All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy.

1. Is Western New York interested in stimulating business? Increasing government transparency? Utilizing the power of the private sector and our universities to make the city a better place to live? If so, we could follow the lead of municipalities across the country that are taking part in the Open Data movement.

What is open data? It’s the idea that municipal data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other control. The data created, collected, and stored by city government should be made available to the public for analysis, manipulation, and development. It’s data about us and the city we pay for with our tax dollars.

Many cities have pursued open data platforms around the United States, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston and New York City. NYC has set up a wiki to help implement its landmark open data legislation, an example that Western New York leaders might draw inspiration from, with respect to forming more collaborative and transparent processes online.

It’s important that data not just be released, but also subsequently updated. Information released usually covers the gamut of municipal data, including; crime statistics, emergency services response times, payroll, utility consumption, public transportation information, school attendance/enrollment stats, parking regulations, etc. This data can then be manipulated and analyzed by the community for greater accountability. It also provides a rich dataset for startup entrepreneurs to use as they develop technologies and applications for the market.

Here’s an awesome talk by Tim O’Reilly from 2009 that is still incredibly relevant today and explains some of the benefits of an Open Data program. Government as a platform, rather than as a finished product or service.

I think we all know that Mayor Brown wouldn’t be interested in this kind of idea, but Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz (noted technocrat and general numbers nerd) might be inclined to consider this sort of program.

2. Mike Puma of Preservation Studios would like to show you how to buy a house in Buffalo for $1.

The Urban Homestead Program that is offered by the City of Buffalo enables qualified buyers to purchase a home that has been deemed “homestead eligible” for $1.00 and there are plenty of properties left. There are three main requirements when purchasing a homestead property; the owner must fix all code violations within 18 months, have immediate access to at least $5000, and live there for at least three years. You also have to cover the closing costs of the purchase.

Check out his list and follow his links to learn more about the program and about the people who are already involved.

3. While reading a story about Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the struggle to find him a final resting place, I came across this fun fact: Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated William McKinley in Buffalo, was dissolved in sulfuric acid, Breaking Bad-style. We were some medieval motherfuckers back then, eh?

4. Teaching the fine art of cursing to your children.

First, you must obliterate any notion that words can be divided into good and bad. Any words can be used to good or bad effect. Curse words are strong words, not bad words, but they are susceptible to being made weak and dumb through overuse. To teach this is far more challenging than it might seem, because every other part of the world in which we seek to raise our children into decent adults is working against you here. And if your children inhabit that world without obedient awareness of the line between good and bad words, they will encounter constant friction.

The second thing you must do is to teach your children to recognize the nuanced differences between public and private, at least insofar as it relates to cursing. They have to understand that while public and private may be mere constructs, they are indispensably meaningful in that deft navigation of them marks a person as well-adjusted whereas flaunting them will inevitably land you in jail.

As a frequent and enthusiastic practitioner of the cursing dark arts, I want my kids to understand the power of their words and when to best use them.

5. Just wanted to share a site I enjoy reading, The Art of Manliness. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s not. It’s filled with a lot of good advice for men on how to be, ya know, men. How to buy a suit, how to find a classic shave, etc. all without taking an overtly macho and/or misogynist approach. Learn to be a gentleman.

6. If this piece of data, visualized, doesn’t stop you in your tracks, I don’t know what to say.

Fact Of The Day: The term “jaywalking” was coined by the auto industry in the 1920s in an effort to “redefine streets as places where pedestrians do not belong”

Quote Of The Day: “Complacency + Mediocrity ÷ Nostalgia = Buffalo” – Chris Smith

Video Of The Day: 38 Common Spelling and Grammar Errors

Song Of The Day: “Pigs In Zen” – Jane’s Addiction

Follow me on Twitter for the “incremental grumpy” @ChrisSmithAV

Like The Morning Grumpy on Facebook

Email me links, tips, story ideas: chris@artvoice.com

All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy.

1. 400 people died in the collapse of a  Bangladeshi garment factory last week. The people there were making the cheap shirts you buy at JCPenney and other low-end retailers and they died working in conditions that were banned in America after incidents like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It might be a good time to ask why we seem to be perfectly content that we wear clothes made by children and others trapped in horrific, slave-like working conditions overseas. For most of us, we don’t have a lot of choice in the matter as we buy what we can afford and in today’s economy, that isn’t much. After all, wages have stagnated for decades and our buying power is less than it was in the glory days of American dominance.

