astonishing.

Mr. Beardsley attributes this to Mr. Yu’s adroit political skills and infectious enthusiasm, as well as the Chinese government’s powerful incentive to appear to be addressing the problem of urban flooding, which has grown alarmingly in recent years.

“Kongjian has managed to be very critical of the government’s environmental policies while still maintaining his practice and his academic appointments,” he said. “He’s both brave and deft in this regard, threading a very narrow needle.”

“Sponge cities isn’t a total solution, but it makes a significant impact,” Mr. Beardsley said. “I mean, we need to start doing something.”

Courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

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Dr. Bob Lee Shares Children’s Reactions from 911 on his WBLS Radio Program.

Austin Tang — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 12:59:02 +0000

Listen to “Dr. Bob Lee Shares Children’s Reactions from 911 on his WBLS Radio Program” on Spreaker.

#bob #lee #radio #schools #youngsters #hurt #us #scared #parents #dad #mom #cry #prayed #pray #bad #people #stop #killed #innocent #homeless #god #resolve #problems

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Thought for the Day…09/27/22

Austin Tang — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 14:57:11 +0000

Scientists Should

stop analyzing

animal intelligence

and start studying

human stupidity…

#thoughtoftheday #scientists #analyzing #intelligence #humanstupidity

The post Thought for the Day…09/27/22 appeared first on Good News!.

Thought for the Day…08/19/22

Austin Tang — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 16:00:16 +0000

Courage doesn’t

mean you don’t

get afraid.

Courage means

you don’t let fear

stop you.

curiano.com

#thoughtfortheday #courage #afraid #fear #stopyou

The post Thought for the Day…08/19/22 appeared first on Good News!.

“National Faith Leaders Response To Mass Killings”

Austin Tang — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 13:12:38 +0000

Good Afternoon,

I hope this email finds you well. Thank you again for attending the “National Faith Leaders Response To Mass Killings” meeting yesterday. If you were unable to attend or missed the meeting, please CLICK HERE to watch a replay on YouTube. To keep up with the latest information from Clergy For Safe Cities, you can also follow us on Twitter.

If you are in the New York area, please join us on Monday, June 6th, 2022 at 6:30 PM in Alliance Tabernacle (formerly Clarendon Road Church) as faith leaders across the nation join their collective voices to reflect and give consideration to the need to end gun violence and stop the hate. Please see the flyer below for more information.

#faithleaders #masskillings #youtube #clergyforsafecities #twitter #june6th #june6 #alliancetabernacle #clarendonroadchurch #collectivevoices #endgunviolence #stopthehate

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GoodNewsLetter: There’s so much bad stuff…stop, take a deep breath & smile!!!

Austin Tang — Fri, 27 May 2022 17:57:07 +0000

Go to: www.goodnewstogo.com ( NEW NAME) and www.pausetheworldforpeace.org to learn more and donate to our Ukrainian Interfaith Benefit, Thank you.

Enjoy these photos

Happy Pictures Submitted by Errol Rappaport

Reverend Paul Sladkus, All Faiths and Spiritual and Our Good News, Peace & Woodstock Teams.

Donate to Ukrainian Benefit

Event Photos By: IG: maxflores_official

www.pausetheworldforpeace.org

Montauk Manor Raffle for $500 Pledge

LET’S GROW TOGETHER. GOOD NEWS MOTTO: ALL WE ARE IS WHAT WE ARE WITH EACH OTHER. ZEAL

For more information contact:

Reverend Paul Sladkus, All Faiths and Spiritual 212 647 1212

New York, NY, Montauk, NY

PS – SPECIAL OPPORTUNITY FOR OUR FRIENDS AND MEMBERS: Looking for a vacation rental, SHORT TERM, in Montauk, NY. Call Paul Sladkus. https://goodnewsplanet.com/montauk-manor-rental-suite-403-paul-sladkus/

call me. Paul 917 687 1790

#memorialday #freedom #respect #goodnewsletter #badstuff #stop #takeadeepbreath #smile #montaukmanor #ukrainianbenefit #ukraine

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Happy Pictures Submitted by Errol Rappaport

Austin Tang — Wed, 25 May 2022 13:29:16 +0000

Happy Pictures

There’s so much bad stuff going on in our world

today,

we need to periodically

stop, take a deep breath & consider

what’s truly joyous & then

smile!!!

#happypictures #badstuff #goingon #worldtoday #periodicallystop #deepbreath #consider #trulyjoyous #smile

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