Fair Kicks Off
Cracker drives property interest
Odebrecht continues development
Volunteers drive success of memorial wall
Smart Networks aims to expandsTop Headlines Poll: Has news of break-ins and theft in the Mid-Ohio Valley changed your habits, such as locking car or house doors?
Our basic practice is the practice of generating the energy [Is Nhat Hahn speaking of willpower here? Is it possible to substitute willpower in every, or most, instances, for energy? JH] of mindfulness, concentration and insight. Insight will bring compassion, love, harmony and peace. p. 96
From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh
Found in my electronic chapbook.
As a teacher, I was usually pretty good at helping people become what they wanted to become. I didn’t try to make them resemble me.
– to Mark Vonnegut on 20 March 1972, p. 180.
The challenge here is to help students decide what they want to become. Vonnegut was working with post-graduate students at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, a select group of individuals who know what they want to become.
How do we, as educators (or parents/family members), clear away some of the brush from the path to self-discovery? I’ve known a tiny circle of people who really knew at an early age what they wanted to be when they grew up. I certainly didn’t (along the way aerospace engineer, forest ranger, history teacher, journalist and writer were all on my short list).
The word passion gets thrown about quite a lot, and that may be at the center, but I don’t know that everyone is capable of passion in the way the term gets generally used. Feeling passionate at 12 or 18 or 25 holds different meanings at different stages of our lives.
How do we proceed?
Rule No. 59 – Don’t Let Yourself Get Too Hungry.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
After The Company Event…
Fun and games: Washington County Fair
Sheriff’s office lawsuit resolved
Who is caring for your loved ones?
Called to duty
Political dinners planned for fallTop Headlines Poll: How do you plan to deal with any traffic problems during the Sternwheel Festival?
Introverts are not what the rest of us, the three-quarters of the population who are extroverts, think they are. If you’re cripplingly shy and desperate to make more friends, you’re probably an extrovert; if you spend time alone because you’re depressed, you could be either. True introverts are, on balance, drained by social interaction and energised by time alone; for extroverts, the opposite applies. So you may have spent much of your life at noisy parties and not even realised you’re really what Marti Laney, in her book The Introvert Advantage, annoyingly refers to as “an innie”. Famous “innies”, she says, include Gwyneth Paltrow, Meryl Streep, Einstein and Al Gore, although also – just in case any introverts are tempted to start feeling superior – Enya. As a culture, Laney writes, “we value action, speed, competition and drive. It’s no wonder people are defensive about introversion.”
Oliver Burkeman writing in Know who you are for The Guardian.
Via Janine Gibson, Times executive editor Jill Abramson–at a meeting to convince the Guardian to collaborate on certain NSA stories–sent a message:
Please tell Glenn Greenwald personally [but not officially or professionally, JH] that I agree with him completely about the fact that we should never have run the claim about China ‘draining’ Snowden’s laptops. It was irresponsible.
Gibson seemed to expect that I would be pleased, though I was anything but: how could the executive editor of a newspaper conclude that an obviously damaging article was irresponsible and should not have been published, and then not retract it or at least run an editor’s note? p. 224-5
–Glenn Greenwald from No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by way of My Electronic Chapbook…
[Update @ 1140: Mano Singham is also not pleased and offers a prescription below…]
The last time Elizabeth Warren was asked about her views on the Israeli attack on Gaza – on July 17 – she, as Rania Khalek put it, “literally ran away” without answering. But last week, the liberal Senator appeared for one of her regularly scheduled “office hours” with her Massachusetts constituents, this one in Hyannis, and, as a local paper reported, she had nowhere to run.
One voter who identified himself as a Warren supporter, John Bangert, stood up and objected to her recent vote, in the middle of the horrific attack on Gaza, to send yet another $225 million of American taxpayer money to Israel for its “Iron Dome” system. Banger told his Senator: “We are disagreeing with Israel using their guns against innocents. It’s true in Ferguson, Missouri, and it’s true in Israel . . . The vote was wrong, I believe.” To crowd applause, Bangert told Warren that the money “could have been spent on infrastructure or helping immigrants fleeing Central America.”
But Warren steadfastly defended her “pro-Israel” vote, invoking the politician’s platitude: “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one.”
Here is the straw that broke this camels back…
Warren even rejected a different voter’s suggestion that the U.S. force Israel to at least cease building illegal settlements by withholding further aid: “Noreen Thompsen, of Eastham, proposed that Israel should be prevented from building any more settlements as a condition of future U.S. funding, but Warren said, ‘I think there’s a question of whether we should go that far.’”
Glenn Greenwald writing in Elizabeth Warren Finally Speaks on Israel/Gaza, Sounds Like Netanyahu for The//Intercept.
This really saddens me. I thought, wrongly, that Warren could be different.
Politicians have to feel the hot breath of angry constituents, even their own supporters. Conservatives figured this out a long time ago and do not hesitate to make their views known if they disagree with their candidates’ stance on some issue. Some elected representatives undoubtedly vote according to the way that various lobbies want them to not because they agree with those views but because they feel great pressure to do so.
It is the liberals and progressives who pick a person to support and then steadfastly shut their eyes to their favored ones’ wrong positions. We progressives should stop seeking the ideal politician who genuinely agrees with us on all the major issues. That candidate may never come. We also should stop pretending that the flawed candidates that happen to be the best of a bad lot are somehow perfect and gloss over their faults. President Obama is undoubtedly better than Mitt Romney or John McCain would have been on many issues. But that does not mean that we should defend him on his awful record on human rights and transparency and his protecting of Wall Street and other oligarchs.
We have to deal with the candidates we have and not the candidates we wish we had, and put as much pressure as we can on them on the issues that we care about. —Mano Singham writing in Democratic war hawks
Mouse-over: I’d like to find a corpus of writing writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher’s 7th grade class every year)–and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I’ve heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I’d bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.
Rule No. 58 – It’s Okay to Be a Little Hungry.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
Local News
Middle school plan
Riverfront fun ahead
Salt Fork gets boost through state program
Sewage plant funding discussed
County engineer gets OK to pursue road projectsTop Headlines Poll: What do you like the most about the county fair parade?
Police didn’t violate the First Amendment when they threatened to ticket Christian evangelists at an Arab-American street festival in suburban Detroit, a federal appeals court said Wednesday in a 2-1 decision that drew a pointed dissent from a judge who called it a “blueprint” to stifle speech.
Members of a group called Bible Believers were pelted with water bottles and rocks while carrying a pig’s head and telling Muslims they were “sick” and would “burn in hell” for their beliefs.
Ed White writing in Court OKs dismissal of case tied to Arab festival for The Associated Press.
Yes, the Bible Believers were unmitigated assholes and likely a waste of human genome, but they were American citizens and guaranteed the absolute right to publicly assemble and non-violently express their views. Censorship is never an acceptable response to offensive speech. The response to such speech must always be more speech.
Judge Eric Clay understood this when he wrote in his dissent (pages 18-29) that: The First Amendment protects plaintiffs’ speech, however bilious it was. (His whole dissent, linked above, is well worth the time to read.)
While Jeremy’s response is ultimately different, of course, I still think that my own rejection of the passive Have a nice day! and use of the active Do all you can to make today a better day! sets the tone Connie is shooting for here.
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