attitudinal bias: who says a "golden age" requires a reversion?

Menzies Campbell: Obama's search for the golden age - Commentators, Opinion - The Independent: Ah, now here comes talk of a "golden" age in a cultural and a political context, but the commentator also thinks of this as being a "reversion to some golden age." It's time for an attitudinal shift.

There are no reversions, ever, at least not given our current functionalities with time and space. We have the present: Look around. Isn't this sort of a marvelous era in which to be alive? Could it be the golden age is right here, right now, and all we have to do is to keep moving?

Could it be that the emergence and blossoming of a golden age has very little to do with the November elections?

“this election has never been about me. It is about you.”

The Democrats A stirring speech Economist.com: Barack Obama: "“this election has never been about me. It is about you.”"

A critical point for all of us, to take to ourselves, to internalize. This is beyond politics.

Table 7 on 09/16/2008

Dear Blogger--

Ah, at the beck and call of an email from the Old Road Warrior (parse this three-word phrase as you will), Table 7 awakens from it's summer slumber and begins to slouch towards Superior in September, on the 16th.

What's the upshot thus far? Where are we now? Will the appetizers be just a little bit heavier? Will the coffee be just as good? Will we find the anwers to the meaning of life, and be able to finance the plan-to-end-all-plans from amongst our herd of new-found friends? Will we get out in time to grab dinner at Marie's?

Will we have fun? I'm hoping to be in town and to see you there.

http://thefounderscafetable7.blogspot.com/

If you want admission to the Table 7 collaboration, drop me a line at timothyferris.thefounderscafe@blogger.com

Tim Ferris
216-255-6640

more Olympics: just wait until Saturday night

Channelnewsasia.com -- Olympics: US, Australian women advance to final in basketball.
The picture you'll find at the link has a young lady in it, on the right, whom I mistook at first for Katie Smith, whose fan club we naturally comprise, as family. She's Kristi Harrower, the caption says.

We're looking forward to tomorrow's square-off.

our Olympic Gold connection

This good news comes from an old standby business-systems supplier of ours, Client Marketing Systems (The Leader in CRM Software Since 1985) in Pismo Beach, California. Our cousin Katie Smith is at the Olympics on the women's basketball team (and blogging it, too), and now here comes another outstanding women's Olympic connection, Stephanie Brown Trafton.

Dear Tim,

Since you are part of our Advisors Assistant family, we want to share our excitement over Olympic Gold Medal Winner Stephanie Brown Trafton.

Stephanie Brown Trafton is the sister of one of our programmers, Nate Brown, who has worked for our company for 12 years.

Stephanie won the GOLD MEDAL in the womens' discus competition in Beijing on Monday.

It's the first womens' discus Gold since 1932.

You've probably seen Stephanie on TV already. She's been all over the news and on the TODAY show. She was the underdog. She came from behind to win the Gold, and they're saying it's the biggest upset of the 2008 Olympics.

We're so excited and happy for Stephanie. We've been watching her work very hard for many years - and it really paid off.

Hip-Hip Hurray for Stephanie Brown Trafton!!!!!

Warm regards,

Carol Dempsey
Client Marketing Systems, Inc.
880 Price Street
Pismo Beach, CA 93449
800 799-4267

reprise: Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones on MTB

Meet the Bloggers » Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones -- from October of 2006. It seems that the death notices are official as of this evening.

cut the fares, increase the service

RTA leaders favor 25-cent fare increase, no drastic service cuts - Cleveland Metro News – The Latest Breaking News, Photos and Stories from The Plain Dealer -- Time to talk about RTA board composition and board pay. Why are we having people who did not do so well in their prior incarnations, like Jane Campbell, continuing to have a hand in things so critical to our productivity around here? What do we pay this board, and should we consider cutting back on that? How many on the board are serving just to have a crack at qualifying for PERS, and should that perquisite be eliminated, too? We need to examine these cosy, and ultimately costly, insider relationships.

We need a better board with better connections and with a better track record of getting difficult jobs done to get us the money it takes to cut fares back to nothing, and soon, and increase services to make this the best transit system in the nation. The basics are already there. An attractive transit system is a prime economic driver. Period.

