How to defeat the surrogates of the 1 percent…

Via Mano Singham…

But orderly habits like [shaving daily in the jungle] can actually improve self-control in the long run by triggering automatic mental processes that don’t require much energy. [19th century African explorer Henry] Stanley’s belief in the link between external order and inner self-discipline has been confirmed recently in some remarkable studies. In one experiment, a group of participants answered questions sitting in a nice neat laboratory room, while others sat in the kind of place that inspires parents to shout, “clean up your room!” The people in the messy room scored lower in self-control on many measures, such as being unwilling to wait a week for a larger sum of money as opposed to taking a smaller sum right away. When offered snacks and drinks, people in the neat lab room chose apples and milk instead of the candy and sugary colas preferred by their peers in the pigsty. p. 156

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

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

1148: Is the paleo diet good for you?

Tim Russo and I have a running disagreement over whether or not President Barack Hussein Obama deserves support for re-election. I’m firmly in the No camp, while Tim, I’ll let you read below. I’ll be back when you’re finished.

Lather rinse repeat. Presidential election year, and a sizable portion of voters who “used to like” Barack Obama, or Al Gore, or Bill Clinton, or whatever, are loudly doing the Republican Party’s bidding, exclaiming “they’re all the same”, “pox on both houses”, AD NAUSEUM, while the 1% laughs all the way to the bank. I’ve seen this movie so many times before, it’s now more amusing than annoying.

Let’s just stipulate – Barack Obama has disappointed us all tremendously. How could he not? The expectations were ridiculously messianic. We’ve been voicing that disappointment loudly, and he’s quite obviously been listening. Through Occupy, I’ve been doing a kind of penance for my “third way”, “New Democrat New Labour”, “centrist” guy who worked for Tony Blair THREE TIMES MY GOD former self for a while now.

Speaking as a former unwitting tool of the 1%, I think I have a little bit of credibility here. I used to be in this system. I’ve been chewed up and spit out by a system I once helped build and benefited from, for a very long time. I know how it works. Got plenty of scars to prove it.

And guess what. There is nothing the 1% wants you to do more than to equate exactly Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Nothing. The “they’re all the same” argument, leading to voters staying home, or voting for Ralph Nader in a swing state, or taking pot shots on Facebook at the first black president Continue Reading »

When I walk in the morning I carry a plastic bag with me to collect the odd bit of litter I find (the Eagle scout in me prevents me from doing less), but recently I have noticed a bizarre trend: dog walkers who stop to bag their dog’s shit and then, I kid you not, drop the feckin’ bag on the trail!

This morning I collected four bags of plastic-preserved dog shit.

The image is worthy of one of John Backderf’s “True Story” installments of The City.

Woody Guthrie sat down to write what I’ve always believed ought to be our national anthem in 1940 in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. More than 70 years later the song remain as powerful as any song can be.

The first phase of the epic land battle for the soul of Riverdale, Pennsylvania has come to the only conclusion possible in a nation where land is property and the founders truly believed that renters were second-class citizens unworthy of the franchise.

My fervent hope is that Riverdale not be seen as just an environmental struggle, but rather that it might become Occupy’s Alabama/Stonewall/Chicago moment.

We begin sporting events with the singing of the Star Spangled Banner, an anthem for the 1 percent. I suggest that every gathering of Occupiers ought to begin with the singing of This Land Is Your Land.

Arlo, Johnny, Bob, Joan and the Boss have all done what the can to keep the message alive.

I’m on the email list for the Ohio Democratic Party. I put the ODP on my spam list (along with MoveOn) months ago, but I do occasionally check to see if the email has any purpose other than getting me to send the ODP money. (Hint: I haven’t seen one yet.)

This morning I received this email from Jerid Kurtz, communications director for the ODP under the subject line Fewer firemen, policemen, and teachers? Here’s Kurtz’s beg:

Jeffrey —

I wanted to drop you a quick note to make sure you saw Governor Romney’s latest claim that we do not need “more firemen, more policemen, and more teachers.”

It’s amazing that less than a year after we finished collecting signatures to repeal SB 5, Mitt Romney is already back on the attack against working families. This guy is simply unbelievable.

You absolutely must check out this video and share it with [yadda, yadda, yadda…] You absolutely must take a moment and watch Romney’s latest attack on working families, then give $6 or whatever you can afford to send a message that Ohioans won’t tolerate these assaults anymore.

I finally sent a reply:

Good morning Jerid,

Please remove my name from all mailing list that you can access.

