Roldo Bartimole writes:

Can we bring back Tom Chema?

Why?

Well, he’d fit right into Cleveland’s present leadership.

How desperate can we be?

Old, tired, used up. Choose your choice of description for Cleveland’s leadership these days.

Mayor Frank Jackson. Top of the list of old, tired politicians with no vision though the Plain Dealer and Gov. John Kasich keep try to give him some luster.

Mayor Frank Jackson’s executive line-up? Tired old Mike White hand-downs: Ken Silliman, chief of give-them-what-the-mayor-wants. Still there. Chris Warren still hanging on. Jackson let the fire chief go despite his mess-ups and can’t seem to replace the law director who left nine months ago. Who would notice the difference? Who might be paying attention? Apparently no one.

Even Mike Polensek seems to have settled down some. Haven’t read a nasty letter of his for some time.

Then there’s George Forbes. Still Continue Reading »

Matt Taibbi writes:

Under the proposal, towns would essentially be seizing and condemning the man-made mess resulting from the housing bubble. Cooked up by a small group of businessmen and ex-venture capitalists, the audacious idea falls under the category of “That’s so crazy, it just might work!” One of the plan’s originators described it to me as a “four-bank pool shot.”

[Snip…]

Cities and towns won’t need to ask for an act of a bank-subsidized congress to do this, and they won’t need a federal judge to sign off on any settlement. They can just do it. In the Death Star of America’s financial oligarchy, the ability of local governments to use eminent domain to seize toxic debt might be the one structural flaw big enough for the rebel alliance to fly through.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

On the other major piece of government business this day [note, Roldo wrote this on Thursday, 19 July, but I allowed it to slip between the cracks, sorry about that Roldo. JH] – the new housing for Cuyahoga County – I think I have the proper solution. And it will aid the Cleveland schools.

The County should buy the Cleveland school administration building, invest in renovating it and use it for its offices.

That will mean public money from the County will go to the Cleveland schools to help it with its relocation to new offices.

It would be only deserved payback to the schools for all the revenue robbed by the former County Commission and its Gateway blunders.

The purchase will maintain a historic 1930 public building within the historic Group Plan and will keep all the public money in public hands.

Finally, I urge the Plain Dealer and Chris Quinn, Metro Editor, to assign someone to total the lost revenue due to the range of abatements by going to the County and getting the figures.

It’s time the newspaper was responsible to the public and not the Greater Cleveland Partnership thugs.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

By stark contrast, The Washington Post‘s Karin Brulliard, reporting from Jerusalem, commits an act of actual journalism with her story on this event. She, too, notes the official accusations of Hezbollah and Iranian responsibility, but, as Think Progress’ Ali Gharib points out, she heavily qualifies that in the third paragraph of her story: “Israel offered no concrete evidence tying the bombing to Iran, and Bulgarian officials cautioned that it was too early to attribute responsibility.” That’s called basic journalism: instead of just repeating official claims, treating them as “confirmed,” and shaping the entire article around those assertions, she prominently notes that there is no real evidence to lead anyone to believe these accusations. She then adds more skepticism: “U.S. intelligence officials said it was ‘plausible’ that Hezbollah carried out the attack but that analysts at the CIA and other agencies were still evaluating the intelligence surrounding the bombing and had not reached a conclusion.”

0655: When do you think Washington County’s jobless rate will fall below 6%?

Engaged Buddhism was born from this difficult situation; we wanted to maintain our practice while responding to the suffering around us. Engaged Buddhism isn’t Buddhism that’s involved in social problems. But engaged Buddhism means we practice mindfulness wherever we are, whatever we are doing, at any time. When we are alone, walking, sitting, drinking our tea or making our breakfast, that can also be engaged Buddhism. We practice this way not only for ourselves but also to preserver ourselves so that we are able to help others and be connected with all life. Engaged Buddhism is not just self-help. It helps us feel stronger and more stable and also more connected to others and committed to the happiness of all beings. p. 3

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.Good Citizens,Thich Nhat Hanh,Mindfulness,Zen,Buddhaism

The people who weighed themselves every day were much more successful at keeping their weight from creeping back up. They were less likely to go on eating binges, and they didn’t show any signs of disillusion or distress from their daily confrontation with the scale. For all the peculiar challenges to losing weight, one of the usual strategies is still effective: the more carefully and frequently you monitor yourself, the better you’ll control yourself. p. 231

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The Cleveland corporate community didn’t give a damned hoot about the Cleveland schools when making all those revenue decisions in the 1980-90. Gave away revenue as fast as they could. The price has been very high. But they don’t want to pay any of it.

