Orchard Place
Marietta police chief plans to retire in Feb.
Drug trafficker gets 90-day jail sentence
Seismic testing
Old vs. new in Ohio House raceTop Headlines Poll: Do you plan to support the Children Services levy in the coming election?
WE HAVE seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer’s slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, this real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty (and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
Bookseller in Calcutta, India: “College Street in Calcutta, India, is known as Boi Para (Colony of Books). Many publishers are based there, and book stalls stretch for half a mile along it”, with pamphlets, paperbacks, out-of-print editions and all kinds of publications in many languages spilling over onto the road.
Seismic testing
Old vs. new in Ohio House race
Local man to get six months
Applications for Secret SantaTop Headlines Poll: Do you plan to support the Children Services levy in the coming election?
Governor John Kasich
State of Ohio
Riffe Center, 30th Floor
77 South High Street
Columbus, OH 43215-6117Dear Governor Kasich:
I have recently been reading articles describing your compassionate conservatism as compared with the more hard-bitten practices of your Republican colleagues. You seem to have a genuine concern for some of the plights of the poor, the deprived and the ailing—again by comparison with many of your gubernatorial colleagues.
Both you and I had a common experience of concern over the huge sums spent on corporate welfare as a result of the first ever hearing you held on that subject when you were Chairman of the House Budget Committee in 1999. You found my suggestion for such a hearing very appropriate and generously invited me to be its first witness. There was a Left-Right presentation that day demonstrating a convergence of views that taxpayers should not be required to subsidize, provide handouts, give away public resources or bail out mismanaged large corporations.
Right after you became governor of Ohio, I wrote you asking for action against the myriad of direct and indirect corporate welfare (aka crony capitalism) that fills Ohio’s statute books at the state and municipal level. At that time you were looking for ways to reduce the state’s deficit. Savings by abolishing those draining corporate subsidies would help towards that goal. There was no reply. So months later I called and wrote again, still no reply.
Maybe this third try will elicit your response. For good measure, in addition to urging you to announce a program to diminish or eliminate various kinds of corporate welfare, you may be interested in a recent enclosed report of corporate welfare in Cleveland, Ohio by legendary investigative reporter Roldo Bartimole—a man of great integrity and sense of what is important for the citizenry to know in detail.
May I hear from you before the election on November 4, 2014?
Sincerely yours,
Ralph Nader
P.O. Box 19312
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: (202) 387-8034
Roldo has been covering Cleveland political and other characters for nearly 50 years. He has been called “arguably Cleveland’s greatest investigative reporter of the past half century” by Ralph Nader in 2014.
Others also have been generously complimentary:
“There are—in my experience—only a handful of journalists in America like him. He’s a citizen journalist, the finest kind of idealist you’ll ever find… Roldo actually believes in American democracy and the American people. It’s easy enough to say someone is a muckraker, but Roldo is much more than that. He’s a reporter with rare insight.” –Jim Ridgeway, then of Village Voice, 1993.
“As an elected public official, I have received my share of ‘hits’ from Roldo. But unlike my experience with other news media, I have never challenged Roldo’s criticisms as being unfair, unsupported by the facts or discriminatory in any way… Cleveland owes Roldo Bartimole a debt of gratitude. –Judge Carl Stokes and former Cleveland Mayor, 1993.
“It’s always high noon for Roldo Bartimole, last of the gunslinger journalists.” –Bill Osinski, article in Akron Beacon Journal, 1983.
The Cleveland Memory Project: Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of View.
Roldo Bartimole at Have Coffee Will Write.ROLDO RIGHTS ON…Roldo Bartimole, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Plain Dealer, Journalism, Sin Tax, Cleveland Browns, Cleveland Cavaliers, Cleveland Indians, Jimmy Haslam, Dan Gilbert, Larry Dolan
James Lee Burke has a vocabulary all his own and the common words arch across novels, decades and characters. The phrase Porte Cochere (see page 326) literally means coach door, and is one that I’ve always thought meant what I would call a carport. I wasn’t far wrong, but there is history and a regionalilty that my vision just doesn’t capture. Burke is one of those writers whom I first read for the shear beauty of his prose and stay for the characters and story. He has been high on my target list for theft for a couple of decades now.
