Once, when asked by a reporter what he thought of the vocal opposition to his plan for building an expressway across Manhattan through Greenwich Village, Robert Moses said, “The common man very often doesn’t know what’s in his own best interest; he isn’t smart enough to visualize what you’re going to do.”
Now, Moses was a Son of a Bitch of the highest order, and he had a myopic take on what made a great and livable city. But he was smart and in his own condescending way he was right. At least in this particular observation. For proof that Moses spoke the truth, look no further than the ever-expanding belt of cornfield development around Chicago. From Monee to Elburn to McHenry, developers are building ridiculous homes in places with no future in a world of $100 per barrel oil. And yet, they build. Why? Because the houses sell. Why? People want them.
And there, in those three words—“people want them”—is the foundation on which all attacks against so-called Smart Growth are built. Take Joel Kotkin’s recent column in the Online Wall Street Journal. The title says it all: “The War Against Suburbia.” Kotkin helpfully reproduces the entire bleating rant on his website, joelkotkin.com .
Kotkin is a Los Angeles resident, which helps explain why he feels his suburban way of life is under attack. L.A. is famous for its sprawl and you can’t have sprawl without people to populate it. More and more, however, there are voices other than those who would push the boundaries of development ever farther. Joining the chorus is Los Angeles’s new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, whom Kotkin quotes in his piece thusly: “This old concept that all of us are going to live in a three-bedroom home, you know this 2,500 square feet, with a big frontyard and a big backyard – well, that’s an old concept.”
Kotkin disagrees, calling such viewpoints “imposed vision.” And it is here, in the second paragraph, that his argument begins to fall apart. “From Australia to Great Britain (and points in between), there is a drive to use the public purse to expand often underused train systems, downtown condominiums, hotels, convention centers, sports stadia and “star-chitect”-designed art museums, often at the expense of smaller business, single-family neighborhoods and local shopping areas.”
This is so far from the truth, and provably so, as to threaten Kotkin’s credibility and standing in the academic world. How many tax breaks have big-box retailers like Wal-Mart and Target weaseled out of cash-strapped villages, towns and cities willing to prostitute themselves for a ride to the end of the sales tax rainbow? According to one website, 244 subsidized Wal-Mart facilities in 35 states have received tax incentives totaling $1 billion.
And how much money have federal and local governments spent building and maintaining interstate and local highway systems, not to mention local roads serving sprawling subdivisions?
Oregon, and Portland in particular, rate special scorn from Kotkin. The target of his ire is the urban growth boundary that the state drew around Portland in the 1970s. It was designed to promote more dense development in the city limits and to discourage massive subdivisions on the urban fringe, preserving that land for farming. It was a move that envisioned the end of the 5,000-mile salad and the need for cities to grow more of what they consume locally.
There are arguments to be made that the urban growth boundary has had unintended consequences, among them pushing unchecked growth to the outskirts of towns beyond the boundary, towns like Newberg, Woodburn and Boring. This is part of the reason that Kotkin can claim that 95% of the region’s population increase occurred outside the city limits. No word on whether Kotkin includes Vancouver, Wash., in that statistic, and if so whether he accounts for the onetime annexation of a huge chunk of land in Clark County in the 90s that basically doubled the population of Vancouver overnight.
Kotkin’s point comes down to this: People like the suburbs. They have voted with their feet and with their money. In a capitalist society, money talks, and people should be allowed to live where they want and how they want. If they want to build communities in the middle of the corn and drive 80 miles each way to work every day, so be it. It is not government’s place to dictate lifestyle.
Which is a fine argument, except. . . . People are hypocrites. They want it both ways. They want government to leave them to do as they please, until something goes wrong, when they want government to fix it.
That, plus the fact that what people like and what’s good for them aren’t always the same thing. People like McDonald’s, for example. They like it because there’s a lot of fat in the food there and the fat helps it taste good. The Indignant Citizen likes the texture half & half adds to his coffee. That doesn’t mean he should go drinking half & half at dinner.
It’s about moderation, really, and as a culture we’re not very good at that. Is there anything wrong with single family homes? No, of course not. Is there anything wrong with the odd person here and there opting to live in the middle of nowhere? No. But when everybody decides he wants a single-family house on five acres, scarcity of land becomes a reality.
Kotkin tries to put the Fear into his readers by suggesting that a cabal of city planners has emerged from the anti-sprawl propaganda-spewing planning schools and are invading city halls across America, hatching ways to squash spawl—and property rights in the process. It’s another of the laughable conclusions he draws.
