November 2007

A serious WTF moment.

I laughed out loud when I got to this last part of the article:

Moving forward, Portland officials should weigh the merits of suspending local red tape such as rights-of-way restrictions, franchise taxes and pole fees to encourage new investment and competitive choice in the broadband market, which can lower prices and increase the quality of services in a more sustainable way.

I wonder if Mr. Penzo lives in Portland. Asking the Portland city council to suspend taxes and fees is like asking water to run uphill. It’s a physical impossibility.

A couple of years ago, that paragon of genius, Randy Leonard, wanted to tax cell phone companies in the same way the city did for land line use. His rationale was a good tax was a tax someone else paid. Either he didn’t realize or didn’t care that the cell companies would just pass on the fee to all cell users in Portland. The city’s track record is to increase fees and add taxes, not decrease fees and remove taxes.

The MetroFi wireless system downtown sucks. It is incredibly slow, with spotty coverage and connections are dropped more often than a hooker in downtown Bangkok. Yet, the MetroFi P.R. engine keeps a positive spin on things. I seriously doubt Portland’s fearless leaders have a clue about how bad it is.

Besides they have more important things to worry about, like renaming a street.

Radley Balko spends much of his time monitoring drug war abuses, the ongoing militarization of the police, and legal cases involving extreme abuses of governmental power. He’s been following and documenting the career of Steven Hayne, the so-called forensics expert in Mississippi. In short, whatever you do, don’t get convicted of a crime in Mississippi. Seriously, if you’re driving cross country to, say, Florida, go around the state.

This post at his blog led to his article at Reason. The whole thing just really pisses me off. The extreme arrogance of the police in their casual disregard for common decency is appalling. I’ve been against the so-called Drug War since Reagan was president, and I find it sad that it takes an article about dogs being casually shot to, hopefully, get people to sit up and notice. The idea that people will casually surrender their civil liberties but get pissed off when a dog is killed is, frankly idiotic.

I guess the P.R. lesson here for drug war opponents and civil libertarians is to emphasize the plight of the pooch. America’s law-and-order populace may not be ready to condemn the practice of busting up recreational pot smokers with ostentatiously armed paramilitary police squads, even when the SWAT team periodically breaks into the wrong house or accidentally shoots a kid. I mean, somebody was probably breaking the law, right?

But the dog? That loyal, slobbery, lovable, wide-eyed, fur-lined bag of unconditional love?

Dammit, he deserves better.

Please don’t get me wrong. Killing a dog just because the animal is in your way is a hanging offense in my book. But then so is raiding the wrong house when serving a drug warrant, destroying a family’s home and personal possessions, and leaving the family with, arguably, a case of post traumatic stress disorder.

There are many things right about this country. The drug war is not one of them.

Rowan Atkinson had this to say about legislation to ban gay jokes in the UK:

“The devil, as always, will be in the detail but the casual ease which some people move from finding something offensive to wishing to declare it criminal - and are then able to find factions within government to aid their ambitions - is truly depressing.”

Way to go, Mr. Bean!

Victor David Hanson hits the bullseye on planing(?) and deplaning:

Getting in and out a plane has become analogous to finding a rare parking spot, when perfectly normal people resort to their primordial selves and see all others for a few moments not as fellow humans, but rival carnivores that must be gored or run over—or else!

I’m not a frequent flyer, bless his noodly appendages, but I end up taking an airplane at least once a year. Each time I feel a palpable tension in the cabin just before the plane reaches the gate when everyone has a hand on their seatbelt buckle. No one waits for the flight attendant to announce arrival, as soon as we feel the slight jerk of the brake and all cessation of forward motion, the cabin is filled with the staccato noise of 150 seat belts being released at once. It’s a parody of a groundhog convention as everyone stands together, those in the aisle seats lunging for the overhead compartments as if they’ll never see their precious laptops ever again.

Then its just the longest fucking 15 minutes of your life as you wait for those people ahead of you to get their shit together and head up the aisle. You watch them fumble about, taking FOREVER to get their bag down, drop it to the floor, pull up the handle, realize the bag is in front of them and they CAN’T POSSIBLY PUSH IT, they have to pull it so they hobble around getting the bag behind them before they start up the aisle and then suddenly stop and back up because the left their coat on their seat, the bastards.

You stand there watching this spectacle, thinking, “WTF? Why must you wait until the people ahead of you have left before you block the aisle to get your shit. WHY? WHY? WHY? Dude, I’ve got to pee. COME ON!” You, of course, have already retrieved your bag, which is now resting on your seat as you shuffle back and forth, desperately holding it in.

Every time I go through this, I think why not exit the plane by rows, with the first 10 rows leaving first, then the next ten, and so on. Those of us further back in the plane can relax and wait for our turn. We board the plane by rows, why not when leaving the plane?

Oh, and his comments on the Iraq war are pretty damn good too.

This one has nudity and public humiliation. Score!

The Oregonian, or as one local talk show host calls it, the Zero, has an article about the income tax kicker, the refund every Oregonian gets if income tax revenues exceed projected tax revenues by 2 percent in a given year. The article is blatantly titled, “Oregon’s kicker means rich to grow even richer”.

Beautiful, no?

The article starts off stating the rich are going to get ‘big payouts’ from an unlikely source, the state of Oregon itself. It’s not until the 4th paragraph in does the article state the reason why the rich are getting so much money back: they paid the most taxes.

The amount of the kicker check is dependent on what you paid in state taxes for 2006. The vast majority will be getting less than $100 back. Only 20 individuals will get the max check amount, which averages $786,000. Think about this for a second, there are only 20 individuals in the highest tax bracket in the entire state of Oregon. How many are there in California? New York? Does it really fucking matter?

