Roldo Bartimole writes:

Flak-like propaganda continued to flow at the Pee Dee as it promotes Mayor Frank Jackson’s school scheme as the best thing since sliced bread (sorry Don Robertson).

Pee Dee columnist and editorial board member Joe Frolik last week wrote a piece that should have come with an advertising price tag. He lifted Jackson to sainthood. It continued the shameless pandering of Jackson by the paper. The headline said: “Jackson isn’t blinking on schools.”

Frolik wrote in praise of Jackson’s stubborn stance: ‘”I’m calling the role,” he said, “People are gonna say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to this…It’s all on us. No one goes unscathed here. Including me.”‘

Tough words from Jackson.

Jackson has said that he would even be willing to give up his post as mayor to help improve the Cleveland schools.

Such bravado.

Jackson unfortunately has never been challenged Continue Reading »

In one remarkable study, researchers in Finland went into a prison to measure the glucose tolerance of convicts who were about to be released. Then the scientists kept track of which ones went on to commit new crimes. Obviously there are many factors that can influence whether an ex-con goes straight: peer pressure, marriage, employment prospects, drug use. Yet just by looking at the response to the glucose test, the researchers were able to predict with greater than 80 percent accuracy which convicts would go on to commit violent crimes. These men apparently had less self-control because of their impaired glucose tolerance, a condition in which the body has trouble converting food into usable energy. p. 45-6.

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

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Via Mano Singham, of course.

We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories: (a) control of thoughts, ability to focus; (b) control of emotions, called by psychologists affect regulation or ability to control mood; (c) control of impulses, the ability to resist temptation; and (d) control of performance, directing energy to the task at hand. p. 36-7

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

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.John Tierney,Roy Baumeister,Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

You can help fix that.

I hit a trifecta yesterday. First, my weight dropped below 200 pounds for the first time in probably 38 years (I don’t actually remember when I last weighed under 200 pounds, but I’m figuring it was pre-beer). Second, I went past 100 miles on my 2012 1,000 miles of biking challenge and with the further loss of another half pound I moved down a BMI level to 26.9.

When I quit smoking back on 5 December 1980 (not that I keep track) people kept asking me if food tasted better or if I felt better and I had to honestly say that neither was true. The only part of my life that got better was that I had more money in my pocket because I wasn’t paying for three packs of Marlboros a day: about $30/week in 1980.

Yesterday, however, one of the counselors at Brush High School commented on how I looked and asked if I felt better and I have to say that I can’t believe how much better I feel not lugging around the more than 66 pounds I’ve shed so far. My hands don’t go numb from riding my bike, my knees don’t ache at night, my biking has improved so much that I ordered a cassette with a higher gear ratio so that I won’t be spending 90 percent of my riding time in 21st gear, my virility and potency have been reset 20 years and, this may be too much information so you might want to stop reading at this point, don’t say I didn’t warn you, last chance to look away, OK, this is all on you, don’t blame me if you can’t get his image out of your head, deep breath: Continue Reading »

Of course, here in the US, we believe in cash transfers too. Except that the money goes from the poor to the rich. Mano Singham, of course.

And that folks, is the nut, the core, the very essence of what is wrong with Cleveland, with Ohio, with the United States and the whole feckin’ Capitalist world.

I passed a major milestone this morning in my continuing effort to live healthier: my weight this morning is 199.1 pounds; the first time I’ve weight less than 200 pounds since I was a teenager. That’s 65 pounds burned away since mid-Novemer of last year and puts me less than eight pounds away from my ultimate goal of a sustainable weight between 185 and 191 pounds for a BMI of 25.

Because Mindfulness in general and eating mindfully in particular have been so vital to my effort, I’m rewarding myself with this Oryoki/Jihatsu set.

To the right of my desk I have a small hanging-file rack where I keep my active folders. The first file is labeled To File and the second To Read. The To Read folder always has way too many pieces of paper in it because one of my worst organizational faults is that I do not adhere to Charles Hobbs’ dictum to handle pieces of paper once as well as I should.

Last night I came home pleasantly tired from my bike ride – 5.15 miles during 29.42 minutes at an average speed of 10.3 mph; leaving me with 910.9 miles to goal to reach my 2012 goal – and after my dinner of beef curry with brown rice and broccoli I lay down on my couch to do a bit of light reading. Well, not so light, I was catching up on Mano Singham’s excellent series of blog posts on Relativity from back in October. Yes. October. 2011. As in five months ago. That gives you an idea of the dust accumulating on my To Read folder.

