On a court ruling this morning Glenn Greenwald writes:

In sum, the U.K. Government wants to stop disclosure of its mass surveillance activities not because it fears terrorism or harm to national security but because it fears public debate, legal challenges and accountability. That is why the U.K. government considers this journalism to be “terrorism”: because it undermines the interests and power of British political officials, not the safety of the citizenry. I’ve spent years arguing that the word “terrorism” in the hands of western governments has been deprived of all consistent meaning other than “that which challenges our interests”, and I never imagined that we would be gifted with such a perfectly compelling example of this proposition.

the Bush-Obama Security Scheme rumbles on.

Just a little bit to make you think this morning.

Via Aljazeera America…

Do something to help it go back—not suppressing it, but helping it to go back. One way is to invite a beneficial seed to come up and replace it. p. 93

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

I would have thought some good reporter or columnist would have jumped all over it.

It isn’t often that a principal in a multi-multi-million deal involving County Commissioners, the Cleveland Mayor, City Council and the city’s top corporate people tells the public they all lied to fool the public.

That it was a fraud.

Alan Glazen, a former ad man for the original sin tax, has done just that.

He told the Plain Dealer: “We were hired to be the people sending that message (28,000 good paying jobs) out, and that message was not honest.” He said those who backed the issue “lied,” according to the PD story.

And it was a big lie.

More important you have to ask the question, if you lied about that, what else did you lie about?

Really almost everything.

Lie upon lie. That’s all they know how to do. For big stakes. And the FBI here plays minor league ball. The big fish swim away with bundles. All legally corrupt. Some lies don’t count.

The big lies were told in a full-page ad run days Continue Reading »

Comment trolls are Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic and sadistic. Who’d have thunk it?

Erin Buckels, University of Manitoba; Paul Trapnell, University of Winnipeg and Delroy Paulhus University of British Columbia, did.

They wrote that:

In two online studies (total N = 1,215), respondents completed personality inventories and a survey of their Internet commenting styles. Overall, strong positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism.

I’ve been more fortunate than most bloggers in having had few persistent trolls over the years and I learned long ago to let trolls have the last word and then ignore them. Of late, however, I’ve been leaving the occasional comment on polls and stories on my hometown newspaper and there are more than a few trolls in the Ohio River Valley who clearly have way too much time on their hands.

The One Percent get hurt.

Mano Singham concludes:

Anyone who still clings to the belief that this spying is all or even mostly about fighting terrorism is deluding themselves. Economic and political espionage seems to be the driver, at least in the international arena.

When corporate executives realize that their secrets are no longer secret, but rather subject to the whims of the highest political bidder, then perhaps change will begin to occur.

The very sad reality, from where I stand, is that, at least at the national level, being a Democrat is more painful because Democrats at least pretend to give a fuck.

The suffering that the Buddha talked about [in the First Noble Truth: to live as a human being is to experience suffering], however, is an experience that is often much more subtle than outright pain. it is a feeling of dissatisfaction, a persistent feeling that things are not as they should be. It is an unpleasant or irritating feeling, one that impels us to move, to do something, to distract ourselves, to eat something, to drink something, to binge, to vomit, to make the feeling of dis-ease go away.

Moving away and creating distractions are not long-term solutions to this feeling that something is not right. It is a feeling based in truth. It must be attended to. Eating, drinking, using drugs or alcohol, courting danger, courting a new lover—these are all over-the-counter remedies for temporary relief of this fundamental dis-ease, the intuition that things are not as they could or even should be. The true source of this dissatisfaction is spiritual, and thus the only true cure for it is also spiritual.

Now you need to look at the question, Am I willing to be empty? from the spiritual point of view. First of all, you are empty, whether you like it or not, Every atom in your body is composed of emptiness (more than 99 percent) inhabited by tiny bits of whizzing energy (less than 1 percent). In addition to your very real physical emptiness, you are empty in another way. You are empty of independent existence. You could not exist without all other beings also existing. Sometimes we become overwhelmed by the multitudes of others and might wish that everything else in the world would disappear, but if that happened, we too would disappear. Fundamentally we are made up of our interactions with all other beings. We are each like a soap bubble in the middle of a huge mass of soap bubbles. We are made up of nothing but emptiness and our intersections and interactions with all other beings. And so are they.

To be willing to be empty is to align with a fundamental truth of our being. pp. 146-7

From Mindful Eating by Jan Chozen Bays Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Or, as I originally learned the lesson…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Hey Gavin,

I’ve been working boring jobs and playing video games my entire life. I’ve been toying around with the idea of being a musician since high school, but never had the confidence to step out of my comfort zone and actually try my hand at creating music professionally.

Then I ran into Zen Pencils. I was so in love with the worlds you created around the quotes and poems. It made each word stand out to me. Before, they were just letters strung together to make coherent thought, and I didn’t put much value in them, specifically because I thought those quotes didn’t apply to me. I always thought I wasn’t the person that the speaker or poet was talking to.

But after going back through all of your comics, something started to make sense to me: These people were passing down knowledge from their own experiences in life, and the reason the quotes are popular or famous, isn’t because they are witty, or because they rhyme, but because they speak from a place of truth that the old cliche’s can’t Continue Reading »

Mano Singham writes today on the progress we’re making to the day when this will no longer be of any particular interest.