Mass transit can make the world go 'round, all day and all night. We must get out of this 9 to 5 mentality and see a bigger picture. Also, we must consider that it's easier to retrofit a transit system to operate off electricity than it is to do the same with all the automobiles. See Andy Grove's recent piece on energy on Portfolio.com

milestone: 700 LinkedIn Connections

LinkedIn: My Contacts: Connections -- As of this morning, I now have 700 connections on Linked In. It's getting interesting watching the seething, teeming mass of humanity assembled there, seeking knowledge of what they have in common, and not what keeps them apart.

I'd say it's a healthy phenomenon.

beginning to understand what it all meant

AWEARNESS: The Kenneth Cole Blog: After 40 Years Of Olympic History, Tommie Smith and John Carlos Are Vindicated -- At the link is a double YouTube play, about 12-13 minutes in all, taking us back 40 years to turbulent times, showing the beginnings of making amends four decades later. These guys created quite an uproar, were judged as being out of line and traitorous, and paid a terrible price over the years for doing what they thought was the right thing. We're now understand better what they were trying to communicate, what they were adding into the cultural dialogue.

From the perspective of now, we can only begin to listen better, to be non-judgmental, to take words and gestures at face value and not load them up with our own baggage. We cannot ostracize a whole segment of our society any longer; we cannot afford to hold each other apart. We cannot afford to waste time any longer.

Julia Child & The OSS: Oh, So Social

Julia Child, international spy - THE WEEK -- In the late '60s in Boston, I would see Julia on her way to and from work. She rode the bus.

At the link is an eye-opening recounting of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services and precursor of the CIA. Follow the links in the article itself. Go deep. Here's a taste:

Julia Child: celebrity chef by day, superspy by night,” said Judy Berman in Salon’s Broadsheet blog. She was already a national treasure for having “pretty much single-handedly introduced fresh, high-quality ingredients to midcentury American tables,” but a “mind-blowingly cool” double life, too? “You can’t get more awesome than that, right?”

True, she was “secretly more awesome than you already thought,” said Ryan Tate in Gawker, but actually her work in an “administrative capacity” at the OSS was already known. It’s “interesting to get confirmation,” though, and there are some great new details, like that she said on her OSS application that “her weakness was that she was ‘impulsive,’ because she quit a department store job once.”

Certainly “there was nothing covert about Julia,” said Robert Stein in his blog Connecting.the.Dots. In fact she “reveled” in telling confidantes about “her most dramatic exploit,” cooking up a shark repellant for underwater mines aimed at German U-boats. Her delight in that makes you wistful for “that innocent time when secretly working for your country was a source of pride.”

Child isn’t the only high-profile OSS member already identified as an operative, said Nick Gillespie in Reason’s Hit & Run blog. The “main takeaway” from these new documents appears to be the sheer size of the OSS. People previously thought maybe there were 13,000 employees.

The number of “notables” was also kind of surprising, said Andrea Stone and Emily Bazar in USA Today. The list of OSS agents “resembles a cocktail party guest list rather than a spy network.” With so many “actors, financiers, and socialites,” the internal joke was that OSS stood for “Oh So Social.”

blogging platform augmentation

Movable Type Pro and 4.2: Where Blogging is Headed - Movable Type -- I've been noticing that a few of the TypePad accounts around the blogosphere lately are quite stylish if not gorgeous, and it seems here that they have some functionality behind them.

I'm considering having the next iteration of our blogs use the TypePad platform; Blogger (my stuff) has become too predictable and identifiable, and WordPress (Gloria's stuff) continues to confound me. Windows Live Writer, a Godsend from time to time, works with all these platforms. We're also going to be backing up our bets with Near-Time for even fuller functionality.

Change of Address for Stephen Post

President's Corner Dear Friends: The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love continues as a non-profit registered in Ohio. However, the address for the Institute has changed to PO Box 1516 Stony Brook, New York 11790 In addition, the preferred email for me is now post@stephengpost.com. I can also be reached at stephen.post@stonybrook.edu. The preferred telephone contact point is 216-926-9244 (cell), or as backup, 631-675-1268. I will continue to send out newsletters monthly. Yes, I have moved from Cleveland to New York, where I serve as Director, Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate care, and Bioethics, Stony Brook University (SUNY). Thank you very much. Stephen G. Post, Ph.D.

	Institute for Research on Unlimited Love PO Box 1516 Stony Brook, NY 11790 -US post@stephengpost.com www.unlimitedloveinstitute.org

Stephen appeared on Meet.The.Bloggers a little over a year ago.

