Instead of figuring out ways to feed 9,000,000,000 people, how about figuring out ways to not have 9,000,000,000 people? The alternative is more likely Soylent Green.

I’d love to see that headline on Faux News.

From 1730 today until 1830 tomorrow, I will be off-line. There will be no new posts during this time, nor will I be checking email. Go for a walk. Have coffee with a friend. Read a book.

0834: Talented West Point cadet dropping out over DADT is from Ohio

0819: The puzzling opposition to red light and speed cameras

0653: How do you make conversations productive and more than just talk?

This morning on the Tim Russo 2010 Coffee House Tour I’ll be drinking espresso at the Phoenix Coffee House on East 9th. I expect to get there at around 7:30. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop in, introduce yourself, mention this blog post and the coffee is on me.

I hope to see you there.

My schedule for the rest of the tour is:

06 August at 7:30 a.m., Moko Coffee at 1505 Euclid Avenue;
9 August at 7:30 a.m., Steve’s Family Restaurant at 4457 Broadview Road;
11 August at 7:30 a.m., Gabe’s Family Restaurant at 2044 Broadview Road;
13 August at 8 a.m., Phoenix Coffee at 1700 East 9th Street;
16 August at 8 a.m., Artefino at 1900 Superior Avenue East;
18 August at 8 a.m., Phoenix Coffee at 1300 West 9th Street;
19 August at 9 a.m., Algebra Tea House at 2136 Murray Hill Road;
20 August at 8 a.m., Civilization Coffee House at West 11th Street and Kenilworth Avenue;
23 August at 8 a.m., Loop Coffee House at 2180 West 11th Street;
24 August at 7:30 a.m., Shipley’s Coffee House at 3664 E. 65th;
25 August at 8 a.m., Lucky’s Café at 777 Starkweather; and finally
27 August at 8 a.m., The Coffee House At University Circle at 11300 Juniper Road.

I won’t be hard to find, I’ll be the blogger with the bright yellow Why Vote Russo For County Council sign on the back of his laptop screen.

Which local political blogs to follow during the 2010 election season:

Ohio
Senate: Lee Fisher (D) vs. Rob Portman (R)
Governor: Ted Strickland (D) vs. John Kasich (R)
OH-15: Mary Jo Kilroy (D) vs. Steve Stivers (R)
Buckeye State
Third Base Politics
Open
Ohio Daily

I did my best to set Slate straight.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

BEFORE WALMART THERE WAS WOOLWORTH’S… Unions seem to think Walmart is unconquerable, but in 1937 a bunch of low-pay saleswomen at a Woolworth store in Detroit changed the retail landscape by demanding that the then retail giant treat them like people, not widgets. Keep reading…

BARRY C. LYNN ON WALMART… Barry C. Lynn, senior fellow in the New America Foundation’s Economic Growth Program and author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, uses Walmart as the example of how America has been sold. Keep reading…

BHARTI/WALMART OPEN 3RD INDIAN STORE… Because India’s laws block Walmart from opening retail stores, the retail behemoth entered into a 50/50 partnership with Bharti to launch a chain of wholesale cash-and-carry locations to sell to retailers. Number three has opened in the state of Punjab. Keep reading…

WILL REMINGTON GET THE WALMART EFFECT…? The fourth paragraph of WJZ TV’s report on a Walmart headed for Baltimore says it all: The Remington neighborhood could be very different in a year with Wal-Mart coming to town. The error is in assuming that the change will be positive. Keep reading…

COULD A MUSLIM PROSELYTIZE IN A WALMART…? With all the furor over the expansion of an existing mosque in lower Manhattan this week, I found one person’s account of proselytizing inside a Walmart interesting. Did the store managers know what was going on? Keep reading…

ZONKER NEEDS JONATHAN AS A COUNSELOR… Jonathan has been writing extensively about Walmart’s academic snowjob and the scam of private universities sucking the cash out of desperate workers terrified that they’ll never escape, let alone retire, from their no-future jobs. Keep reading…

ADOLF HITLER CAMPBELL BACK IN THE NEWS… Remember the story of little Adolf Hitler Campbell and the birthday cake. It looks like we still don’t have a conclusion and Adolf and his sisters Joyce Lynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Himler Jeannie Campbell are still living in foster care. Keep reading…

