If I were a politician today there are two things I would promote in Cleveland and Ohio.

First, a state-wide raise in the minimum wage. If not, a push for city-wide minimum wage hikes. Where are Cleveland politicians?

Second, I’d call for a temporary vacation or permanent decrease in the state’s sales tax. If there is money for cuts in income taxes, which benefit higher income people, there should be state resources to benefit low income people.

And the sales tax is the tax that fits the need.

It would be a way to take a poke at income inequality.

Thirteen states and 10 county & cities have raised the minimum wage—including Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii, Vermont, San Francisco, San Diego, Richmond and Washington, D.C., according to news reports.

At a minimum and as a test, a decrease in the sales tax should be acceptable to Gov. John Kasich for the holiday season – say as a trial for November, December and January for the holidays and after-holiday sales.

An annual take for the State of Ohio in sales tax revenue would be slightly more than $9 billion, according to an expert who watches sales taxes. Continue Reading »

Atlantis Books, Santorini, Greece In 2004, two Oxford students were on holiday in Santorini, got drunk and decided to open a bookshop. Despite niggling doubts once they sobered up, after graduating they filled up a van and drove back. They run a small printing press in the back room and have signs saying you can ‘rent a cat’ while you read.

Finally, if an atmosphere of revolutionary excitement, heroism, dedication, and boisterous violence on all sides characterizes classical dictatorships, then the last traces of such an atmosphere have vanished from the Soviet bloc. For some time now this bloc has ceased to be a kind of enclave, isolated from the rest of the developed world and immune to processes occurring in it. To the contrary, the Soviet bloc is an integral part of that larger world, and it shares and shapes the world’s destiny. This means in concrete terms that the hierarchy of values existing in the developed countries of the West has, in essence, appeared in our society (the long period of co-existence with the West has only hastened this process). In other words, what we have here is simply another form of the consumer and industrial society, with all its concomitant social, intellectual, and psychological consequences. It is impossible to understand the nature of power in our system properly without taking this into account.

From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978

Previously…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Costume choices
Towns avoid Friday for Trick or Treat
Smoke alarm does its job
Oil, gas firms eye Morgan Co. site for HQ
Black bear killed after hit-skip wreck

Top Headlines Poll: What do you give trick or treaters?

Great pictures of Marietta…

What’s going on here…

Previously…

Or so said A. Edward Newton.

Ed had it right.

Leakey’s, Inverness, Scotland This independent second-hand bookshop, opened in 1979, is in an old Gaelic church in Inverness: “It’s huge, with a log fire”, says Campbell. It also happens to be one of novelist Ali Smith’s favourite places – “she used to work at a cafe down the road as a teenager and would spend her money at the bookshop”.

“He was born in a little country town in south Georgia. He didn’t have a lot in his life. But if one child in rural Georgia can grow up to do the things he has done, then we owe it to every child to educate them and give them opportunity.

Georgia State Sen., and 2014 gubernatorial candidate, Jason Carter speaking about his grandfather President Jimmy Carter.

Fourth, the technique of exercising power in traditional dictatorships contains a necessary element of improvisation. The mechanisms for wielding power are for the most part not established firmly, and there is considerable room for accident and for the arbitrary and unregulated application of power. Socially, psychologically, and physically, conditions still exist for the expression of some form of opposition. In short, there are many seams on the surface which can split apart before the entire power structure has managed to stabilize. Our system, on the other hand, has been developing in the Soviet Union for over sixty years, and for approximately thirty years in Eastern Europe; moreover, several of its long-established structural features are derived from Czarist absolutism. In terms of the physical aspects of power, this has led to the creation of such intricate and well-developed mechanisms for the direct and indirect manipulation of the entire population that, as a physical power base, it represents something radically new. At the same time, let us not forget that the system is made significantly more effective by state ownership and central direction of all the means of production. This gives the power structure an unprecedented and uncontrollable capacity to invest in itself (in the areas of the bureaucracy and the police, for example) and makes it easier for that structure, as the sole employer, to manipulate the day-to-day existence of all citizens.

From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978

Previously…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Fall foliage tour
Apple Butter Stir-Off in Belpre
Paying it forward: Woman’s volunteer work impressive
Victorian mourning: Unique event at The Castle remembers native son
Great Bowls of Fire a success for organizations in the Valley

Top Headlines Poll: Have you started Christmas shopping yet?

Great pictures of Marietta…

What’s going on here…

Previously…

One legacy of that original “correct” understanding is a third peculiarity that makes our systems different from other modern dictatorships: it commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion. It of fears a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth. (In our case, the connection with Byzantine theocracy is direct: the highest secular authority is identical with the highest spiritual authority.) It is true of course that, all this aside, ideology no longer has any great influence on people, at least within our bloc (with the possible exception of Russia, where the serf mentality, with its blind, fatalistic respect for rulers and its automatic acceptance of all their claims, is still dominant and combined with a superpower patriotism which traditionally places the interests of empire higher than the interests of humanity). But this is not important, because ideology plays its role in our system very well (an issue to which I will return) precisely because it is what it is.

From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978

Previously…

Via Keith “Keef” Knight.

I have always remembered that as a writer I am constantly working on variations of a single plot: something changed. There are many permutations on this, my favorite being either, a stranger comes to the village (think Something Wicked This Way Comes) or someone leaves the village (think Moby Dick). Everything else is a matter of details.

Creativity lies in those details and the artist realizes that for the rest of the world 1+1 will always be 2 (or for the really challenged, zero). The creative minds understands that 1+1 can begreater than 2.