Bloomberg says mayoral candidate de Blasio's campaign is not just "class warfare," it's "racist."

This comes in a New York Magazine interview. The interviewer immediately asks the simple question "Racist?" and Bloomberg says:

Well, no, no, I mean*...

The asterisk goes to a footnote that says they've inserted these words which they can't hear on their audiotape because the mayor's office asked them to.

... he’s making an appeal using his family to gain support. 

De Blasio has a black wife and mixed-race offspring, and he uses his family in photo ops and ads.

I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone watching what he’s been doing. I do not think he himself is racist. It’s comparable to me pointing out I’m Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote. You tailor messages to your audiences and address issues you think your audience cares about.

That doesn't make the campaign "racist"! He could have said "racial" or "race conscious."

But his whole campaign is that there are two different cities here. And I’ve never liked that kind of division. The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones that pay the bills. The people that would get very badly hurt here if you drive out the very wealthy are the people he professes to try to help. Tearing people apart with this “two cities” thing doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a destructive strategy for those you want to help the most. He’s a very populist, very left-wing guy, but this city is not two groups, and if to some extent it is, it’s one group paying for services for the other.

It’s a shame, because I’ve always thought he was a very smart guy.

And it's a shame that Bloomberg said "racist" and dragged in the man's wife and kids, because he's got an important message here — warning New Yorkers away from excessive leftism. What a gift to de Blasio!

At an appearance in Brooklyn on Saturday with his wife and their 18-year-old daughter, Chiara, Mr. de Blasio called Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks “very, very unfortunate and inappropriate.”

“I’m exceedingly proud of my family,” he added. “I hope the mayor will reconsider what he said. I hope he realizes it was inappropriate.”

In her response to the mayor’s comments about her husband’s campaign, Ms. McCray said, “Do I look like an inanimate object? Or a tool? I walk, I talk and make my own decisions.”

"We don’t cook at home, but, yes, we have separate trash for composting stuff."

Says Mayor Bloomberg, who's proposing food-waste composting for NYC, quoted in a NY Post article titled "It’s a heap of trouble: Vermin fear over Mike's compost bid."

We don’t cook at home... that's rich.

"Speak English" rhetoric that you'd better not try unless you're a Democrat.

1. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg: "I’ve said this a thousand times, if you don’t speak good grammar – English with good grammar – you’re not going to get the kinds of jobs that you want.... If there’s a lot of jargon, double negatives, and things like that, they hurt your career prospects... People think its cute to jive, and it may be for entertainment, but ya just still have to have great command of the english language."

2. U.S. President Barack Obama: "This bill would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are already in this country illegally--a pathway that includes passing a background check, learning English, paying taxes and a penalty, and then going to the back of the line behind everyone who's playing by the rules and trying to come here legally."

3. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: "We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto... Second … we should establish that citizenship requires passing a test on American history in English."

4. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: "And Reagan would have never offended Hispanics as Gingrich did when he said Spanish is the language of the ghetto."

"It is my belief — my BELIEF in big letters — when people don’t make good choices..."

"... you can yell as loud as you want to at me about this is my body and I do what I want to do with my body, so OK yes you can. But now you are spreading it along generationally so that your daughter and grandchildren have it and everybody’s doing it. It becomes a term of apathy because people say my father had it, my aunt had it. People then ask you, 'What your mother die of?' 'Diabetes.' 'Grandmother?' 'Diabetes.' These things don’t have to happen if you make the correct choice."

Bill Cosby, defending Mayor Bloomberg's soda law.

Mayor Bloomberg's aides cried sexism to induce 28 famous women to endorse his choice for NYC school chancellor.

The NYT reports:

As they prepared to contact dozens of famous women, his aides planned to use several talking points, among them [Cathleen P.] Black’s managerial and business accomplishments, according to the e-mails. The aides also planned to argue that there was “clearly a difference” between the ways the public treated Ms. Black, “a female publisher without educational experience,” and her predecessor, Joel I. Klein, “a male prosecutor without educational experience.”

