The paws of American preparedness

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The _Washington Monthly_ has a puff piece this month about government websites for children. For reasons that date back to a Clinton Administration memo setting guidelines for web content, most Federal agencies have a special “For Kids” section of their sites. What really caught my eye in the article, though, was Rex, a disturbingly hunky mountain lion (aren’t even big cats rather lithe creatures?) who apparently enjoys cartography and speaks on behalf of (naturally) “Homeland Security’s Ready.gov”:http://www.ready.gov/kids/family/dad.html .

Sadly, though, even Rex probably has to put up with the ridiculous farce of the TSA. From the acidly correct “Boyd Group”:http://www.aviationplanning.com/asrc1.htm airline consultancy:

The negligent people running the TSA have ignored the threat of liquid explosive detection for years. Right after 9/11, technologies were discussed that could ascertain if that bottle in the Samsonite was mouthwash, nitro, or a bottle of cheap hooch. But the TSA ignored them, because the TSA is a political bureaucracy run by incompetents who have had no anticipatory plan to counter anything.

Prime Example: Richard Reid sticks explosives in his shoe. The TSA reacts by requiring shoes to be put through a metal detector. A metal detector that can’t detect explosives. So, now we’re all going to be sitting on airplanes, with no chapstick, no make-up, no lip gloss, and no mascara. Unless the terrorist is a part-time hooker, this won’t do anything except make the coach cabin even less attractive…

The TSA’s idea of security is “target removal” – not counter-measures to protect our way of life. The idea is that if something can conceivably be used as a terrorist device, or if something might be a target, the philosophy is to simply remove it. It’s like circling the wagons tighter and tighter to make a smaller target. Not defending territory, but ceding it to terrorism.

Remember, too, that Kip Hawley, Michael Chertoff and the rest of these security cub scouts have no plan, no goals, no ideas about what to do next. So jumping into that intellectual vacuum we have the congressional likes of Reps Markey, Wyden, and Israel, et al., all of whom have their own crackpot, short-term, and generally inept ideas of how security should look… [W]hat we see today are not security measures. They are the actions of government officials who are totally clueless and essentially are having their strings pulled by events…

Instead of making us safer by crafting anticipative [sic] counter-measures to terrorism, and instead of developing programs that protect and defend our way of life, Chertoff, Hawley, and – deal with it – the entire Bush Administration have no plan except to have us run faster and faster away whenever there’s a threat.

Too-fashionable homes

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bq. “This is what I did with my nightclubs and hotels and I intend to do with people’s homes” [says Ian Schrager]. Imagine that: coming home and finding a shrieking gay Cuban bouncer with a clipboard on the door; three peroxided trust-fund brats with added silicone bits, all talking at once, locked in the bathroom; and a family from Idaho in town to see The Producers asleep in your bedroom… They boast that [a key decorative element is] an extrapolation from New York City street graffiti. So, after they clean up the street and move out the kids who do the graffiti, they offer you chic designer graffiti instead. No one seems to have noticed the irony of this or, indeed, seen the writing on the wall.

— A. A. Gill, taken aback by designer glass condo towers in NYC, writing in Vanity Fair

Dancing in the streets

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Dancing in the street #2

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Last week, The Space/Movement Project occupied a metered parking space as part of the Park Yourself performance art event, which temporarily liberated parking spaces all around town for human leisure activities. Once rid of the hulking, momentarily abandoned steel boxes (renting the space at absurdly cheap prices), parking spaces can become colorful, joyful extensions of too-crowded sidewalks — here, just as wide as the walk itself.

Similar, citywide parking space occupations took place in SF and NYC this week.
Of the San Francisco exercise, John King wrote:

All of which made for good fun and a mild case of sunburn. But is also makes a point about what constitutes good public space in a city. Size doesn’t matter; the important thing is to craft something that people can cherish — and more often than not, the snug spots are the ones that work best.