This morning I wondered what else was in the folder and just how far back did the stack reach? I did a quick tabletop first-in-first-out sort of the stack and found the oldest piece to be from January 1980. To be fair to myself, the folder is not 22 years old. I photocopied the piece – a John Gribbin science fact article titled “Carbon Dioxide And Climate: Burning Question” from Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact – before I gave a year’s worth of the pulp magazine to my friend Adam Harvey (Adam will be getting another year’s worth, 1982 this time, this weekend when I bring my Asian broccoli dish to his Orphan Easter Dinner on Sunday). Before I give my old science fiction magazines away – in addition to Analog I have Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazines, this last from Volume 1, No. 1 – I flip through to see if there are any seminal stories that I would like preserve. I can fairly say that I did read this particular article back in 1980 when I was fresh from my naval experiences playing with the Iranian in the Gulf of Oman, but given the current disinformation promulgated by science hating Republicans, I wanted to keep a copy of this piece around and re-read it.

The next oldest bit is a collection of articles from issues of Mother Jones magazine dates November/December 2010, January/February 2011 and May/June 2011. I purchased a one-year subscription to Mother Jones because I wanted to support the writers’ efforts and quickly remembered one of the important reasons I stopped subscribing to magazines: the flood of junk mail that quickly followed.

Third in the folder is my notes from Christopher Hitchens’ book Why Orwell Matters and four Orwell essays: “A Nice Cup Of Tea”, “A Hanging,” “Antisemitism In Britain” and “Arthur Koestler”. I went on a bit of a Orwell tear in 2011 after reading Hitchens’ book and rediscovered what an amazing writer Eric Blair had been.

The remaining two pieces are chapter nine: “Reading As A Writer” from Becoming A Writer by Dorothea Brande and Clinton Anderson’s notes on Chris Phillips’ Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy. (I really need to make copies of this last for distribution to all the new members of the Socrates Café of Cleveland – check Facebook and Meetup for more information – group which next meets on Tuesday, 10 April.)

I felt good discovering that my To Read folder is neither as ancient or as full as I had originally thought when I picked it up this morning. I’m now thinking that by Monday morning the file will be empty.

1112: The problem with Easter

America’s Top 10 Most-Polluted Waterways…

My hometown of Marietta, Ohio, is just 80 miles downstream from No. 3 Coshocton.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The Cleveland Foundation has awarded $700,000 to help implement the new Cleveland School plan.

In case you haven’t heard the “plan” is called the “Jackson Plan” by the Plain Dealer, broadcast and other media. Truth distorters.

The Cleveland Foundation’s $700,000 matches the Gund Foundation’s $700,000 contribution to the “Jackson Plan.” No collusion involved.

Just a team effort. A corrupt effort.

Of course calling it the “Jackson Plan” is pure nonsense.

This is a perfect example of how the news media really is the propaganda media. Don’t forget it.

The double $700,000 gifts for the plan – which despite some good aspects is a take out of the Cleveland Teachers Union – is bought and paid for by the city’s two biggest foundations.

Therefore, it is the “Foundation Plan” not Continue Reading »

I’ve written two thoughts over the last couple of days that I think are coming together as part of a personal gestalt.

The first was a response to a thought from Amy Harmon on her Facebook page. Amy wrote: Pondering how to be excited about a religion without being a zealot or offend others, and I replied that I thought the solution is simple: quietly practice your faith, be a perfect stranger and become the change you want to see.

The second I wrote this morning as I contemplate Buddhism, Truths and my personal journey toward mindfulness. I wrote: What is the answer? We have known the answer at least since 535 BCE (more than 2,500 years ago) when Siddhartha Gautama achieved Enlightenment. The answer is found in the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.

In both cases the answers are short, direct, easily understood and motherfuckers to implement across a lifetime.

There are no red pills.

This is, in part, what I believe my brother Cavana and I are wrestling with concerning the microcosm of Trayvon Martin and the macrocosm of living in a mutually beneficial and supportive society.

(Just an aside, before his post yesterday, Cav had neglected his Left Thumbprint blog for several months. I’m very happy to see him writing there again.)

This morning Cav wrote:

The bottom line falsehood is I “raised myself up by my own bootstraps” or I built the house I was born in, I got mine now you get yours, ignoring the uneven terrain.

In the past I’ve just given up on such ubiquitous ignorance. I am not even surprised any more that it still exists. This basic lack of understanding and in my opinion lack of basic decency, because it is so ignorant… choosing to ignore is not relegated to “race,” or class, or religion or gender but we all identify with our special interest groups and point at the shortfalls in all of the other groups thus making ourselves just like them. So sadly much of the time I have to name myself among the careless.

I now realize that in life, in living and navigating through this world that the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it and narrow is the gate, and straitened the way, that leads unto life, and few are they that find it. There are few who find it because there are few who seek it out. Being comfortable at the expense of others is so easy, so easy. I check myself more and more to make sure I am on the right path going through the right gate.

