Cartoonist Scott Adams pointed me to his video. He wrote:

Donald Trump, graduate of Wharton’s business school, builder of empires, master of several different domains, and probably the next President of the United States is “not smart” based on the evidence that his intentional speaking pattern is more effective than the competition.

Did you see it?

In the old days you would have concluded that the author of the video is an idiot. But clearly he is not, because his work shows both talent and high intelligence. This is as clear a case of cognitive dissonance as you will ever see. And it is a totally normal process for a normal brain. You and I are not excluded. So don’t get cocky :-)

Time and time again we make the mistake of calling people whose world views don’t match our own stupid. That’s a mistake. I cringed every times someone called President George W. Bush stupid. I feel the same way about Trump. To call him stupid, or even to say that he’s not smart, is a tragic mistake because that view dismisses him as a non-threat. Trump is smart, he is very smart, and he knows exactly what he is doing. We ignore that reality at our peril.

There was a famous line from National Lampoon regarding President Richard Nixon: Would you buy a used war from this man?

The answer, of course, was, yes. We did buy Nixon’s used war. Twice.

What are we buying from Donald Trump?

For the first few years of blogging I was obsessive about my reader statistics. I think we all were. That changed with time and not until Roldo Bartimole began publishing his essays here did I begin to regularly watch the number again.

The past 12 months have been pretty good, as the numbers above indicate, for Have Coffee Will Write. I’ve done better in the past, but still I must be publishing enough interesting posts to keep readers coming back for more.

To everyone who visited HCWW during 2015, I say thank you.

Simon Hattenstone had this to say in The Guardian:

It wasn’t even Aretha’s night. Oh no. This ceremony was to award, among others, Rita Moreno, George Lucas and Carole King. Then up steps Aretha to sing the King/Goffin/Wexler 1967 classic (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.

Look at King, open-mouthed in shock and awe (the right kind of shock and awe)—and this is before Aretha’s even opened hers. Everything about Aretha is astonishing—the range, depth, control in her voice, the phrasing, the passion, the playing, the floor-length fur, the sparkling clutch purse. The more Aretha sings, the harder it is to believe that King is not going to die and go to heaven. President Obama is wiping away tears before Aretha’s even done with the first verse. Aretha is 73, looks wonderful, and might just be singing better than ever.

She wrung the same emotions from me.

After watching the performance for the third time I rolled the clock back to the summer after I was discharged from the Navy.

The New York Times spanked Cleveland hard this week with an editorial entitled, Cleveland’s Terrible Stain. The starkness of those words contain an assessment that really calls for much more than the one incident—the senseless killing of a 12-year old Tamir Rice by police.

Cleveland’s “stains” go far beyond what the Times finally acknowledged on Wednesday. The newspaper didn’t touch more than the surface.

The paper really misses the dreadfulness of Cleveland’s status and its neglect of public need.

Maybe this should apply to all American cities at this time.

City leaders—and this includes African-Americans—have for decades paid little attention to the staggering needs of its low economic people, especially minorities.

Publication after publication has sent reporters into Cleveland to cheer its resurgence. And plenty more will come as the Republican Party holds its 2016 presidential convention here next June. Hip hip hooray!

But the Times only touches the surface of this sad city’s story.

No doubt there have been some improvements in Cleveland. They deserve some attention and applause.

However, praise should not come to the exclusion of observing deep problems and the neglect of most of its inhabitants. Despair prevails for many.

Cleveland’s civic attention for years has been diverted to “improvements” mainly sought by its business leaders. Fortune magazine in 1989 crowed, How Business Bosses Saved a Sick City.

It was more how they took over a city. With what right?

The attention to the cravings of a small band of elites trumped the dire needs of its lower economic thousands in this shrinking city.

Downtown has been the center of elites thoughts and rewards. The city’s former great wealth, much of it concentrated in its powerful foundations, has steered investment by the public sector where it decided. There is always abundant seed money for Continue Reading »

Lynyrd Skynyrd

Anyone who has seen my album and CD collection knows, thanks to my father, that my music tastes range far and wide, but if I could only listen to one band for the rest of my life, I’d pick Lynyrd Skynyrd. I’ve never been able to listen to the music recorded post 1977. I’m not taking anything away from the band members who survived that crash, and I wish them all well, but if some believe the music died in 1959 or cried when they heard the King was dead, I’ll always remember how I felt when read about 20 October 1977.

