Roldo Bartimole writes:

You did expect them back, didn’t you? Oh, you had to.

They never stop, you know. It’s in their DNA. The 1 percenters. They WANT. More.

After the original sin tax passed, they came back for more – a $45 million County bond issue and then an added $75 million. Still paying for those at about $8 million a year. That’s a lot of money.

Then they came back – after firm promises not to – for a tax abatement, which they stretched into a tax exemption. Full taxes to never-to-pay. Cost: tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now they came back again. They needed parking. So the city built two parking garages at some $40 million

It wasn’t over. They came back for an extension of the sin tax – 10 years atop the 15 years. That’s has cost County taxpayers $88 million as of January this year. And it still costs.

So now what?

Oh, a sin tax extension OF the sin tax extension. Another 10 years? Fifteen years? Whatever they can get.

Our sports Billionaires – Randy Lerner of the Browns is leading the way and expecting to pull Larry Dolan of the Cleveland Indians along with mortgage/casino Dan Gilbert of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Three Billionaires asking for sales taxes on beer, liquor, wine and cigarettes from the many. To pay their bills.

Of course, they need a public vote. We’ll hear from all the usual voices.

HERE’S WHAT I BELIEVE IS A SOLUTION: Give it to them! Continue Reading »

0743: The menace of unpaid internships

0623: Another example of how religion poisons everything

Video streaming by Ustream

Snap observation: whole-brain teaching scares me. As I watched the teacher in this video I had Jim Joneseque flashes of brainwashing in action. This is the way you teach a pet, not a child. The children in this classroom are demonstrating that they can parrot back information without questioning, they might as well be learning to phonetically speak Greek, they are not demonstrating understanding. Am I wrong?

Charles Duhigg’s The Power Of Habit also scares me because it demonstrates the great good vs. great evil that arises from every scientific inquiry. I first heard about Duhigg’s book on Morning Edition last week. I’ve always been fascinated by how our brains function, but I’m particularly interested in matters of habit, discipline and willpower now as I continue my weight loss regime (211.9 pounds this morning, down from 265 pound in mid-November 2011).

Understanding how we can instill new, beneficial habits that we wish to cultivate is good. Knowing that advertisers and marketers interested solely in moving more of whatever they’re selling can manipulate the process without our wishes is evil. Wrapping our heads around what goes on inside our heads is our only defense.

Next up: Algonquin Books Executive Editor Chuck Adams & Literary Agent Sally Hill (from 733 days ago) and Why the Body Mass Index (BMI) is a Poor Measure of Your Health.

Previously…

While I’m not a candidate for televised intervention, I do, with the best of intentions, save both physical and intellectual bits and pieces honestly believing that they will be useful to me some time in the future. I come by my habit honestly, I grew up with a father and a grandfather whose boxes, jars and tins ordered the flotsam of their lives.

In my quest to Go Up From Egypt, I have made great inroads in reducing my physical baggage, but less successful with my online freight, in part certainly, because the links to pieces I intend to read someday simply don’t occupy space in any real sense.

Several years ago I began using the Firefox extension Read It Later to keep track of interesting posts and articles that I thought I’d like to read later when I had free time. Yeah, right. Yesterday I noticed that the counter for the program in the upper, right-hand corner of my screen showed 499 items in the queue. Four-hundred and ninety-nine, feckin’ items. What was I thinking?

I opened the file and sorted from oldest to newest and discovered that I had saved the oldest item nearly a thousand days ago. My initial reaction was to unload the program and toss every bit into the electromagnetic void, and maybe that ought to have been the correct response, but I didn’t do it. Enough of me wants to still honor my original intent and so I came to a two-part compromise.

First, I removed the two websites more responsible for my backlog (Boing Boing and MetaFilter) from my daily reading list and vowed to not visit either of those sites again until nothing remains in my Read It Later stack.

Second, I promised myself that I would read at least two stories each day — the newest and the oldest — and share each with my readers in some manner, whether it be a cursory blogpile note or a deeper investigation of my thoughts on what I read. Here then are the first two: Dr. Tae — Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning, flagged 965 days ago; and Sleep is better in two-hour blocks? from last Monday, 27 February.

I found this 30-minute video worth my time because it helps me continue my own wrestling with the nature of education and how our American system does and does not function in achieving at least our stated purpose of producing an educated populace. Tae has been busy since he produced this video back in 2009, expanding his work to include Dr. Tae, The Physics Of Dr. Tae and UniversiTae.

As regards sleep times and polyphasic sleep patterns, Mano Singham and I had read the same article a week ago Thursday from the BBC headlined: The Myth Of The Eight-Hour Sleep. Mano was a bit surprised that some people, like myself, are not prone to sleep in uninterrupted chunks of eight hours or so, but rather sleep in shorter bits and rise in between for an hour or so to do other activities.