Contrary to Kotkin’s argument, city governments are not suddenly clamping down on sprawl. For evidence he need only drive through the hinterlands of Chicago. Despite the fact that dozens of condominium buildings are under construction throughout the city, houses are rising from the fields unabated. The push outward has continued with no ill effect felt from a resurgence in city building.
Kotkin also slams the media for writing stories about how some people think cities are still good. As an example he points to an article in the Jan. 8 New York Times headlined “Goodbye, Suburbs” about couples who moved to the ‘burbs, decided they didn’t like it, and moved back to the city, sometimes selling their suburban homes at a loss. Kotkin thinks this kind of reporting ignores demographic trends, and worse, ridicules them. But Kotkin’s own statistics suggest that people are choosing the suburbs despite newspapers occasionally writing stories about how some people prefer the city.
Kotkin, begins his screed by describing suburbia as “the preferred way of life across the advanced capitalist world,” and he concludes, “It is time politicians recognized how their constituents actually want to live. If not, they will only hurt their communities, and force aspiring middle class families to migrate ever further out to the periphery for the privacy, personal space and ownership that constitutes the basis of their common dreams.”
The bottom line is that the time is coming when living in far-flung suburban developments, with all that entails such as five-mile drives to the store, will be impractical. When that happens, all those people who insisted that the American Dream consisted of the right to a house, a yard, and SUV and a boat will be asking their politicians why nobody warned them the end of the cheap energy era was nigh. They’ll want to know why they were allowed to live in places that are no longer viable. They’ll be demanding compensation of some kind, no doubt.
Then the government, which Kotkin now complains is doing too much, won’t be able to do enough.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Soy 'Milk' ≠ Milk
Random Thought of the Day:
Soy milk is not milk. It doesn’t really look like milk. It doesn’t taste like milk. So how can soy milk’s marketers get away with calling it “milk?”
According to Webster’s Online Dictionary, milk is either “a fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young,” which soy milk most definitely is not, or it can also be “a liquid resembling milk in appearance,” which is a stretch in the case of soy milk.
It could just as easily, and accurately, be called “soy juice.” But since soy milk is touted as a healthy substitute for the real thing, calling it juice wouldn’t do. Who’d buy it? Soy juice sounds disgusting. It sounds, in fact, like what it is—soy beans soaked in water, ground and cooked before being “processed into a milky liquid,” according to the soy milk section of the Hormel Foods website.
The good people at Hormel also point out that soy milk needs no small amount of alteration before it can be passed off as “milk.” To wit: “Soy milk is often thickened to appear more like common milk (in other words it’s more juice-like in its normal state) and flavored with honey, vanilla or carob to alter a mildly bitter taste that would be noticeable without the flavoring.”
Not that milk isn’t altered chemically before it reaches your local store, but at least at its heart it’s milk, not bitter bean juice.
And another thing: Milk shouldn't be packaged in a box and stored at room temperature for five months, like soy “milk.” The Indignant Citizen was in his local Starbucks today and saw boxes of Silk soy “milk” with a “Best if Sold By” date of April 2006. That ain’t right.
(Of course, in Italy the Indignant Citizen saw milk sold in boxes and somehow stored at room temperature, but it was still real milk, and besides that's just Italy. Italians have espresso bars in their truck stops.)
There’s an old saying about how putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the fact that the animal wearing the lipstick is still a pig. Likewise giving a bean a face transplant and an enema doesn’t change the fact it’s still a bean.
Soy milk will never be milk, no matter how hard its backers work to make it so.
Soy milk is not milk. It doesn’t really look like milk. It doesn’t taste like milk. So how can soy milk’s marketers get away with calling it “milk?”
According to Webster’s Online Dictionary, milk is either “a fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young,” which soy milk most definitely is not, or it can also be “a liquid resembling milk in appearance,” which is a stretch in the case of soy milk.
It could just as easily, and accurately, be called “soy juice.” But since soy milk is touted as a healthy substitute for the real thing, calling it juice wouldn’t do. Who’d buy it? Soy juice sounds disgusting. It sounds, in fact, like what it is—soy beans soaked in water, ground and cooked before being “processed into a milky liquid,” according to the soy milk section of the Hormel Foods website.
The good people at Hormel also point out that soy milk needs no small amount of alteration before it can be passed off as “milk.” To wit: “Soy milk is often thickened to appear more like common milk (in other words it’s more juice-like in its normal state) and flavored with honey, vanilla or carob to alter a mildly bitter taste that would be noticeable without the flavoring.”
Not that milk isn’t altered chemically before it reaches your local store, but at least at its heart it’s milk, not bitter bean juice.
