David French writes:

When you see a mass murder unfold on the television screen or read about it online, let me tell you the single-most important and effective thing you can do in response. It also happens to be the single-most important and effective thing you can do on a sustained basis to turn the hearts of evil men, to strengthen the courage and resolve of good men and women, and to inspire the ideas and actions that bring change. You can pray.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know—not think, know—that French’s response would have been very different if Devin Patrick Kelley hadn’t been a white male christian?

I doubt that French, or anyone at National Review, suggested that prayer was the proper response when the person with a gun didn’t look like Kelley.

Yes, Amazon’s HQ2 feeding frenzy inspired John Oliver to do yet another of his insightful pieces on how clueless politicians have bought into the false idea that throwing tax dollars at already really wealthy people will create jobs, really good paying jobs (like mining coal), but, as the most recent tax bill illustrates, our elected officials don’t really have a clue as to how to save any jobs other than their own.

I moved to Cuyahoga County in November, 1984 and in the last 33 years Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have thrown hundred of millions (billions?) of tax dollars at the our local plutocracy. Can anyone say, with a straight face, that all that tax money has been a good investment for anyone other than our local plutocrats?

Consider just these three portions of Roldo’s recent posts:

Cuyahoga County has released its bond prospectus showing more than $140 million to be borrowed for the Quicken Arena expansion.

The issue that never got the vote it deserved. Politicians, corporate interests and even citizen action forces jilted citizens of a voice on a give-away to seven times billionaire Danny Gilbert, all around capitalist money-grabber.

The sordid deal was made after the city refused to examine for validity more than 20,000 gathered signatures (some 6,000 valid were needed) calling for a vote on the subsidy deal and after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled the city must examine the signatures. City Council, under Mayor Frank Jackson’s pressure, had voted to provide some $88 million of city money to the expansion. Council then refused to validate signatures. Some 22,000 Clevelanders didn’t matter.

It’s an old saying, but a relevant cliché: the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Let me be blunt. I think the squeaky wheels in this town have skewed the priority agenda of community needs. The squeaky wheels in recent years have been the sports teams, art, bicycles, towpaths, lakefront parks, convention centers, fancy bridges, downtown housing—all in some way worthy causes, most of them causes of middle and upper class desires. [I guess you could add Public Square and a dirt bike track since. RB].

However, these voices—many good—have championed these needs incessantly. The echo of that chorus overwhelms needs that have no vocal champions. These other voices are seemingly now passé and off the community agenda. These would voice the needs of the powerless, in essence, the poor.

We don’t pay attention to the past. So we repeat it. To our disgrace and heavy cost.

The latest Quicken Arena deal—$282 million in all—repeats the mistake of feeding the beast. Further, it opened a new source of tax revenue, ignoring the voted sin tax receipts. As of the end of March, the sin tax has produced $3,742,748.30 this year.

But finally, in this mayoral election year, there is push-back. Real resentment to this latest money grab.

And a political climate of despair fed by crime, unemployment and the usual array of social problems among so many here.

If you think jobs come from politicians, read the record and then think again.

For a taste of the papers, see Trump commerce secretary’s business links with Putin family laid out in leaked files.

For the more visual examination of all this tax avoidery, there’s First Dog On the Moon.

Every time I think that maybe I should reconsider my canceling my Twitter and Facebook accounts—which I did back in 2013—I’m reminded by journalists I trust just how bad the two platforms are for the intellectual health of anyone.

Writing in Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That are False for The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald details exactly how these four lies gathered traction on Twitter and, as the quote regularly attributed to Sir Winston Churchill suggests, quickly gained a commanding lead.

The four lies examined by Greenwald are:

Viral Falsehood #1: The Clinton/DNC agreement cited by Brazile only applied to the General Election, not the primary.

Viral Falsehood #2: Sanders signed the same agreement with the DNC that Clinton did.

Viral Falsehood #3: Brazile stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee.

