From BLACK MAN IN THE COSMOS:

Boy Scouts of America, you do have a choice. I know that many of you are affiliated with the military and that many Scouts go on to military service. You can choose to follow the U.S. Military’s recent decision to end “don’t ask, don’t tell.” You can learn from them about how they have changed their policy, about how they learned to accept the reality that gay and lesbian soldiers were already within their ranks and that this was only a way for those soldiers to be open and honest about the lives they were already leading.

Your other option is to go in the direction of the Catholic Church. You can choose to become increasingly bitter, angry, secluded, and delusional. You can go on foolishly believing in your own self-righteousness and convincing yourself that you are upholding tradition while the rest of the world laughs at your blatant hypocrisy and watches you get humiliated by scandal after scandal.

[snip…]

My Eagle Scout medal is on the dresser in my room in my parent’s house in Mississippi, and it will stay there. It means too much to them for me to give it back. They worked too hard to help me get it. The medal means too much to the Scoutmasters who volunteered their time and energy to help me and other young men to grow into maturity through the scouting program. I know that it meant a lot to those black folks in my church and in my community who themselves endured hatred and violence under Jim Crow in Mississippi. Many of them were happy to lend their support to a young black man from their community who was trying to do something good. Some of those same people may not agree with this stance that I am taking now. My parents may not even agree with all of this. I just hope that they will see that my position is a direct result of the values that they taught me and not an aberration from them.

His proud mother responded:

I cannot speak for anyone but myself at this time, but I want to assure you that my love for you, my son, will always remain the same. You are 34 years old now and all of your life you have been the ‘perfect’ son. You have given us so many proud moments and for this I am so grateful to call you my son. As a mother, very few things surprise me about my children. I have wanted to talk to you, ‘one on one’ about your personal life, but could not find the opportunity to do so. I understand a lot more than you think and I accept you for who you are. Your article was an “eye opener’ for me, for you brought out so many truths. Thank you son for opening up your heart to us. Look for a call soon.

I love you with my all my heart and soul and nothing will ever change that. Thank you, son.

Your Mama, with love.

Each passing day finds the circle of wagons gathered by the small and ignorant men who have so dishonorably abandoned the American values that I came to understand were embodied in the honor of attaining the rank of Eagle Scout grows smaller and smaller as they strive mightily to make themselves irrelevant.

Previously…

Barry Eisler writes:

So I got to thinking. What are the warning signs, the real metrics a well-intentioned and clear-eyed journalist should consider before her subornment begins, and by which she can judge whether her integrity is slowly being compromised, corroded, and lost? It’s important to think about these issues in advance. Cops and soldiers, after all, use when/then thinking to prepare for physical danger. The principles apply to the danger of subornment, too.

I’ve come up with a few general warning signs that I think represent a good start. I hope Hayes, and others, will consider them, and I hope readers will add to them.

Via a tweet from @ggreenwald…

Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose and the moment a journalist or politician or any individual is not willing to walk away empty handed, they can be turned.

It really is, regardless of rationalizations that rise in the small hours of the night, that simple.

These are the vital elements for survival of any individual ranked in the order of which their absence is most critical under normal environmental conditions (energy moves up in temperature extremes, we tend to freeze to death pretty quickly).

In the 21st century, however, energy continues to gain significance as electrical devices increasingly define access to communication, information and cooperative politics.

Nowhere is this more evident than at the epicenters of natural disasters where the trappings of advanced civilization have disappeared.

Here in Cleveland we have a company offering an elegant solution and they are teaming with Crisis Mappers to immediately restore energy access when Mother Nature strikes. Tremont Electric’s nPower PEG is seeking support for the project through indiegogo.

This is an excellent change to think globally and act locally.

From Tom Peters’ Weekly Quote

I can give you guidance for doing a task, but unless you “discover” your own way of doing it, you won’t own it.

Coincidentally, this evening I read the following from James Michener’s Space (page 382):

“Dr. Kolff and I are here as engineers and scientists responsible for the crucial decisions, and I remind you that the Moon shot is only part of our program. Either before or after its success, we’ll be sending a probe to Mars, Unmanned.