[T]he potential uses of checklists in everyday life—a list for holiday packing, say, or for getting the kids out of the house every morning (there are hundreds of examples at checklists.com) – aren’t usually matters of life and death. But they are similar in this respect: the idea of making a checklist is so stupidly obvious that it seems impossible it could have so vast an effect. As with the doctors, the suggestion that we use more checklists in our lives, advanced by numerous time management gurus, seems a veiled insult: are they suggesting that we’re too stupid to rely on our instincts and expertise in the moment? But the truth is that all life, not just medicine, is increasingly complex; if highly trained intensive-care specialists can forget a crucial step, it’s surely conceivable that anyone might.
Besides, the stepwise structure of checklists has the salutary effect of narrowing your focus to the next action. When it comes to large undertakings, dwelling on the big picture can be paralysing, and a distraction from the next step, which is the only one you can ever actually take. As they say, I’m told, at Alcoholics Anonymous, where they preach it as a survival strategy, all you have to remember is to “do the next right thing”. Then the next, and the next, and the next.
Oliver Burkeman writing in This column will change your life: Check out checklists for The Guardian.
The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
Singing Wind Bookstore, Benson, Arizona: Winifred Bundy has been selling books here for 40 years. It’s a little tricky to find, situated on a working cattle farm four miles from the nearest town. It doesn’t have a website, Twitter, Facebook or email address. “It doesn’t even have opening hours: you just have to turn up and hope for the best.”
Banishing bullies
Belpre man gets 4 years
Accomplice gets prison
Former Steeler to speak locally
Around TownTop Headlines Poll: Do you plan to support the Children Services levy in the coming election?
Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
George Bayntun, Bath, England: George Bayntun’s bindery has been open since the 1800s, and even now there are eleven binders working there, with clients across the globe. Between them they’ve been in the field for 337 years. The bindery also claims to have the largest collection of hand tools and blocks in the world—more than 15,000.
Providing safe haven for animals a labor of love
What the Children Services Levy means
Guilty plea for drug trafficking
Gator’s open for business
Warren schools looks at 5-year forecastTop Headlines Poll: Do you plan to support the Children Services levy in the coming election?
[d]emystifying passion “is liberating. It frees you from obsession over whether you are doing the ‘right’ thing with your life,” says Cal Newport. Almost any interest “can be transformed into a passion with hard work, so there’s no reason to sweat choices such as [a university degree] or your first post-college career.” If you’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity, just pick something that interests you, he counsels. Then work hard at it. “Passion” may not be worth getting too excited about.
Oliver Burkeman writing in This column will change your life: The passion for passions for The Guardian.
BETWEEN the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self organization, in short, toward the fulfillment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbable structures, the post-totalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states. The aims of the system reveal its most essential characteristic to be introversion, a movement toward being ever more completely and unreservedly itself, which means that the radius of its influence is continually widening as well. This system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it. Anything beyond this, that is to say, anything which leads people to overstep their predetermined roles is regarded by the system as an attack upon itself. And in this respect it is correct: every instance of such transgression is a genuine denial of the system. It can be said, therefore, that the inner aim of the post-totalitarian system is not mere preservation of power in the hands of a ruling clique, as appears to be the case at first sight. Rather, the social phenomenon of self-preservation is subordinated to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism which drives the system. No matter what position individuals hold in the hierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fuel and serve this automatism. For this reason, an individual’s desire for power is admissible only in so far as its direction coincides with the direction of the automatism of the system.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
Previously…Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
Munro’s, Victoria, Canada: In 1963 Jim Munro and his first wife, the Nobel-winning short story-writer Alice Munro, opened a bookshop in a narrow space near Victoria’s movie theatres. Now Munro’s is in a neo-classical building designed for the Royal Bank of Canada in 1909. “They keep their overstock in the old bank’s vaults,” says Campbell.
Fire crews practice techniques on donated structure
Career Center project finally sold
Fall fun for all on the farm
Paying it forward: School volunteer finds job rewarding
WSCC offers honors program to new studentsTop Headlines Poll: What do you do with your leftover Halloween candy?
The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization the society under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised. In other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating to the world and of self-justification which ideology involves. But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from outside, and the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse. It acts as a kind of bridge between the regime and the people, across which the regime approaches the people and the people approach the regime. This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
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