Pro-life Americans, Terry said, are the ethical heirs of Northern abolitionists, who refused to flinch when the violent Nat Turner rebellion sent Southern slave owners into an angry panic. Tiller’s murder, he reasoned, was like the Turner rebellion–the sort of event that becomes inevitable when systemic injustice thrives. “They want to blame our rhetoric,” Terry said. “They don’t want to face that child killing has something so insidious inside of it that it will boil over and create havoc and heartache and violence.”
Regardless of the final count tomorrow, I think this will be a huge milestone of democracy in the Middle East. While Iranians have in the past made bad choices, they are WAY ahead of their peers in the Muslim World when it comes to democracy.
In 1905, before the vast majority of Muslim states even declared independence, Iran already had a constitution and the right to vote given to all men. Iran had an actual revolution the year after, where people fought the monarch”s men in the streets so they could protect their new rights.
From 1940 to 1952, Iran actually had an almost functional democracy, while most of its neighbors either had dictators or monarchs. Iranians brought about another revolution for expanded political rights in 1979, before most of the Eastern European nations threw off the yoke of Communism.
Let”s hope they teach a thing or two to their neighbors again tomorrow.
Have we hit bottom yet? Worse job news suggests not. George Zeller today reported new unemployment claims as “alarmingly high and still accelerating in Ohio.”
The figures, he writes in his 12-page report, means that Cuyahoga County, the Cleveland-Akron-Lorain-Elyria area and Ohio are all still losing employment during early June 2009 and “at an accelerating rate.” Not good news for the state or northeastern Ohio.
“The data for the new week were once again extremely discouraging in the U. S. nationally, and they were once again alarmingly unfavorable in Ohio. The level of new claims in Cuyahoga County remained disturbingly high in a new week.” Continue Reading »
While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method.
I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from Continue Reading »
At the Holocaust Museum in Washington this day, the history of human hatred marks a moment of convergence as an 88-year-old shooter, enraged about Jews and blacks, opens fire only hours before the scheduled performance of a new play about an imagined meeting between 15-year-old Anne Frank, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, and Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy murdered in Mississippi a decade later for whistling at a white woman.
Could this degenerate waste of human genome have thought he was getting a twofer?
Somebody is going to have to reform the reform movement on County government. Otherwise reform appears dead on arrival once again.
Why would anyone want to set up a Cleveland City Council for the County? It doesn”t make sense to me.
What you”d have are 11 new politicians who all will need new staff and an expense account, creating 11 more fiefdoms. The 11 all by themselves would provide the unnecessary political egos for mischief. And, as someone pointed out to me, these 11 won”t even be legislators – as City Council members are – because we don”t have County laws as we have municipal laws.
About a month ago, in a conscious effort to carry on her father’s tradition and to commemorate his birthday, my wife Helen paid her own solo visit to the Museum. She arrived at the end of a busy work day, in a rush, just a few minutes before closing time. Unfortunately, given the late hour, they had run out of the candles usually provided in the Hall of Remembrance for visitors to light and leave in the niches of the outer walls.
Already feeling emotional — her dad had passed away just six months before — she broke down sobbing.
A staffer nearby immediately came to her assistance, asking if she needed help. She explained, and the gentleman asked her to wait. He soon returned with a candle, explaining with a conspiratorial wink that he kept his own special supply for such emergencies.
For this and other reasons, read the whole post, Blumenthal considers the security force at the Holocaust Museum to be family. As should we all. Blumenthal notes in an update that the security guard, Officer Steven Tyrone Johns, has not survived the attack. And so we say…
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, Robert Feinman and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.
WALMART TO ADD ONE-THIRD FEWER JOBS… That”s not the headline you”re reading after the announcement yesterday that Walmart intends to add 22,000 news jobs in 2009. News-release hooked journalists lede with the 2009 number and most miss that in 2008, the company added 33,000 jobs. Keep reading…
MORE ON THOSE 22,000 MCJOBS AT WALMART… Walmart made big news – finding a headline that didn”t scream Walmart creates 22,000 jobs would have been difficult – with its jobs growth prediction this week, but financial writer Douglas McIntyre spotted an interesting twist on the story. Keep reading…
ANOTHER MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR SETTLEMENT… Yes, Walmart is settling with yet another state, this time Minnesota, on wages and hours abuses by the company. But the recent comments from laid-off Walmart worker Nana have stuck with me about the size of these suits. Keep reading…
FOR THE FALLING PRICE OF $3.99 $2.19… I really feel for academics like Jonathan who have to deal with students interested only in the outcome and not the process. So I find it fascinating the number of students who went online to buy the answer to this Walmart question: Keep reading…
WALMART DISCOUNTS SCHEDULE II DRUG… Did you know that Walmart has a secret list of medications on its infamous $4 list? Me neither. But it appears, for now, that only one drug – methylphenidate, commonly known as Ritalin – is on the list. Why is that? Jacob Milbradt speculates: Keep reading…
Cleveland”s Forest City developers get walloped by N. Y. Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff for the design of a new basketball arena in Brooklyn N. Y. “A colossal, spiritless box,” he writes.
