The Power and the Money

Puerto Rico is not following the Tennessee Plan, but it may work regardless

In 1790, North Carolina ceded its western territories to the federal government in payment for the federal assumption of its revolutionary debts. In March 1796, the Southwest Territory unilaterally declared that it was now a state. The legislature elected two senators and organized a popular vote for two representatives. The delegation showed up in Washington and demanded to be seated. After a few months of confusion, Congress passed a joint resolution admitting the Southwest Territory as the State of Tennessee. Congress seated the two senators, who had been constitutionally selected by the legislature, but insisted on a new election for the House of Representatives. 

That was before the 17th Amendment, however. But in 1959, the Alaska Territory tried the same thing. The state organized elections for two senators and a representative, who went to Washington and asked to take their seats. Congress agreed to seat the representatives in 1959, as part of a deal that also admitted (then Republican) Hawaii. 

But such a plan is not a sure shot at success. Did you know that  the District of Columbia has been electing shadow senators since 1990? I discovered this fact on March 13, 2016.

I was stuck at a red light on an exit ramp from Rock Creek Parkway onto Massachusetts Avenue, when I saw that the Chrysler 300M ahead of me had the strangest license plates. They were D.C. plates, but instead of a number there were the words “US SENATOR” in an unusually small font. 

So I took a photo.

To my surprise, the Chrysler dropped behind me and started to tail my car. This went on for about two miles. Annoyed, I pulled onto a side street, stopped the car, and walked over to car now tailing me. I knocked on his window. “You’re following me.” It wasn’t a question. 

The driver, a bearded white man, responded with no hostility in his voice. (That will be hard to believe when you read the words, but it is true.) “You took a picture. Was there something you didn’t like about the car?” 

My voice likely showed some irritation. “I’ve never seen a license plate like that. I took a picture. Are you a Senator I don’t recognize?”

He didn’t answer my question. Instead he said, “I’m sorry, there’ve been incidents.”

“What incidents?” I responded. “What senator do you work for?” But he drove off. 

And that was how I discovered that he was Paul Strauss, one of D.C.’s shadow senators, elected by the people of the District to lobby Congress for statehood. So far, Strauss and his colleague, Mike Brown, have accomplished precisely nothing.

Puerto Rico is now trying what it claims to be the same strategy. Appoint shadow senators and representatives and lobby Congress to have them seated. But:

1. Problem #1 with the plan is that the would-be congresspeople haven’t been elected. So poof, none of the legitimacy that the representatives from Tennessee (and later Alaska) brought to the table. 
2. Problem #2 is that Puerto Rico will be highly Democratic. Despite impressions, that was not true as of September 20, 2016 2017. But now, after the Trump administration decided that it did not care about the island, whatever conservative leanings the electorate might have had have been destroyed. Republican strategists know this. But the Puerto Rican delegation has no plan (a la the paired admission of Alaska and Hawaii) to counterbalance.
3. And problem #3 is that D.C. has been trying the serious version of the strategy for 27 years, to no avail. 

Which means that I should be here saying that this strategy has a snowball’s chance in Hell of succeeding. But I actually think the reverse. In fact, I would bet on statehood happening very fast the next time that Democrats win both houses of Congress and the presidency.

Once upon a time admitting two states (D.C. and P.R.) on a party-line vote would have been seen as a sort of unconscionable gerrymandering. But that time is passing. The norms of American political life have been going out the window for some time, maybe since Robert Bork, certainly since Texas decided to carry out its intercensal redistricting in 2003. (The redistricting violated political norms, but despite all the liberal outrage, it actually made Texas politics fairer and more democratic. Really.)

I do not see the political penalty for the Democrats from shoving through statehood for both jurisdictions at the next chance they get. Plus side: four extra senators. Minus side: some loss of control over the District on the part of Democratic representatives from Maryland.

Which leaves only one reason not to admit either or both the District and Puerto Rico: fear of a voter backlash at the following election.

Is that likely? 

Code switching

On the Red Line home there were three teenagers, two female, one male. I have never heard anyone switch so fluently between English and French. Multiple times per sentence. The English was from the DMV. The French was not from Quebec; 100% for that. Now, I do not know if the French was from the Hexagon or Côte d’Ivoire or the West Indies, but it was native and how did they switch in the middle of a sentence? I was impressed. More so because their English accent was unaffected. I wish I had been there with a native French speaker. 

I have heard and spoken much Spanglish in my life. This was a whole nother level. 