Gentrifying TOD (updated)

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Alan Ehrenhalt’s Assessments column in Governing this month looks bittersweetly at the phenomenon of transit-oriented gentrification. The used bookstore Ehrenhalt’s daughter works at, smack between Minneapolis and St. Paul, will soon front a light rail station. Its owner fears the higher rents and gentrification that he believes inevitably follows.

What, really, is the response here? Sure, the bookstore will gain business from being next to the train; many of the world’s greatest bookstores garner much business from their classic, transit-served urban neighborhoods; indeed, their density and accessibility to broader markets probably make such niche businesses possible. Yet the inevitable transit-oriented development, by realigning an area’s land value and development intensity with its newly expanded transportation capacity, could indeed “force” lower rent, less dense uses out. The usual NU policy prescriptions of “flood the market with TOD; supply and demand will rebalance accordingly” or “give it time; it’ll decay nicely” ring hollow to individuals faced with the considerably less abstract notion of having to move their businesses. (Unlike affordable residences, affordable business space is rarely on any policymakers’ radar.)

Sure, property markets do respond to shifts in supply and demand, but a confounding factor exists: amenities, and with it desirability. The addition of transit (an amenity) increases desirability and thus spurs additional demand. Indeed, adding supply can, through a curious feedback loop (e.g., by introducing high-quality housing or entirely new housing product types), create more demand — first latent demand within the area, and then by drawing in outsiders. Property markets do work, but they do so in very imperfect ways.

Says Patricia Diefenderfer, a new resident of South L.A. (in a well-balanced LA Weekly article by David Zahniser), “The other unfortunate thing is that neighborhoods like South L.A. have… all the right ingredients, and yet somehow, [the amenities] are just not there. And when they get there, the same people will not be there living in it and appreciating it. And I don’t know why that is.”

Corruption’s third city (but below LA!)

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Daniel Engber in “Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2149240 finds that Chicago is only third in the nation in federal corruption convictions, after southern California and southern Florida. Well, gee, that’s a letdown. Besides, we have so many more local governments than either of those metro areas — 371 municipalities here, compared to 201 in Los Angeles-San Diego and 61 in Miami (according to “Metropolitan Area Research Corporation”:http://metroresearch.org/projects/national_report.asp), with more elected officials per capita besides (compare 50 Chicago aldermen to 15 LA council members).

Well, this particular number crunching makes me realize that I’m now part of the problem: an official in one of those 1,500-odd local governments that have taxing authority in Chicagoland. (That was before LSCs were invented, too.) Ah well.

Cars make you fat

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William Saletan in Slate notes that “[Chinese] households with [motor] vehicles have an obesity rate 80 percent higher than their peers.” (The link in the article doesn’t lead to a good source.) Sure, that correlation probably has two huge confounding factors: income, as rich Chinese both own cars and eat more; and maybe a bit of selection bias.* Yet it’s nice to think that such a big correlation implies at least a little bit of causation.

Incidentally, elsewhere in Slate “Joel Waldfogel”:http://www.slate.com/id/2148759 points to British evidence that taller people are paid more because they’re smarter, while “Daniel Engber”:http://www.slate.com/id/2132990/ links heavy babies to bigger adults. All of which sets me up as an outlier again: against American male norms, 87th percentile by birth weight, 5th percentile by adult height, and, well, an immodestly high figure on intelligence. Of course, earnings — well, never mind. (Of course, a decades-old British data set also wouldn’t account for Jewish or Asian Americans, two short[er] groups with above-average incomes.)

* This seems more likely in the U.S., where not driving is an anomalous choice. Bicyclists as a group may be skinnier than average, but no one claims that the act of playing football makes one hefty.

Mod

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This month’s “Dwell magazine”:http://www.dwell.com/now/currentissue has two features on Chicago: a flattering, if coldly photographed, “travelogue”:http://www.dwell.com/learn/detour/3788777.html with Brad Lynch (interviewed by Lee Bey), which calls out Bari Foods with the title photograph. Elsewhere, Robert Sullivan’s paean to the “L” (wrapped in Saturn ads) calls out a notable editing error: my former coworker Heather Campbell is introduced correctly as Heather Gleason first, then as Campbell (her maiden name) later. Oh well — not that I understand the whole marriage thing, anyways.