And another thing: Milk shouldn't be packaged in a box and stored at room temperature for five months, like soy “milk.” The Indignant Citizen was in his local Starbucks today and saw boxes of Silk soy “milk” with a “Best if Sold By” date of April 2006. That ain’t right.
(Of course, in Italy the Indignant Citizen saw milk sold in boxes and somehow stored at room temperature, but it was still real milk, and besides that's just Italy. Italians have espresso bars in their truck stops.)
There’s an old saying about how putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the fact that the animal wearing the lipstick is still a pig. Likewise giving a bean a face transplant and an enema doesn’t change the fact it’s still a bean.
Soy milk will never be milk, no matter how hard its backers work to make it so.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Cultural Archaeology
Primitive man sought shelter in caves and spent his days foraging for food, hunting and getting busy with primitive woman in order to keep the population growing. We know this because these men and women left drawings on cave walls and cliffs depicting the world as they saw it and related to it.
The Indignant Citizen wonders: What clues about the way we live are we leaving for future civilizations to discover?
One clue might be the billboard the Indignant Citizen saw on Christmas Day. Looming over the Tri-State Tollway near the bridge over Pulaski Road, the sign showed a broad-smiling, dark-bearded man in a dark suit holding a pile of cash in his cupped, outstretched hands. He was wearing a Santa hat. Over him were the words “Need Christmas Cash? Borrow on your lawsuit!” Then there was a company name and phone number, but the Indignant Citizen missed them as we drove under the tollway.
No doubt for a certain sector of the motoring public, perhaps a sizable sector, this sign will resonate. It will hit them like bat to the head on clear blue day; a “Why Didn’t I Think of That Sooner?” bombshell, like the news of that guy in Colorado who printed out his own bar codes at home and bought a $150 i-Pod for $4.99.
Fucking brilliant.
If the Indignant Citizen were on the archaeology team that unearthed that billboard 10,000 years from today, here’s what the sign would say to him. That we were a culture obsessed with money and material possessions. That we believed in the doctrine of getting something for nothing, rather than through work. That lawyers and loan sharks occupied prominent positions in our culture. That our lives were so fast-paced only giant advertisements could get our attention.
If the archaeology team were to understand English the way we do today, the sign could confirm why we eventually perished, or offer a key clue that could lead the team to posit on our demise.
The Indignant Citizen is trying to notice these markers, our cultural detritus, more, and view them in this new context. Try it, it will give you a new lens through which to view the everyday.
The Indignant Citizen wonders: What clues about the way we live are we leaving for future civilizations to discover?
One clue might be the billboard the Indignant Citizen saw on Christmas Day. Looming over the Tri-State Tollway near the bridge over Pulaski Road, the sign showed a broad-smiling, dark-bearded man in a dark suit holding a pile of cash in his cupped, outstretched hands. He was wearing a Santa hat. Over him were the words “Need Christmas Cash? Borrow on your lawsuit!” Then there was a company name and phone number, but the Indignant Citizen missed them as we drove under the tollway.
No doubt for a certain sector of the motoring public, perhaps a sizable sector, this sign will resonate. It will hit them like bat to the head on clear blue day; a “Why Didn’t I Think of That Sooner?” bombshell, like the news of that guy in Colorado who printed out his own bar codes at home and bought a $150 i-Pod for $4.99.
Fucking brilliant.
If the Indignant Citizen were on the archaeology team that unearthed that billboard 10,000 years from today, here’s what the sign would say to him. That we were a culture obsessed with money and material possessions. That we believed in the doctrine of getting something for nothing, rather than through work. That lawyers and loan sharks occupied prominent positions in our culture. That our lives were so fast-paced only giant advertisements could get our attention.
If the archaeology team were to understand English the way we do today, the sign could confirm why we eventually perished, or offer a key clue that could lead the team to posit on our demise.
The Indignant Citizen is trying to notice these markers, our cultural detritus, more, and view them in this new context. Try it, it will give you a new lens through which to view the everyday.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Tired ... of war
The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is rightly known as a repository of conservative thought, which is fine because even though many of the ideas presented there are straight out of the H.R. Haldeman Political Manual and borrow heavily from the Chicago School of economic thought, often the pieces are well-written and reasonably well argued.
On occasion, however, OpinionJournal.com spits out some truly bilious dreck that offends even hardened sensibilities. Brendan Miniter, assistant editor at OpinionJournal.com, used the Journal’s space on Dec. 20 to puke upon the paper’s readers what can be described only as the most twisted kind of a pep talk to rally the weary troops around our New Reality, the perpetual “War on Terror.”