It is hard to keep a detached attitude about the internet and politics

First, neo-Nazis organized by the internet booked a bunch of tables at an Italian restaurant around the corner from my house. They gave each other Hitler salutes, including, bizarrely, Tila Tequila. This upset the neighborhood, as you might imagine.

Then, yesterday, my wife found herself delayed while driving our kids back from a swimming pool by police called out because a man with a gun fired shots inside a pizzeria a few blocks away from our house and next to my favorite D.C. bookstore. The shooter had been inspired by a bizarre internet lie that Hillary Clinton had been running a child prostitution ring out of the place. 

That would be disturbing enough, but it seems that the national security adviser to-be believes the pizza-pedophile story, as does his son. (Links go to tweets by Gen. Michael Flynn and Michael Flynn, Jr. No hearsay.) 

This is not normal. This is certainly not normal from people close to the President-elect of the United States, or the President-elect himself. 

This morning, an email correspondent reminded me that in February 2010, in a post about potential failure modes for American political institutions, I had written the following: “The U.S. population might become apathetic and gullible to the point of civic dysfunction.” But I followed up with:

“That said, I see two problems, one potential and unlikely, one with us right now. The potential and (IMHO) unlikely one is that the internet and cable news will somehow interact with America’s ideological cleavages to produce a dysfunctional electorate. I really have my doubts that there is anything to worry about here, but I can of course be convinced otherwise by a good argument.” 

The 2016 election and its aftermath appears to be providing such a good argument. 

Chester County, Pennsylvania

Happy Election Day? I wish. Anyway, D.C. has early voting. I voted with my son in tow on Halloween; my wife took my daughter to the polls a few days later. We voted for President, for city council members, and for the District of Columbia to become the Douglass Commonwealth; we kicked ourselves for not having researched the school board elections. (Discussion of D.C. statehood at the link.) 

We have been spending our weekends campaigning in Pennsylvania. I hope to write a little about that before the polls close this evening. Surprisingly (or not) the campaign has consistently sent us to a near-suburb of Philly called Cheltenham. As a result, even though we know Chester County well and sleep there often (when we aren’t with my cousin in Fairmount) we have not done any electioneering there. 

Fortunately, Emma Green of the Atlantic is prepared to step into the breach. Her profile of Chester County is not especially incisive or deep. But it is accurate. And it is very funny how Trump somehow confused Downingtown for a depressed area. 

The county has a pleasant, if in some places stark, urban core in West Chester:

And also rural areas where the kids can build their immune systems in actual farms:

It is a great place for unsupervised little boys to risk their lives. 

Anyway, for those of you who want to know what the election looks like on the ground, you could do worse than the Atlantic profile. 

The future is not all bad

My reaction to most new technological developments at the level of personal tech usually falls into one of two categories. (1) “Who gives a fuck?” Fitbit, any new phones since 2007, Google Glass. (2) “This is going to make life worse.” Intelligent personal assistants (Alexa, Siri, et al), autonomous flying drones, ever-smaller cameras, virtual reality, whatever succeeds Google Glass. (Self-driving cars are in an intermediate category if they really bring down accidents.) 

In general, I am not a terribly big fan of the future I find myself in. I like TiVo, cellphones were nifty, search engines are an excellent thing and I wish that more books and datasets were digitized. Beyond that, I am neutral ... at best. Even blogging, hey, it wastes some time, but there is a reason I went off social media as soon as I got on it.

So ... I am happy to discover a list of new inventions that I really can get behind! Now, not all. The Naked 3D fitness tracker is creepy. Ori Systems robotic furniture seems useless. Awair smart air-quality monitor, pretty much ditto. And I cannot really see myself buying an OURA ring.

But the rest? Awesome! A future I can get behind.

Plus, my kids and I watched a spaceship take off from our attic window last night.

Open carry is insane

Seriously, letting people openly carry long-guns in urban areas is crazy. There is no self-defense scenario in which they would be useful. And if a terrorist starts shooting, having civilians carrying rifles will only put those civilians at risk.

Here in D.C., I am very glad that this fellow, who was just wandering around outside my office this evening, could be picked up by police. 

I will be curious to find out just what he thought he was doing. But more broadly, why have people now seized upon their right to sling rifles over their shoulders as a symbol of freedom? A long gun slung that way won’t even protect you from a mugger with a knife. It certainly won’t protect you from a police officer. Consider this enlightening video about what happens when a black man decides to exercise his open carry rights in a state (unlike D.C.) where open carry is legal. It did not seem to help the gentlemen in the video; nor did it help this man in Dallas. 