The reasons are many and are beyond the scope of a simple media curation blog. But when you really get down to it, these shirts are made overseas as a means to maximize profits for the manufacturers and retailers who don’t pay their American workers the kind of money that would allow them to buy an American-made shirt. 

I want us to start thinking more about the reasons why things are the way they are, who benefits, and understand the real consequences of our decisions. It all comes down to the same question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately, what kind of country do we live in? And what kind of country do we want to live in?

2. What happened to all the good jobs?

There are no shortage of suspects for this sorry state of affairs. The stark decline of labor, now reaching less than 7 percent of the private sector, has dramatically undermined the bargaining power and real wages of workers. The erosion of the minimum wage, for which meager increases have been overmatched by inflationary losses, has left the labor market without a stable floor. And an increasingly expansive financial sector has displaced real wages and salaries with speculatory rent-seeking.

New work by John Schmitt and Janelle Jones at the Center for Economic and Policy Research recasts this question, posing it not as a causal riddle but as a political challenge: What would it take to get good jobs back?

Schmitt and Jones start with a basic distinction between good jobs (those that pay $19.00/hr or better and offer both job-based health coverage and some retirement coverage) and bad jobs (those that meet none of these criteria). Each of these categories accounts for about a quarter of the workforce (the rest fall somewhere in between), with the share of good jobs slipping since 1979 and the share of bad jobs creeping up. The goal, by simulating the impact of different policy interventions, is to increase the share of good jobs and to eliminate—as much as possible—the bad jobs entirely.

Pretty solid readin’ here.

3. Hey, remember that fertilizer plant that exploded near Waco?  We cared about about it for a few minutes a couple weeks back. That’s how things work in this country: huge tragedy happens, Matt Lauer and Anderson Cooper are dispatched to the site of the devastation to report the news with a concerned look on their faces and an arched eyebrow, everyone blithely writes “thoughts and prayers” as a half-assed statement of recognition on Twitter or Facebook to the populace of the woe-begotten locale, and then a new shiny object comes along to distract us during the next news cycle. But, what actually happened at that plant to cause such massive devastation and carnage?

Here’s what we do know: The fertilizer plant hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. Its owners do not seem to have told the Department of Homeland Security that they were storing large quantities of potentially explosive fertilizer, as regulations require. And the most recent partial safety inspection of the facility in 2011 led to $5,250 in fines.

Why was a plant that stored explosive chemicals allowed to be located so close to a school?

The EPA and other federal agencies actually don’t regulate how close such plants can be to schools, nursing homes and population centers. In Texas, the decision is left up to the local zoning authorities.

A Dallas Morning News investigation in 2008 found that Dallas County residents were “at risk of a toxic disaster because outdated and haphazard zoning has allowed homes, apartments and schools to be built within blocks — in some cases even across the street — from sites that use dangerous chemicals.”

So, the investigation continues and data journalists like the men and women at ProPublica are following the story. You should too. When government funding for safety inspections is slashed, this is what happens. Same thing happened at the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Also, next time a local economic development agency complains about zoning restrictions and environmental reviews, these types of explosions and accidents are what they’re trying to prevent. Now, we might overdo it here, but finding a middle ground between putting fertilizer plants next to schools in Texas and trying to stop a Greek restaurant on Elmwood from putting tables on its front porch would probably be a good thing for everyone.

4. You won’t believe what’s in your turkey burger.

Back in August 2011, the agribusiness giant Cargill recalled a stunning 36 million pounds of ground turkey tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella that had come from a single processing facility in Arkansas, a failure that eventually sickened 136 people and killed another. The company shut down the plant, tweaked its process (mainly by adding to and “intensifying” its system of spraying meat with antimicrobial fluid), and quickly reopened it. Within a month, the companyhad to recall another 108,000 pounds of ground turkey from the same plant, because it was infected with the same strain of superbug salmonella.

Have things improved?

Cargill says it has cleaned up its act, but recent research suggests that ground turkey still has an antibiotic-resistant-pathogen problem. The latest evidence comes from Consumer Reports, which has just published the results of testing it did on 257 samples of ground turkey picked up from retailers around the country, produced by a variety of processors, including Cargill.

