Yeah, they’re our elected representatives and technicaly they do speak for all of us, whether actually agree with them or not, but sometimes politicians can get so feckin’ full of themselves that the only thing missing in their proclamations is a royal we. Scott Bakalar has the goods on Lorain’s City Council:

My problem occurs after the Now, Therefore, :

In fact I would call your attention to this item. Word of Mouth ran a little poll in July of this year asking our readers” opinions on Craig Foltin”s job performance as Mayor of Lorain from 2000 – 2007.

How high do you thnk Craig I’m-off-ta-edekate-yo-kids Foltin ranked in his constituents minds?

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is TED: Ideas Worth Spreading.

I do believe that entrepreneurial capitalism is the strongest force possible for unleashing human potential and perhaps a relatively peaceable kingdom-from Tinmouth Vermont to Dubai to Nairobi. And, by and large, successful entrepreneurial capitalism depends upon the effective practice of management.

And if you believe Paul Weaver-“Effective management is management that delivers more value to customers and more opportunity for service, creativity and growth to workers. … The decent thing to do is also the smart thing”-effective management is humanistic management. Tom Peters

…it’s what we think we know that just isn’t so.” Shankar Vedantam has a fascinating story in this morning’s Washington Post about why people cling to blatantly false information; even in the face of authoritive information to the contrary. I always want to blame people with agendas supported by the false information.

But it looks like we just can’t help ourselves.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

The serious implications, Vedantam writes, are for public policy. Once lies and misinformation enter the society, it becomes almost impossible to root them out.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

Those notions remain widespread even though the federal government now runs Web sites in seven languages to challenge them. Karen Hughes, who runs the Bush administration’s campaign to win hearts and minds in the fight against terrorism, recently painted a glowing report of the “digital outreach” teams working to counter misinformation and myths by challenging those ideas on Arabic blogs.

And that’s very scary stuff indeed.

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.

The madam opened the brothel door and saw a rather dignified, well-dressed, good-looking man in his late forties or early fifties.”May I help you?” she asked.

The moral of the story is that three things in life are certain: death, taxes and being screwed by a lawyer.

As Rob Hawkins noted last evening, the story of Michael Righi has made it onto Slashdot. Unable to charge Righi with not providing either a receipt or a driver’s license because no law requires such intrusion, the Brooklyn police charged him with not cooperating with phony laws. From Righi’s blog:

Shortly after being booked, fingerprints and all, Officer Arroyo presented me with my charges:

Not being able to find the law in the books that states that a citizen must provide a driver”s license while walking through a parking lot, Officer Arroyo had to settle for “obstructing official business.” Keep in mind that the official business that I was supposedly obstructing was business that I initiated by calling the police. I called for help and I got arrested.

And people think Joseph Heller was just making shit up.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Sweeping Changes: A Practical Guide to Zen in Your Home by Gary Thorp.

When company has been invited, we clean and polish and arrange bowls of flowers… by ourselves, we give less attention and consideration to those rooms or areas our home that visitors seldom see. We have a different standard for ourselves. In Japanese, there are words for these differences: omote, what”s in front, or the surface of things; and ura, what”s in back, the reverse. Studying Zen is only one way in which we can try to integrate these two sides of our nature, to fold up the screens and open the doors and live out in the open as we really are. p. 44

A young person asked me not long ago — only half in jest — whether Labor Day was named in honor of natural childbirth.

Now fewer than 8 percent of America’s private sector workers are in unions, median wage gains have fallen far behind productivity gains, and for most of us Labor Day means a long weekend. Robert Reich

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Goodreads: it’s what your friends are reading.

I don”t believe women are meant to bear and raise children in isolation; they need mothers and grandmothers and aunts and cousins and neighbors and friends. Motherhood is exhilarating but also exhausting and frightening. Too many of us do it without a circle of women who”ve been there before us to show us the path. My place now is in that outer circle, the buffer between the new mother and the world, to silently support her decisions and help when asked. Terry Kanago

American Soldier: I sat in the terminal waiting for my flight to be called, my wife and I enjoying our last moments together. I remember them clearly and all the emotions involved. It was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Across from us was a couple the same age as us, holding each other’s hands and enjoying the moment. For me it was…

But today, for a change, why not a candle
For the man whose name is unknown to you?
Take a moment to wonder whether he died at home
With friends and family or alone on the road,
On the look-out for no one to sit at his bedside
And hold his hand, the very hand
It’s time for you to imagine holding.

From Candles by Carl Dennis.

Yesterday I posted about Michael Righi, an out-of-town visitor to Cleveland, who was arrested after a refusal to show a receipt escalated into a confrontation with a Brooklyn, Ohio, police officer. Jill Miller Zimon commented and then a series of emails flowed back and forth. Last evening Jill posted about the incident.

This morning she agreed to allow me to reproduce our email conversation below.

Jill at 1254:

We stop at stop signs because the traffic laws, as we’ve empowered our legislators to decide, dictate that we believe that that’s a safe thing to do. We don’t rely on people to judge for themselves whether or not the coast is clear in advance and then choose to stop or not stop.

Where do YOU draw the line re: it’s okay to be asked to prove something – like you paid for a product?

Jeff at 1351:

In the first case, our duly elected representatives are making laws for the general welfare of the represented. In addition, we have safeguards in place in our law code to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

Here’s where I draw the line: I am a free citizen of the United States of America, subject to all the rights and obligations of our Constitution and by virtue of that Constitution I may live my life free of official intrusion unless evidence exists that suggests I have broken the laws that govern our society.

Jill at 1340:

I don’t know that I like it or that I think it’s even necessary. You or others could call me a sheep on this one. But for me, it doesn’t rise to the level of so invasive that I would say screw you to the folks asking for the receipt.

A receipt at BJs or Circuit City just doesn’t rise to those levels. But that’s not to say that I like it. It’s just low on the totem pole of possible invasions that I’ll acquiesce to, or fight.

Jill at 2218:

I just posted this and hope we get more input. This is a really fascinating question to me and I want to better understand – and examine – my choice to not question certain actions when people whom I respect feel differently. I think you know me well enough to know hat when I learn of a difference in opinion like this, I’m always provoked to understand if I’m in the wrong, or if I really am okay with what I’ve thought. Max enjoyed having a discussion about this at dinner and I told him that I was just warming him up for when we hope you join us at the holidays. :)

Jeff at 0811:

Let’s take a slide down the slippery slope:

If it’s OK to check the receipt, is it OK to conduct a cavity search?

Jill at 0816:

No – I would not say it’s okay to all the if thens you have below – but I’m happy to respond in the comment section – wherever.

It’s a dialogue/conversation. :)

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.

Let’s see if I understand how the world works lately. If a man cuts his finger off while slicing salami at work, he blames the deli.

I must have lived too long to understand the world as it is anymore. So, if I die while my old, wrinkled butt is parked in front of this computer, I want all of you to blame Bill Gates

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Sweeping Changes: A Practical Guide to Zen in Your Home by Gary Thorp.

… many of us have too many things. The more things you have, the less time you have to spend with each one individually. p. 28

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is New Al Durah Film.