One in a hundred

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John Allen Paulos writes for ABC News about Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine”:

bq. A companion to the Cheney 1 percent action doctrine (if the probability is at least 1 percent, act) is the administration’s non-action doctrine (if the probability is less than 99 percent, then don’t act). This latter doctrine is generally invoked in discussions of global warming, where it seems absolute certainty is required to justify any significant action. Ideology determines which of these two inconsistent doctrines to invoke.

More drilling won’t help

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Even if Dick Cheney sinks exploratory drills in every single playground in America, there will never be enough oil to slake the SUVs’ unending thirst for tar:

bq. “SUVs alone burn half the total for all passenger cars, far more than their fair share and more petroleum than our entire country produces in a year.” — Mark Morford, writing in the SF Chronicle

And since we’re dealing with an nonrenewable resource, faster consumption now merely hastens “the inevitable decline and fall”:http://www.salon.com/tech/books/2004/05/19/end_of_oil/index.html :

bq. “We believe oil markets may have entered the early stages of what we have referred to as a ‘super spike’ period — a multi-year trading band of oil prices high enough to meaningfully reduce energy consumption and recreate a spare capacity cushion only after which will lower energy prices return… Perhaps the ultimate answer to high how oil prices need to go before demand destruction occurs is derived from knowing when American consumers will stop buying gas guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel efficient alternatives… Based on our analysis of gasoline spending and the economy noted above, we estimate that U.S. gasoline prices may need to exceed $4 per gallon.” [Goldman Sachs analyst report, quoted at “Energy Bulletin”:http://www.energybulletin.net/5017.html%5D

or this, from “the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f20cfb8a-920d-11d9-bca5-00000e2511c8.html (reported by Kevin Morrison and Javier Blas):

bq. “The rapid rise in global oil demand should lead the industrialised world to promote alternatives to oil as well as energy conservation, the International Energy Agency said on Friday. The warning, from the West’s energy policy adviser, signals a sharp turnaround by the IEA, which has previously tried to cool oil markets by blaming prices on speculators and short-term supply disruptions…. The agency also plans to release a report next month entitled _Saving Oil In A Hurry_, which will cover among other issues the topic of energy efficiency in consuming nations. Energy analysts said a new drive on energy efficiency could be difficult because most of the increase in oil consumption is in transportation, where there are few economic alternatives.”

At a new year’s party, the conversation turned at one point to survivalist techniques for dealing with the forthcoming civil war between Red and Blue — with the assumption that we Blues are in trouble since the Reds obviously have a better armed populace. (And no, I’m not a good shot.) At the rate we’re going, we may very well end up in armed conflict, but I’m a bit more optimistic. Even in the event of a peak-oil situation or currency crisis (both of which some pessimists predict will happen this year), I’m encouraged by the natural resilience of diverse ecosystems — human in the city and natural in the countryside — to absorb shock.

Toby Hemenway, formerly a permaculture farmer in rural Oregon, came to different conclusion than most of the pessimists–the socially denuded countryside, completely stripped of social capital by capitalism, would implode during a crash while the socially diverse cities would maintain their resilience. It’s worth reading in its entirety; an excerpt follows the jump.

Continue reading →

DOAP

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There was one other set of camera crews dancing around the Billionaires for Bush “this past March”:https://westnorth.com/2006/03/19/15-seconds-of-fame/ — a British crew filming, they said, for a “documentary” about the antiwar movement. However, upon further inspection, it turned out to be more like a docudrama for a project they called “DOAP.” Hmm: sure sounds like “Death of a President,”:http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2006/films_schedules/films_description.asp?id=88 which has “the blogs”:http://technorati.com/search/%22death%20of%20a%20president%22 as excited as they were about “Snakes on a Plane.”