Even so, the results of Consumer Reports’ tests won’t make you eager to order that next turkey burger: “More than half of the packages of raw ground meat and patties tested positive for fecal bacteria.”

Overall, 90 percent of the samples tested by CR researchers carried at least one of the five bacteria they looked for—and “almost all” of the bacteria strains they found showed resistance to at least one antibiotic.

So, there’s that.

5. Dorks are the reason we can’t have cool things, like Google Glass.

The Segway. The Bluetooth headset. The pocket protector.

What do these three technologies have in common? They all pretty much work as promised. They all seem like good ideas on paper. And they’re all too dorky to live.

Now, far be it from me to claim that nerdiness equals lack of popularity potential. But I contend that dorkiness and nerdiness are two different qualities. While nerdiness implies a certain social awkwardness that’s ultimately endearing, dorkiness connotes social obliviousness that opens you to deserved ridicule.

Guess which category Google Glass will fall under when it goes “mainstream?”

Dorks.

6. The Internet could have been patented and we all would be living very different lives.

Twenty years ago this week, researchers renounced the right to patent the World Wide Web. Officials at CERN, the European research center where the Web was invented, wrote:

CERN relinquishes all intellectual property to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.

Fact Of The Day: Oral sex with the man who impregnated you could cure morning sickness. Or, exactly what husbands of pregnant wives will be saying for the next 50 years.

Quote Of The Day: “Realists do not fear the results of their study.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Video Of The Day: A little Macho Man to brighten up your Friday.

Song Of The Day: “Ain’t Nothin Wrong With That” – Robert Randolph and The Family Band

Follow me on Twitter for the “incremental grumpy” @ChrisSmithAV

Like The Morning Grumpy on Facebook

Email me links, tips, story ideas: chris@artvoice.com

All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy.

1. Local writer Kevin Purdy details seven days without email.

Speaking of anxiety, why does nobody text me, chat me, or call me, four days after I took a no-email pledge? It seems like communication has, overall, died down. I seriously believe some people are treating this as if I were on vacation. Maybe that’s the only way we can collectively deal with someone who’s not responding to email and not a cloistered celebrity: assume they’re somewhere else. I wish I could say I was really somewhere else.

As a slave to one corporate email account, and five other accounts related to side projects and non-profit work and three personal accounts, I’ve begun to hate email. The process of checking multiple accounts, responding to constant requests for my time and attention, it’s fucking ponderous. I look forward to a time when email is no longer the preferred communication medium of choice and we simply send mental notes to one another through embedded 4G chips in our temporal lobe. At least I might respond to your email in a timely manner.

2. The Guantánamo memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. He was kidnapped by CIA, tortured in Jordan, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, where he remains to this day. This despite calls from former military prosecutors and Federal judges for his release. His 466-page handwritten memoir of the torture, “classified” for 6 years, has now been released. Amnesty International had previously documented his case.

The Wikipedia page regarding his story is informative. As a federal judge wrote in 2010:

Salahi may very well have been an al-Qaida sympathizer, and the evidence does show that he provided some support to al-Qaida, or to people he knew to be al-Qaida. Such support was sporadic, however, and, at the time of his capture, non-existent. In any event, what the standard approved in Al-Bihani actually covers is “those who purposefully and materially supported such forces in hostilities against U.S. Coalition partners.” 530 F.3d at 872 (emphasis added). The evidence in this record cannot possibly be stretched far enough to fit that test

So, what to do? An Al-Qaeda sympathizer who has been rendered and tortured without direct evidence of his involvement in any terrorist activities is now stuck in a legal and moral limbo. If released, will the treatment he received from our government radicalize him further? Does it matter? Do we have the right to perpetually detain people who may commit acts of terror against America? These are the decisions left behind by the Bush Administration and will challenge our legal system and Constitution for decades to come.

3. Deloitte and Share our Strength have published a troubling report on the societal impact of childhood poverty in America.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), a family is “food insecure” if it faces “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.” In 2011, 17.9 million U.S. households were food insecure – 14.9% of all households in the country. More importantly, households with children are nearly twice as likely to be food insecure as households without children.

Across children of all ages, food insecurity is linked with lower academic achievement. Hungry children are sick more often and are 31% more likely to be hospitalized, at an average cost of approximately $12,000 per pediatric hospitalization. And food insecure children are 3.4 times more likely to be overweight or obese.