“And the nation will know nothing of it,” Tucker Thompson predicted, “because writers like me will have no human being on which to hang our story.”

“You think the story is everything?” Mott asked.

“I do,” Then, sensing that he was being put into opposition to those two brilliant scientists, he told a joke. “Public relations men, which I am not, have to be watched. When Moses was leading the children of Israel out of their captivity in Egypt, he gathered them on the banks of the Red Sea and told them frankly, “Children, we’re in trouble, deep trouble. The sea ahead of us. The desert around us. The Egyptian army bearing down on us. Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna separate the Red Sea and make a pathway of dry land. We’ll march across, and when the Egyptian army tries to follow us, I’ll tell you what I’m agonna do. I’m gonna close up that pathway and drown ’em all.” The Israelite PR man who heard this was ecstatic. “You do that, Moses,” he cried, “and I can get you three pages in the Old Testament.”

Less that 2 million people have viewed the video Seven Minutes of Terror on YouTube. At his moment, less than 100,000 people, worldwide, are watching the live feed.

I kept my eye on the tally for current views: the number topped out at about 2.1 million at the landing.

From The Washington Post:

In contrast to Obama, Republican candidate Mitt Romney does have a public position on the Scouts’ policy — he politely disagrees with it.

Back in 1994, during a political debate in Massachusetts, Romney said this: “I support the right of the Boy Scouts of America to decide what it wants to do on that issue. I feel that all people should be able to participate in the Boy Scouts regardless of their sexual orientation.”

A Romney spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said in an e-mail that this remains Romney’s position today.

The real threat comes from sexual predators, a class of individuals that the Boy Scouts, like the Catholic Church, have been less than perfect in excluding from their ranks: Boy Scout files reveal repeat child abuse by sexual predators.

Previously: I’m Returning My Eagle Medal…

Glenn Greenwald writes:

In fairness to Obama, he did campaign on a promise of change, and vesting the President with the power to order the execution of citizens in secret and with no oversight certainly qualifies as that.

0517: Tim Pawlenty out as vice-presidential hope?

Anybody else?

The Superbowl of Planetary exploration…

Touchdown is now scheduled for 0131 tonight.

Via Mano Singham…

Lost to history is the name of the person who floated the maxim:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,

onto our collective consciousness (yes, Margaret Mead might have crafted the sentance, but there is no evidence that I can find supporting that assertion).

Like another popular mistributed (no the words did not emerge from Edmund Burke’s craft) quote:

,

we want to believe the meme of the small group of thoughtful committed citizens because it speaks to our sense of justice and right, but how do you find, form or facilitate such a group?

Ideas, anyone?

A little more than four years ago, on Tuesday, 3 June 2008 at 1039 to be precise, the email below — with bad grammar and typing left intact — popped into my inbox:

SOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD.

I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to end like this if you don’t comply, i was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within10 days. Someone you call your friend wants you dead by all means, and the person have spent a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told us that he wants you dead and he provided us your names, photograph and other necessary information we needed about you.

Meanwhile, I have sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation, but I ordered them to stop for a while and not to strike immediately because I just felt something good and sympathetic about you. I decided to contact you first and know why somebody will want you dead by all means. Right now my men are monitoring you, their eyes are on you, and even the place you think is safer for you to hide might not be. Now do you want to LIVE OR DIE? It is up to you. Get back to me now if you are ready to enter deal with me, I mean life trade, who knows, and I might just spear your life, $12,000 is all you need to spend.

You will first of all pay $4,000 then I will send the tape of the person that want you dead and when the tape gets to you, you will pay the remaining $8,000. If you are not ready for my help, then I will have no choice but to carry on the assignment after all I have already being paid before now.

Warning: Do not think of contacting the police or even tell anyone because Iwill extend it to any member of your family since you are aware that somebody want you dead, and the person knows some members of your family as well. For your own good I will advise you not to go out once is 7pm until I make out time to see you and give you the tape of my discussion with the person who wantyou dead then you can use it to take any legal action.