Miniter’s basic point is that the U.S. public is tiring of the unending beat of the Bush Administration’s war drums, and that this fatigued condition has led directly to compromises in lawmaking and policy fortitude that have weakened the government’s ability to fight the terrorists. For example, there was delay in approving the defense spending bill, which of course pays for the gas that fuels the U.S. war machine; television gave expanded talk show and news coverage to Sen. John McCain’s anti-torture campaign and Rep. Jack Murtha’s proposal for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; extension of certain Patriot Act provisions was held up on Capitol Hill amid wrangling over civil liberties concerns; and Bush was forced to defend an indefensible policy of domestic spying.
In Miniter’s eyes, each of these represents an ax chop at the base of the domestic security tree trunk. Enough chops and the base will weaken and the tree will fall, presumably leading to a terrorist attack.
Then Miniter begins the inevitable conservative lubing up of the executive powers penis, preparing for the blowjob du jour. Bush, he said, reminded citizens on his weekly radio address (does anyone listen to those anymore, or are they just recorded so that snippets can be played on the evening news later?) that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers communicated with Al Qaeda members outside the United States prior to ramming planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“Had the National Security Agency been running its secret program then, the authorities might have known that the two were planning to board a plane and ram it into the Pentagon,” Miniter wrote.
Which is fine, and maybe true. But it’s equally true that if about two dozen other things had happened or not happened the hijackers’ plot might have been foiled either in the planning stages or early in the execution phase. To pin the blame for Sept. 11 on the fact that the NSA was not eavesdropping on American’s phone conversations at will and without review by the judiciary branch is telling much less than half the story. It’s telling 4% of the story. To Miniter’s way of thinking, we should be grateful to have the NSA listening in because they’ll catch the evil-doers. Benjamin Franklin said something about people willing to give up liberties to gain security deserving neither liberty nor security. The Indignant Citizen trusts Ben’s thinking more than a mid-level editorial hack at the Wall Street Journal.
Then Miniter gets really offensive, essentially calling for an end to debate about how we’re waging the never-ending war on terror. “The real danger here is that such debates will exhaust all of us, sapping the energy we need to fight a long and broad-based war,” he wrote.
Oh please, fuck him. Just Fuck Him. In dispensing this knob saliva in writing, Brendan Miniter disclosed something remarkable. He doesn’t think the American people have the stamina to wage war and scrutinize the waging of war at the same time. We’ll get too tired, he thinks, and lose focus. And so by all means, let’s advocate ending scrutiny of the war, not the war itself.
Who are these people? There are a damn lot of them out there; there must be for someone like Miniter to get prime space in the Journal. But there are signs that more Americans are discovering the stamina to be vigilant and critical at the same time, and they’re even applying extra brain power to considering the possibility that running the war machine 24 hours a day, seven days a week forever may be a bigger drain on energy than discussion.
Sometimes exhaustion produces clarity in thought.
On occasion, however, OpinionJournal.com spits out some truly bilious dreck that offends even hardened sensibilities. Brendan Miniter, assistant editor at OpinionJournal.com, used the Journal’s space on Dec. 20 to puke upon the paper’s readers what can be described only as the most twisted kind of a pep talk to rally the weary troops around our New Reality, the perpetual “War on Terror.”
Miniter’s basic point is that the U.S. public is tiring of the unending beat of the Bush Administration’s war drums, and that this fatigued condition has led directly to compromises in lawmaking and policy fortitude that have weakened the government’s ability to fight the terrorists. For example, there was delay in approving the defense spending bill, which of course pays for the gas that fuels the U.S. war machine; television gave expanded talk show and news coverage to Sen. John McCain’s anti-torture campaign and Rep. Jack Murtha’s proposal for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; extension of certain Patriot Act provisions was held up on Capitol Hill amid wrangling over civil liberties concerns; and Bush was forced to defend an indefensible policy of domestic spying.
In Miniter’s eyes, each of these represents an ax chop at the base of the domestic security tree trunk. Enough chops and the base will weaken and the tree will fall, presumably leading to a terrorist attack.
Then Miniter begins the inevitable conservative lubing up of the executive powers penis, preparing for the blowjob du jour. Bush, he said, reminded citizens on his weekly radio address (does anyone listen to those anymore, or are they just recorded so that snippets can be played on the evening news later?) that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers communicated with Al Qaeda members outside the United States prior to ramming planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“Had the National Security Agency been running its secret program then, the authorities might have known that the two were planning to board a plane and ram it into the Pentagon,” Miniter wrote.