What kind of country are we living in?

4. The sorrowful state of American mental healthcare. In the 1950s, 1 in 300 Americans were being treated for their mental health in hospitals, today there’s one psychiatric bed per 7,100 Americans.  Absolutely astonishing. Between 2009 and 2012, states cut a total of $4.35 billion in public mental-health spending from their budgets. According to a report by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, significant cuts to general fund appropriations for state mental health agencies have translated into a severe shortage of services, including housing, community-based treatment and access to psychiatric medications. “Increasingly, emergency rooms, homeless shelters and jails are struggling with the effects of people falling through the cracks,” the report says, “due to lack of needed mental health services and supports.”

5. How conservative Christians have come to dominate the international child adoption circuit.

6. The Tea Party isn’t going anywhere, and that’s bad news for Republicans.

The survey asked FreedomWorks activists if they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “When we feel strongly about political issues, we should not be willing to compromise with our political opponents.” Altogether, more than 80 percent agreed to some extent. Thirty-two percent of respondents “agree strongly” with the statement. Meanwhile, less than 10 percent disagreed even “slightly.”

Uncompromising ideologues unconcerned with compromise or winning bipartisan elections? Great, that’s also bad news for the rest of us.

Fact Of The Day: Glenn Burke, one of the first openly gay professional athletes, invented the “high five” which was a sign of gay pride and identification.

Quote Of The Day: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” – Abraham Lincoln

Video Of The Day: Scripted Disorientation

Song Of The Day: “Roots Radicals Rockers and Reggae” – Stiff Little Fingers

Follow me on Twitter for the “incremental grumpy” @ChrisSmithAV

Like The Morning Grumpy on Facebook

Email me links, tips, story ideas: chris@artvoice.com

All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy. Let’s get started, right after you take a piece of advice from a mallard.

1. Local writer Brian Castner wrote a thoughtful article for The Daily Beast about guns in schools and a father’s desire to protect his children.

The attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School restarted a long-delayed national debate about guns, and their proximity to children is on many more minds. The slaughter of young innocents, a war zone transported to small-town America, touched a nerve with an intensity that even other multiple homicides in workplaces and Sikh temples and movie theaters did not. In the last few months, gun control advocates saw an opportunity to finally make some headway, while guns were purchased at a frenetic pace by those who were afraid they may succeed.

Castner speaks with Lt. Col. David Grossman, a retired soldier and academic who sees several solutions to the growing problem of violence in our schools.

2. Speaking of plutocrats looting the public trust, Matt Taibbi is begging you to read this article and get fucking pissed.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

I know that financial instruments and interest rates are confusing, but Taibbi breaks this down in such a way that even my readers in Sloan will get it. Seriously, did i mention this is a big deal? Yup, it’s even bigger than HSBC laundering money for terrorists and drug cartels and getting off with a stern scolding. I am still shocked that hardly anyone gives a shit about any of this.

3. I love the retro-future, looking back on how people of the past imagined we would live. As usual, people are incapable of seeing innovation that will come and only use their current context and tools to imagine future technology, like how people in the 1950′s imagined the “newspaper of tomorrow“

Rumors are that the editors of The Buffalo News are currently enamored with this idea. Coupons! From the Radio!

4. If you watched Mad Men on Sunday, one of the story lines was what happened in New York City in the days following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The history of how the Mayor of NYC handled those troubling times is astonishing and this is quite a read.

5. Raiteros and the seedy underbelly of the American economy.

Ty Inc. became one of the world’s largest manufacturers of stuffed animals thanks to the Beanie Babies craze in the 1990s.

But it has stayed on top partly by using an underworld of labor brokers known as raiteros, who pick up workers from Chicago’s street corners and shuttle them to Ty’s warehouse on behalf of one of the nation’s largest temp agencies.

The system provides just-in-time labor at the lowest possible cost to large companies — but also effectively pushes workers’ pay far below the minimum wage.

Temp agencies use similar van networks in other labor markets. But in Chicago’s Little Village, the largest Mexican community in the Midwest, the raiteros have melded with temp agencies and their corporate clients in a way that might be unparalleled anywhere in America — and could violate Illinois’ wage laws.

