TALENT TRUMPS DUMB…
0844 by Jeff HessVia Mano Singham…
12 November 2008
12 November 2008
MY COMMENTS…
0824 by Jeff Hess12 November 2008
SOCRATES CAFÉ: THE MORNING AFTER…
0745 by Jeff Hess
Last evening the Cleveland Heights Socrates Café group met. We asked: What is the essence of beauty? For those who could not join us, please use the comments to offer your perspective. And for those of us who did take part, if you’ve had a morning-after revelation, please share it in a comment.
A great deal of our discussion revolved around moving past the beautiful or aesthetically pleasing to that which has beauty and then attempting to discover if there is an objective, universal essence that is beauty.
As always, we arrived at no conclusion.
So, what do you think?
12 November 2008
THE SWORD MUST CUT BOTH WAYS…
0715 by Jeff Hess[President-elect Barack Hussein] Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy”s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.
I agree with Ayers. Yet reasonable people engaged in intelligent conversation must be prepared to accept the principle universally.
We cannot rightly defend President-elect Obama’s conversations with Ayers unless we are also prepared to rightly accept Governor Sarah Palin’s conversations with the leaders and members of the Alaskan Independence Party.
And please hold the sputtering claims that that’s different. No it isn’t. Just as one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist, so too is one person’s whack-job another’s sage.
We can’t have it both ways.
And I prefer the former to the latter.
Via she who Writes Like She Talks…
11 November 2008
CHANGE AT CHANGE…
1117 by Jeff HessOn Friday I linked to change.gov and commented:
It’s our America. Keep it that way.
Over the weekend change came to change and it’s difficult to tell whether the change is a good change or a bad change. Transparency needs to come first. Retooling to pull the curtains closed is not good for our America.
11 November 2008
11 November 2008
11 November 2008
WHAT THEY SAID…
1043 by Jeff HessFirst, understand that the main problem right now is not the supply of credit. Yes, Wall Street is paralyzed at the moment because the bursting of the housing and other asset bubbles means that lenders are fearful that creditors won’t repay loans. But even if credit were flowing, those loans wouldn’t save jobs. Businesses want to borrow now only to remain solvent and keep their creditors at bay. If they fail to do so, and creditors push them into reorganization under bankruptcy, they’ll cut their payrolls, to be sure. But they’re already cutting their payrolls. It’s far from clear they’d cut more jobs under bankruptcy reorganization than they’re already cutting under pressure to avoid bankruptcy and remain solvent.
This means bailing out Wall Street or the auto industry or the insurance industry or the housing industry may at most help satisfy creditors for a time and put off the day of reckoning, but industry bailouts won’t reverse the downward cycle of job losses.
The real problem is on the demand side of the economy.
Amongst all the talking heads, I find Reich’s sense and sensibility restorative. I sincerely hope that whomever President-elect Barack Hussein Obama names as his Secretary of the Treasury listens hard to what Reich has to say.
11 November 2008
MY COMMENTS…
1028 by Jeff Hess11 November 2008
ARE WE ALL…?
0620 by Jeff Hessafter years of feeling ashamed you look up and you see what you represent on your best days, what you hope your fam represents–vision, courage, competition, confidence–is represented at the highest levels of this country. You wake up and realize that your best face, is the face of the country, is the face of the world.
I’m broadcasting live from Harlem at five in the morning. The boy has to go to school. I’ve got to go run my miles. I haven’t done a lick of work (as my mother would say) and yet. already, I feel the need to have a drink. Damn. Black people, are ya’ll ready for this?
10 November 2008
10 November 2008
WHAT THEY SAID…
0629 by Jeff HessThe huge opportunity for book publishers is to get unstuck. You’re not in the printing business. The life and death of trees is not your concern. You’re in the business of leveraging the big ideas authors have. There are a hundred ways to do that, yet book publishers obsess about just one or two of them. Here’s the news flash: that’s not what authors care about. Authors don’t care about units sold. They care about ideas spread. If you can help them do that, we’re delighted to share our profits with you. But one (broken) sales channel–bookstores–and one broken model (guaranteed sale of slow-to-market books) is not the way to get there. If you free yourself up enough to throw that out, you’ll figure out dozens of ways to leverage and spread and profit from ideas worth spreading.