Good luck as I await your reply to this e-mail contact: (redboletpoint@gmail.com)

Mr Nnaeke Olando

I found the email this morning as I was cleaning out a to write about file.

Out of curiousity, I Google my friend and found eight hits. I’m surprised that there weren’t more.

I have to wonder if a single person actually sent Nnaeke a check.

For years, I have tried to point people to how the placement of the equator on most maps distorts the importance of countries in the Northern Hemisphere and makes Africa (and South America) appear small in comparison to North America and Europe.

This map does an excellent job of making the comparison easy to grasp.

Matt Taibbi writes:

The very funniest part, I thought, was the response of Squawk Box host Andrew Ross Sorkin, the single most credulously slobbering financial reporter on the planet this side of Maria Bartiromo. Even he was so shocked by [Sanford] Weill’s comments that he lost his voice – “I’m speechless,” he said.

What did Weill (with a straight face) say?

I’m suggesting that [the too-big-to-fail banks] be broken up so that the taxpayer will never be at risk…. What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking.

Taibbi’s suggested response approaches (but does not quite achieve) the Hunteresque:

Some version of, “Dude, are you high? You invented Too Big To Fail!” would have been the proper response – followed hopefully by a spirited lunge across the set to beat Weill repeatedly about the neck and head with a Swingline stapler, until he screeched out a tearful apology to every last living soul on earth.

In his next post, Taibbi offers a compelling reason for Weill’s conversion: he got taken to the bank.

So: if he had sold all his stock at that very moment in 2003, he would have made about $792 million. He must have felt pretty stoked about that pile of shares when he walked out the door that year.

Fast forward to this summer. On the day he gave that interview to Sorkin on Squawk Box, Citigroup shares traded at $25.79 at the close, which doesn’t sound too bad, until you figure in the fact that the company did a reverse stock split last May. Through that move, Citi turned every ten shares into a single share.

So to put this another way, Weill’s shares are actually worth ten times less now. If the stock traded at $25.79 on the day Weill blabbed to Sorkin, they were actually worth $2.58 to Weill.

To sum up: Weill was sitting on $792 million worth of shares when he left in in 2003. But fast forward a few years, and Weill’s 16.8 million shares, if he hasn’t gotten rid of them already, are now worth a total of $43,344,000 – basically nothing at all. Hell, there are black basketball players who have more than that!

I got a chance to see this process in 1988 when the retirement funds of then mega-publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich went in the toilet as ignorance fueled by hubris crashed the stock from more than $50 per share to less than $1 and long-term employees near retirement with seven- and eight-figure funds saw they dreams disappear like an Edgell-lobed apple into the abyss.

In this scene The Newsroom’s Will McAvoy grossly glosses over History and attempts to make the case that the United States was ever different, that our Capitalist aristocracy did not always rule.

This is the refuge of the incidentally and purposefully ignorant who long for their personal fantasy. Great Americans have risen and fallen over our 236 years and we are, if nothing else, a nostalgic nation (witness our Baby Boomer fetish).

We have grown. We have gotten better — ending chattel slavery, broadening the franchise to include women, imposing federal laws to counter state and local legislative attempts to enshrine bigotry and hatred — but the fight can never be over. The last clear victories our nation knew came nearly 70 years ago. We don’t get to pack up and go home.

And watching television, even the very best of television, is not a revolutionary act.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

How much of the billion $$$$ for the Browns does the City of Cleveland get? What’s the share for the Cleveland schools?

Oh, zero?

Must be a good deal then, according to Fred Nance.

The sale of the Cleveland Browns for about $1 billion tell us just how meaningless pro sports are for the cities that build the stadiums for owners and players who don’t give a shit about Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Boston or any other town. They’re just passing through.

It’s a business. It’s a subsidized business. Most of its money comes from the TV airwaves, which are supposedly public. At least I’ve never heard of an auction to the highest bidder for the privilege.

Someone recently said that Karl Marx’s claim that religion is the opiate of the masses was wrong. Sports are the opiate, they said. How can you dispute it?

Anyone can go back into my writing and see what Cleveland and Cuyahoga County taxpayers have done to make the life of the Lerners, Dolans, Gunds and Jacobses a whole lot easier and profitable. The 1 percent shouldered by the rest.