The raiteros don’t just transport workers. They also recruit them, decide who works and who doesn’t, and distribute paychecks.

What kind of country do we live in?

6. How’s the “economic recovery” working out for you? If you’re reading this, it probably stinks.

During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released Census Bureau data.

From the end of the recession in 2009 through 2011 (the last year for which Census Bureau wealth data are available), the 8 million households in the U.S. with a net worth above $836,033 saw their aggregate wealth rise by an estimated $5.6 trillion, while the 111 million households with a net worth at or below that level saw their aggregate wealth decline by an estimated $0.6 trillion.

Because of these differences, wealth inequality increased during the first two years of the recovery. The upper 7% of households saw their aggregate share of the nation’s overall household wealth pie rise to 63% in 2011, up from 56% in 2009. On an individual household basis, the mean wealth of households in this more affluent group was almost 24 times that of those in the less affluent group in 2011. At the start of the recovery in 2009, that ratio had been less than 18-to-1.

So, we have that going for us, which is nice.

Fact Of The Day: New York state law requires that a seller inform potential buyers if a house is haunted.

Quote Of The Day: “Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be-or to be indistinguishable from- self-righteous sixteen-year olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” – Neal Stephenson

Video Of The Day: “The Machine” – Bert Kresicher with one of the greatest stories ever told.

Song Of The Day: “Heavy Soul” – The Black Keys

Follow me on Twitter for the “incremental grumpy” @ChrisSmithAV

Like The Morning Grumpy on Facebook

Email me links, tips, story ideas: chris@artvoice.com

All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy.

1. Yesterday in The Buffalo News, Jane Kwiatkowski offered some guidance on how to “handle” panhandlers as you go about your business in downtown Buffalo.

All it takes is one bad panhandler to ruin your day.

Maybe he got too close when he asked for your spare change, or pestered you after you said no.

On any given day downtown, panhandlers walk the Theater District, Elmwood Avenue, West Chippewa Street or Main Street.

Getting a handle on panhandling is a rite of spring for city merchants, visitors and police, who view it as a quality-of-life issue. Many municipalities including Buffalo have enacted ordinances that prohibit aggressive panhandling, although enforcing the law is discretionary, police said.

The article makes a lot of assumptions and paints with a pretty broad brush in the most generic way possible. In fact, I found it to be pretty offensive. These types of articles paint a picture of urban life in the city that appeals to the sheltered, fearful, and prejudiced.

“There are some gentlemen who are very respectful and honest with you, and yeah I’ll throw them some change in my pocket.

“But most of them I don’t, because I know they’re going right to the store to buy beer. Sometimes I’ll actually take the guy to the store and buy him something to eat instead of giving him money, but some guys just walk up to you and they’re rude, saying they need a beer. I’m recovering myself, I’m not going to feed anybody else’s habit.”

I’m not so naive to think that there aren’t a few people walking the street who are trying to “get one over on me” for the benefit of the few cents I might be able to spare. I also have empathy and think this isn’t a problem to be “handled” as if it were some personal inconvenience to me. Give the person a dollar if you are so inclined or perhaps give a little thought to why people find themselves on the street in the first place. Perhaps contemplate how your consumption patterns, life choices, voting choices, and overall attitude fits into the puzzle of broad-based poverty and homelessness. Most of all, remember that people on the streets are, first and foremost, human beings and deserve to be treated as such. They aren’t “problems” to be “handled”. Here’s an interview with a homeless man in Chicago, whose story is familiar to anyone with any sense of empathy.

2. Here’s an awesome Q&A with Buffalo-area graphic designer Julian Montague that was recently featured on Dwell.com. The best part? The lack of incredulity by the author about why Julian chooses ot live in Buffalo, which is standard fare in stories like this one. “You’re talented and live in Buffalo?! My heavens, Why?!” Probably because it was written by a person with Buffalo roots, but refreshing nonetheless.

3. Remember Jimmy “The Rent Is Too Damn High” McMillan? You know, the be-gloved karate expert who ran for Governor and seemed like a serious candidate when put on the stage next to horse porn enthusiast Carl Paladino? 

Well, he’s back and running for Mayor of New York City. And, yes. The rent is evidently still too damn high.