10 November 2008
9 November 2008
WHAT THEY SAID…
0648 by Jeff HessCleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and all but one Cleveland City Council Mayor Frank Jacksonmember (Mike Polensek) thoughtlessly voted to give $1 million cash to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum for its induction dinner.
Now that”s what I call absolutely disgusting. The poor feed the rich.
This is business as usual in Cleveland. Mayor Jackson should break from the give-away policies of former mayors, George Voinovich and Michael White. Those mayors favored corporate interests to the severe detriment of city people. Jackson knows better.
Why does Cleveland have to pay a cent for what they”ve already bought with city taxes?
Let me get this right, we have a multi-billion dollar a year music industry unable to pay for its own induction ceremonies and dinner. However, the down-and-out city of Cleveland can fork over $1 million. How disgusting is that?
And what has our local dead-tree media to say about the million-dollar dinner?
9 November 2008
NO PRESS…? NO FREEDOM…
0616 by Jeff HessPost Secret founder Frank Warren got a lesson on a basic Bill of Rights principle this week.
Many people who haven’t actually, you know, read the Constitution of the United States of America, believe that they have an absolute right to publish what they want. That’s true only if you own the press — the means of publication — or you can convince someone who does own a press to rent you theirs for the duration of your publishing what ever it is you’re publishing.
We’ve come to confuse the press — the physical means of publication — with a mythical body of people who record events and then share them with whomever is willing to read, listen or watch what they’ve produced. The rights of the first are guaranteed, the rights of the second aren’t.
Journalists don’t have press rights, publishers do.
So what happened to Frank? He got smacked down by My Space’s owner/publisher Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch also owns News Corporation, which operates Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and many other influential news and entertainment properties.
There was no censorship here, of course. Frank didn’t own the press so he doesn’t get to have a say in what gets published on the press, the owner of the press does.
Think about that the next time you get all indignant about an injustice and post it on your blog.
8 November 2008
7 November 2008
GONE THINKING…
1714 by Jeff Hess
electronic until 1713 tomorrow as I continue my going out from Egypt.
7 November 2008
ANOTHER GREAT REASON TO LOVE CLEVELAND…
1231 by Jeff HessFrom The Lancet:
Studies have shown that exposure to the natural environment, or so-called green space, has an independent effect on health and health-related behaviours. We postulated that income-related inequality in health would be less pronounced in populations with greater exposure to green space, since access to such areas can modify pathways through which low socioeconomic position can lead to disease.
We classified the population of England at younger than retirement age into groups on the basis of income deprivation and exposure to green space. We obtained individual mortality records to establish whether the association between income deprivation, all-cause mortality, and cause-specific mortality (circulatory disease, lung cancer, and intentional self-harm) in 2001-05, varied by exposure to green space measured in 2001, with control for potential confounding factors. We used stratified models to identify the nature of this variation.
The association between income deprivation and mortality differed significantly across the groups of exposure to green space for mortality from all causes and circulatory disease, but not from lung cancer or intentional self-harm. Health inequalities related to income deprivation in all-cause mortality and mortality from circulatory diseases were lower in populations living in the greenest areas. The incidence rate ratio for all-cause mortality for the most income deprived quartile compared with the least deprived was 1·93 in the least green areas, whereas it was 1·43 in the most green. For circulatory diseases, the IRR was 2·19 in the least green areas and 1·54 in the most green. There was no effect for causes of death unlikely to be affected by green space, such as lung cancer and intentional self-harm.
Populations that are exposed to the greenest environments also have lowest levels of health inequality related to income deprivation. Physical environments that promote good health might be important to reduce socioeconomic health inequalities.
Go take a walk in your part of the Emerald Necklace this weekend. I’m going to.
7 November 2008
WHAT THEY SAID…
1019 by Jeff HessFor bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
Back when I was a magazine editor doing trade-show dailies, we called the writing we did meatball journalism, stealing the term from the Hawkeye Pierce character on M*A*S*H.
And then Sullivan adds toward the end:
If all this sounds postmodern, that”s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don”t do this and cannot do this-and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing.
A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor”s perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, blogging”s gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.
And finally:
The conversation, in other words, is the point…
Now where have I read that before?
7 November 2008
THE PERFECT WATCH FOR LEAVING EGYPT…
0945 by Jeff Hess
NOW, now… NOW, now… NOW, now… NOW, now… NOW, now… NOW, now…
