Entries Tagged 'Editorial' ↓

This is an example of where I want to just read a news story, and instead get a watered-down article written by someone who thinks they’re George Carlin. It’s a story about how a Vice Principal activated a remote camera on a student’s laptop while the student was in their home. The Vice Principal observed behavior they found to be offensive (one can only imagine), and notified the student, who notified his parents.

This is probably against Federal wiretapping laws, to say nothing of privacy invasion involving a child. The FBI is investigating.

But instead of just reporting on this interesting story, the writer, Joel Hruska, tries his best Judd Apatow shtick, complete with references to strip clubs and Japanese porn. How that has anything to do with the story fails me. He later asks readers to “put on your helmet, kids” and “you couldn’t make this stuff up.”

Enough of this. A story like this is important! Please just give me the news story. A tad bit of editorializing is generally OK – but to this excess is just plain distracting. It took me twice as long to digest and understand the story because I had to mentally filter out all the silliness.

As a long-time contributor to aviation safety (Western Michigan College of Aviation, The Boeing Company, FlightSafety) I’d like to THANK the VP’s of flight departments, line check airmen, flight instructors, support staff, and most of all, THE PILOTS of US-based airlines who work long hours in the worst conditions imaginable to bring our grandparents, moms, dads, kids, neices, nephews, etc. home to us safely each and every day!

THANK YOU


I’m a New York transplant, first got to NYC 13 years ago, been here off and on, but now a longtime permanent downtown Manhattan resident. Perhaps this will sound a little odd, but I go out of my way to befriend native New Yorkers (I’m giving one such native a hard time in the photo, with the typical
“Why me?!?!” response). New York natives are the reason why I moved here in the first place. There is just something about them that makes NYC, well, more authentic NYC. New York-specific accents that don’t seem to be going away:

1. Hil-LARRY-ous
2. Hiz-TARA-cul
3. Shtreet instead of street
4. Waiting on line instead of in line (I once asked someone if they were on line and they said, after a puzzled look, yes and that I could go in front of them if I wanted! (It was a long line too).
5. Train instead of subway
6. Even Manhattan itself is said MunHATTAN

I’ve noticed that if I turn on the accent (it’s easy), and add a little Bayside, Queens Italian shoulder shrug here and there, adopt a little Brooklyn Jewish animation, I find that the city makes room for me: on the train, in restaurants, and in general, people automatically give me respect… strange as it sounds, it’s absolutely the truth. I turn the accent off and revert to my native nasally Michigan accent, and I’m trampled upon in every way possible. I might as well be invisible.

HOW you say things here in NYC – from my observations – can absolutely alter the kind of experience you have in the city.

Thanks to Eric W. and Michael Moore for posting my Flint/Haiti article on the front page of MichaelMoore.com today. I’m humbled and honored…

There is a working class, blue-collar bar I visit often in Flint called Jesters. To outsiders it might appear as a rough and tumble place, with an unsual mix of bikers, pool sharks, white folks, single moms, gangsters, old folks, black folks, autoworkers, young folks, latin folks, and everything in between. A true melting pot, defying its label as an economically segregated city. The people watching in here doesn’t get any better.

Located just inside the city limits of Burton – which is even poorer then Flint – people come to forget. With 25% unemployment, the highest crime rates in the nation, and a fleeing population, you have to wonder how smiles can possibly happen. And yet they do. You see people struggling. People are out of work. Some are working. Many are making ends meet. Others live on the edge. A sudden, costly car repair, for example, can rapidly spin out of control into a black hole of financial despair of which there is no way out. I’ve seen it firsthand, countless times.

My heart goes out to the people of Flint who did nothing to bring this economic devastation onto themselves. And they have enough to worry about without the problems of the world creeping in. Even global tragedies pale in consideration to the view outside their own front window. I’m reminded of the kids at Southwestern High School in Fahrenheit 9/11 that when viewing bombed-out Bahgdad, comment “There are parts of Flint that look like that!”

And now I get word that Jesters, this past Sunday, held a fundraiser. Not for its own townspeople, who could use a hand, but to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. I’d wager a significant amount that few people in Flint have ever set eyes on a Haitian in their entire life. Now, consider the result:

They raised over four thousand dollars for Haiti.

This in a town where one can purchase 50 homes for $60k (that’s $1,200 per home), where a dinner for four costs $24, and car dealers sell used cars with an internal mechanism that disables the car when you get behind on a payment – where ever you are.

You get the idea of the significance of this event, this amount of money, and how out of proportion it is for Flint.

Four thousand dollars.

Four thousand dollars from what Business Week called “America’s fastest shrinking city.” Four thousand dollars from a town that is not doing better than anyone else. Raising $4,000 is like raising $4 million dollars from a small cocktail party in New York. It’s way more than it should be, and you wonder just where the money can possibly be coming from.