Which is fine, and maybe true. But it’s equally true that if about two dozen other things had happened or not happened the hijackers’ plot might have been foiled either in the planning stages or early in the execution phase. To pin the blame for Sept. 11 on the fact that the NSA was not eavesdropping on American’s phone conversations at will and without review by the judiciary branch is telling much less than half the story. It’s telling 4% of the story. To Miniter’s way of thinking, we should be grateful to have the NSA listening in because they’ll catch the evil-doers. Benjamin Franklin said something about people willing to give up liberties to gain security deserving neither liberty nor security. The Indignant Citizen trusts Ben’s thinking more than a mid-level editorial hack at the Wall Street Journal.
Then Miniter gets really offensive, essentially calling for an end to debate about how we’re waging the never-ending war on terror. “The real danger here is that such debates will exhaust all of us, sapping the energy we need to fight a long and broad-based war,” he wrote.
Oh please, fuck him. Just Fuck Him. In dispensing this knob saliva in writing, Brendan Miniter disclosed something remarkable. He doesn’t think the American people have the stamina to wage war and scrutinize the waging of war at the same time. We’ll get too tired, he thinks, and lose focus. And so by all means, let’s advocate ending scrutiny of the war, not the war itself.
Who are these people? There are a damn lot of them out there; there must be for someone like Miniter to get prime space in the Journal. But there are signs that more Americans are discovering the stamina to be vigilant and critical at the same time, and they’re even applying extra brain power to considering the possibility that running the war machine 24 hours a day, seven days a week forever may be a bigger drain on energy than discussion.
Sometimes exhaustion produces clarity in thought.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Daybreak
On these frigid winter mornings near the solstice, when the Indignant Citizen’s alarm squawks and wakes him from deep, warm slumber, there is no light. It is dark outside, the kind of cold darkness that can make you believe all light has been extinguished from the universe forever.
But eventually the dawn comes, faintly at first, but determinedly. For the darkness cannot last forever. The light will not be denied.
In the Bible, when people are referred to as living in darkness the writers are referring to a darkness of understanding – a kind of intellectual darkness. Light – knowledge and understanding – is always in conflict with darkness in the Bible. People are always wandering from the darkness to the light, or allowing light to illuminate the darkness.
It is no different today, not just in the Indignant Citizen’s morning but also in life. Darkness has overtaken us and the light has been all but snuffed out. It is cold, and there seems no hope for spring.
Then, just when hope appears lost, the dawn breaks. Over Harrisburg, Pa., no less. On Tuesday, a federal judge – a Republican appointed to the bench by President Bush – ruled that a school board in Dover, Pa., acted unconstitutionally by presenting so-called intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in high school biology classes. The story in the New York Times does a good job explaining the ruling.
Just as good as that story, though, are the judge’s own words. In just this one excerpt, he destroys just about every potential right-wing nutzoid argument criticizing his ruling. The ruling is stunning in its rebuke of the “intelligent design” quacks and their disingenuous argument that no, they weren’t trying to promote religion, just have intelligent design taught on an “equal par.”
Here, then, is an excerpt of Judge John E. Jones III’s ruling:
“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on [intelligent design], who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”
Could it be? Morning in America?
But eventually the dawn comes, faintly at first, but determinedly. For the darkness cannot last forever. The light will not be denied.
In the Bible, when people are referred to as living in darkness the writers are referring to a darkness of understanding – a kind of intellectual darkness. Light – knowledge and understanding – is always in conflict with darkness in the Bible. People are always wandering from the darkness to the light, or allowing light to illuminate the darkness.
It is no different today, not just in the Indignant Citizen’s morning but also in life. Darkness has overtaken us and the light has been all but snuffed out. It is cold, and there seems no hope for spring.
Then, just when hope appears lost, the dawn breaks. Over Harrisburg, Pa., no less. On Tuesday, a federal judge – a Republican appointed to the bench by President Bush – ruled that a school board in Dover, Pa., acted unconstitutionally by presenting so-called intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in high school biology classes. The story in the New York Times does a good job explaining the ruling.
Just as good as that story, though, are the judge’s own words. In just this one excerpt, he destroys just about every potential right-wing nutzoid argument criticizing his ruling. The ruling is stunning in its rebuke of the “intelligent design” quacks and their disingenuous argument that no, they weren’t trying to promote religion, just have intelligent design taught on an “equal par.”
Here, then, is an excerpt of Judge John E. Jones III’s ruling:
“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on [intelligent design], who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”
Could it be? Morning in America?
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Still the World Champions
The Indignant Citizen just finished re-watching Game 2 of the American League Division Series between the White Sox and Red Sox. You know the one: Tad Iguchi hits a three-run homer in the fifth off David Wells and Bobby Jenks pitches two innings for the save. Hmm, it's still so sweet you can almost taste it. Comcast SportsNet is re-running the entire playoff run through Game 4 of the World Series, bless the network’s heart. (Game 4 will air on New Year’s Day.)