That last line struck me hard between the eyes because it made me think of a similar statement concerning sanity: if you think you might be crazy, you’re not. The most dangerous members of a society are those who know they’re right and want you to know how right they are. That may be the nut of what makes a reactionary.

As Cav suggests, if you’re comfortable, you are not part of the solution but rather a source for the problem, and I cannot help but follow that line to Finely Peter Dunne’s 19th century maxim: The job of the [journalist] is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

This, more than any other reason, is why I’m putting the time I can into the Occupy Cleveland movement. I feel I have to afflict the comfortable, to cease, as Cav suggests, living among the careless.

I confess that until this very moment I have never considered that powerful meaning of that word: careless, to live without care. Without care for others, without care for myself; to be; to sleepwalk through my very brief existence.

What a horror that truly is.

The experiments consistently demonstrated two lesson: first, you have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it; and second, you use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks. p. 35

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

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Earlier today I passed along Mano Singham’s thoughts on the Trayvon Martin case to my brother Cavana Faithwalker and Mano’s words sparked a response from Cav that I’ve been contemplating for a considerable time this evening.

Trayvon Martin is not important because he is tragically not unique, he is ubiquitous.

As Cav wrote:

Trayvon is my dark skinned daughter who many believe to be ignorant, unrefined, “ghetto,” as if they know the ghetto, and belligerent because of the color of her skin before she speaks or acts, sans hoodie and even many times afterward despite the contrary evidence.

Trayvon is every middle-classed Black person discounted as naturally knowledgeable (I worked for my degree and any knowledge I may have amassed like you worked for yours, don’t get it twisted) and exotic by many liberal white folk who sadly truly believe they are color-blind though the be far from it.

These are the ignorant that demand our attention. Trayvon is every Black person ostracized and put in a box by her or his “own” Black folk for being too White, too educated, too articulate, this is the ghetto mind as opposed to saggin and gangsta rap. God forbid Black folk should like European classical music and art, Carly Simon, even Tracy Chapman or Frank Sinatra, eat Beef Wellington and know what the heck Vichyssoise is. (Did I spell that correctly?)

What is Black anyhow? Trayvon is me. And if you are not dark skinned know that by extension Trayvon is even you, you better recognize… It’s almost too late.

I’m about as not-Black as can be. I’m German and Welsh on my father’s side and French and Northern Italian on my mother’s side. I know that by virtue of my European heritage I’m part of an elite with privileges that most of the others who live on this blue marble cannot even dream of.

That reality does not please me and I feel a void where my action to heal the damage ought to be.

My Brother is right. Trayvon is me because I have more in common with that young man than I ever will have with the bosses and thieves who do all they can to ensure that young men like Trayvon frighten me and that those young men are, in turn, frightened of me.

To borrow the line from Frank Herbert, fear is the mind-killer. We have to stop living in fear of the threat that does not exist.

0605: NPR story on bullying

0552: Charles Murray on The Colbert Report

Mano Singham writes:

In the Trayvon Martin case, the initial facts were that a young unarmed black man walking in a residential neighborhood at night was shot dead by a Hispanic white neighborhood watch person who had suspicions that Martin did not belong there and had some criminal intent. Using just this data, it is easy to construct two stories that are plausible, depending on one’s ideological presuppositions. One is that of Zimmerman as a prejudiced person who was itching to be a crime fighting Dirty Harry shooting an innocent person merely because the latter fitted his racial stereotype of a criminal. The other narrative is that Zimmerman, although mistaken in his judgment of Martin, had good reason to be suspicious of him and was not guilty of racial malice, and may even have been defending himself from attack.

Either of these narratives may or may not eventually turn out to be largely true but once people picked one early, it became the one to be defended even if they had no idea if it was true or not. People on both sides have now dug in their heels and refuse to moderate their early strong stands since that would involve a loss of face or admitting they might be wrong. Instead they highlight evidence that supports their case and try to poke holes in anything that does not agree with it. This is an example of the danger Sherlock Holmes warned about to Dr. Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia when he said, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

This is why in such situations, rather than quickly deciding guilt and innocence, the only call for action that makes sense is for a full, open, and transparent investigation of all the facts that can then be weighed carefully. In other words, System 2 needs to be brought in. Carrying out the due processes of law may not be emotionally satisfying to satisfy our System 1 needs for quick answers, but we have got to get into the habit of doing so to prevent every tragedy of this sort becoming a full-fledged circus with two competing sides seeking to ‘win’ their case in the media, because then truth becomes the ultimate loser.

System Two… Engaging…