Here’s why.

In 2008 I vowed that unless Barack Hussein Obama proved by his deeds that he represented more than just the left-wing of the Republican Party, I would never again be fooled into believing that a Democratic Party candidate would be different.

President Obama has failed miserably in meeting that goal.

The Ohio Democratic Party in particular demonstrated a complete lack of vision when it stepped over Jennifer Brunner, a woman with true vision and integrity, and foisted the tired, lame Lee Fisher who hasn’t had a creative idea since, hell, I doubt a hack like Fisher ever had a creative idea, on Ohioans as the anointed one to run against Rob Portman, Rob Portman for feck’s sake.

I’m done voting for candidates because they don’t suck as bad as the Republican alternative. While I will continue to campaign for and financially support honorable and worthy candidate such as Anthony Fossaceca, I will not vote for a Democrat that I cannot know.

In all other races I will vote third party. If that means I’m a spoiler, well, that’s on the Democratic Party because you promised and promised and promised and delivered nada, zip, bupkis. Maybe, just maybe, if enough Republicans win and really screw up the country as they will if given any chance, people will become angry enough to act and the Democrats will go the way of the Whigs.

Do all you can to make today the best day you can,

Jeff Hess

Last evening 10 people, five women and five men, gathered at The Coffee Phix, née Phoenix Coffee on Mayfield Road in South Euclid, Ohio, to invest 90 minutes in discussing one question. Aaron, a first-timer at our monthly Socrates Café, pulled this question from our jar: Why is the idea that nudity and sex are harmful to children almost universally accepted; what is the perceived harm, is there real harm?

My initial reaction to the question was that I disagree with the precept. I do not think that the idea that nudity and sex are harmful to children is almost universally accepted. Before I explore my thoughts there, however, I would parse the first statement three ways by suggesting that nudity and sex, which I would further divide into consensual sex and rape, are not in any real sense related and must be examined in turn rather than discussed as a whole. While this did not become a definitive part of last evening’s discussion, I realize this morning that we ought to have also questioned what we meant by children in this context.

In post-19th Century America we generally ascribe the term to those members of society not of legal age. (That term is itself problematic because we cannot agree, as a society, what number of calendar years are required to reach legal age for all rights and responsibilities.) In the United States, adolescence, an artificial and poorly defined term, generally includes the years between the onset of puberty and 18 years of age. That we attempt to hold the idea that a citizen is old enough to be drafted into the military and be asked to kill other people at the age of 18 but denied the right to buy a bottle of whiskey until they are 21 years of age is just one example of our society’s inability to rationally grapple with what we mean by of legal age. For my purposes, I will restrict the use of the term children to pre-pubescence or, if forced to put a calendar restriction on my definition, 14 years of age.

The nudity taboo is, in my experience with cultures and religions outside of the United States, tied to the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and springs from the second creation story in which Adam and Eve become ashamed at their nakedness after eating of the fruit from The Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Bad. In these faith traditions, this act of defiance is the root cause of, and is responsible for, all human suffering; all was peace and love in the garden and we blew it. I am not aware of any studies of the levels of religiosity among nudist communities, but I have read studies indicating that nudity, and attitudes toward sexuality among participants generally lead to less sexual activity among post-pubescent members than found in the general population. My conclusion here is that nudity, in of itself does not rise to the level of creating real harm in children.

Then there is sex. In a purely biological sense, humans are ready for sex shortly after the onset of puberty, but we are more than our biological selves and societal demands place restriction upon sexual activity among consenting participants that nature does not. At one point in our conversation I asked how our attitude toward sexual activity might change if we had universal access to 100-percent affective birth control? My intent in asking the question was to suggest that in our society, becoming a parent before you are able to financially and emotionally handle that responsibility is considered ill-advised and detrimental to the good of society – one current aspect of this is the fact that birthrates decrease as the years of education completed by the mother increase – and that, in absence of perfect birth control, we discourage adolescent sexual activity because, as a society, we don’t want individuals seen as unable to support and raise children engaging in sexual activity with a very real possibility of producing children.

