Arrest in ’81 killing
Woman convicted of armed robberies
Harmar sidewalk work in limbo again
United Way kicks off campaign
Life after high schoolTop Headlines Poll: Are more inclined to play the lottery if there’s a reallybig jackpot?
On 8 December 2004, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) slipped Section 111 of Title I, Division J, of the Fiscal Year 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Pub. L. 108-447) and a new national holiday into our collective consciousness: Constitution Day. Our Constitution is the single most important document in Human History; read it all.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Please keep reading…
There are a large number of additional resources. Here are just a few:
The U.S. Constitution.
Celebrate Constitution Day.
I never leave home without my pocket-sized copy of our Constitution.
Celebrate Constitution And Citizenship Day.
A Day Set Aside for the Constitution.
For members of Congress like my representative Republican Jim Rencci (OH-16) who put “voted to repeal Obamacare over (sic) 40 times” as his top legislative accomplishment on a recent piece of campaign literature, the above chart is very bad news. What can Renacci say when 74 percent of Republicans with the new coverage report speak favorably—are somewhat (30 percent somewhat satisfied and 44 percent very satisfied—of Obamacare.
As the law shocked detractors last spring by exceeding its enrollment targets, the anti-Obamacare community fixated on a final hope: that consumers looking to enroll this fall for next year would encounter soaring premiums. Not only has the hoped-for premium shock failed to materialize, rates seem to be coming in actually lower than this year. In a market where annual large price hikes have occurred for decades, the result is almost unfathomably positive.
Jonathan Chait writing in Ted Cruz’s Obamacare Nightmare Comes to Life for New York Magazine.
Chait concludes:
Republicans in Congress worry about passing bills that would harm consumers and companies that are participating in Obamacare… Vulnerable Republicans have calculated that the message no longer helps them. It mobilizes more potential victims against them than it mobilizes potential anti-Obamacare voters.
The Republican crusade against Obamacare is not ending; rather, it is shrinking and mutating. The party base will demand a presidential nominee who promises to repeal the hated law, just as it did in 2012. But the next Republican candidate will be running in an environment where repealing the law would create millions and millions of now-identifiable victims. Since the start of the year, Obamacare has gone from a weakness Republicans were salivating at the chance to exploit to an issue they no longer want to talk about. Two years from now, matters could be worse still.
I have to wonder how Mr. Renacci will spend his time next year, if he is reelected, without Obamacare to kick around anymore?
Watching the president describing IS Wednesday night, (former U.S. Air Force drone pilot Brandon) Bryant saw the extension of what he now considers an uncountable, global killing machine.
“He calls them ‘unique in their brutality,’ but we’ve got prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that haven’t seen the light of fucking day,” Bryant says. “We’ve killed children. We’ve killed entire families getting at one or two people. We’ve killed entire weddings or funerals just to get at one or two people.”
“It doesn’t really seem like there’s much of a difference in our military actions versus what they do, other than we justify it because they’re a terrorist group and we’re an official government,” he adds.“I’m pretty sure that acts of barbarism like we have would be considered acts of terrorism by anyone else in the world.”
Ryan Devereaux writing in Those Who’ve Seen Bloodshed Warn of Endless, Brutal War in Iraq for The //Intercept
In the current issue of The Atlantic, Jessica Lahey interview Stephen King in How Stephen King Teaches Writing. Here are a few bits I found interesting.
Lahey: While I love teaching grammar, I am conflicted on the utility of sentence diagramming. Did you teach diagramming, and if so, why?
King: I did teach it, always beginning by saying, “This is for fun, like solving a crossword puzzle or a Rubik’s Cube.” I told them to approach it as a game. I gave them sentences to diagram as homework but promised I would not test on it, and I never did. Do you really teach diagramming? Good for you! I didn’t think anyone did anymore.
We face a “coming dark age”, cautions Maggie Jackson in Distracted, one of the better recent works on the topic. She fears an “attention-deficit future” in which we’ll live shallow, fragmented, joyless lives, robbed of our powers of “deep focus”.
It doesn’t disprove this thesis to observe that people have been saying similar things at least since the invention of the telegraph. “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times,” wrote the wise Trappist monk Thomas Merton in the 1960s, long before the web, or BlackBerrys, or the first use of the word “multitasking” as applied to human activity. “Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace.”
Oliver Burkeman writing in his column will change your life for The Guardian.
Meanwhile, in the Duncan household…
Rule No. 76 – Place a Bouquet of Flowers on the Table and Everything Will Taste Twice as Good.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
Notorious lots
Children Services levy to help families
Man admits selling drugs to informant
Body found in home gutted by fire
Warren on track with middle school planTop Headlines Poll: How do you winterize in your house?
John Oliver does a good job here, but what caught my eye was the way The Republic Of Ireland is photoshopped out of the map to Oliver’s right (upper left from the viewer’s perspective).
New Zealand’s national election will be held on September 20. Over the last several weeks, Key has been embroiled in a scandal that saw a top minister resign, after independent journalist Nicky Hager published a book, Dirty Politics, documenting ties between Key officials and a right-wing blogger known for attacking public figures and showing that Key officials declassified information for political purposes.
