Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The giant paint company Sherwin-Williams has had its headquarters and its main research facilities in the city of Cleveland since its founding in 1866 and has often boasted about how proud it is to be there and what a good corporate citizen it is, donating to the arts and charities and the like.
But like all major corporations, it has decided to shakedown the city it has long called home and which is under financial stress in the usual way, by threatening to move its headquarters elsewhere unless it gets a good deal in the form of tax and other incentives. And in a familiar move, the city and the corporation are not divulging the details of the deal being worked out.
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I tried to collect in one place all the adjectives that describe Donald Trump’s qualities and so far have come up with the following list, not in any particular order:
Ignorant
Petulant
Narcissistic
Vain
Irrational
Reckless
Misogynist
Racist
Xenophobic
Swaggering
Law-breaking
Venal
White supremacist
Corrupt
Paranoid
Cruel
Lying
Abusive
Cowardly
Vulgar
Petty
Greedy
Boastful
Spiteful
Preening
Vindictive
I am pretty certain that I have not exhausted the possibilities and am open to suggestions to add to the list
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Once again we have an utterly absurd fuss ginned up by Republicans over the fact that speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi had handed out to various people the pens used to sign the articles of impeachment. I had known that at formal signing ceremonies in the US, the pens that are used to sign the documents become important trophies that are given out as rewards. Barack Obama used 22 pens to sign the Affordable Care Act and Lyndon Johnson used 75 to sign the Civil Rights Act. Donald Trump also gave away dozens of pens after signing the trade pact with China, an event that no one will remember after a few weeks. But I wondered how you could have more than one pen and the above linked article explains what happens.
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Anyone who has worked at a large organization, especially if they have been in charge of a department or section, will have encountered the dreaded metrics. Someone in upper management decides that they need to measure precisely how effective each part of the organization is functioning and so they develop some sort of metric that is sent out which section heads are supposed to periodically fill in and return.
The problem is that unless you are dealing with highly tangible and easily measurable entities, like the number of widgets that are produced per day, metrics can turn out to be extremely frustrating to fill out and even counter-productive, as Jerry Z. Muller explains.
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In an excellent analysis, she reminds us to ignore the trivial fights that CNN and the other media love to promote and focus on what is really important.
I had been wondering about what would happen to the Equal Rights Amendment ever since Democrats took control of both houses of the Virginia state legislature last November and said that they would ratify it, making them the 38th state to do so, the minimum number needed to pass a constitutional amendment. But there were some issues that had to be resolved. I had been planning to look into those issues and write a post about it but Crip Dyke over at Pervert Justice has saved me the trouble by providing a nice explainer.
He describes how before, during, and after the debate CNN completely abandoned any pretense of objectivity and neutrality and single-mindedly went after Bernie Sanders, using commentators who all belonged to the political establishment that views Sanders with a mixture of alarm and disdain. He says that CNN ginned up the Sanders-Warren ‘controversy’ in a cynical ploy to boost ratings for the debate.
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This cartoon by Ted Rall describes the process by which the unthinkable slowly becomes the reality.
Nothing embodies the law of unintended consequences more than weapons systems. When drones were first introduced as possible battlefield tools, contractors said that there was nothing to worry about in terms of them being converted into weapons systems. They would only be used for surveillance. Now we’re using them to kill top government officials.
Due to other commitments, I did not watch last night’s Democratic debate and so had to read reports of it. As I expected, much of the media attention on the debate was focused on the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren tension that CNN, the network that was airing the debate and which provided two of the moderators, did all it could to promote.
Jeet Heer of The Nation says that the blatant nature of CNN’s anti-Sanders bias was obvious and that it clearly has it in for him, a blatant example of which was where the moderator completely ignored Sanders’ denial of the charge made against him and asked Warren as if the charge were true.
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