Psychiatrist Jennifer Harris recently pointed out that today, “many clinicians find it easier to tell parents their child has a brain-based disorder than to suggest parenting changes.” p. 86 [From A Rush To Medicate Young Minds.]

From Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Maybe you have heard the news. Tragic.

We’ve lost Robin Swoboda.

What will happen to Cleveland Journalism now?

Such a loss. Such a shame. The Pee Dee gave it a banner headline. Keep telling us the news. Please!

And coming on the heels of that startling television news another tragic loss.

Bill Applegate is leaving.

We will have in one week lost two of the people who have given us such laughable TV moments.

The roving Anchorwoman Robin yuck yucking it with sidekick Browns pr guy Jimmy Donovan. What a belly full of laughs.

Who needs the news?

Robin, however, says there’s too much tragic news and her inner self can’t seem to deal with it. You know the appalling stuff. Another Browns loss Continue Reading »

From The Best of 2013…

Megan McArdle writes (eventually):

Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got A’s in English class. (There are exceptions, but they often also seem to be exceptions to the general writerly habit of putting off writing as long as possible.) At an early age, when grammar school teachers were struggling to inculcate the lesson that effort was the main key to success in school, these future scribblers gave the obvious lie to this assertion. Where others read haltingly, they were plowing two grades ahead in the reading workbooks. These are the kids who turned in a completed YA novel for their fifth-grade project. It isn’t that they never failed, but at a very early age, they didn’t have to fail much; their natural talent kept them at the head of the class.

This teaches a very bad, very false lesson: that success in work mostly depends on natural talent. Unfortunately, when you are a professional writer, you are competing with all the other kids who were at the top of their English class. Your stuff may not—indeed, probably won’t—be the best anymore.

If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you’re finished, you’re more like one of those 1940’s pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.

Via Zen Pencils…

Previously…

Roldo Bartimole writes:

An incompetent mayor tries to cover his ass and pleases no one.

Oh, yeah. He did please a few safety force leaders with salaries of some $120,000 for their incompetence.

Apparently, failure is the new marker for $100,000 salaries in the city of Cleveland.

That’s my feeling about the latest move by Mayor Frank Jackson.

He had to head off the kind of protests against an all-white police hierarchy. Some ire raised by council members faithful to him.

But the new police team is pretty much like the old team. Not African-American at the very top.

The new police chief Calvin Williams has McGrath and Flask, who have been the leaders in this appalling time of safety failures, atop him.

The failure team just moved up. Former Police Chief McGrath becomes Safety Director at $122,720 and Safety Director Marty Flask becomes a mayor’s assistant on police matters at $121,965. Nice work Continue Reading »

From Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill:

The Intercept has a two-fold mission: one short-term, the other long-term.

Our short-term mission is limited but critically important: to provide a platform and an editorial structure in which to aggressively report on the disclosures provided to us by our source, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. We decided to launch now because we believe we have a vital and urgent obligation to this story, to these documents, and to the public.

Over the past seven months the journalists who have reported on these documents from the National Security Agency have been repeatedly threatened by a wide range of government officials. Sometimes, the intimidation campaign has gone beyond mere threats. These attempted intimidation tactics have intensified in recent weeks and have become clearly more concerted and coordinated.

None of this will deter the journalism we are doing. A primary function of The Intercept is to insist upon and defend our press freedoms from those who wish to infringe them. We are determined to move forward with what we believe is essential reporting in the public interest and with a commitment to the ideal that a truly free and independent press is a vital component of any healthy democratic society.

Only a West Virginian knows instinctively that the best gesture of solace for a neighbor who’s got trouble is a plate of hot fried chicken and a big bowl of cold potato salad. If the neighbor’s trouble is a real crisis, they also know to add a large banana puddin’!

My Hess line moved to Palantine, Virginia (now Fairmont, West Virginia) in 1723. My father and his parents moved to Marietta, Ohio during World War II. My dad is fond of joking that he raised the average intelligence in both states when he moved.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

You can’t be the city you used to be. No matter how much you want to be.

It’s that simple.

Cleveland was the sixth largest city in 1930 with a population of 900,429. It was seventh when it hit its peak at 914,808 in 1950.

To me that’s when Cleveland’s leaders thought it had answers to the future.

It only had fanciful desires.

They wanted Cleveland to be what it would never, ever again be.

The plans proved faulty and unrealistic.

That’s Cleveland’s major problem. Recapturing the past. Has been for many years.

It’s a real problem.

Cleveland has all the necessities of a big league city.

However, it isn’t a big league city. It’s presently 48th in population among American cities.

Behind such cities as Nashville, Oklahoma City, Mesa and Virginia Beach.

So it ought to stop acting as if it were big league. It should stop faking it.

Yes, we have a great museum. Yes, we have a great orchestra. Yes, we have major league teams in the three top professional sports.

However, we can’t Continue Reading »

The second aspect of practice is that if by chance the seed of anger, despair, jealousy, suffering or trauma has already manifested as a mental formation, we do something in order to help it go back down to sleep again as a seed in store consciousness. p. 92

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.