Did Bribery Bring Red Light Cameras?

A lawsuit points to widespread bribery and gifts paving the way for the arrival and use of red light cameras in Tennessee and other states.

KnoxViews has some details.

Nashville Scene notes the cities in Tennessee - including my own here in Morristown - which should be examined.

Turn Left At Greenland - The Beatles and America

It's my earliest memory.

Watching The Beatles on TV on a Sunday in February 1964.

I was only three but this event was new, different. I can recall there was some yelling involved - my siblings were yelling and singing while watching TV standing up and jumping around. That was not they way we usually watched TV.

There had been some yelling before that too - some serious tension from my parents who did not think this Beatles thing on a Sunday of all days was good. It was bad.

Youth won out. My brother and sister and I watched it all.

My minister father really disapproved. And yet by the end of the 1960s, his hair was growing over his collar and his sideburns had gotten long. 

That night in 1964 quickly changed everything - music, clothes, politics, religion, family, fame, and much more. Billions of words have been written about every note, every song, every person linked to the band, and more arrive every day.

It's good - great even - to know I was there that night. To grow up listening to the music, waiting for new albums and new singles to get released. It seemed each release pushed at the limits of imagination. 

I've learned since that night how much work the band put into all they did. Work which changed how music was written, recorded and marketed. Business changed. Families changed. Lives changed.

Changing the world with music. It's a primal force, which many have tried to duplicate - none have.

50 years later, we all live in a world those four musicians remade. 

State Ponders Dropping Out of Daylight Savings Time

A bill has been filed to exempt the state from observing Daylight Savings Time, from Rep. Curry Todd and Sen. Janice Bowling.

I'd sure like the time changes to stop and for us to just have one time system. But there will likely be passionate debate on the topic for and against. Some things, unlike Time, never change.

Double-Secret Government in Tennessee?

"Don't ask me about my business." 

Questions for Gov. Haslam via Speak to Power:

"It would be unremarkable if this were the first time Haslam claimed special privileges to cloak his office’s doings from the public, but it’s not.

Today’s snub to transparency is part of a much larger pattern of secrecy —

• secretive relationships with high-powered lobbyists
• preference for secret tax deals with big corporations
• hiding his tax returns
• executive order to hide his income
• hidden loans to business partners
• secret pay raises for his department chiefs
• secret political slush funds

The closed-door meetings with old business partners who suddenly win no-bid contracts, the constant special interest dealing and unprecedented secrecy have wholly undermine his credibility with anyone paying attention to his actions.

85 People Own Half of the World

A study from Oxfam reveals a mere 85 people own nearly half the assets of our planet. And that means it takes combining the assets of 3.5 billion people to match what those 85 have. It's not the result of a "free market", says Oxfam. It's a calculated effort of corruption.

"The Oxfam report found that over the past few decades, the rich have successfully wielded political influence to skew policies in their favour on issues ranging from financial deregulation, tax havens, anti-competitive business practices to lower tax rates on high incomes and cuts in public services for the majority. Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 out of 30 countries for which data are available, said the report. This "capture of opportunities" by the rich at the expense of the poor and middle classes has led to a situation where 70% of the world's population live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s and 1% of families own 46% of global wealth - almost £70tn."

A  confession of sorts from a former hedge-fund manager published this week in the NYTimes blames "wealth addiction".

But that's not the problem says Salon:

"The story starts 40 years ago when most of the economic profession made the argument that deregulated markets could solve all our problems by creating more and more wealth for society. By cutting taxes on the rich, there would be more incentive to create new enterprises and jobs, and higher incomes would then flow to all—all boats would rise. By getting government out of the economy, business would be free to innovate and grow.

This push for massive tax cuts and deregulation, however, unleashed Wall Street much more than it did the “real” economy —the part that produces tangible goods and services. In fact, it led to the destruction of much of American manufacturing as financiers (corporate raiders; private equity firms like Mitt Romney’s) hollowed out corporation after corporation, loading each up with debt, and then squeezing its workforce as much as possible, including replacing it entirely by shifting the facility overseas.

Instead the “innovation” took the form of junk bonds, offshore accounts, high-risk mortgages, derivatives, CDOs and a myriad of financial tricks that step by step moved money away from productive industry and shoved into the pockets of Wall Street."

Changing Your Outraged Brain

I'm seldom a fan of the material found in Psychology Today magazine. But I noted an article this week about words and the physical effects words have on our brains and bodies.

Negative words flood the brain and body with chemicals and emotions and studies indicate the brain and body react to one negative word while a positive word has to be repeated to create similar impacts.

There are recent discussions about the apparent rise in what's being called the "Outrage Industry", as daily and hourly we see and hear stories and events which are meant to evoke powerful emotions. Some might say the public is addicted to outrage.

Way back in the mid-90s, I knew a fellow who listened every day to 6 or 7 hours of angry radio rantings from Boortz and Limbaugh and others. Day after day after day, he became sullen and angry and just plain mean. For him the world was an Us versus Them place locked in a holy war. I found it quite sad to watch him devolve into a hating machine. He became physically ill, and nearly died.

The article noted above indicates that while our brains react immediately to negative words to combat danger. A positive word, a Yes, does not do that. One researcher says a person needs 3 or 5 Yeses to equal the effects of one No.

It's very easy to drown in the oceans of outrage, some folks constantly bellow about The End of Everything.

And while negative commentary on our shared worlds can be found in abundance in the posts here on my blog, I've tried to balance that with the positive or humorous or even the silly.

So what follows is nothing less than an effort to add to the positive. Read the list of words below. You can even say them out loud and effect even more powerful change, and if others hear you, that change will spread. You can repeat this act every day too. Ready?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

TennCare Requires Enrollment on Imaginary Online System

$35 million spent for a required online system to obtain TennCare - but it doesn't exist. Tennessee politicians have made sure to fight healthcare reform at every step, no matter who gets hurt.

"The state committed $35.7 million -- $32 million of that in federally allocated money -- to a three-year contract with global cybersecurity contractor Northrop Grumman to create a new system called the "Tennessee Eligibility Determination System," or "TEDS," which will result in a new TennCare application website.

But the project, which started in December 2012, is not completed -- and there is no projection as to when it will be finished, Gunderson said."

Your History Is Being Rewritten

A chaotic event or even a mundane event might be recorded, then rewritten, then disappear, be rediscovered and rewritten many times. The furious speed at which information goes through these changes is mind boggling. These days, history is not written by winners of conflicts, it is endlessly revised by whim.

Writer William Gibson spoke about this in an interview with the Paris Review:

"Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.

In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.

We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while."

Whether the event is the recent chaos in Benghazi or the hysteria over "Duck Dynasty", our society seeks out revision over resolution.

Little Tree - A Christmas Gift

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid

look     the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy

then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel" 

little tree
By e.e. cummings

News Photos of 2013

Boston's Big Picture website always boasts stunning photography, and their year end roundup of news photos from around the world is also an impressive collection. (Click to enlarge.)

Above, a shot from massive wildfires in Australia in January of this year. 

Here's an image from August in Egypt ad that nation struggles to reinvent itself.

There are three parts to this year's collection - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.