WALMART ROLLBACKS TAKING A BOUNCE…? Charles Grom, a retail analyst for JPMorgan, cries out over a 5.8 percent increase in the cost of a pre-selected basket of food items for July over the cost of the basket in June. I think Walmart just rolled too far and is scrambling away from the cliff. Keep reading…

WALMART’S JUST-IN-TIME SERVICE… Ann Aguirre’s tale of Walwoe won’t surprise anyone who a.) reads The Writing On The Wal; or b.) has ever shopped at Walmart. The key here is that when you cut staffing to a razor’s edge, you’re going to piss off shoppers who have a choice. Keep reading…

WALMART ON THE SLIPPERY SLIMY SLOPE… In the past Walmart was taken to task for tossing usable food into the dumpster rather than donating perfectly good food to food banks or kitchens, and to Walmart’s credit, it changed it’s policy and began to direct food away from the landfill. Keep reading…

Via I See Invisible People…

This morning on the Tim Russo 2010 Coffee House Tour I’ll be having breakfast at Gabe’s Family Restaurant. I expect to get there at around 7:30. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop in, introduce yourself, mention this blog post and breakfast is on me.

I hope to see you there.

My schedule for the rest of the tour is:

06 August at 7:30 a.m., Moko Coffee at 1505 Euclid Avenue;
9 August at 7:30 a.m., Steve’s Family Restaurant at 4457 Broadview Road;
11 August at 7:30 a.m., Gabe’s Family Restaurant at 2044 Broadview Road;
13 August at 8 a.m., Phoenix Coffee at 1700 East 9th Street;
14 August at 9 a.m., Algebra Tea House at 2136 Murray Hill Road;
16 August at 8 a.m., Artefino at 1900 Superior Avenue East;
18 August at 8 a.m., Phoenix Coffee at 1300 West 9th Street;
20 August at 8 a.m., Civilization Coffee House at West 11th Street and Kenilworth Avenue;
23 August at 8 a.m., Loop Coffee House at 2180 West 11th Street;
24 August at 7:30 a.m., Shipley’s Coffee House at 3664 E. 65th;
25 August at 8 a.m., Lucky’s Café at 777 Starkweather; and finally
27 August at 8 a.m., The Coffee House At University Circle at 11300 Juniper Road.

I won’t be hard to find, I’ll be the blogger with the bright yellow Why Vote Russo For County Council sign on the back of his laptop screen.

The teabaggers never quit so neither will I. For Teabagger Tuesday I bring you:

Try and Guess Who I am…

I was born in one country, raised in another. My father was born in another country. I was not his only child. He fathered several children with numerous women.

I became very close to my mother, as my father showed no interest in me. My mother died at an early age from cancer.

Later in life, questions arose over my real name. My birth records were sketchy and no one was able to produce a legitimate, reliable birth certificate.

I grew up practicing one faith but converted to Christianity, as it was widely accepted in my country, but I practiced non-traditional beliefs & didn’t follow Christianity, except in the public eye under scrutiny.

I worked and lived among lower-class people as a young adult, disguising myself as someone who really cared about them.

That was before I decided it was time to get serious about my life and I embarked on a new career.

I wrote a book about my struggles growing up. Continue Reading »

There was a time in the United States when employers were allowed to ask: Have you ever been treated for a mental illness? How many people who were honest and checked yes do think got any further in the employment process.

Today there is another employment killing box that asks: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Remember now that there is no what a potential employer can know if the conviction was for multiple murder or a minor drug possession and that just isn’t right.

That’s why the guy who sounds just like Tim Russo says…

This morning on the Tim Russo 2010 Coffee House Tour I’ll be having breakfast at Steve’s Family Restaurant. I expect to get there at around 7:30. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop in, introduce yourself, mention this blog post and breakfast is on me.

I hope to see you there.