The salute to the Sox comes at the perfect time for White Sox fans. With the holidays upon us, and nearly two full months elapsed since the World Series trophy found a home on the South Side, the Indignant Citizen, for one, was primed for a reality check, a little reminder that it was not a dream.
The IC has found that using the following phrase helps keep things in perspective: “The White Sox won the World Series.” Repeat as needed.
The IC’s good friend and former coworker Vince, who runs Exile in Wrigleyville, has done a nice job updating his site during this short off-season, providing news on the big trade with the Phillies for power hitting lefty DH Jim Thome, the re-signing of power hitting first baseman Paul Konerko, the trade with the Pirates for utility infielder and left handed batter Rob Mackowiak, the trade with the Diamondbacks for right-handed pitcher Javier Vazquez, and the contract extension for catcher A.J. Pierzynski.
Watching the games again on Comcast SportsNet obviously doesn’t hold the same drama that watching them live the first time did. But it does allow the IC to record them on VHS (remember that technology?), including all the post-game breakdowns. It’ll make for a nice video library and a fine set of companions to the World Series and Sox Pride DVDs that already inhabit the IC’s TV room bookshelf.
Watching the games again without the stress of an uncertain outcome has also allowed the Indignant Citizen to focus on the abject homerism of ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman. This has been discussed in great detail on all manner of White Sox blogs and message boards, but Berman was so obviously for the Red Sox that even casual baseball fans watching the ALDS purely for shits and giggles must have sensed it.
Fuck him. The Red Sox are finished for another 87 years, and New Englanders should feel free to resume their stoic defeatism as it relates to their baseball team.
Meanwhile the IC will continue to roll on his back in the sweet green grass of the White Sox world championship, arms and legs in the air, reveling in the sweet silliness of it all.
The salute to the Sox comes at the perfect time for White Sox fans. With the holidays upon us, and nearly two full months elapsed since the World Series trophy found a home on the South Side, the Indignant Citizen, for one, was primed for a reality check, a little reminder that it was not a dream.
The IC has found that using the following phrase helps keep things in perspective: “The White Sox won the World Series.” Repeat as needed.
The IC’s good friend and former coworker Vince, who runs Exile in Wrigleyville, has done a nice job updating his site during this short off-season, providing news on the big trade with the Phillies for power hitting lefty DH Jim Thome, the re-signing of power hitting first baseman Paul Konerko, the trade with the Pirates for utility infielder and left handed batter Rob Mackowiak, the trade with the Diamondbacks for right-handed pitcher Javier Vazquez, and the contract extension for catcher A.J. Pierzynski.
Watching the games again on Comcast SportsNet obviously doesn’t hold the same drama that watching them live the first time did. But it does allow the IC to record them on VHS (remember that technology?), including all the post-game breakdowns. It’ll make for a nice video library and a fine set of companions to the World Series and Sox Pride DVDs that already inhabit the IC’s TV room bookshelf.
Watching the games again without the stress of an uncertain outcome has also allowed the Indignant Citizen to focus on the abject homerism of ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman. This has been discussed in great detail on all manner of White Sox blogs and message boards, but Berman was so obviously for the Red Sox that even casual baseball fans watching the ALDS purely for shits and giggles must have sensed it.
Fuck him. The Red Sox are finished for another 87 years, and New Englanders should feel free to resume their stoic defeatism as it relates to their baseball team.
Meanwhile the IC will continue to roll on his back in the sweet green grass of the White Sox world championship, arms and legs in the air, reveling in the sweet silliness of it all.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Where's the warmth in global warming?
Interminable winter. Season of searing flesh, frozen feet and unending layers. Winter – cold and dark in the morning, cold and dark at night. Winter – when the cold seeps through any opening in your clothing or your house. Winter, when you’d just as soon crawl into the furnace as wait for it to blow air to warm a room. Winter. . . .
Whoops. Scratch that. It’s only Dec. 19, which means it’s still officially fall. And yet … and yet, it feels like winter. It has for weeks. Chicago, and much of the nation east of the Rockies, has been in the deep freeze since November. So far this December, only three days have managed to make it to freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Snow covers the ground outside the Indignant Citizen’s home to a depth of around five inches, adding a special kind of evil chill close to the ground, where feet live.