In the end, 28 women signed the letter, including Gloria Steinem, Evelyn Lauder and Whoopi Goldberg....

"The Bloomberg administration hoped the endorsements could help persuade the state education commissioner to grant Ms. Black a waiver to become chancellor, which she needed because of her lack of education credentials:

Ms. Black eventually received the waiver, and the job. But she resigned just 95 days into her tenure, after Mr. Bloomberg concluded that the situation could not be salvaged.

"Before he became the anti-junk-food mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg was a pioneer in the corporate provision of junk food."

"For decades, Bloomberg has made available to employees—at no charge—the entire contents of a convenience store. What started as coffee, chips, and cookies (snacks, not meals), quickly expanded to things that were like meals (fresh fruit, cereal and oatmeal for breakfast, cans of tuna fish, soup, and noodle packets for lunch)."

Writes Daniel Gross, in part of an argument that the IRS shouldn't add the value of food provided to employees to their taxable income. This food is "an instrument of social control."

Companies use people’s basic needs and desire to consume calories as a way of channeling their efforts toward the greater corporate good.

Does that really make food different from money, which is also used to energize and appease workers? One difference is that people eat different amounts of food and some — such as vegetarians — eat less expensive items. How would you calculate the value of the free food?

Notice that this issue heated up because of the high quality of the food in Silicon Valley workplaces:

A Gourmet magazine article last year raved about the "mouthwatering free food" at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The article cited dishes such as porcini-encrusted grass-fed beef and noted that nearly half the produce was organic....

Facebook's headquarters in nearby Menlo Park, Calif., has two main cafes, plus a barbecue shack, a pizza shop, a burrito bar, and a 50s-style burger joint. Recent menu options at Facebook's Café Epic, which dishes up free food from morning until night, included spicy she-crab soup and grilled steak with chimichurri sauce.

By the way, how did "mouth-watering" ever come to be a standard way to describe something appetizing? It's an internally inconsistent word. It's not "mouth-watering" to picture a mouth watering. It's stomach-turning. Looking at the (unlinkable) OED, I see the word originally described the person who was slavering:

1779   H. Downman Lucius Junius Brutus v. iv. 124   Conscientious, babbling, sniveling, Mouth-watering knaves, who envy every man The dainty morsel they can't eat themselves.
1845   R. Ford Hand-bk. Travellers in Spain I. i. 67   The mouth-watering bystanders sigh, as they see and smell the rich freight steaming away from them.

In the early use as a description of the object of the drooler's desire, there is a connotation of disgust and disapproval: "1900   Speakers 3 Jan. 338/2   The White Star shareholders have made a most mouth-watering bargain."

I've changed the topic, and I'd like to go on in this vein (duct?). Bodily fluids are a bit of a theme on the blog today, and the language of saliva is truly interesting. Drool and slaver. Did you know that drool is derived from drivel? And slaver and slobber are basically the same word. Drool and slobber — the words with the letter o — convey a childishness or mental incompetence, while the o-less drivel and slaver seem better for criticizing a competent adult who's wasting our time or is dangerously greedy.

So if you don't like the direction this post has taken, call it drool, slobber, slaver, drivel.

1852   J. S. Blackie On Stud. Lang. 2   As it begins with dreams, so it must end in drivel.

Ah, that reminds me. We were talking about the government. The mouth-watering government.

"Rapper Lil Poopy’s dad cleared of abuse."

"Brockton police filed an abuse and neglect complaint against the 9-year-old rapper’s father, Luis Rivera, in February, saying that letting the fourth-grader rhyme about 
cocaine and risque themes amounted to abuse."

To get you up to speed on why this complaint was filed — perhaps you, like me, had never even heard of Lil Poopy — here's video and a time-stamped list of the worst things about it. Note that a much-repeated line is: "Coke ain't a bad word it's only soda."

0:44  Coke is a bad word. Maybe not like your more high-rent bad words, but 9-year-olds have little business drinking soda, much less rapping a whole song about it. What rhymes with flax seed? Also: Mayor Mike Bloomberg would probably, rightly, beg to differ with your assertion.

