Roldo Bartimole writes:

Do you recognize propaganda when you see it? The Pee Dee had a perfect display of it in today”s newspaper.

The Pee Dee has fallen in love with the so-called “Opportunity Corridor.” It is a proposed roadway that will slide people through poverty areas to University Circle from I-490 and East 55th Street. The drivers won”t have to see much as they speed along the proposed $350 million project. An overly expensive bypass, don”t you think?

“Few road projects hold so much promise for so many people,” wrote Karen Farkas. What data revealed that gem of a statement? The story doesn”t say. That”s because it”s made up by our local propagandists from the business community. Continue Reading »

When was the last time you saw a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker?

Sitting down last night to read Jonah Lehrer’s Don”t! The secret of self-control was a personal ahah! moment. Most psychology is mumbo jumbo to me but the work of Stanford professor of psychology Walter Mischel clicks.

And it all grew from a humble marshmallow.

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair.

Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she”s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn”t like them,” she says. “But they”re just so delicious!”

A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second.

Then he left the room.

What follows over more than 30 years is fascinating. Lehrer writes: Continue Reading »

Omit needless words.

And if you need more, then:

Mysterious at its core, the process works. So don’t screw it up. Omit needless words.

This morning the Plain Dealer has blighted the landscape of Cleveland Heights — and I can only imagine other Cleveland suburbs — with thousands (ten’s of thousands?) of sickly yellow plastic bags containing unasked for and unwanted copies of the Sunday edition of the paper.

The Plain Dealer even littered the hallways of my apartment building, forcing residents to collect and either recycle or landfill the newsprint and plastic bags.

Cleveland Heights has laws against solicitation and littering. In my book, this pathetically desperate attempt to convince people to please, please, please read us so that our advertisers don’t take their money elsewhere deserves prosecution.

Yes, I know I’m dreaming, but the thought of the sales and editorial staff of the Plain Dealer performing the worthwhile task of picking up their trash rather than generating it does make me smile this morning.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

What”s the problem with tax abatements, tax exemptions and tax incremental financing, all incentives that reduce property taxes?

Why shouldn”t Cleveland give developers as much property tax relief as they want? After all, developers are producing something in return. They are producing what should result in economic development, right? Making jobs. Revving up economic activity, right?

There has been an argument about this issue in comments to a couple of items I”ve written here for RealNEO, particularly on the Wolstein East Bank Flats project. The stalled project is loaded with freebies. Continue Reading »

Last week I requested, and this morning recieved via UPS, a review copy of Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God And Wal-Mart: The Making Of Christian Free Enterprise. For now, I simply want to share the flap copy with you:

In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America”s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world”s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad.

While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next.

This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart”s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.

…an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.

Just… fucking… wow…

Via Blogger Interrupted…

Thank goodness they didn’t perform My Lovely Horse….

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The Wolstein East Bank project is in limbo but that hasn”t stopped the City of Cleveland from feeding Scott Wolstein $1.4 million for land for a future walkway and park along the Cuyahoga River in the Flats.

The city, via two government grants, has paid Wolstein $1,417,000 for less than a half acre of land, according to a document made available to me by the city.

The Wolstein Group and Fairmount Properties – the developers – have been promised tens of millions of dollars in government subsidies in legislation passed during a hurried City Council session in May of 2006. Council President Martin Sweeney gave members a 57-page document one working day before the legislation was passed.

It”s so easy to get money from government that I don”t know why there isn”t more development in Cleveland. Oh yeah, there”s no market for it.

That doesn”t stop the flow of freebies to developers, however. Continue Reading »

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

But the whole game is based on a deep ignorance, and arrogance–an inability to confess how little they know about race. It really is the twisted vestiges of segregation that allow Obama to stand up in front of a bunch black Democrats, and say as banal and qualified as “The scourge of anti-Semitism, at times, revealed itself in our communities” and then get credit. It’s what allows Obama to say what black mothers have been saying for three decades now, and garner applause.

To which I replied…

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.

OOPS…! SORRY…! (WELL KIND OF…) The New York Times drops the other shoe this morning on Walmart”s faux mea culpa in the death of Jdimytai Damour – a $1.9 million dollar gift and a promise to improve safety at its New York stores during the post-Thanksgiving sale periods. Keep reading…

WALMART, CHARTER SCHOOLS AND UNIONS… I pay my monthly bills, put food on my table and gas in my car as an educator. And I”m not a member of any teacher”s union. I hear (and occasionally see) the same examples of educational malpractice that charter school advocates trot out whenever they can. Keep reading…

RULE NO. 12… DON”T NAME YOUR VERMIN… [Update — 0704, 13 May: Lowering The Bar offers further hilarity, including nutria recipes.] [Update — 1214: Dave Barry likes the story as well.] Readers of James Lee Burke”s Dave Robicheaux novels know what a nutria is. Among other valuable traits, the little bayou rodents make great fish bait. They are cute in an aquatic rat kind of way, but are not known as great pets. Keep reading…

THIS JUST IN FROM FAUX NEWS… Media Matters For America has the full analysis, but Worrierking”s comment made my day: They”d better hold off until after the 2010 elections. I”ll be damned if I”ll let anyone ram affordable health care down my throat. Hear, hear! Keep reading…