Would it be helpful to have more Turkish civilians firing AR-15s right now? Somehow, I do not think so. I would like to think that my skepticism comes directly from having carried a loaded M-16A2, but sadly having served in the U.S. military does not seem to innoculate people from this strange belief about the magic of long guns.

My experience leads me to extreme skepticism about their use in anything other than open infantry battles, organized patrols facing armed insurgents, or in equally-organized insurgent bands aimed against such patrols. But way many Americans with similar experience do not seem to draw that conclusion. 

Let’s grant for a moment that the United States government might turn into something worth raising armed insurgent bands to fight. I think that is somewhat less probable than as asteroid hitting the Earth, in that it would give decades of warning, but right now assume it could happen in an instant. Well, what the fuck would open carry get you? The weapons are useless until the rebels launch organized resistance; wandering around with one across your back beforehand just makes it easy for the government to identify a potential rebel. And once you have launched a war against the state, well, the open-carry laws are moot.

In other words, even if you grant the wingnut rationale, open carry makes no sense. 

JKR, do you have any thoughts on this? Andrew? Ivan? Other random readers with experience carrying loaded weapons in potential combat situations?

UPDATE: What the hell?

Why we can’t have nice things

 Environmental reviews in the United States have long passed the bounds of reasonableness. European countries, with far-better environmental protections, are still able to build large-scale infrastructure projects. The United States, not so much.

California is the biggest offender. But it is everywhere. The Purple Line is back in court over ... oh, man. A bridge is too big, and should be made smaller and more expensive. More vegetation needs to be planted between the tracks to reduce runoff. And, of course, we need to protect the Hay’s Spring and Kenk’s amphipod. 

I do not know how to build a political coalition to weaken the environmental laws. Democratic operatives tell me that they would in theory be open, but in practice do not trust the Republicans enough to start the process. Republicans tell me that they would obviously love to weaken the protections, but worry about a backlash from NIMBYs who like the laws for completely non-environmental reasons. But they dismiss Democratic worries as political piffle and say that if the Democrats would provide cover, their amendments would pass.

Either way, it is depressing. We have bad environmental laws that block needed projects for no public benefit, yet the political system is unable to reform them. One side fears losing the baby with the bathwater; the other dismisses those fears but says that a lot of their supporters like being able to throw dirty bathwater at people. Gaaaaaah.

Washington drivers have to stop with the goddamned honking

 We have bemoaned the honking around this city here and here. Now comes Dr. Gridlock at the Washington Post with confirmation. A reader writes in with exasperation to tell her fellow DMV residents to “Stop honking, you are not in New York.”

Dr. Gridlock tells her, “I’m from New York City, and had a New York driver’s license for more than a decade. Never heard as much car honking there as I have in the land of Southern hospitality.”

Damn skippy.

More on the mystery of Maryland drivers

 I’m in New York City without my pen-and-paper journal, so I suspect I’ll post some musings about the trip over the next few days. Why not? Reading over this blog, I like some of the early travelogues the best.

But until then, a brief thought about Maryland drivers, courtesy of a senior traffic engineer who worked in both the District and Prince George’s County. His explanation for the disregard given pedestrians is simple: “Maryland has no cities and therefore no municipal laws about pedestrian safety. Therefore, drivers are not sensitized by local regulations.”

It is strange that the urban counties around D.C. have not passed such laws, but they haven’t. The explanation does have the benefit of comparing like-with-like. 

There is one other possibility: the District, unlike, say, New York or Chicago, has gone out of its way to suburbanize traffic signals. For example, streets that look just like someplace in downtown Brooklyn will force pedestrians to wait for left turn signals ... even from one-way streets. Cars with D.C. plates (to further cite my traffic engineer friend) are likely driven by relatively upper-income people who also spend much time as pedestrians; they will therefore be more respectful than suburban drivers who (unlike somebody from Long Island driving into Queens) neither spend much time on foot nor have to adopt a different driving style when in the city.

I admit to a preference for non-cultural explanations, because they are falsifiable, so I like this one.

I also asked him about all the honking in the DMV. The difference with New York is striking. For three days I have been driving all over the counties of New York, Kings, Queens, and Nassau, plus the trip here and a long stop in Philly. Since leaving the Beltway the only horn sounds I have heard since then was (a) at a turnpike exit in New Jersey; (b) directed at me; and (c) thoroughly deserved. 

So why the honking?