It’s difficult to determine if County Prosecutor Tim McGinty’s handling of the Tamir Rice grand jury was a fix, or just badly botched.

But the smell isn’t pleasant in this holiday-conveniently released decision.

The prosecution was marked by paid but seemingly biased “reports” to McGinty’s unprecedented allowance of the police officers to read statements to the jury yet avoid any questioning. It leaves a distasteful flavor to anyone who has watched trial movies or congressional hearings involving those who take the Fifth Amendment as a dodge to answering questions. They don’t get both choices.

McGinty also recommended to the jury that there be no charges. He really directed the verdict.

It’s clear that the shooting of the 12-year old, less than two seconds after the skidding arrival of a Cleveland police car, and all caught on tape, cried out for more than a clear bill of no offense. The tape was an indictment and put a lie to the declaration of the police.

(Mayor Frank Jackson didn’t give us any confidence in what the city might do. In a short press conference the mayor, in his typical nonsensical manner, promised not just a process to examine the tragedy but a “due process.” His emphasis was silly. What other kind of process would such an exam entail? Undue process? And more than a year after the fact?)

You have to wonder why McGinty, who brought indictment charges against officer Michael Brelo in the 137-bullet, absurd 60 or more Cleveland police car chase that led to the death of two fleeing blacks, didn’t do the same with the tragically flawed officer, Timothy Loehmann. And then let a jury or judge determine the result. Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams were killed in the car chase. Brelo almost manically fired numerous shots Continue Reading »

The why we must seek, however, is not why we want to change, but rather why we do what we want to change.

Oliver Burkeman’s column The truth about inefficiency reminded me of Thomas Moore’s Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism. While Moore focused specifically on Sadism, the principle involved is that we take actions—that to outside observers (and often ourselves)—seem madness, yet we follow that path for a reason and in discovering that reason, that payoff in Burkeman’s parlance, we may find answers.

Burkeman concludes:

In terms of personal psychology, the key concept here is the “payoff”. You don’t procrastinate, or miss appointments, or fail to communicate with your spouse because you’re an idiot who doesn’t realise there’s a better way. You do it because there’s a hidden benefit you’re getting. And just as you’ll never understand the persistence of voicemail’s awfulness without asking who benefits, you’ll never solve the procrastination problem, or the meetings problem, or whatever, until you figure out what that hidden something is.

There are always hidden benefits.

If Cleveland and the U. S. Justice department are truly interested in providing safety to Cleveland residents they had better look carefully at the use of the city’s police force. Where and who gets served.

It looks badly skewed to me. Toward the rich and their playthings. Naturally.

Records show Mayor Frank Jackson provided 34,173.5 hours of police service to our three sports teams.

Nearly 35,000 hours to date.

Police regular duty provides 26,385.5 hours to the Cleveland Indians, the Cavaliers and the Cleveland Browns.

In addition, the city provided 7,788 hours of overtime police protection to the three team owners, including non-game events at Quicken Arena.

Dan Gilbert, Larry Dolan and Jimmy Haslam—among our most wealthy—obviously rate more security than the city’s poorer neighborhoods where crime is growing and murders are not rare.

Those figures come via a request for the city’s statistics on use of police resources for sports events.

Never enough for our sports teams.

(When Gateway opened former Mayor Michael White and City Council made promises by legislation for a certain number of police officers for traffic and safety based on game attendance. So the deal for special attention came with all the other freebies provided sport team owners in a disgusting display of squandering city resources.)

Not only do and did we provide hundreds of millions of dollars for facilities to these billionaire owners and multi-million dollar players but it appears they get a huge amount of safety at the city’s tax expense. And we throw in free property taxes for their facilities.

That’s criminal, folks.

In my request for overtime for sporting events the city provided a breakdown of police force use for events in total hours expended by the Cleveland police force.

For the Cleveland Cavaliers the city reports 6,412 hours of regular safety service plus 1,124.5 hours of overtime. That’s a total of 7,536.5 hours of police protection for the Cavs and owner.

Would you call that special attention and protection? I would.

The Cleveland Browns received 2,095 regular hours of police protection and 3,303 hours of overtime protection for a total of 5,398 hours. How many games have they played?

The Cleveland Indians received 8,906 hours of regular police coverage and 2,233.5 police overtime hours for a total expenditure of 11,139.5 hours of police protection. Real low attendance.

