Nov 7
2022
Monday Morning Read
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Taxpayers in Nashville are going to fork over more money to build their football team a new stadium than we suckers in New York are going to spend subsidizing Terry Pegula’s stadium in Orchard Park. Did we get a better deal? Hardly. The new stadium for the Tennessee Titans will include a dome and be located within walking distance of downtown’s fabled entertainment district. Oh, and the team owners are depleting much of their family’s fortune to pay for their portion of the venue. Pegula is making no such sacrifice.
The beleaguered STAMP industrial park near Batavia has landed a second tenant, Edwards Vacuum, which promises to bring 600 jobs to the hinterlands. Before anyone celebrates, let’s see how much money taxpayers are going to dole out to recruit the company. I mean, subsidies for the first tenant amounted to $4 million per job, half of them truck drivers. The state has pledged $22 million, which is hefty by itself. The feds, state power authority and Genesee County have yet to hand out their goodies. Count on the subsidies to be worth more than government can ever hope to recoup in taxes.
A lot has been written on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. I found The Intercept’s take to be particularly readable. Meanwhile, The Washington Post offers alternative to Twitter if you’d like to quit the platform.
I referenced this in my opening paragraph, but it’s worth repeating: The Pew Research Foundation studied the data and found that crime is not on the rise, the rhetoric from the right notwithstanding.
Concluded Pew:
“Annual government surveys from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show no recent increase in the U.S. violent crime rate. In 2021, the most recent year with available data, there were 16.5 violent crimes for every 1,000 Americans ages 12 and older. That was statistically unchanged from the year before, below pre-pandemic levels and far below the rates recorded in the 1990s.”
Bob Woodward has released tapes of the interviews he recorded with Donald Trump in the course of researching his books on the former president.
As The Guardian wrote:
“We hear Trump ladle out praise for Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Kim Jong-un is dear to his heart. Trump praises them for smarts, cunning and ruthlessness. He envies autocrats, seemingly wishes to join their ranks. A second term as president would provide that opportunity, Woodward argues.”
This obituary on Jerry Lee Lewis in New York magazine didn’t pull any punches.
Jerry Lee Lewis was known as the Killer, and it wasn’t a casual sobriquet — a schoolmate called him that after he tried to strangle a teacher. He once shot his bass player in the chest; just about all of his seven wives, including one who was a child, said he beat them; and there’s a lingering suspicion that he murdered wife No. 5. He was the very model of a high-functioning sociopath and somehow defied hard living, drug and alcohol abuse, and serious health problems to make it well into his ninth decade.
Yes, but the boy knew how to rock ’n’ roll, as evidenced by this performance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in 1958, right before his fall from grace for marrying his 13-year-old cousin.