Viral Falsehood #4: Evidence has emerged proving that the content of WikiLeaks documents and emails was doctored.

The corrections/retractions/explanations are all out there, but the damage is done.

Platforms are not benign. They must be made to beheld accountable.

This brave new world is looking really cowardly, and Donna Brazile isn’t having it.

Coordinating lead authors Donald J. Wuebbles, National Science Foundation and U.S. Global Change Research Program—University of Illinois; David W. Fahey, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory and Kathy A. Hibbard, NASA Headquarters have just published what I’m certain will be the source of much angst and sleeplessness among those who continue to deny that the existential threat posed to life as we know it on Earth by human-caused climate change/global warming. Because I fear that this vital document may disappear from government servers—there’s a reason the document was released on a Friday—I’ve taken the precautionary step to download the file and archive multiple copies.

The executive summary of the 477-page report begins:

New observations and new research have increased our understanding of past, current, and future climate change since the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment was published in May 2014. This Climate Science Special Report is designed to capture that new information and build on the existing body of science in order to summarize the current state of knowledge and provide the scientific foundation for the Fourth National Climate Assessment.

Since NCA3, stronger evidence has emerged for continuing, rapid, human-caused warming of the global atmosphere and ocean. This report concludes that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

The last few years have also seen record-breaking, climate-related weather extremes, the three warmest years on record for the globe, and continued decline in arctic sea ice. These trends are expected to continue in the future over climate (multidecadal) timescales. Significant advances have also been made in our understanding of extreme weather events and how they relate to increasing global temperatures and associated climate changes. Since 1980, the cost of extreme events for the United States has exceeded $1.1 trillion; therefore, better understanding of the frequency and severity of these events in the context of a changing climate is warranted.

The significance of NCA4 cannot be underestimated. Lisa Friedman and Glenn Thrush, writing in U.S. Report Says Humans Cause Climate Change, Contradicting Top Trump Officials for The New York Times, lede:

Directly contradicting much of the Trump administration’s position on climate change, 13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report on Friday that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization.

Over the past 115 years global average temperatures have increased 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to record-breaking weather events and temperature extremes, the report says. The global, long-term warming trend is “unambiguous,” it says, and there is “no convincing alternative explanation” that anything other than humans—the cars we drive, the power plants we operate, the forests we destroy—are to blame.

The report was approved for release by the White House, but the findings come as the Trump administration is defending its climate change policies. The United Nations convenes its annual climate change conference next week in Bonn, Germany, and the American delegation is expected to face harsh criticism over President Trump’s decision to walk away from the 195-nation Paris climate accord and top administration officials’ stated doubts about the causes and impacts of a warming planet.

“This report has some very powerful, hard-hitting statements that are totally at odds with senior administration folks and at odds with their policies,” said Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center. “It begs the question, where are members of the administration getting their information from? They’re obviously not getting it from their own scientists.”

While there were pockets of resistance to the report in the Trump administration, according to climate scientists involved in drafting the report, there was little appetite for a knockdown fight over climate change among Mr. Trump’s top advisers, who are intensely focused on passing a tax reform bill—an effort they think could determine the fate of his presidency.

This report comes on the heels of another report from earlier today: The three-degree world: the cities that will be drowned by global warming. President Donald John Trump and his mindless minions can scream as much as they want, but climate change, unlike Tinkerbell, doesn’t disappear when you don’t believe.

In the process of doing a bit of blogcleaning, I came across this post from 15 March 2005. Gawd only knows what I was thinking at the time, but I decided to dive in anyway because the post was associated with—it appeared at the very bottom of my list for—Oliver Burkeman. Go figure. In addition, I’ve decided to share with my students who, as Steve Pavlina, in The Power of Clarity, writes:

[G]o through years of schooling and never receive any instruction on goal setting at all.