In addition, the year-to-date hours revealed a “miscellaneous” use of police protection at 8,972.5 regular coverage and 1,127 hours of overtime for 10,099.5 additional hours of police coverage.

Quicken Arena, where Gilbert rakes in all the receipts for extra events, accounts for the entire “miscellaneous” category.

In total hours, the city provides 26,385.5 regular hours of police coverage and 7,788 hours of overtime for a total police protection of 34,173.5 hours of police coverage.

That’s a hell of a lot of protection.

You have to wonder if there are any police left for all city neighborhoods after sports events, arena gigs and the rest of downtown gets its city police protection. Downtown figures are not included.

Inequality isn’t just represented by all the earnings going to the top 1 percent but in the gifts of special services they automatically receive from our city politicians.

The business/civic/philanthropic/political leadership in town makes sure those with great needs go to the end of the line.

Don’t expect any change from politicians who bow to the powerful and the news media, which provides incredible amounts of free publicity. And no real critical coverage.

And expect next year to be much worse with the Republican National Convention in town.

We indeed are a sick society.

By Roldo Bartimole…

Much hand wringing has transpired in recent days over the Democratic National Committee’s timing of the debates in ways to favor the party’s heiress apparent. All of that may be true, but what the party is missing is that the rules have changed. No one cares if the debate is on a Saturday night, when young voters are partying, or that football fans might tune in to agame rather than watch. No one cares because we don’t watch debates that way any more. We watch the debates when we want to watch the debates. In the 21st century, the people, not the billionaire class and its minions, get to decide.

If you, like me, like to read faster than you can watch (and prefer to skip the really boring parts), The Washington Post has provided a transcript of the debate.

Giving to the Future from CSRL on Vimeo.

From Ralph Nader…

So, today is Friday and Friday is the day The Guardian posts Oliver Burkeman’s weekly column: This Column Will Change Your Life. I might get frustrated that the column isn’t posted early enough for me to read the newest offering when I get up—the time is presently 0525 EST/1025 GMT—but I survive because I’m slowly working my way through Oliver’s backlog.

This morning I’m up to 5 October 2013 and the topic is self-talk and Oliver is writing about the power of don’t vs. can’t.

Researchers at two US business schools wanted to examine the effects of self-talk employing the phrase “I can’t” versus the phrase “I don’t”, in the context of personal health goals. Suppose it’s time for your weekly kick-boxing class, but the sofa looks inviting, so you try to talk yourself into action. Does it really matter if you say, “I can’t miss my weekly class”, or, “I don’t miss my weekly class”? You wouldn’t have thought so, but according to the experiments, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, it does. In one, students seeking to eat more healthily were instructed to use either “I can’t” or “I don’t” each time they confronted a temptation. Upon leaving, they were offered a token of appreciation for taking part: a chocolate bar or a granola bar. Of those instructed to resist temptation using “I can’t”, 39 percent went for the healthier choice; of those using “I don’t”, the figure was 64 percent.

This makes perfect sense to me because I’ve known for years that when I didn’t want to take on a task I always get better results from telling the person wishing to hand-off said task that I don’t do that instead of saying I can’t do that. The latter offers a cracked door that might be fully opened by cajoling or outright appeals to reason. The former however, is a an unopened door impervious battering. (Oliver uses this example in his conclusion.)

I never thought to try the tactic on myself however. I don’t know to what extent, if any, this kind of self-talk might work in my particular case, but, because I’m fascinated by matters surrounding willpower, I’m willing to give the concept a go.

Why might this work? Oliver explains:

Try repeating each of those to yourself, perhaps with a more personally relevant example—in my case, “I can’t/don’t check Twitter when I’m meant to be working.” Monitor your immediate emotional reactions and you’ll probably see what’s going on. The “can’t” framing implies an external restraint, which feels disempowering (even if you imposed the restraint on yourself). You might even be tempted to disobey solely to assert your independence. To say that you “don’t” do something, by contrast, suggests autonomy, as well as long-term commitment. Who wouldn’t rather be the self-directed, principled type who doesn’t have more than one beer, or check email after 9pm, et cetera, than the rule-oppressed drudge who can’t?

So, do I become the kind of person who doesn’t?

From 1991…

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Tie it up with a big red bow.

The gift is complete. It’s that time of year, isn’t it?

And our business leaders are great gift TAKERS.