0:45  Ohhhh, you’re telling me people are saying the "coke" thing is a reference to cocaine? Well that's not good....

1:38  Again, you should not be drinking soda, Lil Poopy....

Bloomberg on his cup-size law: "All we're saying is we want to show you just how big the cup is."

"If you want 32 ounces, take two cups to your seat. If you want 64, carry four. But our hope is, if you only take one, you won't go back."

He's just showing us things that maybe we didn't understand before.

We're not banning anything. We're trying to urge them to tell the public -- we're tr-- our job is to educate. It's the public's job to decide when they look on the grocery shelf or have the lever on a soda machine, which thing to take, which product is in their interest. All we're trying to do is educate. And then hopefully, if they understand they would be better off with one product or another....

So it's not really fair to call him Nanny Bloomberg. It should be Schoolmarm Bloomberg.

Bloomberg's ban on big sodas is "fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences."

"The simple reading of the rule leads to the earlier acknowledged uneven enforcement even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole…. the loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the state purpose of the rule."

Says the state court judge.

The Bloomberg diet.

"If you eat less than 2,000 calories you'll lose weight... If you eat more than 2,000 calories, you'll gain weight. Now some things metabolize more quickly than others. And everyone says I should go on this kind of diet or that kind of diet. Don't eat and you'll lose weight."

How does that fit with the "nanny" image? Nannies can get tough.



Anyway, how tall is Mayor Bloomberg? Tall enough to eat 2,000 calories a day (at the age of 71) and not gain weight?

But, as you know, I agree with him. If you're overweight, you are eating too much. You're eating too much for you. Why is it so hard to just eat less? Of course, if you could do it, it would work, but people can't do it. (I think the actual best answer is to go low carb, not to count calories. That's what we do at Meadhouse. )

What's wrong with the argument that Bloomberg Businessweek cover isn't racist because the artist is from Peru.

Here's the cover, in yesterday's post, where some commenters were saying something like what I'm seeing at the Columbia Journalism Review:

Sounds to me like it might have been [the artist Andres] Guzman’s decision to make the family members minorities — not Businessweek’s. And I have a hard time believing that a man from Latin America deliberately intended to portray minorities, including Latinos, in a negative light.

Ridiculous. It doesn't matter what Guzman intended or how Guzman feels about things. Bloomberg Businessweek chose to run the illustration on the cover. They are responsible for that decision which had to include judgment about how it would be perceived by potential readers. The point of a magazine cover is to reach out to readers — not to passively convey an illustration that an artist was asked to provide. If what comes in from the artist is going to strike readers as weirdly racial, the editors shouldn't run it. Does the Columbia Journalism Review seriously think otherwise?

Now, it is interesting that we perceive a cartoonish image with 4 black and/or Hispanic caricatures to be saying something about minorities. Maybe we should have evolved to the point where our natural reading of such a cartoon would be generic, but Bloomberg Businessweek's choice of cover illustration took place in the real world that currently exists.

Businessweek "Warns That Minorities May Be Buying Houses Again."

Horrendous magazine cover for which they've issued a sorry-if-you-were-offended apology.

"The city’s going after families who have pigs as companions."

"Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s daughter has a pig in Gracie Mansion and no one mentions it’s illegal."

The powerful think the rules don't apply to them. But that's not an argument in favor of pigs in the city. No pigs in the city!

"What gives the mayor the right to decide, without adequate notice, to give our children drugs that will impact their bodies and their psyches?"

The drug is Plan B (the "morning-after pill") and the mayor is Bloomberg.

About 40 separate “school-based health centers” doled out 12,721 doses of Plan B in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10....
The city says about 6,300 NYC girls had unplanned pregnancies last year, and more than half had abortions. Of those who give birth, the city says, about 70 percent drop out of school, making their futures bleak.

"We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen."

Said Icepick in last night's thread about Boston banning drinking games in bars. He began:

I recently read "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Return of the King. It was disturbing how much the Shire under (ultimately) Saruman's direction sounded like modern America. The country is being run by over-officious jerks, and the American people are putting up with it. Land of the free no more....