4. Dottie Gallagher-Cohen was hired to replace Andrew Rudnick as the head of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership. I was going to write some thoughtful analysis of the hire, but I decided to leave that low-hanging fruit for Geoff Kelly to cover in the print edition. Instead, I photoshopped Dottie’s head on to Andrew’s bow-tied torso.

Because that’s what I do.

5. Today, in America, nearly 500,000 children as young as six years old harvest 25 percent of our crops.

Child migrant labor has been documented in the 48 contiguous states. Seasonal work originates in the southernmost states in late winter where it is warm and migrates north as the weather changes. Every few weeks as families move, children leave school and friends behind. If you’ve had onions (Texas), cucumbers (Ohio or Michigan), peppers (Tennessee), grapes (California), mushrooms (Pennsylvania), beets (Minnesota), or cherries (Washington), you’ve probably eaten food harvested by children.

This isn’t a slavery issue, or an immigration issue per se. What’s remarkable is that most of the migrant child farmworkers are American citizens trying to help their families. This is a poverty issue and it gets to the heart of what we, as consumers, see as the “right price” to pay for food.

No minimum wage, long hours, and brutal working conditions. But, hey, we need cheap cucumbers, right?

6. Chart of the day which might cause you to think about the money we spend on the “war on drugs“. Perhaps the real enemy in the war isn’t the illegal drugs.

We’ll see if the substantial shift in national drug policy just announced by the Obama Administration will mean a real change.

“Drug policy should be rooted in neuroscience, not political science,” said Gil Kerikowske, director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy.

“Too many people are cycling through the (criminal justice) system,” Kerikowske said. “We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.”

Treating our national drug problem as a public health crisis that can be solved with prevention, treatment, and science? It’s about time.

Fact Of The Day: Scientists have created a computer program that can detect good “that’s what she said” sentences.

Quote Of The Day: “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.” – J. Paul Getty

Video Of The Day: Charlie Brooker, the best critic of American media. Bar none. He also turns his critical eye toward social media dummies.

Song Of The Day: “19-2000 (Soulchild Remix)” – Gorillaz

Follow me on Twitter for the “incremental grumpy” @ChrisSmithAV

Like The Morning Grumpy on Facebook

Email me links, tips, story ideas: chris@artvoice.com

All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy.

1. 4/20 is not just a big day for people who smoke weed, it’s also a big day for people who like beer. More specifically, for people who like Community Beer Works beer. Why? Because it’s the one year anniversary of the opening of Buffalo’s first nanobrewery! (of which I am a part-owner). To celebrate a very successful first year in business, we’re hosting an anniversary party on 4/20 starting at 6PM at both Cole’s and Mister Goodbar on Elmwood Avenue. Along with the regular beers that we have on tap at these two fine establishments, we’ll be bringing some special one-off anniversary beers for you to imbibe.

• A Belgian tripel
• A double IPA with amarillo, cascade and zeus hops
• A porter made with hops from McCollum Orchards in Lockport
• A barrel-aged Imperial Stout that has been resting comfortably in rye whiskey barrels we procured from the fine folks at Finger Lakes Distilling

As loyal readers of The Morning Grumpy, I’d like to extend to you an invitation to the pants party, err, the anniversary party. See you there! If you can’t make it to the party, you can find us at many fine drinking establishments around town or you can stop down to the brewery to pick up a growler on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

2. An interview with a retired police officer from WGRZ’s “2 Sides” program from a few months back has picked up some national steam and has turned into quite a viral hit. Captain Peter Christ (Vice-Chair of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) from Tonawanda makes a very clear, concise, and simple case for legalizing drugs.

He destroys every argument for continuing our policy of prohibition and instead wants to treat drug addiction as the public health crisis that it is. We’ve spent over $1 Trillion on the “War On Drugs” and President Obama is spending more in actual dollars and percentages on interdiction and enforcement than any President who has come before him. In 2010, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses. It’s time to rethink the policy.

3. The pervasive influence of social media is now even changing how law enforcement investigates crimes. The investigation of Monday’s bombings in Boston will rely to an extraordinary extent on crowdsourced surveillance, provided by Marathon spectators’ cellphone photos, Vine videos, and Instagram feeds. However, combing through the massive amount of digital data is a huge challenge for investigators.

4. The connection between the grotesque rise in baseball salaries and our ailing financial system.

5. Did you know there is a growing number of men who are giving up on masturbation? They claim it makes them healthier, happier, and better men. What this means for the porn industry is still…insert your own pun, I’m tired.