Well, that, he says, is cultural. “That is the District and Virginia too. People scoring self-importance points. Drives everyone nuts.”

Help one American colony, and you gotta hurt another, or something, plus Maryland drivers suck

 Speaker Ryan may be helping the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico against the wishes of his caucus, but man is he letting them fly their freak flag when it comes to the District of Columbia. One Republican basically said that if Washingtonians did not like it, we could go join Maryland.

Bah. I do not like the idea because of a profound culture difference: Maryland drivers are terrible. And I mean terrible in a unique nowhere-else-in-America kind of way.

I just got into a yelling match with an asshole in an SUV who pretended to threaten to run me down when my kids and I were walking in an alleyway that he had turned into illegally. Fucking idiot, by the way, had a goddamned parking enforcement vehicle behind him when he revved his engine and lunged at me and my kids as we were walking. Pendejo. It ended poorly for him, as you can imagine. 

I have had conversations with Marylanders in bars who admit to thinking pedestrians should get out of their way in crosswalks. Add that to the way they honk at anything, and it makes you almost long for Virginia. Really, the craziness drops a lot among cars with District plates and dries up across the Potomac. Unfortunately, I only live a few blocks from Maryland, so I have to deal with them.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with drivers in that state? Disrespecting pedestrians and honking at everything. Where are we, Egypt? Brazil? Mexico City is becoming better than Maryland in this respect.

Note that I have lived in Boston and Miami. Marylanders do not drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. I drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. (Well, not Floridians.) Marylanders drive fine when it comes to signalling and stop signs and situational awareness and speed limits and respecting other vehicles ... well, except for the bloody honking. 

But while the honking is annoying, Marylanders deserve their own circle of hell for the way they treat pedestrians. WTF?

But despite these strong cultural differences with Maryland (do not get me started on their traitorious racist anthem) the actions of Congress are beginning to make me think that maybe retrocession would not be such a bad idea. 

Jane Jacobs was wrong

 Hillary as president, big burst of traffic. Mexico shows the amazing advance of solar power, something that may save the planet even if You-Know-Who is elected, meh. Oh, well.

Anyhoo, I just saw this email from Randy McDonald: “I’d be pretty curious to see your reaction to Jacobs on the blog. I know you’re a Moses fan, but that’s it.”

So, at his request, I’ll talk about Jane Jacobs. I did not intend to say anything, because why speak ill of the dead? I’m sure that she was a very nice person.

But my short version is: Death and Life of Great American Cities is bullshit. 

Now, bullshit is a technical term. Bullshit is basically truthiness by another name. And Jacobs was truthy. She made claims about social cohesion coming from architecture for which she had no evidence. She refused to acknowledge that the pathologies of American cities in the 1960s were due to racism, not construction. She blasted entirely functional and pleasant “towers in the park” buildings but ignored the way well-intentioned traffic engineers were making suburbs unnecessarily unpleasant. 

In fact, you can see how much bullshit she wrote from her defenders. Here is an essay Randy linked to called  “Was Jane Jacobs right?” The dude manages to contradict himself. First, he claims that Torontonian neighborhoods have gentrified and become full of retail monocultures because of too much construction. Well, that is the purest form of bullshit: as Randy has documented, rising rents are creating such monocultures in old neighborhoods. Then he confuses typology for hypothesis testing, by showing us that dense districts in Milan are more dense. (No, really. That is what he shows.) 

In a normal world, I might like Jane Jacobs. I am by no means ideologically averse to regulations that drive up housing costs. (Frex, requiring first-floor retail on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn.) She was right about highway building. (I like that Moses built stuff; I am less convinced that he built the right stuff, although really do wish the Cross-Brooklyn existed.) She was certainly right about most urban planning of the time, and her arguments apply to modern suburban planning quite well.

But we do not live in a normal world. We live in a world where Jacobite (Jacobin?) ideology means that everyone thinks it is entirely okay that the law protects cute streets like mine from the scourge of high rises. (Calling Eric Moore!) Hell, from the scourge of triple-deckers. 

We live in a world where people can pretend that filtering does not exist. (The link goes to a study of the California housing market. Theory here.) And while the worst problems are in fact in the suburbs, where I suspect Jacobs would be fine with replacing quarter-acre plots with “missing middle” construction, the fact that we have decided to preserve our older neighborhoods in amber is creating just as many problems.

In short ... I usually do not buy slippery slope arguments, but it seems to me that the United States slid all the way down the goddamned slope that Jacobs greased back in the 1960s. If we need to bulldoze the West Village to get back to a normal housing market that serves all Americans (while making our cities greener in the process) then so be it. 

