Roldo Bartimole writes:

How wise are the smart guys who take the rest of us to the cleaners because we are sports fans – and maybe suckers, too?

It’s not so much a matter of cleverness as influence peddling.

They OWN the politicians and the news media. They are a corrupting force.

With a property tax free football stadium just over a dozen years old and a baseball stadium six years older, these forces are softening us up for another touch.

They want more MONEY! Tax money.

Am I the only one who thinks this way? Not a cent more. Get off the dole, rich guys. I can’t believe it.

Take a look. Here are the three Cleveland sports team-owning families, according to the latest Forbes magazine listing of the richest 400:

– The Dolans – worth $3 billion. That’s 3,000,000,000. Yes, nine zeroes.
– Dan Gilbert – worth $1.9 billion. That’s $1,900.000.000. Yes, that’s a one followed by 9 and eight zeroes.
– Jimmy Haslam – worth $1.2 billion. That’s $1,200,000,000. Yes, that’s a 1 followed by a 2 and eight zeroes.

The Indians, Cavs and Browns. Welfare recipients.

The three owners represent more than six billion dollars in wealth.

That’s a lot of money.

Yet they want handouts. More city and county tax money Continue Reading »

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Conor Friedersdorf writes:

My recent article, “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama,” is one of dozens I’ve written in the last several years criticizing President Obama for violating civil liberties, expanding executive power, and waging a secretive drone war that presumes all unidentified males killed are “militants.” Why did it receive more attention, by many orders of magnitude, than any of those articles? One significant reason is that partisan Democrats reliably pay attention to every issue that might impact Obama’s chances at the ballot box — and frequently ignore many important issues that won’t. Write that the president is killing hundreds of innocent foreigners, or routinely spying without warrants on millions of innocent Americans, or setting the reckless precedent that one man can secretly order extrajudicial killings on his word alone, and relatively few people pay attention. Add the notion that those failures should cost Obama votes and perhaps a million people will read it!

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

I’ve been telling people for months that Iceland understood that the proper response to criminal bankers is to charge, convict and lock the bastards up.

Iceland’s Economy now growing faster than the U.S. and EU after arresting corrupt bankers

Via What’s Up:

WHAT: An Evening With The Federal Reserve
WHERE: Lakewood Public Library Auditorium, 15425 Detroit Ave.
WHEN: Tuesday, 2 October, 6:30 p.m.
WHO: Mark Sniderman, executive v.p. of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Mark Sniderman is responsible for guiding the Bank’s economic research and community development efforts. Dr. Sniderman joined the Bank’s Research Department as an economist in 1976. He was appointed assistant vice president in 1983, vice president and associate director of research in 1986, and senior vice president and director of research in 1995. He assumed his current position in 2007.

The twin goals of the Federal Reserve are price stability and full employment. How is the Fed doing in meeting these goals? What role does the Fed play in money creation? Did the Fed contribute to the 2008 financial collapse? How does the Fed work? Is the Fed a government agency? What are some of the critical economic issues that we should expect candidates to address during the 2012 election season?

These are some of our questions. What are YOUR questions? Join us, and bring your questions.

FREE and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Monetary Literacy Group More information

In The City…

Tom Peters writes:

Too many people risk their life savings on a not very original idea. No, I don’t mean that you have to start a Google, but I do mean that you must be clear, very very clear, about how your new Italian restaurant or real estate agency will be “dramatically different” from the current offerings in your local-market.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Via What’s Up:

WHAT: How To Start A Revolution
WHERE: Northwest Akron Branch Library,1720 Shatto Ave., Akron
WHEN: Monday, 1 October, 6:30 p.m.
WHO: Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee

How To Start A Revolution is predominately concerned with Gene Sharp’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, the 198 non-violent “weapons” that he claims are effective and how his work has influenced non-violent regime change in Serbia and Egypt. Syrian opposition leaders are looking to Sharp for help today.

Gene Sharp is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and founder of The Albert Einstein Institution, which studies methods of non-violent resistance to oppressive governments. Sharp has written extensively on how dictatorships should, and can, be overthrown by peaceful methods.

You demanded designer universities to go with your designer jeans and universities delivered.

Julia Edwards writes:

The way [former George Washington University President Stephen] Trachtenberg saw it, selling George Washington over the other schools was like selling one brand of vodka over another. Vodka, he points out, is a colorless, odorless liquid that varies little by maker. He realized the same was true among national private universities: It was as simple as raising the price and upgrading the packaging to create the illusion of quality. Trachtenberg gambled that prospective students would see costly tuition as a sign of quality, and he was right. “People equate price with the value of their education,” he says.

Trachtenberg was hardly the first to reach this conclusion, but under his leadership, George Washington was peerless in following its logic. He didn’t spend the tuition windfall to shift the professor-to-student ratio or overhaul the curriculum. Instead, he covered the campus in cafés, beautiful study spaces, and nicer dorms. Trachtenberg thought that construction on campus gave the appearance that the school was financially sound and was progressing toward a goal, so his policy was, “Never stop building.” If he wanted to erect or renovate two buildings, he would stagger the projects so that jackhammers could be heard constantly around campus. He also introduced a three-day orientation, known as Colonial Inauguration, that featured ice-cream socials, casino nights, and a laser show that cost $2,500 per minute.

The day I confronted my troll: He drove me off Twitter, hacked my Facebook, and abused and terrified my family. Yet the biggest shock of all was meeting him…

0933: School lunch complaints

Ken at Popehat wrote:

But this episode says something about far more than Bob. It says something very fundamental about the War on Terror. It says this: if we let it [emphasis mine, JH], the government will define the War on Terror however it wants.