I’ve always known that I tended to this arrangement of sleep patterns, but I’ve also always felt I needed to force myself out of the habit and get that good eight-hours of sleep. Reading the article has prompted me to lie down on my couch after dinner and enjoy an extended nap. When I wake up naturally after four hours or so I don’t go immediately to bed, but rather take 60 to 90 minutes to work on other projects. I’m finding that I’m terrifically clear headed and able to take on a task that four hours before would have been a real chore to bully through.

I need a lot more data to decide just how exchanging my artificial sleep habits for a more natural (for me, at least) pattern will play out, but I’m optimistic and intrigued by what I’m learning.

Next up: Whole Brain Teaching (from 794 days ago) and The Power Of Habit (from last Thursday).

Seriously folks, unless you can list a good reason why watching television enhances your life (and staying informed is not a good reason in the 21st century) you need to put every last one of the infernal diversion devices in the dumpster and quite feeding the multinational noise machine.

I tossed mine on the three lawn back in ’92 — yes I’m coming up on my 20th anniversary — and I’ll go head-to-head with anyone in a discussion of local, state, national and international news that really matters. Flooding your life with reminders of hate, disaster, suffering and death that you do nothing about is not healthy; rather it is the equivalent of the infamous psychology experiment where rats were placed in cages where random sections were electrified and the rats ended up quivering in a corner, terrified to move for fear of a shock they could not predict and avoid.

I think Mano Singham’s post on Land Of The Fearful, speaks to this challenge.

At our most recent Socrates Café (7:30 p.m. ever second Tuesday of the month at the Phoenix Coffeehouse on Mayfield Road in South Euclid) we discussed the question: How much worse is it to do evil than to simply allow evil to occur? In part for the sake of discussion, I took the contrarian position that not only was it not worse to allow evil to be done, but doing so was not bad at all.

I reasoned, that evening, that if we considered the potential evil we allowed whenever we made a choice with the potential to cause another human discomfort, distress or even bodily injury then we would become immobilized like the caterpillar considering which leg to move first. If we truly consider that our very act of drawing breath harms millions of our fellows – I’m not even considering the horrors we wreck on the rest of the inhabitants of our biosphere – then the only reasonable action is a quiet suicide deep in the forest where our molecules can be recycled. We are, however, selfish folk so the potential for humanity flinging itself into the sea in one last great act of selflessness ain’t going to happen. Fatalistically adopting the One Percent’s hedonism pretty much sucks as a universal strategy as well; living as a One Percenter requires there be a 99 Percent or the whole concepts fails.

How then do we live full, purposeful lives without sowing pain and suffering everywhere we go?

Very carefully.

Shaker Heights expatriate and Mother Jones writer Mac McClelland offers one meditation on the question in her most recent piece: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave. When I was much younger, I worked in retail and spent my share of time in the stockrooms. My work was never the Dantean circle of hell described by McClelland in the Internet shipping warehouse fictionally named Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. (I’m curious why McClelland – and Mother Jones – chose to not name the company, but that’s another story.)

I do not know how long I will be able to resist ordering anything on the Internet knowing that when I do so I force individuals desperate for $7.25 an hour in our America to suffer Dickensian working conditions (complete with repeated electric shocks) and supervisors who studied Emil Zola’s Germinal, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times for management tips. The cube farms of Scott Adams are heavenly bliss in comparison.

Of courser Walmart is there in the story, at No. 6, but so is No. 1 Amazon, No. 2 Staples, No. 3 Apple and 56 other companies with an online presence.

An early Internet meme involved a ubiquitous picture of a kitten with a gun to its head. In the real world it is not a kitten who dies when you click Place Order but a bit of a living, breathing human being like Brian.

In his Road To Wigan Pier, George Orwell asked his fellow Englishmen to consider how the glowing lumps of coal in their hearths were procured. Mclelland is not yet an Orwell, but her message is much the same: know and own the evil you do.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Newspapers are killing themselves. How? By giving the public the same brand of coverage they’ve always been offering.

They’re stuck in the past.

Generations of journalists have been trained in the same manner. The lesson of what a news story is supposed to be. It continues day after day.

It’s known as the four “W”s of a news article.

Who What When Where. And sometimes Why.

Newspapers have been selling a so-called “objective” standard for years. It’s not subjective. Any sense of opinion is frowned upon. Just the facts. Too often then the context is missing. The truth gets distorted.

I believe this is no longer the gold standard. More is needed. It is no longer satisfying enough.