My schedule for the rest of the tour is:

06 August at 7:30 a.m., Moko Coffee at 1505 Euclid Avenue;
09 August at 7:30 a.m., Steve’s Family Restaurant at 4457 Broadview Road;
11 August at 7:30 a.m., Gabe’s Family Restaurant at 2044 Broadview Road;
13 August at 8 a.m., Phoenix Coffee at 1700 East 9th Street;
14 August at 9 a.m., Algebra Tea House at 2136 Murray Hill Road;
16 August at 8 a.m., Artefino at 1900 Superior Avenue East;
18 August at 8 a.m., Phoenix Coffee at 1300 West 9th Street;
20 August at 8 a.m., Civilization Coffee House at West 11th Street and Kenilworth Avenue;
23 August at 8 a.m., Loop Coffee House at 2180 West 11th Street;
24 August at 7:30 a.m., Shipley’s Coffee House at 3664 E. 65th;
25 August at 8 a.m., Lucky’s Café at 777 Starkweather; and finally
27 August at 8 a.m., The Coffee House At University Circle at 11300 Juniper Road.

I won’t be hard to find, I’ll be the blogger with the bright yellow Why Vote Russo For County Council sign on the back of his laptop screen.

*Not related to Frank…

Perhaps it’s time I gave him another chance.

Paul A. Cantor writes:

In what might be dubbed the Amadeus or Shakespeare in Love method, Slater is mainly interested in showing how Dickens mined his personal experience to create his fictional characters. In a moment typical of this approach, Dickens visits an opium den and sees “a haggard old woman blowing at a pipe” and she soon emerges as the Princess Puffer in his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. There is nothing wrong with this straightforward kind of biographical criticism—especially in a biography—but when pursued relentlessly, it can become tiresome, and threatens to reduce Dickens to a mere chronicler of his day-to-day existence.

Why do I nevertheless insist, then, that Slater’s work is very much worth reading? True to his basic purpose, his is one of the best studies I know of the life of a professional writer precisely in his capacity as a professional writer. The book offers a minutely detailed, step-by-step account of Dickens’s whole literary career, from his early and spectacular popular success with Pickwick Papers, to his establishment as a respectable man of letters, to his unprecedented and unparalleled domination of the literary scene, throughout the English-speaking world, for the rest of his life. Slater gives sales figures for almost everything Dickens wrote, circulation numbers for the periodicals he edited, the juicy financial details of the many contracts he made—and broke—with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, and also attendance figures for the public readings Dickens started giving in the late 1850s. This book would be invaluable if it did nothing more than assemble all this vital data conveniently in one volume. What I would give to have comparable facts and figures for Shakespeare’s literary career!

Slater provides an intimate portrait of a writer who flourished in the rough-and-tumble, topsy-turvy world of the Victorian publishing business. As such, his biography can help dispel a number of Romantic myths that have grown up about the nature of literature and art in general, myths that have distorted our understanding of creativity. Dickens is one of the supreme masters of the novel in the English—or any other—language. And yet he emerged right in the middle of the world of commercial publishing, and never left it for a moment throughout his literary career. As Slater documents, from the beginning to the end, Dickens wrote for a largely middle-class audience, and, far from denigrating the bourgeoisie in Romantic fashion, he embraced it and welcomed his role as its spokesman and champion.

So many books, so little time…

A well spent 29 minutes and 26 seconds.

Mano Singham writes:

Cooking the books to make things appear rosier is not done just for psychological reasons, to make people feel good about the state of the economy. While it does help the government politically if the public thinks that the economy is growing, inflation is low, and the government is living within its means, the main reason for cooking the books is that these numbers carry with them serious financial and budgetary implications.

Of them, the most important is the inflation rate. For one thing, social security benefits increases are tied to inflation rates. By making CPI rates seem low, the government can pay seniors less. Philips quotes economic analyst John Williams who says that “if you were to peel back changes that were made in the CPI going back to the Carter years, you’d see that the CPI would now be 3.5 percent to 4 percent higher”- meaning that, because of lost CPI increases, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are.” So by keeping CPI numbers artificially low, the government saves money (which it then spends on wars and tax cuts for the rich) at the expense of poor seniors who are being gradually squeezed into greater poverty but may not understand why that is happening since their benefit payouts are supposed to be rising along with with the cost of living.

1916: Emma Larkin on Burma

1839: Protecting Tigers in a Troubled Land

1835: Patience needed for county corruption probe: News Comment of the Day

From 1730 today until 1830 tomorrow, I will be off-line. There will be no new posts during this time, nor will I be checking email. Go for a walk. Have coffee with a friend. Read a book.