So, if you’ve begun to think about your New Year’s resolutions consider this:

Clear goals and objectives are essential to the success of any enterprise, and this is no less true of building your own career. If you don’t take the time to get really clear about exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish, then you’re forever doomed to spend your life achieving the goals of those who do.

Goal setting is daunting, however:

A frequent deterrent to goal setting is the fear of making a mistake. Teddy Roosevelt once said, In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

Not doing something is not the same as doing nothing. The former requires a decision to act in the negative, the latter is a matter of not deciding and that can be fatal.

The most valuable advice Pavlina repeats from many, many others is to be specific as hell:

Many people assume that because they have a direction, they must therefore have goals, but this is not the case and merely creates the illusion of progress. “Making more money” and “building a business” are not goals. A goal is a specific, clearly defined, measurable state.

For example: If I want to set a goal to finish my current novel by 1 June, I might say, I will finish a clean draft of Absent Son by 1 June. That goal meets Pavlina’s criteria. I might further set smaller, intermediate goals based on say, word count such as, I will complete a clean draft of the first 20,000 words of Absent Son by 1 February, &c.

What goals do you have?

Meanwhile, over at National Review, David French, in Sure, Go Ahead and Politicize Tragic Events, and Jonah Goldberg, in Propriety for Thee, but Not for Me?, have a sleep-over pillow fight over the issue.

I recall stories from two writers back in the last century touting the wonders of not having to leave their desks. In the first case, the writer was at a month-long retreat where writers could rent small cabins deep in the north woods that included cabin-service that delivered three meals a day to their door. That seemed, well, convenient.

In the second case the writer realized that one of the bedrooms in his house had a window that opened onto the driveway that, with a little work, could become a reverse drive-up window. By placing his writing desk next to the window, he could phone in orders for dinner to be delivered not to his door, but to his window. He could literally open the window, pay for his pizza and eat without leaving his writing desk. That was convenience!

Twenty-five years later, the convenience, according to Ralph Nader, has gone hyper.

Nader, in The Serious Price of the Hyperconvenient Economy, writes:”

Apart from sensual appeals, the chief marketing wave in our country is selling convenience. It has reached a level of frenzy with companies like Amazon and Walmart racing your order to your doorstep (with Amazon now wanting the electronic key to your house).

Ever since the industrial revolution, when the division of labor between consumers and producers widened and deepened, the convenience of not having to grow your own food, weave your own clothes and build your own shelter have become a given of economic progress. Expert specialization has tended to make products better Continue Reading »

This is precisely the hypocrisy that boils my grits. Every time I see a wrong-wing group gather to protest how liberals and progressives aren’t real Americans, I can be assured that there will be men and women choosing to wear our nation’s flag as a sign of their patriotism.

That is so wrong that Michael Harriot, writing in Tomi Lahren’s Disrespectful Flag Costume Highlights the Hypocrisy of Whiteness for The Root, was driven to quote the U.S. Flag Code, specifically Section 8: Respect The Flag which, in part d. states:

The flag should never be used as wearing apparel….

And in part j.:

No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume….

A feckin’ Halloween costume, Ms. Lahren? Really?

Shame… Shame… Shame…

[Update @ 1626 on 31 October—The following comment exchange took place between the anonymous Starvin Marvin and Roldo this morning:

Posted by Starvin Marvin on 10/31/2017 at 7:28 AM

To Roldo and the other naysayers on downtown development. What would the city look like if we followed your advice and disinvested in downtown Cleveland?

Posted by Roldo Bartimole on 10/31/2017 at 10:53 AM

Rich developers would have to pay themselves and invest and the rest of us would pay less in property and other taxes, which keep going up but maybe you don’t have any concern there.

Imagine that, rich developers carrying their own water and lower taxes for the rest of us.]