There’s a sucker born every minute and someone to take him, is a quote I remember as from P. T. Barnum. The showman denied it.

He did say, however, “Never give a sucker a break.” Clevelanders should write that on the blackboard 1,000 times.

Not that it will do any good.

[Updagte No. 18 on 2 August @ 2225: We can add Return My Eagle to our list.]

More updates below the fold.

This piece orginally appeared at 1659 on Tuesday, 17 July. JH

Sitting in a box on my desk is the above medal.

I have earned the highest rank in Scouting.

I am an Eagle.

No longer.

Today I’m wrapping up my medal and returning it to the small and ignorant men who have so dishonorably abandoned the American values that I came to understand were embodied in the honor.

I no longer want to have the award in my possession. Continue Reading »

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Jimmy Dimora was a victim of ignorance. The ignorance of his choice of friends. The ignorance of his expectations of public office. The simple ignorance of a simple man.

He added arrogance to ignorance. An explosive combination in public life.

He was also the victim of circumstances. This resulted in the over-sentencing by Judge Sara Lioi. The 28-year “death sentence” of US Judge Sara Lioi.

Dimora’s ignorance apparently led him to believe that he had done nothing that other politicians had not done. This might have some truth to it. Not enough, however. And it isn’t much of a defense in a court of law. Or anywhere else.

Dimora badly needed a media adviser. Worse than being his own lawyer, he decided to be his own media brain. Bad decision. His comments and behavior throughout this entire episode revealed that he didn’t have someone advising him. If he did, he ignored or got the worst advice anyone could buy.

He was also the victim of circumstances in his public posturing.

Dimora had the misfortune of running into the law just as the media, particularly the Plain Dealer, ran into threats of losing position as our arbitrator of all things. The newspaper business suddenly found itself under threat Continue Reading »

Cavana Faithwalker writes:

So we can still help this little guy keep “chugging along.” If you are not part of this you can do like Romney and retroactively hop on board… we know your heart was there from the beginning, we’ll paste you in the roll call… Often the greatest form of protest is revealed not aggressively in shouts and screams but by aggressively positioning one’s self not to participate…

WRITE EVERY DAY: Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.

From Glenn Greenwald this morning:

Yet even in the wake of the oligarch-caused 2008 financial crisis that has spawned extreme levels of sustained suffering around the globe, and even as social unrest emerges in several places in the Western world as a result of this insecurity and sense of outrage and betrayal, the American elite class still seems remarkably free of any such fear. The main reason I was and remain so enthusiastic about the Occupy movement is precisely because something is needed to pose a credible threat of unrest if America’s elite class continues on the same course. Yesterday, New York Magazine published a profile of Jeff Greene, a typically vapid, bombastic American billionaire who has devoted his wealth to piggish, flamboyant personal consumption and yacht parties with Lindsay Lohan, but what struck me was this passage:

But over the past few months, it’s become clear that rich people are very, very afraid. Sometimes it feels like this was the main accomplishment of Occupy Wall Street: a whole lot of tightened sphincters. It’s not a stretch to say many residents of Park Avenue harbor vivid fears of a populist revolt like the one seen in The Dark Knight Rises, in which they cower miserably under their sideboards while ragged hordes plunder the silver.

“This is my fear, and it’s a real, legitimate fear,” Greene says, revving up the engine. “You have this huge, huge class of people who are impoverished. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we will build a class of poor people that will take over this country, and the country will not look like what it does today. It will be a different economy, rights, all that stuff will be different….”

“There are all these people in this country who are just not participating in the American Dream at all,” he says. This makes him uncomfortable, not least because they might try to take a piece of his. “Right now, for some bizarre reason, a lot of these people are supporting Republicans who want to cut taxes on the wealthy,” he says. “At some point, if we keep doing this, their numbers are going to keep swelling, it won’t be an Obama or a Romney. It will be a ­Hollande. A Chávez.”

I see no evidence that “rich people are very, very afraid” — at least not by their actions. And that, to me, is the problem.

It shames me to admit that I had to Google Hollande.