I bike. Not a tremdous amount, but I get around Cleveland Heights under my own power when the weather is reasonable. Maybe that’s why I was on the email list (see below for my illustrious company) for a news conference tomorrow. I won’t be able to make it, I have a student at that time out in Chardon, but if you can be there at:

10 a.m., Friday
Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency
1299 Superior Avenue (at East 13th St.)

to stand up for bikes and bikers, please give your support.

From Jim Sheehan:

Large volume of public comments call for ODOT to reconsider lack of bike/pedestrian access on new I-90 Bridge

After a public rally last Sunday where more than a hundred cyclists and walkers were urged to speak up about this issue, scores of letters and emails have been pouring in to the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency in advance of their board meeting on December 11th, when the Ohio Department of Transportation will present an update on the Innerbelt project.

The public was also encouraged to attend that meeting and make comments in person. Organizers expect more people than the board room can hold to attend, with many people planning to speak, using the full 30 minutes allowed for public comment.

Letters in support of a dedicated, separate space on the bridge for non-motorized traffic have come from individuals, businesses, social service, philanthropic and religious organizations. Congressman Dennis Kucinich Continue Reading »

Seriously.

Michael Fox writes:

But with unsteady employment during difficult economic times raising the threat of default, many Uruguayans risked losing their newly-acquired homes and ending up right back where they started. The answer: housing cooperatives, that could take out loans collectively, minimizing the individual risk while building solidarity among members.

“Collective property functions as an umbrella under which members can take cover in stormy weather,” says FUCVAM President Mario Fígoli metaphorically. “If I lose my job, and for a few months I don’t have the funds to pay off my monthly share of the loan, … my fellow cooperativistas will pay for me until I have a job again. Then I will pay them back.”

So, seriously, why shouldn’t Mayor Jackson propose something similar as one route to fix Cleveland’s housing crisis?

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Getting laid

Attributed to Disorder In The Court.

0625: Shawnee!

Found in my electronic chapbook.

[T]here”s something else you can do that may increase the effectiveness of your reading. It”s simple enough. You outline what you”ve read. For example: Two brothers are on their way to commit a big-time robbery when they run low on gas in the middle of nowhere. The service-station operator keeps telling them their car needs additional work and they sense they”re being conned, yet they don”t want to take chances. They let the man make more repairs than they have cash to pay for, finally robbing the station at the end because there”s no other way out. p. 31

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

I wrote 939 words yesterday morning and my total word count is now 21,380.

Tomorrow, from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Mac’s Backs on Coventry will host an Amnesty International Write-A-Thon in an effort to free political prisoners around the world as part of the UN’s International Human Rights Day. There is a long list of political prisoners, but I’m particularly interested in Aung San Suu Kyi, of course.

From Amnesty International:

The military rulers of Myanmar have jailed thousands of people in their continuing efforts to crush all dissenting views. Most prominent of those detained is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been the beacon of hope and change for two decades in Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma.

Aung San Suu Kyi co-founded the National League for Democracy, a pro-democracy political party that sought to counter the military junta that had reigned over Myanmar since 1962. In 1990, the NLD won almost 80% of the parliamentary seats in a general election. Surprised at the landslide victory, the military junta refused to transfer power to Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD, and jailed scores of political activists. Aung San Suu Kyi has spent 14 of the last 20 years under some form of detention. She was recently sentenced to 18 more months of house arrest.

Mac’s ask that you:

Stop in to write a letter—it won’t take long and there will be delicious raw food snacks and a fair trade raffle sponsored by the InterReligious Task Force. Handcrafts from Latin America and local artist’s work will also be on sale, so combine your holiday shopping with a good cause.

See you there. I’m thinking of live blogging at least part of the event.

Tuesday evening our Socrates Café met at the Mayfield Road Phoenix Coffee House and the question we pulled from the box was:

Is our ability to reflect upon our actions pointless and even detrimental?

The initial reactions were no, reflection often offers benefits. Upon further reflection, however, we discussed instances where instinct or training ought to drive actions and not reflection which led us to examine potential differences between decision making and reflection.

I wanted to make the case that reflection required post-action thought and that thought before action was more in the realm of considered decision making. That there was a potential for reflection before a decision is possible, I just don’t see it. To me, reflection ought to be tied to the image that the word evokes: that of our studying ourselves in a mirror, studying our reflection as if we were outside of ourselves in some sense.

We also spent considerable time on concepts of decision making and Free Will was thrown into the mix as well. As we continue to develop our understandings of brain chemistry and neurology, it becomes increasingly difficult to make the case for classical Free Will in the sense of conscious decisions to act or not act.

To the classical philosopher, the dilemma was the Pre-Modernist vs. the Modernist points of view: god is in control vs man is in control. Today the focus has shifted to the Modernist vs Post Modernist question: man is in control vs no one (or physics/chemistry) is in control.

We did not discuss this last evening, although I wish we’d had the extra time, but a post-modernist view changes our understanding of responsibility and justice. If no one is in control, those still holding to a Modernist or even Pre-Modernist view want to argue that punishment becomes meaningless.

I would argue that justice and punishment shift from being a socially corrective or protective paradigm to a repairative function. If are actions are the sum total of our genetic and experiential makeup, then aberrant behavior, however that might be defined by society, ca be corrected through the appropriate experiences.

In this sense, justice can become even more meaningful because we set aside revenge and punishment in favor of rehabilitation.

Sadly, there will be those individuals who are so broken as to be, in the absence of genetic manipulation, unfixable and justice would demand that they either be separated from society, for the protection of that society, for the length of their life or their life terminated.

The choice there is a whole other discussion.

This is what self-delusion and revisionist history looks like.

1123: Tough Acts to Follow

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shitting me?

Attributed to Disorder In The Court.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Understand, please, that I did not learn any formulae. I don”t know that such a thing exists. What I did learn, in a manner I cannot entirely explain, is a sense of the possible variations that could be worked upon the crime story, a sense of what worked and what didn”t. p. 30

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

I wrote 1,430 words yesterday morning and my total word count is now 20,441.

My family has been Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth/Mopar devotees (my dad sold his 1968 Dodge Charger before I got my learner’s pemit) for a very long time. My first two cars were Plymouths and my brother races a 1973 Plymouth Challenger. I’ve diverged in the ’90s, but after seeing this ad, I have to rethink my next automotive purchase.

Do you remember all the shouting and finger pointing at ACORN after some young Republicans decided they were going to to get the goods on the evil, communist, Jihadist organization masquerading as community organizers?

It turns out — why am I not surprised? — that an independent report, led by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, has found that:

While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers.

Harshbarger’s investigation further found that — gasp! — those young Republicans played fast and loose with the videos.

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

Clearly, these young Republicans, raised on the rape, pillage, plunder and burn philosophy of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, have learned their lessons well. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is off the table if you are to save the Republic for the likes of Democrats and President Barack Hussein Obama.

And, by the way, ACORN is now suiing the federal governmet. I only wish there were a way a judge could deduct settlement from the pay of every Congresscritter who voted for the silly law.

Via TPM…

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

The writer is a species of God–they create our world. There will always be limits on what we can experience and truly understand. We turn to writers to fill in the gaps. I trust, for instace, that India exists, but what I know of it has largely been shaped by what other writers have told me. I have never stepped on the soil of Africa (even if I had, that wouldn’t be enough) and what I think of the continent is shaped by what’s been written. Malcolm X is real, and Spiderman is not. Both are products of writing, and frankly, I’m at pains to tell you which of the two had a larger influence on my life.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year- old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He’s twenty, much like your IQ.

Attributed to Disorder In The Court.