When it gets cold like this, the kind of cold that numbs your entire body after just a few minutes’ exposure – fully dressed, of course – we must always hear from the sanctimonious anti-global warming crowd. They crow that the cold is sure proof that global warming is a myth, a ruse perpetrated on slow-thinking citizens by the overzealous, doomsaying environmental movement.
They write letters to newspapers, mostly. Occasionally one of these kooks will end up on an editorial page someplace. These outlets don’t even take into account the multitude of blogs that populate the Internet and that serve as a pulpit for all manner of uninformed opinion. There’s just one problem: The fact that it’s really, really cold so early in the season, both in the eastern U.S. and in Western Europe isn’t proof that global warming is a myth. There are some signs that the opposite is true, that the presence of cold air so early is actually proof that global warming is melting the Antarctic ice sheet into the Atlantic. That cool fresh water is being pumped along the oceanic conveyor belt that runs north-south between the Americas and Africa-Europe, weakening the current and over time changing the atmospheric setup.
While there is little doubt among reputable and thoughtful scientists that the earth’s temperature is rising, there is plenty of debate about exactly how fast the temperature is rising in an historical context and whether the rise is a sign that man is fucking up the planet or merely a cyclical occurrence – another of Earth’s periodic mood swings.
But really, what difference does it make? Say half the scientists think it’s cyclical and half think it’s man’s fault. Who’s to know? We may not learn anything conclusive for hundreds of years, and by then it’ll be too late if the scientists who blame civilization turn out to be right. So why not start treating the planet with a little more respect today? Use a little less energy, recycle a little bit more.
On the way to work this morning, the Indignant Citizen saw a CBS2 TV truck parked on a side street near the Dirksen Federal Building, engine running and the driver asleep inside with his feet up on the dashboard and the heat on. This is an especially ridiculous kind of consumption, and the IC briefly considered removing the truck’s valve stems as a kind of punishment. He thought better of it, though, because no doubt whatever tow truck or repair vehicle that showed up would have left its engine running, too.
In a way, it’s disappointing global warming doesn’t really mean “warming.” It might be easier to stomach if it did. Now all we seem to have to look forward to is the return of the glaciers.
Whoops. Scratch that. It’s only Dec. 19, which means it’s still officially fall. And yet … and yet, it feels like winter. It has for weeks. Chicago, and much of the nation east of the Rockies, has been in the deep freeze since November. So far this December, only three days have managed to make it to freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Snow covers the ground outside the Indignant Citizen’s home to a depth of around five inches, adding a special kind of evil chill close to the ground, where feet live.
When it gets cold like this, the kind of cold that numbs your entire body after just a few minutes’ exposure – fully dressed, of course – we must always hear from the sanctimonious anti-global warming crowd. They crow that the cold is sure proof that global warming is a myth, a ruse perpetrated on slow-thinking citizens by the overzealous, doomsaying environmental movement.
They write letters to newspapers, mostly. Occasionally one of these kooks will end up on an editorial page someplace. These outlets don’t even take into account the multitude of blogs that populate the Internet and that serve as a pulpit for all manner of uninformed opinion. There’s just one problem: The fact that it’s really, really cold so early in the season, both in the eastern U.S. and in Western Europe isn’t proof that global warming is a myth. There are some signs that the opposite is true, that the presence of cold air so early is actually proof that global warming is melting the Antarctic ice sheet into the Atlantic. That cool fresh water is being pumped along the oceanic conveyor belt that runs north-south between the Americas and Africa-Europe, weakening the current and over time changing the atmospheric setup.
While there is little doubt among reputable and thoughtful scientists that the earth’s temperature is rising, there is plenty of debate about exactly how fast the temperature is rising in an historical context and whether the rise is a sign that man is fucking up the planet or merely a cyclical occurrence – another of Earth’s periodic mood swings.
But really, what difference does it make? Say half the scientists think it’s cyclical and half think it’s man’s fault. Who’s to know? We may not learn anything conclusive for hundreds of years, and by then it’ll be too late if the scientists who blame civilization turn out to be right. So why not start treating the planet with a little more respect today? Use a little less energy, recycle a little bit more.
On the way to work this morning, the Indignant Citizen saw a CBS2 TV truck parked on a side street near the Dirksen Federal Building, engine running and the driver asleep inside with his feet up on the dashboard and the heat on. This is an especially ridiculous kind of consumption, and the IC briefly considered removing the truck’s valve stems as a kind of punishment. He thought better of it, though, because no doubt whatever tow truck or repair vehicle that showed up would have left its engine running, too.
In a way, it’s disappointing global warming doesn’t really mean “warming.” It might be easier to stomach if it did. Now all we seem to have to look forward to is the return of the glaciers.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Stupid Is as Stupid Does
There’s stupid and then there’s Christine Barnes.