Adolescents are not, however, children (see above) and that brings me to my further parsing of the initial statement’s use of the sex (not used here in the Clintonian sense) into consensual sex acts between consenting pubescent individuals of relatively close, a year or two, age (remember, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet were 14, just one good reason the play is often the gateway exposure to the bard in our Freshman English classes), or societally designated adults of any age and radically different acts of power involving sex which we label rape. There is no doubt that the latter is a well-documented and serious source of harm and that, as a society, we ought to firmly condemn and punish such acts of violence in any form they may take. We are far from universally agreed as to how to address sexual play or sexual mimicry by children or the exposure of children to adult sex acts when living quarters are close. What ought to be our response when we discover that our child is engaging in anatomical exploration with a playmate? Should a child whose bedroom abuts that of loudly exuberant parents or who walks in on daddy and mommy having sex be rushed to the therapist? I don’t think so.

If I could identify one thread running through our conversation last evening it would be this: our societal attitudes toward nudity and sex are primarily driven by our inability to openly and intelligently discuss that which is part of our biology and that by failing to do so we set up situations where, wishing to avoid personal discomfort, we attempt to make taboo that which makes us uncomfortable. I think that is unhealthy.

What do you think?

Whenever I read about Mr. Rogers, I remember the strip by John Backderf (I would provide a link, but sadly, Derf’s art is not well indexed on the web) where he once got a ride from Mr. Rogers while he was attending art school in Pittsburgh. What a moment that must have been.

[Update: 0938 John Backderf rocks (and occasionally reads, or has a Google alert on his name that led him to) Have Coffee Will Write).]

Via Mano Singham…

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Some 30 years ago when I was producing my newsletter Point of View I’d spend lazy Friday afternoons at the County Recorder’s office. There was no time to waste.

I’d go through the documents that recorded business formations in the county.
The time spent was often rewarding. I’d find who was partnering up with whom. Who was doing business with whom and often why. I’d find politicians in cozy relationships with business leaders.

It was one of these trips on a cold January in 1982 that told me the life of the Cleveland Press was nearing its end. Joe Cole – who had bought the Press to save it – really wanted a valuable piece of downtown real estate. The document revealed more base motives. Ugly motives.

Hard to imagine now but 30 years have passed since the Press slipped away on June 17, 1982.

In the January 30th issue of Point of View – entitled “Press Land Deal” – I pointed out that the idea that Cole bought the Press to give back to the community which helped him become a millionaire was sheer nonsense.

“The more cynical among us,” I wrote then, “said that Continue Reading »

From Adbusters:

In Minneapolis, a core of occupiers have launched an Occupy Homes campaign that is unique for its edgy tenacity. “What is unusual, in fact utterly unprecedented, is the level of aggression and defiance of the law by these activists,” a spokesperson for Freddie Mac, a U.S. corporation that trades in mortgages, told a local paper. “Over the past week … the city has tossed out protesters and boarded up the house, only to see the demonstrators peel back the boards and use chains, concrete-filled barrels and other obstacles to make it more difficult to carry them away,” the article reports. Last Friday, police were so desperate to prevent a re-occupation of the foreclosed home that they surrounded the house with “30 Minneapolis police officers with batons” and “over two dozen marked and undercover squad cars and a paddy wagon.” Occupiers responded by laughing and signing songs… joyous in their struggle to elevate the home into an symbol of democratic resistance to the banks.

This afternoon I’m taking food and a picnic blanket down to Public Square in Cleveland to take part in the Occupy Cleveland second bi-weekly potluck. The Occupy movement has many faces — perhaps too many, but that is not yet certain — and I want to convene a downtown edition of the Cleveland Socrates Café to consider the meta-issues involved with Occupy.

Over the past week I’ve been considering the following:

Occupy Wall Street can choose to be a loose confederation of volunteer fire departments fighting to put out fires set by the empowered and deep-funded gang of international arsonists that make up the One Percent, and that is an honorable and worthy task; but Occupy Wall Street can also choose to be a unified focused arson strike force intent upon identifying the societal miscreants setting these economic fires and dedicated to rendering them and their civilization-wrecking conflagrations harmless. While the former is important and appropriate for a great number of citizens, the latter, this meta-function to shift society more toward equality and fairness, is, for me, the greater and more important task.

The above statement is only a draft and as my thinking evolves, so too does my attitude toward this duality in the movement. Please stop by my blanket-on-the-square between two and four o’clock this afternoon and share with me what you think the meta-issues are.

Yes, there actually is real research for this (see note for pages 32-33)…

After weeks and weeks of up and down shifts, I crossed the threashold this morning and for the first time in 30+ years, and at 191.1 pounds (a Body Mass Index of 25.9) I’m officially not fat!

These last few pounds have been particularly difficult because I’ve been building muscle with my biking routine and, since muscle is denser than fat and thus weighs more per volume, fat coming off in proportion to muscle being added has meant a slower overall weight loss.