Burke Lakefront Airport named after HC alumnus

A few days ago, for some reason, I was looking up a listing of the mayors of Cleveland and noticed that The Honorable Thomas Aloysius Burke, Jr., had a Wikipedia entry indicating he attended "Holy Cross University." Backchecking on the Holy Cross alumni online community, I found that Burke was indeed one of our alumni of the class of 1920 at the College of the Holy Cross, and that his wife was Mrs. Evelyn Burke.

Burke Lakefront Airport (BKL), the sixth busiest airport in the state of Ohio, was named after him; it opened in 1947. Here, below, are a few notes from the city planning commission regarding the lakefront plans Burke set in motion. As a side note, the Cleveland Port Director when the Air Shows began at BKL back in 1964 was Captain Noel C. Painchaud, USNR (R), also an alumnus of the College of the Holy Cross, class of 1954. Hoya.

1947

Burke Lakefront Airport opened as Cleveland’s second municipally-owned airport with a 3,600-foot dirt runway and a small operations facility.

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1952

The Lakeland Freeway (now I-90) was constructed through Gordon Park, almost destroying it.

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1954

The Cleveland Aquarium opened at Gordon Park south of I-90.   Operated by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the City of Cleveland, the Aquarium housed freshwater and marine exhibits in a building originally constructed as a bath house.   A major expansion in 1967 tripled the Aquarium’s size giving it a capacity of 82,000 gallons, but by 1985 structural problems forced the building to close and the exhibits were transferred to the Cleveland Metroparks in 1986.

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1957

After additional landfill had been placed in Lake Erie, a 5,200-foot hard surface runway opened at Burke Lakefront Airport.

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1959

The northern segment of Cleveland’s Innerbelt (I-90) that would eventually wrap downtown Cleveland on its eastern and southern sides opened between Memorial Shoreway and Chester Avenue.   A sharp curve, created as the depressed highway passed under the lakefront railroad tracks and merged with the Shoreway, produced numerous accidents and continues to be known locally as “Deadmans Curve”.

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1968

Intercity Yacht Club was established at East 72nd Street north of Gordon Park.

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1972

The City of Cleveland leased property at the eastern end of Burke Lakefront Airport to the Cleveland Board of Education to build Aviation High School.

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1975

A confined disposal facility, holding dredgings from the Cuyahoga River shipping channel, was filled creating 114 acres of new land at the eastern end of Burke Lakefront Airport.

God bless the little Meweet

Teagan - Origin and Meaning of the name Teagan at BabyNamesWorld -- The baby has arrived, down in Knoxville, at 5:09 PM. She came in at a little more than 7 pounds and hasn't been measured for height yet--her mom and dad haven't turned her loose since she made her debut. And at last we know her name: Teagan Elizabeth. The kids have picked something that should please all sides of the family, with a little Gaelic and a little English derivation.

TIME - 10 Questions » Submit questions for » Tom Wolfe

TIME - 10 Questions » Submit questions for » Tom Wolfe: -- TIME now lets us interact with Tom Wolfe. Ask him a question. Here's mine:

"Posted by TimFerris in Cleveland, Ohio:

I’ve been one of your fans since the ’60s, and one of Norman Mailer’s, as well, and for different reasons. Do you miss having him around? That “lead dog” quip is whacked, but still one of my favorites."

Breast Cancer Fundraiser..

Right here in Brooklyn Centre at THE UGLY BROAD TAVERN  Sherry Perry and her friends are helping out in a unique and fun way.

For just $2 a ball, 3 for $5, and $10 for an instant dunk you can help raise money for Breast Cancer Research.

Never felt the urge to dunk someone, well then come on down and have a hot dog and corn on the  cob for just $1 each and put the change in the big jar.

oh yeah, did I tell you our Councilman Brian Cummins has put his hat in the ring and he will be in the  dunk tank from 6 to 6:30 p.m.

So come on down before TEN P.M. tonight and help your neighbors and friends raise money for this worthy cause.

 It's my birthday and my dear husband climbed in that tank and let me dunk him!  Thanks, Tim.

 When we were there this afternoon, EVERYBODY and I mean everybody was having a great time.