Last Friday Sam Allard and I—along with a lot of other listeners to the Weekly Regional News Round Up edition of WCPN’s Sound of Ideas broadcast—had a skidmark moment when Chris Quinn, editor of Cleveland.com, dropped this bombshell at the 3:07 timemark:

We at Advance Ohio and the Plain Dealer have been a member of that group for a long time. We’re getting out. We’re not going to be a part of it anymore. We are all about transparency, and don’t want to be part of something that’s not.

No, the bombshell wasn’t Quinn’s announcement that the Plain Dealer was getting out, it was that Quinn thought he lived in a alternate universe where his organization was all about transparency.

I, and a lot of other I have no doubt, started looking for followup and I dropped a note to Roldo Bartimole to ask what he was hearing. This afternoon Sam Allard got the confirmation in Plain Dealer and Advance Ohio are Backing out of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. Allard writes:

Friday, on WCPN’s weekly Reporters’ Roundtable, Cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn announced that the Plain Dealer and Advance Ohio (PD/Cleveland.com parent company) would be renouncing their memberships in the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the local chamber of commerce.

That decision comes amid local controversy surrounding Cleveland’s bid for Amazon’s second headquarters, details of which have been kept secret. Though the city of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and 20 other quasi-public and private organizations were involved in the creation of the bid, no one is sharing specifics. Mayor Frank Jackson told Channel 5 that he would release the bid eventually, but GCP is said to be mandating the tight lid on information.

The final graph in Allard’s story nailed the source of the real problem here: the inherent conflicts between the missions of the GCP and journalists.

“We certainly think it is important that the major newspaper within our region is a member of the Chamber of Commerce, given our shared mission to advance the economic prosperity of our region,” said Sarah Johnson, GCP’s communications VP. “Advance Ohio and the Plain Dealer have always been good and very important members of GCP, and we will work hard to get them to rejoin.”

No Sarah, there very well may be, but their ought not to be, a shared mission between journalists and business. In Journalism Ethics 101 that’s called boosterism, a bad position for any journalist to find them self. (Ms. Johnson may very well have a journalism degree, but as I also learned in my journalism ethics class, advertising and public relation majors belong in the Business School, not the Journalism School.)

Roldo had this to say in a comment to Allard’s story:

It’s good that the Plain Dealer dropped out of the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

However, why was the newspaper ever IN a lobby group that represents corporate interests that don’t benefit most people but special interests?

The PD and the defunct Cleveland Press were both members of the GCP’s predecessor, the Greater Cleveland Growth Association. I wrote back in the 1970s that both were dues-paying members.In 1975 & 1976 the two newspapers contributed $36,000 each.

Even worse, the County Commission gave $100,000 and you’ll find that both the county and city pay these dues.

Chris Quinn should be demanding detailed information on the many and costly tax abatements and TIF arrangements and demanding public information on the cost. But for some reason only the Amazon issue has caught his attention. There are GCP deals throughout downtown, including the multi-million deal for the Quicken Arena deal, which the PD has managed to forget.

Now Quinn discovers transparency?

Please.

There was a time that I entertained fantasies of going to Harvard to study law and row. I came close, I ended up at Harvard On The Hocking, Ohio University, instead—although one professor did encourage me to attend the law school at Akron University because of the quality of Law Review there—earning my B.S. in journalism and minors in computer science, history and political science in 1984. I still dream of what might have been.

Ralph Nader did graduate from Harvard, Harvard Law specifically, in 1958, and he has returned many times to lecture, speak and often criticize his Alma Mater. On the bicentennial of the storied law school, Nader chose to look to the future.

Nader, in Why Harvard Law School Matters: A New Critique, writes:

As Harvard Law School celebrates its 200th anniversary with two days on October 26 and 27 of events attended by hundreds of alumni, some law students, led by Pete Davis (’18), are inviting the Law School to engage in extra-ordinary introspection as it looks toward its Third Century.