When I heard the figure, I immediately felt like The Grinch, after he boo-hoos the townsfolk for trying to do something worthwhile as he sits on his perch wondering what all the fuss is. Then he sees the joy the event brings, the selflessness, the spirit of giving especially at a time when there is so little to give. And his heart breaks free and grows from two sizes too small, to fifty times its size, bursting all constraints.

To George Zaravelis, the owner of Jesters, and his lovely wife Genie, I cannot fathom how you did it. And the world now has an example of how the people of Flint – beaten down and counted out, still have a few more rounds left.

I have never been more proud of my hometown.

My hometown of Flint, Michigan needs all the help it can get. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is holding a public comment period from now until February 28th, 2010 to talk about cleaning up the Buick City factory lot, which is heavily contaminated. They might have a new business that wants to go in there, but obviously, this new business cannot afford – nor be expected to clean up – a 100 year-old industrial wasteland.

From mlive.com

The site’s cleanup is crucial to creating a truck-to-rail intermodal hub on the site that could create 600 jobs. Officials with the Genesee Regional Chamber of Commerce have said that the developer doesn’t want to take on long-term liability of environmental contamination at the site.

Please visit the special EPA comment website and tell them that Flint needs all the help it can get, and both GM and the U.S. Government certainly owe a debt to the people of Flint who  have sacrificed far more than their fare share. It’ll take you all of 2 minutes, and it will mean a lot to the people of Flint, and to me… thank you!

It is rarely appropriate to celebrate a death. All but the most reviled humans in history carry a certain sadness at the news of their passing. When Roger Smith, former Chairman of General Motors, died, however, it felt bittersweet. Michael Moore put Smith on the front page of his website and offered his condolences to Smith’s family. It was an appropriate gesture. However Smith was a man that single-handedly put GM on a path to bankruptcy, destroyed several automaking cities (namely Flint) and with that, destroyed countless thousands of families. So far as I know, Smith never expressed regret or remorse. His passing was not exactly cause for mourning. His genocide of the working class is not lost on anyone.

When I heard of former Flint Mayor James Rutherford’s passing, it also was bittersweet. I knew him mostly as a pizza store owner at the local strip mall near my childhood home on Atherton & Hammerberg Road. I was just a little kid in the early 80’s, and like most kids I liked pizza and video games. Rutherford was always kind to me. It wasn’t until I got older and looked back with adult eyes did I find out that “Mayor Rutherford” should have considered himself lucky to not have spent his twilight years in federal prison.

September, 1979. Michael Moore’s fledgling Flint Voice newspaper is two years old and is doing the kind of muckraking journalism that even today would be considered “controversial.”

Rutherford was using city and federal-funded employees to do his campaigning, as well as “forcing” contributions from them – which is patently illegal. Moore was going to break the story. Upon publication, it ignited a firestorm in Mayor Rutherford’s office. A few months later, in May of 1980, Rutherford sent the Flint police to the Lapeer Press Printing company, which printed the Voice to find out where Moore was getting his inside information from. He wanted to find Moore’s sources. But you see, any government intervention of the freedom of press violates just about every provision of that pesky US Constitution. The founding fathers put up major walls to keep the press and speech free (it is, after all, the FIRST amendment, not the tenth).

The result of this illegal search and seizure was none other than one of the more sensational media stories to emerge on the national scene. The New York Times, CBS, Detroit Free, Press, Detroit News, all ran stories condemning the police and mayor, as well as calling for a federal investigation. The national exposure brought Moore some of his first glimpses of a national audience. Most mayors would have been forced to resign, but arrogant Rutherford stuck it out somehow.

Rutherford was just getting started. In the early 80’s came the laughing-stock disasters that were the Hyatt, Waterstreet Pavillon, Windmill Place, and Autoworld. Shall I go on? By 1983 voters had enough, electing James Sharp, ending Rutherford’s nearly ten year reign. As Flint residents surveyed the city around them, they could see GM was taking its gigantic Flint tax breaks (courtesy of Rutherford) and heading to Mexico. Fisher One gone. Chevrolet, gone. It was all crumbling down on top of us.

All of this made for excellent journalism. The Flint Voice would eventually expand statewide to The Michigan Voice, with Moore leaving in 1986 to helm the national magazine Mother Jones. That didn’t last, and the rest is history. Moore went on to film Roger & Me, and it’s all downhill from there. The young, poor, idealist “Mike Moore” everyone knew in Flint might very well be running yet another bingo game right now if Rutherford had not constantly make the kind of mistakes that provided for great journalism.

So while I struggle to find anything of value Rutherford “accomplished” – the one thing he did do, along with Roger Smith, was create the world’s most revered voice on the left. And I suppose we have to thank him for that.

Rest in Peace, Mayor. I still like pizza.