Why haven’t they changed? Continue Reading »

When I was grade school I had a couple of magic sets and later, in high school, I worked for a time as an usher at the Colony Theater where magician Tommy Windsor used to hang out on Saturdays with the boss and I learned a bit of of close-up magic — mostly card tricks and coin manipulation — but I never quite appreciated the psychology and neurology involved the way I do now after reading Raymond Teller’s discourse.

They took women away when they tested positive., They always came back, but they didn’t seem the same. And most of the time they were visibly pregnant in a few months. Grace had never managed to convince one to talk about what had happened, but that was mostly her fault, not theirs. Once someone was caught, as cruel as it sounded, all the women in the community pulled away from her. It wasn’t her fault, but it was far the greater good, really. Grace hated the phrase “greater good”, actually. Perhaps they should replace it with “lesser bad.”

From ILU-486 by Amanda Ching…

Yesterday I passed a milestone on my way to my weight-loss goal: there were 50 pounds less of me than when I began back on 14 November of last year (yes, insane me decided to start losing weight over the November/December holidays).

Coincidentally I also had a doctor’s appointment yestrday at the Veterans Administration with my Behavioral Medicine physician to whom I was referred back in September by my general physician who expressed his concerns about my weight and what it represented for my potential to contract diseases such as diabetes.

We discussed my progress, all good, and then turned to the issue of eating triggers. Mine involve large gatherings and frustrations brought on by challenges that I can’t immediately deal with. When I was a magazine editor, I was the guy hoverng over the food table at the convention parties, but any gathering, including social affairs with a significant other’s relatives, are deadly for me. Most recently I told my doctor of a mini-binge (I managed to keep it from being a total disaster by binging in small amounts that I made myself weigh and record) brought on by missing papers I needed for my 2011 taxes that I could not retrieve until the following day; yes, I was frustrated by a 12-hour delay for something that isn’t due for 60 feckn’ days.

Like most people who attempt to affect life changes, I’ve gone down this road many times before and failed. So what makes this time different? I make the comparison to my quitting smoking. I quit on 5 December 1980. I had quit dozens of times before, once for more than 100 days — I’d forgotten about that, but saw my journal notes while looking for other information — and burned through three packs of Marlboros a day for about seven years. What made 5 December 1980 different? I have no clue. I just remember being done. Losing weight this time has been like that.

Other doctors have given me warnings. Not losing weight was the ultimate reason I left the Army back in 1986 (I was ready to go, but the Army wouldn’t have allowed me to re-enlist if I’d wanted to); but my weight slowly climbed from 185 pounds in 1975 to my peak of 265 pounds in 2011. Last November, I was just ready.

I have three tools that I can principally credit with my success: my journal, which I’ve dubbed The Self Hack: an exercise in physical and mental improvement; and my two digital scales: the first a gram scale on which I weigh most of what I eat (I don’t take it with me to restaurants or to my family’s homes) and my body scale from Weight Watchers that I use to record my weight upon rising each and every morning. My doctor tells me that more than any other tool, the journal has proven to be the most effective in weight loss. Of course, I’m obsessive about my journaling, The Self Hack is at 49 pages and counting, but just the act of recording is reinforcing for me.

In the past month, I became aware of two books that seemed of interest to me — Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain (I first heard about it here) and Willpower: The Rediscovery of Humans’ Greatest Strength by Roy Baumeister (I first read about it here).

My doctor was aware of both — we had spoken in particular about how we were both introverts previously — and he recommended that I read both books. Even though I’ve sworn off new books for 2012, I’m making an exception in this case on doctor’s orders. I’ll let you know what I find.

OK, so now they’re just getting cocky — snicker, snicker — and daring anyone to even mention pitchforks and torches…

1022: Heartland Institute exposed as a propaganda outfit

0834: Unintended consequences

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Does this make any sense? Or do we have the same pay-to-play game today that we’re seeing exposed in the Akron trial.

You figure it:

Cuyahoga County taxpayers are ponying up some $800-million dollars in sales tax revenue for a new convention center and medical mart. We’ll be paying for 20 years at about $40 million a year.

Despite this heavy public investment, here’s what Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s administration wants to do right next door on East 6th & St. Clair streets from the $800-million public investment:

With cooperation of Cleveland City Council, Jackson wants to give a $1 million low interest loan to the renovators for a Westin hotel. It’s a redo of the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM AN $800-MILLION PUBLIC INVESTMENT!

WHY? WHY? WHY?

And the terms are sweet for the hotel developers – Sage Hospitality.

The $1 million loan commands no payment on principal Continue Reading »

And it wasn’t a government grant…

What I want to know is this: what happens to the other $1,003,471?

…Out, so we can all join the race to the bottom favored by our 1 percent overlords…