Instead the Corporates and City Hall want a substantial levy of 15 mills to be passed by its citizens for the poor Cleveland schools. That’s a hard whack for homeowners.

They’ve been robbing revenue from the schools for decades. And they haven’t seemed to care a bit. The Plain Dealer has gone along every time, naturally.

Since the late 1970s when abatement was given to National City Bank – then one of the richest banks in the nation – hardly any substantial building downtown hasn’t gotten some form of tax subsidy.

In fact, it went from 20-year abatements at 100 percent to full forever tax exemptions for major sports projects.

Nothing was too costly to free it of taxes.

The City of Cleveland has borne the substantial burden for the rest of the area not only with tax abatements of office and housing, tax shifting via TIFs (where taxes pay for development, diverted from public use), full tax exemption as in the Continue Reading »

In a perfect example of the wackiness of blogging, Mano Singham, a theoretical physicists, writer, educator and all-around thoughtful kind of guy added a post to his blog yesterday about Breyer’s changing the formula on its ice cream and downsizing the half-gallon container by 25 percent and the commentators have piled on with 31 comments.

Now I don’t know if that is a record, but I’ve been reading Mano for several years and I don’t remember any of his deep and thoughtful posts racking up that many comments in such a short time.

You just never know what will set readers off.

1052: One American, One Vote, Every Time

…the suspected suicide bomber is:

a long-haired Caucasian in sportswear… [with] a U.S. driver’s license issued in Michigan – apparently fake?

Are we prepared to start profiling long-haired Caucasians in sportswear with driver’s licenses from Michigan?

Hmmmm…?

Venkatesh Rao wrote:

I am not sure who first came up with the term Peak Attention, but the analogy to Peak Oil is surprisingly precise. It has its critics, but I think the model is basically correct.

Peak Oil refers to a graph of oil production with a maximum called Hubbert’s peak, that represents peak oil production. The theory behind it is that new oil reserves become harder to find over time, are smaller in size, and harder to mine. You have to look harder and work harder for every new gallon, new wells run dry faster than old ones, and the frequency of discovery goes down. You have to drill more.

There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind.

Attention behaves the same way. Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.

But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.

Sure, there is an equivalent to the Sun in the picture. Just ask anyone who has tried mindfulness meditation, and you’ll understand why the limits to attention (and therefore the value of time) are far further out than we think.

The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.

The result is a spectacular kind of bubble-and-bust.

The Daily Show on and The Colbert Report on Romney’s Bain woes

Previously…

I am much less concerned about President Barack Hussein Obama than I am about the office in which he has vested (fast forward to time mark 37:00) the power of kings…

Canadians, on Average, Now Richer Than Americans

Matt Taibbi writes:

And that, folks, is probably what this whole Bartiromo episode is all about. If you follow any of these Wall Street settlements and investigations, banks and their executives often insist post-factum that they only paid fines to keep regulators off their backs – not because they’re guilty, mind you, but because paying off vengeful, mindlessly angry, and (probably) jealous regulators is part of the cost of doing business when you’re a rich, powerful, successful, and tirelessly ethical financial firm.

0428: Free Tiny Library

Glenn Greenwald writes:

This excuse constantly given by journalists — we have to agree to our government source’s demands or else they won’t talk to us — is patently fictitious and, independently, irrelevant. In response to the NYT story yesterday, numerous commentators condemned this practice. Journalism Professor Christopher Daly denounced these quote-approval agreements as “pernicious” censorship and argues that “the journalists should never have agreed to it.” Both Daly and Jeff Jarvis argue that it should never be done, but if it is, at the very least it must be clearly disclosed in each article. The Guardian‘s Europe editor, Ian Traynor, notes that this is standard practice in Germany and warns that it becomes “infectious,” whereby all political officials, high- and mid-level alike, reflexively demand veto power over all quotes. Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum mocked the journalists’ defense this way: “If they refuse, they won’t have anything to write about? These kinds of campaign stories almost never produce anything of real interest. If reporters were banned from doing them, virtually nothing would be lost. In fact, the quality of campaign reporting might very well go up.”

I agree with all of that, but want to make one other point that has long bothered me about this excuse. It is simply absurd to claim that Obama officials will refuse to speak to, say, The New York Times if its reporters do not agree to these demands. Is the Obama campaign really willing to have one story after the next written about the presidential campaign by The Paper of Record without any input from it, without its side, its messaging, being included? I seriously doubt that. The same is true of the Obama White House.