Mr. Davis, after two years of observation, participation, conversation and research, has produced a major report titled Our Bicentennial Crisis: A Call to Action for Harvard Law School’s Public Interest Mission. Over the past sixty years, many of the beneficial changes at the law school were jolted, driven or demanded by a small number of organized students calling for clinical education, for women and minorities to be admitted as students and faculty, for more affordability, for more realism in their legal education and for more intellectual diversity among the professors (The critical legal studies scholars obliged them up to a point). Over time, the law school administration, with faculty persuasion, responded.

The bicentennial report by Pete Davis asks important questions about the law writ large square in the context of the law school’s long declared mission statement: “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.”

Out there in the country, the rule of law and justice is relentlessly overwhelmed by concentrated, unjust power. Just consider the stark reality that our profession’s legal services are unaffordable to most Americans and, as retired Continue Reading »

[Update @ 1228 on 4 November—Mano Singham and I are in total agreement here.]

A week from Tuesday, on 7 November, Ohioans lock down the vote on two key ballot questions: Issue 1 and Issue 2. Like many Ohioans, I’ve already cast my ballot, voting no in the first case and yes in the second. Because I have a 9 a.m. student, I’ve not been able to listen to and take part in the conversations on WCPN’s Sound of Ideas weekday program, but I have been listening after-the-fact. On Monday, 23 October, host Mike McIntyre herded the cats—Matt Borges, Issue 2 “Vote Yes” representative; Dale Butland, Issue 2 “Vote No” representative; Seth A. Richardson, lead political reporter for Cleveland.com and author of Issue 2 FAQ: What you need to know before you vote; Sarah Jane Tribble, Senior Correspondent with Kaiser Health News, former Health Reporter at Ideastream; and Karen Kasler, Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau Chief—on Ohio Issue 2, Drug Price Standards Initiative.

McIntyre had hoped to get to a discussion of Ohio Issue 1, Crime Victim Rights Initiative, but was forced to put that off due to heavy interest in the Issue 2 discussion. That may happen this week, but as of now, there is nothing posted on the Sound of Ideas page at WCPN.

Forget being kicked out of the driver’s seat, Congress threw consumers into the trunk and slammed the lid. Only a presidential veto stands between the One Percent—supported by their corporate lackeys—and the rest of us. Frankly, I doubt that President Donald John Trump is capable to doing the right thing even when his beloved Trump voters are at serious risk.

Ralph Nader, writing in Ralph Nader Calls on President Trump to VETO Anti-Consumer Bill is more optimistic. I hope he’s right.

October 25, 2017

President Donald Trump
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW,
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Trump,

The Senate has voted to repeal a crucial pro-consumer protection, with Vice President Michael Pence casting the final vote to break a 50-50 tie.

This year, after careful study and deliberation, The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau restored consumers’ constitutional right to challenge fraud, cheating, deception, and swindles perpetrated by banks and other financial institutions before an impartial judge or jury.

Unscrupulous banks, payday lenders, and credit card companies regularly present consumers with one-sided forced arbitration provisions that block consumer access to courts of law and prevent victims from banding together to Continue Reading »

Via Mano Singham…

For much of my adult life, the mathematical economists of the Chicago school have driven much of our nation’s discussions on the economy and the role of Homo Economicus, the rational consumer. Ralph Nader thinks that Chicago’s reign, or at least the school’s grip on how we talk about economics, is beginning to wane and he points to the Nobel Committee’s recognition of Richard Thaler as a key indicator in that possible loss of control.

Nader asks the question: Why is Nobelist Economist Richard Thaler So Jovial?

When Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago received the news that he had won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for “contributions to behavioral economics,” he faced an eager press with unusual mirth. What’s the story behind Professor Thaler’s jovial response?