Barnes, 30, lives in Elmwood Park and was one of the imbicles who stopped on the tracks at a railroad grade crossing on Grand Ave. the night before Thanksgiving. An outbound Metra express train rounded a curve at about 70 miles per hour and slammed into six of the cars on the tracks, throwing those into five other cars. In all 11 cars were destroyed. No one was killed, although Barnes and a few others ended up in the hospital.
Investigators quickly determined the Metra engineer did everything he could have and that two factors contributed to the accident: the design of the intersection and the fact that the drivers stopped on the tracks.
The intersection is bad. The tracks cross Grand Ave. at a diagonal, meaning there’s more track across Grand than if the tracks crossed perpendicular to the street. Additionally, there is a stop light nearby that can cause traffic to back up past the tracks. Which is why the village or Metra or the railroad that runs that line, perhaps all three, paid for giant yellow signs that hang over Grand Ave. warning drivers of the long crossing and admonishing them not to stop on the tracks.
Stories on Friday and Saturday in both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, as well as on local TV, clearly conveyed the frustration police, Metra and crash investigators felt. Of all the steps that could have been taken to prevent the accident, the most basic and least expensive was the exercising of just a little common sense on the part of the drivers. Simply put, they shouldn’t have stopped on the tracks.
So, of course, Barnes stopped on the tracks. That’s dumb enough, but what garns her the Gold Star for Stupidity in this case are her comments in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. In the story, by Lolly Bowean, Barnes makes clear she takes no blame. The light should have changed or the train should have stopped. But she has no culpability for stopping on the tracks. Barnes told Bowean she is tired of officials blaming the drivers. “What do they think,” she asked. “We really want to be hit by a train? I could have died.”
Of course, no one ever suggested the drivers stopped on the tracks because they wanted to be hit by a train. They’re saying the accident wouldn’t have happened if the drivers had not stopped on the tracks. They’re saying the drivers stopped on the tracks because they failed to use common sense.
They’re saying Barnes and her fellow drivers are idiots.
Every one of those drivers should be ticketed and should have their licenses suspended. But you can bet they’ll sue Metra and the village and the Illinois Department of Transportation and anyone else they can think of in a desperate, flailing attempt to assign responsibility for this accident anywhere except where it rightfully belongs – with the drivers.
Barnes, 30, lives in Elmwood Park and was one of the imbicles who stopped on the tracks at a railroad grade crossing on Grand Ave. the night before Thanksgiving. An outbound Metra express train rounded a curve at about 70 miles per hour and slammed into six of the cars on the tracks, throwing those into five other cars. In all 11 cars were destroyed. No one was killed, although Barnes and a few others ended up in the hospital.
Investigators quickly determined the Metra engineer did everything he could have and that two factors contributed to the accident: the design of the intersection and the fact that the drivers stopped on the tracks.
The intersection is bad. The tracks cross Grand Ave. at a diagonal, meaning there’s more track across Grand than if the tracks crossed perpendicular to the street. Additionally, there is a stop light nearby that can cause traffic to back up past the tracks. Which is why the village or Metra or the railroad that runs that line, perhaps all three, paid for giant yellow signs that hang over Grand Ave. warning drivers of the long crossing and admonishing them not to stop on the tracks.
Stories on Friday and Saturday in both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, as well as on local TV, clearly conveyed the frustration police, Metra and crash investigators felt. Of all the steps that could have been taken to prevent the accident, the most basic and least expensive was the exercising of just a little common sense on the part of the drivers. Simply put, they shouldn’t have stopped on the tracks.
So, of course, Barnes stopped on the tracks. That’s dumb enough, but what garns her the Gold Star for Stupidity in this case are her comments in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. In the story, by Lolly Bowean, Barnes makes clear she takes no blame. The light should have changed or the train should have stopped. But she has no culpability for stopping on the tracks. Barnes told Bowean she is tired of officials blaming the drivers. “What do they think,” she asked. “We really want to be hit by a train? I could have died.”
Of course, no one ever suggested the drivers stopped on the tracks because they wanted to be hit by a train. They’re saying the accident wouldn’t have happened if the drivers had not stopped on the tracks. They’re saying the drivers stopped on the tracks because they failed to use common sense.
They’re saying Barnes and her fellow drivers are idiots.
Every one of those drivers should be ticketed and should have their licenses suspended. But you can bet they’ll sue Metra and the village and the Illinois Department of Transportation and anyone else they can think of in a desperate, flailing attempt to assign responsibility for this accident anywhere except where it rightfully belongs – with the drivers.
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