Revelations of illegal GCSB spying prompted the creation of the anti-surveillance Internet Party, which formed an alliance with the left-wing, indigenous Mana Party and is predicted to win several seats in Parliament.
Glenn Greenwald writing in New Zealand Launched Mass Surveillance Project While Publicly Denying It for The//Intercept.
The GCSB provides mass surveillance data into XKEYSCORE. They also provide access to the communications of millions of New Zealanders to the NSA at facilities such as the GCSB station at Waihopai, and the Prime Minister is personally aware of this fact. Importantly, they do not merely use XKEYSCORE, but also actively and directly develop mass surveillance algorithms for it. GCSB’s involvement with XKEYSCORE is not a theory, and it is not a future plan. The claim that it never went ahead, and that New Zealand merely “looked at” but never participated in the Five Eyes’ system of mass surveillance is false, and the GCSB’s past and continuing involvement with XKEYSCORE is irrefutable.
But what does it mean?
It means they have the ability see every website you visit, every text message you send, every call you make, every ticket you purchase, every donation you make, and every book you order online. From “I’m headed to church” to “I hate my boss” to “She’s in the hospital,” the GCSB is there. Your words are intercepted, stored, and analyzed by algorithms long before they’re ever read by your intended recipient.
Faced with reasonable doubts, ask yourself just what it is that stands between these most deeply personal communications and the governments of not just in New Zealand, but also the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia?
The answer is that solitary checkbox, the Five Eyes Defeat. One checkbox is what separates our most sacred rights from the graveyard of lost liberty. When an officer of the government wants to know everything about everyone in their society, they don’t even have to make a technical change. They simply uncheck the box. The question before us is no longer “why was this done without the consent and debate of the people of this country,” but “what are we going to do about it?”
This government may have total control over the checkbox today, but come Sept. 20, New Zealanders have a checkbox of their own. If you live in New Zealand, whatever party you choose to vote for, bear in mind the opportunity to send a message that this government won’t need to spy on us to hear: The liberties of free people cannot be changed behind closed doors. It’s time to stand up. It’s time to restore our democracies. It’s time to take back our rights. And it starts with you.
Edward Snowden writing in New Zealand’s Prime Minister Isn’t Telling the Truth About Mass Surveillance for The//Intercept.
My favourite anecdote about the novelist Anthony Trollope—no less noteworthy, I like to think, for also being my only anecdote about Anthony Trollope—concerns his writing habits. Each morning, before leaving for his job at the post office, he wrote for three hours. (“Three hours a day,” he reckoned, “will produce as much as a man ought to write.”) So far, so disciplined. But here’s the kicker: if he finished a novel midway through a three-hour period, he just started writing the next one.
It’s easy to see this as indicative of workaholism, or of a dull, unimaginative, grinder’s attitude; critics have certainly disdained Trollope for producing too many words and not enough art. But there’s something useful to be learned here, too—not from Trollope’s relentlessness, but from his focus on process rather than outcome. His goal, it appears (though of course we can only guess), wasn’t “finish great book”, or even “get paid”. It was “put in three hours”. What resulted from all those three-hour chunks, he seems to have recognised, was beyond his control, and not worth worrying about.
Admittedly, there’s something about this that rankles. Working on an assembly line is boring, and the postindustrial era promises an escape from soul-crushing routinisation.
The marathon runner who’s reached a state of “flow” isn’t visualising the finish line, but looking through a narrower lens, focusing on one stride, then another, then another. This isn’t merely a matter of breaking a big project into chunks, which is an adjustment of scale; it’s a total shift in perspective. The young Jerry Seinfeld’s scriptwriting technique involved marking an X on a calendar for every day he sat and typed. His goal was an unbroken chain of Xs. If he’d aimed instead to write brilliant jokes, he’d have been distracted and intimidated.
We can’t control outcomes in any sphere of life. All you can do—and therefore the only responsibility you have—is to put in the time and effort. The actual result, in a profound sense, is none of your business. Take this one step further and it becomes positively meditative: a matter, in the words of the Vietnamese writer Thich Nhat Hanh, of “doing the dishes just to do the dishes”, not to achieve clean dishes.
Oliver Burkeman writing in his column will change your life for The Guardian.
Rule No. 75 – No Labels on the Table.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
City eyesores
Ohio voters picking sides for Nov. 4
‘The scientist’ stays ‘signed in’
Changes welcome at block party
Very first Parkersburg Paddlefest goes wellTop Headlines Poll: Do you hunt deer for food or just the sport of it?
The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us is known in social science as “homophily”, and it shapes our views, and our lives, in ways we’re barely aware of. It explains why, if you know the political positions of a person’s friends, you can predict their own with near certainty. It’s also why, say, creationists imagine that the debate over evolution is an active and unresolved one: in their social circles, it is. We long to have our opinions confirmed, not challenged, and thus, as the Harvard media researcher Ethan Zuckerman puts it, “Homophily causes ignorance.” (It also makes us more extreme, studies show: a group of conservatives, given the chance to discuss politics among themselves, will grow more conservative.) Even priding yourself on being open-minded is no defence if your natural, homophilic inclination is to hang out with other people like you, celebrating your love of diversity.
Oliver Burkeman writing in his column will change your life for The Guardian.
Rule No. 74 – Don’t Get Your Fuel From the Same Place Your Car Does.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
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