6. The hell of the barely regulated and often unsafe American day care industry.

7. Retired Army General Stanley McChrystal on the domestic ramifications of foreign drone strikes: “…we should not be upset when someone responds with their equivalent, which is a suicide bomb in Central Park, because that’s what they can respond with.”

8. The Great Debt Delusion: How Math Keeps Proving Austerity Wrong

Fact Of The Day: 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.

Quote Of The Day: “Worry is a misuse of the imagination” – Dan Zadra

Video Of The Day: The first commercial cellular phone in the US is put to the test in front of the world’s media.

Song Of The Day: “North American Scum” – LCD Soundsystem

Follow me on Twitter for the “incremental grumpy” @ChrisSmithAV

Like The Morning Grumpy on Facebook

Email me links, tips, story ideas: chris@artvoice.com

All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy. But first, the Venn diagram of irrational nonsense.

1. Here’s the latest Trending Buffalo podcast featuring Brad Riter and me discussing new media and whether or not it’s possible to make money running a local website. I have more to say about this topic (and the original article in Buffalo Spree which inspired the conversation), but I’ll defer writing about it until Alan Bedenko has a shot to weigh in as he wasn’t able to join us for the podcast.

2. Want to be happier? Stop reading the news.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we’d expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That’s not the case.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

I know this seems counter-intuitive from a blogger who curates “news” for his readers. However, if you’ve been reading the Grumpy, you’d know that I try to not link to the daily bump and grind of local or even national news, but instead focus on underlying trends or articles that inform movements and larger shifts in ideology. I haven’t been explicitly doing it for the reasons stated in the aforementioned article, but I’ve stopped reading the daily news. It’s noise that makes me decidedly less intelligent and less-informed. I try to consume longer-form work and investigative articles that challenge my assumptions and spend the time to fill out an idea with persuasive evidence. When was the last time you read a daily news story (most likely partially ghost-written by a press release and/or featuring pre-packaged comments from a press conference) and thought, “I’m glad I read that.”? Not too often, I’ll bet.

3. Detroit’s story is also Buffalo’s story. I’m constantly watching developments in Detroit  to see how they are working to solve the problems of sprawl, poverty, large-scale economic disinvestment, crime, and sustainability while comparing them to our own efforts in Buffalo. Detroit is ahead in some ways and behind in others, but America is rooting for Detroit’s resurgence and there is a billionaire who is underwriting some broad-based private sector development.

4. A great local hobby for Buffalonians is to imagine and opine about what should happen to the Central Terminal. Some think it should be re-purposed as an events center, an office, apartments, put back into service as a train station, or all of the above. Here’s ten more suggestions for everyone to chew on. Whatever you think should be done with the terminal, you might want to kick in a few bucks and help put a new roof on the place.

5. The annual bee die-offs that have come to be known as “colony-collapse disorder” appear to be accelerating. Mother Jones reports on the issue, and the emerging scientific consensus regarding the effect of pesticides on bee colonies as well as on how the media is covering it.

6. How conservatives invented “voter fraud” to attack civil rights.

Fact Of The Day: Bacon accelerates hangover recovery.

Quote Of The Day: “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Video Of The Day: Happy Monday from Operation Smile. Warning: It might get a bit dusty in whatever room you’re sitting in while watching this video.

Song Of The Day: “Falling For You” – Weezer

Follow me on Twitter for the “incremental grumpy” @ChrisSmithAV

Like The Morning Grumpy on Facebook

Email me links, tips, story ideas: chris@artvoice.com

All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy. But first, the Venn diagram of irrational nonsense.

1. The economic story of the year: the stock market vs. the labor market.

On Tuesday, the S&P 500 and the Dow closed at nominal all-time highs. Three days later, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added a shockingly low 88,000 jobs in March. How bad is 88K? Well, put it this way, we’re theoretically in the midst of an accelerating recovery, and 88K new jobs per month won’t get us back to full employment for another 20 years, or more.

I suspect that this will be one of the defining national stories of 2013, and beyond: The big, sustained, and accelerating gap between the working opportunities of most Americans and the profits produced at the top.

