One of my mentors at Portland State, Carl Abbott, has recently launched his own blog, The Urban West, to showcase work that has appeared in other places (such as his book reviews for H-Urban) and provide a less-formal venue for presenting aspects of his ongoing projects.
Carl's blog will link to news about the Oregon Encyclopedia, Portland's urban history, and, as the blog title indicates, urbanization in the American West.
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Saturday, November 13, 2010
Noteworthy website: Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project
We at the Northwest History Network recently featured historians Trevor Griffey and Felicia Williams and union leader Keith Edwards at our quarterly public event. The event provided some comparisons-&-contrasts between Portland's and Seattle's labor and civil rights history in the second half of the twentieth century.
Trevor is a Seattle-based historian, finishing his PhD at the University of Washington. He co-edited a recently-published book, Black Power at Work, and he serves as the Project Coordinator of a highly informative website, the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project (SCRLHP).
The SCRLHP contributes to our knowledge in the following ways:
Trevor is a Seattle-based historian, finishing his PhD at the University of Washington. He co-edited a recently-published book, Black Power at Work, and he serves as the Project Coordinator of a highly informative website, the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project (SCRLHP).
The SCRLHP contributes to our knowledge in the following ways:
The final public tour of the Big Pipe project
A few weeks ago I sent in my name for a drawing of people to take the final public tour of Portland's Big Pipe project. I found out the other day that my name wasn't drawn.[1] Bummer!
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[1] Brad Schmidt, "City Hall: Five feet at a time, $1.4 billion Big Pipe project is finishing ahead of schedule," Oregonian, Nov. 9, 2010.
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| Portland's East Side Big Pipe completed |
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[1] Brad Schmidt, "City Hall: Five feet at a time, $1.4 billion Big Pipe project is finishing ahead of schedule," Oregonian, Nov. 9, 2010.
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I can throw a football over the North Salem High School football team
In spite of what it may seem like with what I'm about to write, I don't spend my days fixated on the "coulda-woulda-shoulda" regarding my high school football experience. I'm not at all like this guy:
Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com
However . . .
Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com
However . . .
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
This is quite surreal to me
Wow: The private prison industry was behind efforts in Arizona to pass the state's Draconian anti-immigration bill.
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- NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry. The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them. (quote; another link)
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Monday, November 8, 2010
Perhaps it's time to allow Texas to secede?
We awoke late last week to Texas governor Rick Perry's words coming through the radio. It was one of those mornings where I was waking slowly, so the first bit of his segment was incorporated into my dream. Here is what I thought I heard him say:
- If you want to live in a state that has high taxes, high regulations — that is favorable to smoking marijuana and gay marriage — then move to California . . . [In Texas,] we still believe in freedom,freedom from over-taxation, over-regulation, over-litigation.
The Texas School Board continues its quest to change history
Some on the Texas School Board oppose proportional representation of the history of Islam in world history textbooks. A resolution before the board in September asserted an anti-Christian, pro-Islam bias in K-12 world history textbooks.
The Texas School Board, as a body, has already proven itself to favor misrepresentation in K-12 social science standards.
Some specifics of the shallow-minded ideological machinations of the majority of the Texas School Board here.
What the Texas School Board and its supporters fail to understand is that ignoring, misrepresenting, skewing, or otherwise manipulating historical narratives does not magically transform the resulting fallacy into truth. However, what they do understand is that if they can influence historical narratives to reflect their personal biases and ideology, they can get these inaccurate notions into the minds of K-12 students and create future citizens and voters who are uninformed. As Depeche Mode sings in their song "New Dress":
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The Texas School Board, as a body, has already proven itself to favor misrepresentation in K-12 social science standards.
Some specifics of the shallow-minded ideological machinations of the majority of the Texas School Board here.
What the Texas School Board and its supporters fail to understand is that ignoring, misrepresenting, skewing, or otherwise manipulating historical narratives does not magically transform the resulting fallacy into truth. However, what they do understand is that if they can influence historical narratives to reflect their personal biases and ideology, they can get these inaccurate notions into the minds of K-12 students and create future citizens and voters who are uninformed. As Depeche Mode sings in their song "New Dress":
- You can't change the world / But you can change the facts / And when you change the facts / You change points of view / If you change points of view / You may change a vote / And when you change a vote / You may change the world
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Eat more cheese! No, wait: Eat less cheese! Like we said: Eat more cheese!
A recent report found that the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture designed and implemented a $12 million marketing campaign last year to help Domino's Pizza recover from a period of sagging sales and declining customer satisfaction. The campaign that the USDA's subsidiary organization Dairy Management designed centered on increasing the amount of cheese on Domino's pizzas. Dairy Management is one of eighteen USDA programs that exist to market agricultural products, including beef and pork; the "Got Milk?" campaign is one of Dairy Management's most well-known and successful initiatives.
Meanwhile, other USDA initiatives continued to fund research and marketing campaigns to try to convince Americans to eat less cheese as a way to sustain a more healthy diet and lower saturated fat consumption. The USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion runs on an annual budget nearly half that of the single campaign for Domino's Pizza, $6.5 million.