My goal is to hit a BMI of 25.5 at 187.9 pounds. Only 3.2 pounds to go.

Walk Foss walk!

Roldo Bartimole writes:

If you want to read a masterpiece of bullshit propaganda please read Brent Larkin’s column in Sunday’s paper. Larkin lauds Jackson with inane manufactured praise. You have to leave your brain somewhere to get this ridiculous.

Larkin writes about the school plan Jackson – and the establishment and the Plain Dealer – have been pushing hard as a prelude to getting a property tax passed. The piece is also meant to give the state legislature a push to pass the Cleveland plan, which it has not done. And may not do.

Larkin mirrors the panic here among Cleveland’s Corporates. It’s panic time.

It is part of the corporate community’s big push for a tax increase for the Cleveland schools. The same schools they have robbed of revenue so readily with tax abatements and tax exemptions for their benefit.

The piece is entitled: Jackson’s feat of statesmanship. What a crock.

Larkin quotes a lobbyist – a state house lobbyist at that Continue Reading »

What good is self-awareness for [improving survival and reproduction]? The best answer came from the psychologists Charles Carver and Michael Scheier, who arrived at a vital insight: self-awareness evolved because it helps self-regulation. They had conducted their own experiments observing people sitting at a desk where there happened to be a mirror. The mirror seemed a minor accessory – not even important enough to mention to the people – yet it caused profound difference in all kinds of behavior. If people could see themselves in the mirror, they were more likely to follow their own inner values instead of following someone else’s orders. When instructed to deliver shocks to another person, the mirror made people more restrained and less aggressive than a control group that wasn’t facing a mirror. A mirror prompted them to keep working harder at a task. [Hmm, should I put a mirror in front of my desk? I did put up a mirror, on the wall to the right of my desk. JH] When someone tried to bully them into changing their opinion about something, they were more likely to resist bullying and stick to their opinion. p. 112-3

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

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

How much money are you willing to give to wealthy corporations and their wealthy executives? How much will you tolerate them taking? I am talking about free money. Gifts. Tax free, too.

Not much? But you already are.

Let’s see.

The State of Ohio – that’s YOU and your taxes if you live here – has awarded General Electric $115,335,000. Nice if you can get it.

Marathon Petroleum got $72,128,036.

These are massive figures. Even in this day and age.

And we get furious at Jimmy Dimora for taking some tens of thousands. As we should. But how about the legal graft that has become part of our give-to-the-rich culture? All the money goes up the ladder. To the top.

What about these guys? The guys that don’t get the headlines for what they take. They escape notice or exposure. Walk on to the bank.

How about Eaton Corp., the company that apparently now wants to shift even of its normal U.S. income tax to Ireland so it can escape higher U.S. taxes. Our state has given Eaton Corp. $30,417,493 and another $17,670,632. That’s $48 million Continue Reading »

The following is a second open letter I’ve sent to the Occupy Cleveland activists:

Good morning Michael Brooks,

Thank you for the invite. I left the potluck on Saturday telling myself that I was done.

I know that is unfair.

I don’t have nearly as much skin in the Occupy Movement — a handful of meetings and some food donations — as many others, so my objections don’t carry sufficient weight for me to expect change. I do believe that I need to be the change I want to see. I continue to be frustrated by the lack of focus on what I believe are core issues.

I would offer this weekend’s trip to Pennsylvania for the anti-fracking protest as an example. Don’t misunderstand me. I support the efforts of those who devoted time and physical resources in this important environmental battle and I recognize the value of the action to draw attention, but my early hope for the Occupy Movement was that it would help people to see that their personal cause was a symptom of a greater societal threat and that by addressing that threat in mass, everyone’s cause would be treated. I just haven’t seen that happen.

I recognize that I am part of the problem because I am not fully a part of the solution. In that vein, I will come to this Saturday’s potluck with a blanket on which I’m going to sit down and convene an Occupy Edition of Socrates Café. I invite you and Katie Kaplan Steinmuller and Tim Russo and Cle Guy and ZachyIraqi Schraufl and Rae O’Sunshyne and any others who wish to join me, to share some food and engage in the conversation.

Do all you can to make today a good day.

Jeff

I’ll let you know what happens next Monday.

As per my post below, I diverting my public conversations to what I see as a more profitable and significant platform: Civic Commons. This morning I entered two conversations.

The first regards the concept of doing more with less and the second is Jill Miller Zimon’s musing on open source software and government.

What do you think?