Gloria Ferris

doin' the epochs: media displaces culture

Op-Ed Columnist - Lord of the Memes - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com --Here's a marvelous piece of good-natured, high-spirited bombast from David Brooks, dancing around the idea of "epochs of intellectual affectation," as he prances through how the pith of McLuhan's thought has now come home to roost for most of us. A snippet:

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art.

two and a half hours in transport, half an hour on site

We just got back from cousin Rick's show over at *Asterisk. We RTA'd from Archwood-Denison to Tremont. We spent half an hour in Tremont at the show. The rest of the time between 8 and 11 PM was spent getting there and getting out of there. We walked a lot from stop to stop to kill time. The public transit around here is not conducive to mobility in the evening hours.

Tremont is a walking neighborhood incredibly clogged with cars. The bus stop to the side of Parallax was filled with valet parking. If the bus ran reasonably often, fairly late, and were dependable, the parking problem would disappear.

Sitting grousing in the grimy, sticky bus stop, we came to the conclusion that the public transit system has no real advocates, especially among those who run it. If there were advocacy, enthusiasm, and a sense of urgency and now of dire necessity, the funding would not have been cut back as it has been. The RTA folk seem not to be connected; state and regional "leaders" consider them and their mission expendable, and certainly not as integral as an economic driver should be.

Our RTA execs can be counted on to do something quite well: They don't make waves. Because of this, they get a nice retirement from good jobs.

bad timing, but what did you expect?

Tower City site appears to be top convention center choice - Cleveland's Top Story from The Plain Dealer -- It appears that the ConventionCenterMedicalMart charade is now making a feeble move to act as though they're serious about spending that money--that extra sales-tax money--that currently balances the county's budget.

I think they're trying to lock it up for ForestCityRatner and a dwindling supply of hypothetical conventioneers before somebody steps in and gives it to the RTA for the use of a million or so of us locals.

getting ready to get productive: crunching the numbers

This whole RTA discussion has made me think what it would be like to be a young person again, with a limited amount of cash, looking to be employable or otherwise earn some money. Back in the '60s, we went out and bought a car for $500-1,000 so we could get a job, from somebody else, and get back and forth to the job and to Kent and Geneva after hours. I'd imagine that same type of car would cost $3,000-4,000 today.

That's just about the same as the cost of a high-end Mac and some nifty accessories, or an IBM tablet with all the trimmings. And, all I would have to do to get myself the computer would be to put a car somewhere into a lower priority slot, get a bicycle, and pick up a weekly bus pass for $17.50.

The bike would cost as much as 2-4 tankfuls of gas; each weekly bus pass would cost one-half to one-third of a single tankful. My costs of transportation upkeep would be much reduced. I would not have to buy car insurance at the exhorbitant rates charged younger adults.

Economics writers like David Bach estimate I would be $7,00-8,500 a year ahead of my car-owning, or car-owned, peers.

On the downside, I would have to learn patience and tolerance, I would have to plan my activities ahead and with deliberation, I would have trouble going to a drive-in, I would have no back seat for recreation or sleeping, nor would I have a receptacle for my beer cans, my changes of clothes, or my McDonald's McMuffin wrappers, and I certainly would not have a glove compartment to keep a nickel-plated snub-nosed .38 out of sight, but at the ready.

Not having a car would have made sense for me, 42 years ago, and even more sense if I could have had the trade-off of a computer.

A computer gives you the option to be self-employed and independent, in lieu of or in addition to having a straight job. It links you into that nicer bunch of people our parents told us about. Even though you can't sleep in it, it is a complete office and entertainment emporium.

Young people need to have the option not to have a car, to buy their big computer right off the bat, to have reliable public transportation, just the same as we all need reliable public education. Education and transportation should be provided for the same price--free to the user, paid for by all of us--and used as drivers of the economy.

In cutting back on the buses and trains, we are again missing the boat. (Ewwww...I had to.)

the endrun around

The Sound and the Fury 2.0 Ohio Daily Blog - A Community Blog On Ohio Politics And Public Affairs -- Note what Chris Baker has to say about doing an "endrun around." This is how it happens, on the real-life/game continuum: We take from a rugby tactic and apply it to communications. The result is the same--we're running for daylight.

RTA should be a critical economic driver, not the first place to cut costs

I would like to comment on service cutbacks on our RTA system. I can't be at the hearings today, or tomorrow, or Thursday. I cannot spare time from our business. Gloria is taking this note of mine to the hearing at the library now. My thoughts--

--It's exactly the opposite of what needs to happen now. When people need to wean themselves from cars, they need public transportation more frequently, more broadly dispersed.