LIVING ON PLANET PALIN… I really, really wanted to respond to Ed Morrissey”s pronouncements concerning Walmart, Unions and the Employee Free Choice Act but the blogger formerly known as Captain Ed has restricted comments to his loyal fans. That”s really too bad. Keep reading…

THE STORY OF STUFF… I first posted this animation just before Christmas of 2007. Nearly 18 months later, the story, according to the New York Times, is gaining traction in American classrooms as we see the connections between the materials economy and our present economic crisis.Keep reading…

FROM THE 5 & 10 TO THE DOLLAR STORE… About two years ago, a dollar store opened down the street from me in a building that formerly housed a typewriter repair business. The store is right across the street from the independent local grocery where I do the bulk of my shopping. Keep reading…

MAKING BILLIONS… TWO CENTS AT A TIME… Back on tax day I posted the blogger at Durango Texas” lament that Walmart was purposefully stealing his two cents. Now another blogger has commented on his initial post with a detailed account of how the process works, like the house in any casino… Keep reading…

VOCATION VS. AVOCATION… Most of us have jobs and hobbies, and except for the fortunate few, the two never meet. For a corporation there can be no such thing as an avocation. It must, by design, always keep a tight focus on that which benefits shareholder value. It really is that simple. Keep reading…

YET ANOTHER REASON TO VOTE FOR THE EFCA… Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh are wrestling for the shriveled soul of the Republican Party. This week the former vice president jumped into the Employee Free Choice Act debate on Faux News where he rolled out the ultimate boogieman. Keep reading…

Last evening we gathered to discuss the question:

Are labels — Italian, skinny, blind, zealous, socialist, lawyer, tall, etc. — helpful?

If you’d like add your voice, please join the conversation by writing a comment.

From an email I received this morning from Slate:

The Slate Group is proud to announce the launch of Double X, Slate’s magazine for women. The site spins off from Slate ‘s XX Factor blog, where we’ve started a conversation that we think both men and women will enjoy.

If Slate thinks that the conversation is one that both men and women will enjoy, why segregate it away from the primary magazine?

I suspect that the move has nothing to do with conversations other than those taking place between advertising sales people and potential advertisers who want to reach a more targeted audience.

When advertising drives a publication, the publication is doomed.

I did OK in high school with my science classes but I only took chemistry in college and have forgotten 95 percent of what I learned. But I have always been a avid Science Fiction reader and learned a great deal over the years from reading Isaac Asimov’s monthly science essay in Fantasy & Science Fiction.

All that together allows me to broadly understand the significance, or lack there of, of scientific findings reported in the popular media.

Yesterday as I was scanning the news from Israel in Haaretz I came across this headline:

Study: Quality of Israeli sperm down 40% in past decade.

Here is how reporter Ofri Ilani led off the story:

The quality of Israeli sperm has declined alarmingly in the last decade, according to recent research conducted at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Hospital, Mount Scopus.

The cause for the decline is not known, but it’s believed by some researchers to be connected to the exposure of children and pregnant women to hormones and other contaminants in food and water.

Conducted by Dr. Ronit Haimov-Kokhman, the study showed a 40-percent decline in the concentration of sperm cells among the country’s sperm donors from 2004 to 2008, compared to those of donors from 1995 to 1999. Hadassah’s sperm bank is now turning away two-thirds of potential donors because of low-quality sperm, as opposed to one-third in the past.

Haimov-Kokhman’s research is to be presented today at a conference of the Israeli Society of Fertility Investigation in Tel Aviv.

Three questions immediately jumped to mind: first, how did the demographics of the tested population in the second sample compare to the first? Second, how did the second sample compare to an equivalent Arab population? And third, how did the sample compare to equivalent populations in other industrial nations?

Ilani gives us a hint on the third question:

Studies showing a decline in sperm quality began to be published worldwide more than a decade ago, along with research indicating a rise in the rate of defects in the male reproductive system.

I’m familiar with such studies which have implicated organochlorines found in pesticides as a likely suspect. Organochlorines are estrogen mimickers and their effect on amphibian populations has worried environmentalists for more than 30 years.

Local environmental activist Laurel Hopwood has campaigned against the use of pesticides for years.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

Come Oscar season, World War II films are such a reliable source of nominations that Kate Winslet’s turn as a sexy Nazi became a simultaneous joke on the genre and a lock for the Academy Award.

I watched The Reader on DVD over the weekend and I’d give the movie a 4 out of 10. Kate Winslet wasn’t bad, she gave a good performance, but the premise that a woman would go to such lengths to not admit she was illiterate was just not credible.

I still think Ricky Gervaise nailed the crux to the wall.

And then there’s…

Long ago, I asked my colleague, the esteemed urbanist and architect David Lewis, what he thought was the biggest issue of urban revitalization of our time. He responded without hesitation that the eventual decline of sprawling, shoddily constructed, exurban communities would make the urban cores of cities like Philadelphia or even Detroit – with their compact infrastructure, dense neighborhood footprints, and authentic and historic structures – look like a walk in the park. Not to mention that this entire development cycle is a giant waste of resources and a potential drag on long-run economic competitiveness and prosperity.