And then:

We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen.

A link goes to the Harlan Ellison story "Repent Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman." 

Icepick advises:

Professor, I believe you need some more tags. One for over-officiousness, and perhaps tags for harlequins (see Swartz, for example) and for ticktockmen (anything with Bloomberg).

Ellison begins his story with a quote from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Ellison introduces that quote with: "There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know 'where it's at,' this...."

That story was published in 1965, when the phrase "where it's at" was quite the thing. 

ADDED: I just bought "Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century," which contains "Repent Harlequin!"

"See? You can be messy on the inside, and no one knows."

Step inside a 400-square-foot apartment space, transformed by elaborate built-ins:



The quote I've used for the post title appears about midway and marks the spot where my mood began to shift from delight to despair. What do we think of this man, who is promoting what seems to be a simplified, de-cluttered way of life, but who is, himself, in a business, promoting expensive merchandise, the machinery of compression. Do we want to be compressed thusly? It's one thing to live like this on board a cruise ship, but permanently? For a certain type of person — perhaps this man, or the man he pretends to be — it's a fine, joyful existence. Would he ever really have a dinner party for 10 in this space, as we see enacted at the end? It's not a real party, because it's an on-camera demonstration of the space. Watch closely and notice how the women are responding. There is something they do not love, and it is visible even in this crisply edited production. I felt empathy with these women and resistance to the man's sales pitch. And I remembered the gutted space shown at the beginning of the video, and thought that I could be happy, living in SoHo, in that 400-square-foot space as it looks right then. Just do the kitchen and the bathroom, nice and modern and constrained into a modest space, and let me put in some normal furniture — a good-sized table near the window for my work and eating space (that can be cleared off if anyone needs to come over for dinner) and I'll order a sleeper sofa from Design Within Reach. Spare me all those insane, ever-encroaching built-ins, and those crazy pop-up extra beds for guests. Guests to the city can get a hotel room or sleep on the floor or I'll add sleeper chair. By the end of the video, I felt paranoid that the government had a plan to shift us into smaller and smaller pods with evil corporations getting rich fitting them out with soul crushing storage bins. Mayor Bloomberg! Who fixed your ducts? Huh? Fixed your ducts, all right. I told you before - they fixed themselves. Oh, yeah? Then where did this come from, eh? Out of your nostril? Eh? Nostrils, eh? Central Services. They don't take kindly to sabotage. Sabotage, huh? Jesus, this place is in a terrible state. Just a minute! You're not gonna leave it like this, are you? Why not? All you gotta do is blow your nose and it's fixed, innit?

Mayor Bloomberg: "Well, I don’t know that-- you keep saying control. I think that’s a-- a bad word. What about regulations?"

Funny the way the word "control" troubles the proponents of gun control!

That was on "Meet the Press" this morning, where I also notice this remark by David Brooks:

Can-- can I just say one thing about the-- the debate we need to have?  This has become-- one of the problems for this debate is it’s become a values war.  It’s perceived as urban versus rural... And frankly, it’s perceived as an attack on the lifestyle of rural people by urban people.  And I admire Mayor Bloomberg enormously--there’s probably no politician I agree with more but it’s counterproductive to have him as the spokesperson for the gun law movement.  There has to be more respect and more people frankly from rural and Red America who are-- who are participants in this.

"When you talk about 8.4 million people in New York City living three years longer than they did 10 years ago..."

"... it is just one of the great improvements in life expectancy ever found on the face of the Earth," says Mayor Bloomberg, who is apparently one of the greatest benefactors of humankind ever to emerge in the history of time.

Dr. Tom Farley, the city health commissioner, pointed to declining death rates from heart disease and cancer as primary reasons longevity is increasing.

“The risk factors for those are things we’ve been working on: smoking, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity,” said Farley. “That says that something we’re doing is working.”

See? The nannying worked. Now, shut up. I mean, really, shut up. That's not me saying that, it Mayor Bloomberg, quoted at the link: "People who complain die early, I’ve always thought." So shut up, sip that small soda, skip the doughnuts, and walk briskly and progressively into the new future.