Cuyahoga County has been awarded the business/civic establishment that rules the public agenda, as it has for 50 years and more. Not as successfully as now, however. It’s on a roll.

The reformation of corrupt Democratic control is complete. The voters gave it away under pressure from the news media rallying to the cry of “corrupt officials”—the very ones they had supported and rallied into office. Jimmy Dimora you did a lot more damage than thought. You gave them the excuse for a public takeover.

Ironically, the Plain Dealer typically headlined the final blow: Budish adds 4 more to his team, said the headline.

His team?

The story outlined four new hires by County Executive Armond Budish, who is turning out to be as mushy as apple sauce. He’ll do whatever they want.

The four in question have salaries of $190,000; $181,000 with $19,000 more in benefits; $163,000; and $140,000. Who will they favor? Not you.

This is what I call Civic Corruption. Never examined by the commercial news media.

This is still Cleveland, isn’t it? Poverty Cleveland, right?

The salaries are outrageously, unnecessarily high. Corporate style.

But we know why.

The Cleveland Foundation and Gund Foundation anted up $153,000 for a “national search.” They choose public officials. Now convenient. How undemocratic Continue Reading »

From 1991…

So, this morning I’m reading The Guardian and this headline jumps out at me: Chicago Christian college suspends professor after headscarf comments.

I should have stopped at the word Christian and moved on, but I didn’t. I read on about how Associate Professor Larycia Hawkins was placed on leave after saying she’d wear a hijab as demonstration of ‘human solidarity’ with Muslims.

If she had only worn the hijab there might have not been a ruckus, but she generated confusion about complex theological matters, and could be interpreted as failing to reflect the distinctively Christian theological identity of Wheaton College and a Christian college wants none of that, thank you very much. What was this complex theological matter? That Christians and Muslim worship the same god.

Hawkins posted to her Facebook page:

I don’t love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American.

I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity.

I stand in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor because we are formed of the same primordial clay, descendants of the same cradle of humankind–a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa that I had the privilege to descend into to plumb the depths of our common humanity in 2014.

I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.

Oops. See, this whole people of the book line is problematic. Christians rely on the Hebrew scriptures (old testament/new testament is offensive) to lend credence to their particular faith. Without the connection to the god of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, their Essene’s off-shoot becomes just another cult. Joseph Smith understood this and the Latter Day Saints lean heavily on the Jesus-visited-North-America narrative to separate them from the likes of Heaven’s Gate.

Jews don’t talk much about the misappropriation of YHVH by Christians and Muslims because, well, historically, such talk too often resulted in horrible death, and god is able to take care god’s-self.

Or, as Cable sang to us…

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in Hope and the Historian for The Atlantic, concludes:

I think that a writer wedded to “hope” is ultimately divorced from “truth.” Two creeds can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If your writing must be hopeful, then there’s only room for the kind of evidence which verifies your premise. The practice of history can’t help there. Thus writers who commit themselves to only writing hopeful things, are committing themselves to the ahistorical, to the mythical, to the hagiography of humanity itself. I can’t write that way—because I can’t study that way. I have to be open to things falling apart. Indeed, much of our history is the story of things just not working out.

Maybe ten years ago, in a group discussion of civil rights, I said that ultimately, Gandhiji and Martin failed and that those who turned to violence fired by anger achieved much more.

I was shouted down. Initially. Then, however, we began to talk and gradually people either began hesitantly nodding their heads or indignantly shutting down like petulant children chanting la-la-la-la. As he has many time before, and as I expect he will continue to do, Ta-Nehisi’s honesty and clarity pull aside out personal delusions. To paraphrase Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, too often we can’t bear the truth.

Maybe this is why we continue to be so full of ourselves.

The world is filled with bunches of worthless idiots fostering busywork and bullshit on those who might, given a bit of undistracted thinking time, actually take part in a revolution benefiting the rest of us.

Oliver Burkeman agrees and writes:

Entire professions, [David Graeber] argued in a recent essay in Strike! magazine, consist of “bullshit jobs” that the world just doesn’t need. If nurses and rubbish collectors disappeared overnight, we’d be in trouble; but “it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish”. What explains this proliferation of pointlessness? Graeber concludes, true to his anarchist beliefs, that it’s all about social control. A population kept busy with bullshit has no time to start a revolution.

Clearly, Graeber is channeling the Golgafrinchans who came up with the perfect solution to this problem.