Why should anyone care how much the wealthy are getting back from the kicker? The key point that seems to be missing here is that it’s our money the state is giving back to us. We’re all getting money back proportional to what we had to pay. Rather than point out how much the wealthiest are getting back, why not mention how much they paid in income tax in the first place and thank them for contributing to the state coffers so that the poorest citizens can take advantage of state run services such as the Oregon Health Plan? Why express gratitude for the wealthiest having paid the majority of taxes to the state when you can instead use the kicker refund to express your not so veiled opinion that being rich is bad and selfish?

In the twenty or so minutes it took for me to write this little screed, some editor at the Zero must have realized the article headline went a bit too far and toned it down to what’s there now, which is a bit more subtle, but not much better.

That’s the title of a dystopian novel of the future I read years ago. In the past few years I’ve made several attempts to find a copy as it is out of print. It shouldn’t be, it’s a better read than Brave New World and is on par with Eugene Zamyantin’s We or A Clockwork Orange.

Ira Levin wrote it, he of Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys From Brazil. Mr. Levin died on Monday at the age of 78. This Perfect Day is extremely relevant now and deserved to be read by all who cherish liberty and individual freedom.

This brings up an observation. I find it interesting that all dystopian novels of the future envision society as collectivist with an oppressive government controlling every aspect of daily life. With the possible exception of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which is more of a fantasy than speculative fiction, and you can’t really blame the guy, he wrote it in the late 1880’s when Socialism was an intellectual exercise and hadn’t been put into practice, there have been no books that I’ve come across which have put forth a Utopian view of such collectivism. Every book written about a possible collectivist future has as a first principle that that kind of future is completely fucked. The protagonists of these books spent their time fighting against the constraints of their society, in some cases succeeding, in others, like poor Winston Smith, failing miserably.

I wonder if today’s collectivists read these novels as blueprints for the future, or if any of them have an epiphany and realize how completely idiotic and impractical their ideas really are.

To the extent that this blog, infrequently updated as it is, has a theme, it seems to be me talking about my experiences traveling on the MAX trains. Portland is the first city I’ve lived in where light rail public transit was a somewhat viable option. Los Angeles has a light rail system, but I didn’t live in L.A. and even if I did, the designers of the system there made damn sure it went to places no sane person wanted to go to anyway.

Taking the MAX is slightly more inconvenient for me than driving directly downtown. It certainly doesn’t save me any time, in fact it adds about 15 minutes to my commute. The reason I started to take the MAX was because I was getting really pissed at having to drive in traffic with, well, just about everyone else.

It’s not because I wanted the road to myself, although that would be just fantastic. It was because I earned my chops driving in Orange County and L.A. traffic, and most everyone else on the road didn’t. If Oregon drivers were to spend a day driving the 5 through the Y, or drive up the 405 to the 110 through downtown L.A., the one’s who survived would be better drivers. I guarantee it. All of us are taught to be defensive when we drive. In L.A., traffic, a good defense is a strong offense.

Anyway, talking about all the ways Oregon drivers are idiots is a subject for another post. But lest you just blow me off as just another California transplant bagging on his fellow adoptive citizens, I’ll tell you I was talking with a native Oregonian a couple of weeks ago, and SHE thought Oregon drivers where idiots.

Another reason I started taking the MAX was cost. I could park in the Park N Ride lot for free and a one way 2 zone fare is $1.75. Parking in a structure downtown can be as cheap as $8.50 or as much as $16.00. So $3.50 is a no-brainer, even with having to deal with crowds on the train. I could read for 30 minutes. It seems like a pretty fair trade off.

Well, tell that to Laurie Lee Chilcote, who was attacked for no discernible reason by a 15 year old with a baseball bat on November 3rd as he exited a MAX train in Gresham. That attack has raised a lot of concerns about safety on the trains, especially now that a new green line is being built into downtown.

Since that attack, I’ve stopped taking the MAX, the trade off has swung the other way for me, at least in the near term. Driving downtown and paying 10 bucks for parking is worth it at this point.

Intellectually, I do understand the low chance of being accosted given the number of riders and the time of day I usually ride the trains, but the percentage chance of being attacked goes to 100% when it happens to you and I’ve always had my safety foremost in my mind, that’s one reason I started carrying a folding knife when I started taking the MAX.

Right now, TriMet is left looking like passenger safety is way down on the list of its priorities, when it should be the first thing. It won’t be solved completely, in my mind, until a fundamental assumption about the MAX is changed. TriMet has the concept of a Fairless Square. If you get on the Streetcar, MAX train, or bus within this area, you don’t pay so long as you stay in Fairless Square. You do pay if you leave the Square, or if you get on outside the Square and go into it or through it. This is the root of the issue. By setting up a Fairless Square and not having any way of CONSISTENTLY enforcing proof of fare outside it, a situation has been created where people can take advantage and essentially ride the trains for free. There are fare inspectors who get on occasionally and demand proof of fare, but in the year that I’ve been using the MAX, I’ve seen that happen exactly once.

So it’s basically a Tragedy of the Commons. Drunks, gang members, rowdy assholes, drug dealers all get on the trains and make life miserable for the rest of us. It spills out onto the train platforms and in many cases start there, certainly drug dealing happens in and around the train platforms. TriMet needs to make the platforms safer. Getting rid of Fairless Square and enforcing proof of fare will go a long way toward that goal as well.

“Nutroots to the left of me, Wingnuts to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you”

Sung to the tune of Stuck In The Middle, by Steelers Wheel.

“Life gets in the way of life.”

That really is a thought to ponder while sitting on the crapper, isn’t it?