As part of its campaigns to increase cheese consumption generally, Dairy Management funded research to look into claims put forth in 2003 that intake of calcium would help people lose weight. By 2004, this research contradicted the weight loss claims, but Dairy Management ignored the findings and persisted for three more years with their campaign correlating calcium intake with weight loss. They only stopped their disingenuous campaign on the order of the Federal Trade Commission, which itself was finally acting on a petition brought by a physicians advocacy group two years prior.[1]
The dynamic described above seems rather contradictory and self-defeating: One USDA team is urging Americans to eat more cheese, while another, at the same time, is urging Americans to eat less cheese. To me, it's illustrative of some unfortunate aspects of American society:
Meanwhile, other USDA initiatives continued to fund research and marketing campaigns to try to convince Americans to eat less cheese as a way to sustain a more healthy diet and lower saturated fat consumption. The USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion runs on an annual budget nearly half that of the single campaign for Domino's Pizza, $6.5 million.
As part of its campaigns to increase cheese consumption generally, Dairy Management funded research to look into claims put forth in 2003 that intake of calcium would help people lose weight. By 2004, this research contradicted the weight loss claims, but Dairy Management ignored the findings and persisted for three more years with their campaign correlating calcium intake with weight loss. They only stopped their disingenuous campaign on the order of the Federal Trade Commission, which itself was finally acting on a petition brought by a physicians advocacy group two years prior.[1]
The dynamic described above seems rather contradictory and self-defeating: One USDA team is urging Americans to eat more cheese, while another, at the same time, is urging Americans to eat less cheese. To me, it's illustrative of some unfortunate aspects of American society:
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Bamboozeled by sports franchises
There was a fascinating thread recently on H-Urban in response to a question about the true costs of professional sports franchises. This is a topic I've long wondered about. Over the years I've heard some critiques about hidden or externalized costs of sports facilities & stadia. I've also witnessed—usually from afar and with only part of my attention—sports team owners playing one city against others every few years when local subsidy agreements are nearing an end, or when they perceive that it's time to build a new stadium. Some examples of this include when team owner Art Model moved the NFL's Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore (where they became the Ravens) in 1995, and when chairperson Clay Bennett moved the NBA's Supersonics from Seattle to Oklahoma (where they became the Thunder) in 2008.
Professional sports are really big business in this country (as are certain college sports, claims to the contrary notwithstanding), and team owners generally treat their franchises as revenue-generating businesses. Owners threaten to relocate their businesses when they don't wring from municipal governments the public subsidy agreements they feel are their due; "free market" adherents would claim this is as it should be.
Many fans of professional sports, however, invest in teams the kind of emotional attachment that in some ways can only be described as religious.
The problem arises as a result of the difference between the pragmatic, capitalist perspective of the sports franchise owner and the emotional, religious perspective of many sports fans. As the discussion and sources below allude, the economic returns on sports team investments tend not to meet initial projections, which means that taxpayers pay much more in subsidies than they originally bargained for. Owners generate their original business plans and subsidy packages with threats—variously implied or expressed, as needed—to municipal government and city residents that they will move the franchise if their proposal is not approved. City residents—the voters—then face the decision without full knowledge of the amount they're about to subsidize millionaire (sometimes billionaire) sports franchise owners; many of these citizens also carry with them their emotional, religious attachment to the team & the team's history, potentially clouding rational judgment.
This is where the bamboozling comes in: owners take advantage of sports fans by obscuring economics behind a shroud of emotional manipulation.
Key parts of H-Net discussion & sources below.
Professional sports are really big business in this country (as are certain college sports, claims to the contrary notwithstanding), and team owners generally treat their franchises as revenue-generating businesses. Owners threaten to relocate their businesses when they don't wring from municipal governments the public subsidy agreements they feel are their due; "free market" adherents would claim this is as it should be.
Many fans of professional sports, however, invest in teams the kind of emotional attachment that in some ways can only be described as religious.
The problem arises as a result of the difference between the pragmatic, capitalist perspective of the sports franchise owner and the emotional, religious perspective of many sports fans. As the discussion and sources below allude, the economic returns on sports team investments tend not to meet initial projections, which means that taxpayers pay much more in subsidies than they originally bargained for. Owners generate their original business plans and subsidy packages with threats—variously implied or expressed, as needed—to municipal government and city residents that they will move the franchise if their proposal is not approved. City residents—the voters—then face the decision without full knowledge of the amount they're about to subsidize millionaire (sometimes billionaire) sports franchise owners; many of these citizens also carry with them their emotional, religious attachment to the team & the team's history, potentially clouding rational judgment.
This is where the bamboozling comes in: owners take advantage of sports fans by obscuring economics behind a shroud of emotional manipulation.
Key parts of H-Net discussion & sources below.
Friday, November 5, 2010
History & Place Online: A Selection of Very Interesting Web-Based Resources
Following upon my posts covering a fascinating online historical mapping project documenting St. Louis' urban and social history and on the topic of user-modified online maps, I wanted to bring together a selection of other web-based history projects. The links below were brought to my attention in response to Coll Thrush's query to the H-Enviro list serve in November 2009. Coll's query was:
The responses included the following . . .
- I'm writing to ask if anyone can suggest websites or articles representing community-based investigations of places and/or neighbourhoods. I'm including readings on bioregionalist approaches, but those tend to be very ecosystem-focused rather than engages layers of human inhabitation, particularly in urban places. I know the West Philadelphia Landscape Project; any others? And any articles on these kinds of initiatives?
The responses included the following . . .
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