The United States government, under two opposed increasingly indistinguishable political parties, asserts the right to kill anyone on the face of the earth in the name of the War on Terror. It asserts the right to detain anyone on the face of the earth in the name of the War on Terror, and to do so based on undisclosed facts applied to undisclosed standards in undisclosed locations under undisclosed conditions for however long it wants, all without judicial review. It asserts the right to be free of lawsuits or other judicial proceedings that might reveal its secrets in the War on Terror. It asserts that the people it kills in drone strikes are either probably enemy combatants in the War on Terror or acceptable collateral damage. It asserts that increasing surveillance of Americans, increasing interception of Americans’ communications, and increasingly intrusive security measures are all required by the War on Terror.

But the War on Terror, unlike other wars, will last as long as the government says it will. And, as the MEK episode illustrates, the scope of the War on Terror — the very identity of the Terror we fight — is a subjective matter in the discretion of the government. The compelling need the government cites to do whatever it wants is itself defined by the government.

We’re letting the government do that. We’re putting up with it. We’re even cheering it, because that’s more comfortable than opposing it or thinking about how far it has gone.

Or, as I suspect, were we simply comfortable in our ignorance about just what was in our breakfast pork?

Before the 20th Century, candidates were nominated at conventions and then went home to await the results of the election while their supporters hit the stump to win votes. Was that better than what we have now? Do all the good people say feh! to public office?

Frank Bruni ruminates:

To what bliss can the person who chooses to run look forward? Relentless tedium, for starters. A candidate typically repeats the same 10 to 25 minutes of remarks at least three times a day in at least two time zones a week for at least 10 months on end, if you count the primaries. To embrace that, he or she has to be a narcissist, an automaton, an ideologue or an idealist of the very highest order. And I don’t think the idealists are exactly overrepresented these days.

A candidate must be craven about asking for money and do it round the clock, because at this point so much of it is required that for all Romney’s sterling connections and platinum panhandling, he’s still apparently coming up short. That may be the scariest story of the season.

Due to the differences between a primary and general-election campaign, a candidate must be willing to waffle, and if he or she gets too accustomed to that, it can lead to moments as mortifying as one on the most recent “60 Minutes.”

Scott Pelley, pressing Romney on which tax loopholes he’d close: “The devil’s in the details.”

Romney, refusing to provide any: “The devil’s in the details. The angel is in the policy.”

The hell has no end. The 140-character limit of Twitter, the acceleration of the news cycle and the proliferation of proudly biased newscasts have intensified the patrol for gaffes, heightened the hunger for tiffs and tidbits, ratcheted up the invasiveness.

[Update 2 0744: So, I’m not a supporter of Ron Paul, but I do agree with several of his positions on American foreign policy which I see as essentially a 21st century version of President George Washington’s 18th century vision and this video echoes my Why They Hate Us meme.]

When Ms. Money can describe herself as: Retired Model, Politico, Democrat, Liberal, Writer, Lifetime Student, I think I can understand how Conservatives must feel every time Willard Mitt Romney opens his mouth.

[Update at 0840: These crimes are committed in our name and no voter in the United States is absolved from responsibility. We are not innocent.]

Originally…

Glenn Greenwald writes:

All the way back in 2004, the Rumsfeld Pentagon commissioned a study to determine the causes of anti-US terrorism, and even it concluded: “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.” Running around the world beating your chest, bellowing “we’re at war!”, and bombing multiple Muslim countries does not keep one safe. It manifestly does the opposite, since it ensures that even the most rational people will calculate that targeting Americans with violence in response is just and necessary to deter further aggression.

A one-day attack on US soil eleven years ago unleashed a never-ending campaign of violence around the world from the target and its allies. Is it really a challenge to understand that continuous bombings and civilian-killing assaults over many years, in many Muslim countries, will generate the same desire for aggression and vengeance against the US?

0649: Ode to the people of Gaza

Via What’s Up:

WHAT: How To Start A Revolution
WHERE: Northwest Akron Branch Library,1720 Shatto Ave., Akron
WHEN: Monday, 1 October, 6:30 p.m.
WHO: Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee

How To Start A Revolution is predominately concerned with Gene Sharp’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, the 198 non-violent “weapons” that he claims are effective and how his work has influenced non-violent regime change in Serbia and Egypt. Syrian opposition leaders are looking to Sharp for help today.

Gene Sharp is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and founder of The Albert Einstein Institution, which studies methods of non-violent resistance to oppressive governments. Sharp has written extensively on how dictatorships should, and can, be overthrown by peaceful methods.

0615: Why is there something rather than nothing?

I’ve been enjoying Xkcd for several years, but somehow I missed the offshoot What If? which answers hypothetical questions about physics every Tuesday.

This week the question is: If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?

Previous questions include:

What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?

If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?

What would the world be like if the land masses were spread out the same way as now – only rotated by an angle of 90 degrees?

What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?

What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?

Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet?

What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty?

What if there was a robot apocalypse? How long would humanity last?

What would happen if you were to gather a mole(unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?

How much Force power can Yoda output?

What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Well, you get the idea.

The questions are of the type we used to ask ourselves over lunch in high school or during conciousness altering gatherings in college.

Now I have to figure out a question or two to submit myself, or, better yet, task my students to consider what questions they would submit.

0525: Is religion good for anything?