Ouroussoff writes that the arena design for the Nets team would make it “fit more comfortably in a cornfield than at one of the busiest intersections of a vibrant metropolis.”
I don”t believe in western morality, i.e. don”t kill civilians or children, don”t destroy holy sites, don”t fight during holiday seasons, don”t bomb cemeteries, don”t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral.
The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).
The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East. First, the Arabs will stop using children as shields. Second, they will stop taking hostages knowing that we will not be intimidated. Third, with their holy sites destroyed, they will stop believing that G-d is on their side. Result: no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.
Zero tolerance for stone throwing, for rockets, for kidnapping will mean that the state has achieved sovereignty. Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.
Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: what will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?
Always include nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community.
Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.
Always supply local needs first. (And only then think of exporting their products, first to nearby cities, and then to others.
Understand the unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of labor saving if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination. Continue Reading »
I spend a lot of time (and money) in coffee houses, but you all know that. This afternoon as I was getting a Matte with honey at the Mayfield Road Phoenix, barista Kim handed me one of those little individual containers of honey.
In the past, I know the store has had a problem with people walking off with the honey container and periodically it has been moved behind the counter. I first assumed that this was another way of foiling the honey thieves, but this time there’s another twist. One driven by our hard economic times. The baristas are struggling with the making of hobo lattes.
What’s a hobo latte? It’s the 21st century cousin of the depression era ketchup soup. You ask the barista for a small coffee in a large cup (or, if you can, just a cup of hot water, and then you pour honey and cream or milk in to fill the cup. The milk and cream are not that expensive, but honey is, hence the introduction of the single-serve packets.
To do a small part I bought a guzzler card good for small coffees and asked the baristas to punch the card whenever a hobo latte candidate comes to the counter.
Maybe you’ll do the same where you buy your coffee?
I don’t say this to be provocative, but there is no way to get around this–Slavery was big business. The antebellum Southern economy didn’t have slavery as an unfortunate appendage–it was it’s trunk, not a branch. We’re not even talking about the damage done to the slaves themselves.
We have never grappled with this. We tend to think about America as a country, like all other countries of that era, where slavery was legal. This is a vast understatement, it would seem. More accurately, we were a country in which half the society, the antebellum South, was a slave society.
We have never publicly grappled with that. And I don’t think we ever will. The damage is done, and we don’t have the will–or maybe even the ability–to repair it. My greatest fear is that Obama isn’t the end of something, but that he’s just a small respite before a horrible reckoning.
Forest City Enterprises is taking a beating in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, N.Y. that is.
Read in Gehry leaves Brooklyn megaproject how Forest City dumped architect Frank Gehry for Ellerby Becket, a Minnesota firm. The article notes that Ellerby Becket has a “numbing track record of uninspired sport complexes” to its credit. Of course, Ellerby Becket designed Gund Quicken Arena in Cleveland.
Pressuring Forest City”s desires for development in Brooklyn is a community organization that operates as real community organization should – hit the developers, and then hit them again, and then again. Would that Cleveland has such a creature.
They also dispense RU-486. When I asked one of the directors why, I was told, “We follow the law of love.” They came to the conclusion that when a dilemma doesn’t present black-and-white choices, Christians have to do the most loving thing. Once they looked at it in those terms, it became clear that for an orphaned, eleven-year-old rape victim in a collapsed state with no adoption system and overcrowded orphanages, the most loving thing to do is not to force one child to deliver another who would inevitably suffer and almost certainly die. The most loving thing to do for those girls is to end potential pregnancies with grief for the horror that the living and the yet-to-be-born have to endure.
If any result from the murder of Dr. George Tiller can be said to be good, it must be this, that our national conversation on a woman’s right to choose has changed. How much, it is too early to say. But The Daily Dish reader’s do give a glimpse.
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. —Marge Piercy, For the young who want to in The Moon Is Always Female
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At day’s first light, have in readiness, against disinclination to leave your bed, the thought that “I am rising for the work of man.” Must I grumble at setting out to do what I was born for and for the sake of which I have been brought into the world? Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under my blankets and keep myself warm? “Ah, but it is a great deal more pleasant!” Was it for pleasure, then, that you were born and not for work? —Marcus Aurelius
Let me respectfully remind you, life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken-- Awaken! This night your days will be diminished by one. Take heed. Do not squander your life. —Zen Evening Gatha
Take an ax to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. —Rumi, Quietness