--When an economy needs to expand, the last thing we want to have is a crippling of the transit system.

--The public transit system is a prime economic driver, to those who understand how to make a proper use of resources. If it had extended hours, we would all do more business. If it had extended routes, we would all do business over a greater area. If it were a free service, our region would be without parallel and would be one of the first to prosper on the uptick.

--We have additional revenue from the sales tax hike ostensibly levied for the as-yet stillborn MedMart. RTA is far more important. Confiscate the additional revenues. Use them to do something besides balance the county's budget. Use them to provide extended and free transit.

--Demand that the state provide a lot more dollars, instead of cutbacks. Trim state government. We in the urban areas are more important than government jobs.

--A recent issue of Crain's INVESTMENT NEWS pointed out that government workers earn 51.4% more than their private-industry counterparts. Get this into line fast with pay reductions and cutbacks in all government jobs. Our communities are more important than individual jobs. Make sure that the departing employees get no buyouts, either.

--Take our money back from the state, and from the county. Use it to build out the RTA and to offer free service as a major economic driver. Be the first to make it easy to do business, the first to make it easy to be working and productive. Imagine the possibilities!

--Cut welfare. Give people free opportunity. They will take care of themselves and feel a lot better about it.

--Run the buses around the clock; make RTA the first step toward a true 24-hour economy.

WEN: The Women's Enterprise Network branches out

YouTube - WomensEnterpriseNet's Channel -- Here's an offshoot of MeetTheBloggers and I-Open, Midtown Mornings and Midtown Brews, communicating on multiple platforms, explained by Betsey Merkel:

I wanted to address solutions for anyone who has tried to view the Live Shows and interviews on the Mogulus Internet TV channel and may have had trouble viewing information.

Here's the situation:

1. We have several different platforms for our information distribution: Flickr (for photos) , You Tube (10 min videos); Mogulus (internet tv) ; Twitter (short updated comments). (See the same info posted to the sidebar to your right.)
2. If you do not have the bandwidth for Mogulus (you need at least 500 kpbs. If you are not sure you can measure the speed of any provider with SpeedTest) , I recommend you use You Tube which offers archived video downloads nearly always accessible.
3. At this time most of our content is loaded to Mogulus; I am gradually uploading video clips/summaries to You Tube of our existing content. I am gradually adding these links to each space's side bar.
4. For the multimedia (anything with moving pictures) we are using the Womens Enterprise Network Mogulus and You Tube Channels. If you have the bandwidth capability for Mogulus, use it, otherwise try viewing on You Tube.
The Ohio Library Internet provider has recently made an upgrade in bandwidth. You should be able to view the Mogulus channel without delays at your local library!
Thanks for your patience!


Categories: Brainpower Tags: flickr mogulus tools twitter you tube

1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person perspectives

+kenwilber.com - blog -- Ken Wilber's blog proffers the following in the masthead: "Blogging offers mental perspectives. . ." In this post, Ken, founder of the Integral Institute & usher-inner of the Integral Age, recaps "the 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person perspectives" one can have of the world, and of God. It's an interesting insight into being, awareness, and perception, from the point of view of Brother David Steindl-Rast.

In that blogging is a community thing, it then approaches being a spiritual thing, with lots of people and minds and ideas linking together, at least into one big brain, if not into one big soul. It makes me wonder how much manipulation the blogosphere and the internet will forgive, before it all backfires or upchucks on the manipulators.

Deep thoughts.

from the CRS newsletter: Theatre Benefit to Honor Rokakises

Kerri Broome of the Cleveland Restoration Society has ventured bravely to supply the plural of "Rokakis" in this headline from her CRS newsletter. Jim is a friend of ours and of the community whose proposal for land-banking the foreclosure mess should prove a boon to preservation of our built heritage.

find "Hidden Treasure" on 9/13
Jim and Laurie Rokakis will be honored at the Cleveland Public Theatre on September 13. The annual gala, Pandemonium, will feature a variety of entertainment by local theatre, dance, visual, and performance artists on the Cleveland Public Theatre campus, located on Detroit Avenue in Cleveland's Near West Side. Jim, Cuyahoga County Treasurer, was instrumental in launching our Heritage Home Program(SM) in 2001 and Laurie has a long history of community volunteering and advocacy. Tickets are $125 each and are available online.