The rich get richer…

Corporate profits are spiraling wildly upward amidst “The Great Speedup“. An aging workforce, combined with sharp cuts in labor costs, combined with lower federal spending, massive cuts in state and municipal spending, along with continued tax cuts for the wealthy (and the aforementioned corporations) adds up to a shitty economy. But, it’s Obama’s fault, right?

2. An incredible speech about the necessity of high-speed universal Internet access from Susan Crawford who I wrote about in the Grumpy this past February.

100 years ago, electricity was a luxury. When FDR entered office, 90% of farmers didn’t have it. FDR took this on – took on special interests, drove towards affordable, world-class electricity for everyone. It wasn’t easy, it took leadership.

Today, in America, we treat high-speed Internet access like a luxury. We’ve deregulated it entirely. And we’re reaping what we have sown.

A third of Americans don’t subscribe – a hundred million of us – and we’re stuck there. If you’re poor, less-well-educated, or of color, it’s much more likely that you don’t have a wired connection at home. 19 million can’t get it at any cost.  So we’ve got an enormous digital divide inside our country.

We believed ten years ago that the magic of the market would bring us universal cheap connectivity. Instead, a few giant companies divided markets and consolidated – here’s the bottom line: Cable has won. When it comes to wired internet access, cable has a lock – .2% of new high-speed Internet access subscriptions in the last three quarters of 2012 went to the local cable monopoly.  Comcast by far the largest, 20M; TWC 11M. Verizon and AT&T, meanwhile, have backed off from wires, and are concentrating wholly on the separate wireless marketplace.

We are stagnating – no federal plan for the future. We have the worst of both worlds: both no competition and no oversight.

And Comcast and TWC and VZ and AT&T have the best of all monopoly profits, which is a quiet life.

We need to recapture the regulatory ideal. That ideal is that regulation of infrastructure, government intervention, makes free markets and free speech possible. We used to know this – we understood this with highways, electricity, and communications – Eisenhower and freeways. Our telephone network was the envy of the world when it was built.

This regulatory ideal unleashes human ingenuity; it’s pro competition, pro growth, pro innovation.

Or, we can continue to let corporate profiteers extract maximum profit with minimum benefit for the consumer.

3. A Spectacular, Colorful Chart of Who Works (and Who Doesn’t Work) in America Today. The share of American adults who are either working or actively looking for work (the labor force participation rate) — fell to its lowest point since 1979, according to Friday’s jobs report. So, if 37 percent of American adults aren’t in the labor force, what are they doing?

4. Any doubt that Henry Kissinger was a horrible man will now be removed due to Wikileaks releasing over 200,000 of his diplomatic cables.

“The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” — Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975

Julian Assange today announced the launch of the Public Library of US Diplomacy, or PLUSD, the publication of more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s. PLUSD includes diplomatic cables, intel reports, congressional correspondence, and other formerly restricted material, now all online in searchable text form.

The Kissinger Cables comprise more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records for the period 1973 to 1976, including 205,901 records relating to former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Dating from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1976 they cover a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence. They include more than 1.3 million full diplomatic cables and 320,000 originally classified records. These include more than 227,000 cables classified as “CONFIDENTIAL” and 61,000 cables classified as “SECRET”. Perhaps more importantly, there are more than 12,000 documents with the sensitive handling restriction “NODIS” or ‘no distribution’, and more than 9,000 labelled “Eyes Only”.

The documents also contain hourly diplomatic reporting on the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria (the “Yom Kippur war”). While several of these documents have been used by US academic researchers in the past, the Kissinger Cables provides unparalleled access to journalists and the general public.

Improving access and making these documents searchable is an incredible step forward for historians, journalists, and citizens.

5. NASA won’t be going back to the moon anytime soon, and that’s pretty sad.

6. The CIA’s secret deal that began “The Drone War”.

7. The “nuclear” option for total Facebook app privacy.

Fact Of The Day: There are 62 pieces of Lego for every person on Earth. Most of them happen to be in my basement, strategically placed to inflict maximum foot pain.

Quote Of The Day: “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”  – James A. Garfield

Video Of The Day: An awesome moment.

Song Of The Day: “Free Radicals” – The Flaming Lips

Follow me on Twitter for the “incremental grumpy” @ChrisSmithAV

Like The Morning Grumpy on Facebook

Email me links, tips, story ideas: chris@artvoice.com