Maybe he is laughing because the joke is finally on the empirically-starved economists whose dominance of the field is finally being challenged by a handful of increasingly noticed ‘behavioral economists.’ In turning the tide of mainstream economic thought, Thaler and his colleagues reject the myth of the hyper-rational consumer—“homo economicus”—who are primarily motivated to maximize utility. It has been a struggle for these less dogmatic economists who for almost three decades have incurred ridicule and condescension by the mathematical economists of the Chicago School of Economics, before people started questioning theories of consumer behavior Continue Reading »

So, after the mass murder in Las Vegas I began to ponder the question: what are the people amassing these arsenals afraid of? The public trope has been that the weapon caches are to protect real Americans from the rogue forces of a socialist/communist/liberal government. I don’t buy that. I don’t buy that because, as I wrote earlier this month in CAN THE GUN DEBATE COME DOWN TO TYRANNY…?, no citizen army (Michael Brendan Dougherty still notwithstanding) has ever stood up to the U.S. Army.

Thinking more on the topic, and my conclusion that what the survivalists really fear not surviving is a coming race war, I started thinking about a popular television show that I have never seen: The Walking Dead. I thought I was going to have to force myself to watch a season or two on DVD to test my hypothesis that the show is really about that very race war with zombies acting as stand-ins for African-Americans, Hispanics, Arabs/Persians and other miscellaneous not-whites.

Thankfully I won’t have to watch. Michael Harriot—one of my new favorites—has saved me from that task by writing The Black Person’s Guide to The Walking Dead Harriot begins his fictionalized conversation this way:

What’s up, bruh? Why do you look so depressed?

Because The Walking Dead returns Sunday night and it always makes me a little upset.

But I thought you loved that show. Why would that make you sad?

Although I love the show, I always get sad because every season splits everyone into two factions. In my opinion, there are only two kinds of people in the world:

1. People who watch The Walking Dead.

2. People who don’t yet understand that The Walking Dead teaches you everything you need to know about white people’s fears.

One of the people who didn’t yet understand point No. 2 was one of my students who asked me this morning if I had watched last evening’s episode. That gave us an opening to what I hope was an enlightening conversation. (I’ve printed out Harriot’s complete article to give to my student tomorrow.) Harriot continues:

But isn’t it a series about zombies and shit? I don’t do zombies. Zombie-apocalypse fantasy horror is the definition of white-people shit.

Exactly. Just like Game of Thrones was about how whiteness intersects with power and politics, zombies are an analogy for white people’s worst fears. The two scariest things in all of Caucasia are zombies and black people.

Huh? I’m usually down to listen to your inane theories. They are nothing if not entertaining. But you lost me on this one. Zombies and black people are white people’s biggest fears?

Didn’t you know this? Being white is being fragile and privileged at the same time. There are only two things that make white people nervous: unapologetic blackness and the undead. They are scared shitless of anything that can’t die or that can return from the dead.

Think about it: When white people imagine the most powerful and horrific thing, it’s always a zombie. The White Walkers in Game of Thrones are just cold-weather zombies. Vampires are just bloodthirsty, old-school zombies. Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was just a factory-refurbished zombie.

Even the most powerful deity of all, Jesus Christ, is simply a zombie son who came back to life to change the world and wash away our sins.

But they always need blood.

Damn, I’ve never thought about it that way. But I’ve never watched the show. I can’t just jump in without watching the old episodes, can I? I don’t know how the zombies got here. I don’t know any of the characters. I don’t know the heroes or the antagonists. I’m sure you’re about to tell me about how everything stands for white privilege or white supremacy or something.

You’ve met white people before, right? It’s not that difficult to understand.

The hero of the show is the symbol for white nobility, morality and courage—a police officer named Rick. Rick goes into a coma and awakens to a world that has been taken over by violent zombies who will approach you without fear of being shot. They are multiplying very fast and making white people turn into zombies.

Let me guess. Are the zombies metaphors for black people?

You’re beginning to understand.

Somehow, the Negroes walking dead have taken over the world, except for a few brave people who have banded together to preserve the master race. Future generations of whites are becoming infected with this evil disease. Even children. It’s all about white genocide.

Get it?