Jane Jacobs caused none of that, of course. But she was emblematic. Her ideas have enabled much of the horror show that is the current American economy. Ironically, Canadian cities are doing (slightly!) better (in the face of worse pressure) because they are less beholden to her ideas than American ones. 

Hasta la vista, cuteness. Bring on more buildings! 

I hope that changed your mind, Randy! And even if it didn’t, when are you coming to D.C.?

Reforming investment tribunals

 One of the advantages of living in Washington, D.C., is the chance to go to presentations and roundtables organized by the capital’s myriad think tanks. Cato is one of the best. I’m sure that statement surprises some of our readers, but it’s true. They get a lot of good people to talk about interesting issues.

In this case, the interesting issue is the horribly-named ISDS. That’s the acronym for investor-state arbitration, a subject this blog has written a lot about. Basically, the system allows foreign investors to sue governments when those governments are alleged to have expropriated (or at least damaged) their investments. The arbitral rulings are then enforced in national courts, meaning that a British investor “wronged” by the Ecuadorean government can sue for damages in an American court and have that court attach Ecuadorean assets or income streams … including, potentially, PetroEcuador’s oil sales or the proceeds from any foreign bond sales organized by the Ecuadorean government. It’s a powerful tool. And I would argue that it’s much better than a world where investors go back to their home government and ask it to bitch-slap the government that “wronged” them until it pays up.

(Of course, that still happens with some regularity, but that’s a different subject.)

The thing is, the system is profoundly undemocratic and exceedingly odd. First, the tribunals are essentially ad hoc. The parties to the dispute choose at least two of the typical three arbiters, often they choose all three. The arbiters are generally selected from a small rotating group of people … who also often act as counsel in other arbitration proceedings. (It’s like your judge in a civil was also a similar plaintiff’s lawyer.) There’s no appeal process. Decisions are (usually but not always) published but proceedings are confidential. And the system is molasses slow. It’s a goddamned mess.

(Which is why state-to-state bitch-slapping persists, but again, that’s a different subject.)

Few people care in the United States, but in Europe ISDS is a big deal. In part, that’s because Europeans are more concerned with the way the system appears to be biased towards large imperial corporate power. (In practice, the bias is less clear: governments win more than they lose. But I would argue that it nonetheless exists.) But it’s also because European governments are getting hit with seats suits; thirty at last count for poor beleaguered Spain. And Germany has been smacked with a €3.8 to €4.7 billion claim over its nuclear policies.

While I was writing The Empire Trap, I had a long conversation with Steve Haber about the arbitral system. I suggested that the system would be a lot better if it more resembled an actual judicial system, with standing courts, open proceedings, real appeals and reliance of precedent. He agreed … but added that the idea was a Nirvana thesis. Wasn’t gonna happen. He was right four years ago.

And if European governments hadn’t started getting hit with suits, he would still be right! But they did, and the European public noticed, and the European Commission was seized with the issue. Which is why I got to hear Rupert Schlegelmich, the Director General of Trade, present the European reform proposals at Cato. 

The Commission’s proposals would basically turn ISDS into the Investment Court System (ICS): a real genuine court system like the one I proposed to Steve in 2012. The Europeans would write this new system into all new bilateral investment treaties (BIT). Any BITs signed by the European Union would then supersede any old BITs signed by European national governments.

First, the European proposal would enshrine a “right to regulate” in order to insure that the system could not be used to overturn legitimate public concerns, the way the Phillip-Morris, for example, has tried to use ISDS to force Australia to pay it for losses incurred by that country’s cigarette-labeling laws.

Second, it would define “fair and equitable treatment” of investors as the following:

1. No outright denials of justice;
2. No manifest arbitrariness in state actions;
3. No discrimination on manifestly wrongful grounds;
4. No abuse, meaning coercion, duress or harassment.

Third, it would define expropriation as the following:

1. Causing substantial deprivation for the investors;
2. Causing more than an economic impact on their interests;
3. Not including “normal regulatory activities” concerning “health, safety and the environment” unless they were “manifestly excessive.”

Finally, it would create a permanent court with judges appointed by E.U. governments. Said judges (like all real judges) could not serve as lawyers in other investment disputes. Cases would be allocated randomly among the judges. And there would be full transparency in all proceedings, including video.

Wow! Sounds great. But then came Miriam Shapiro to point out with a smile that there was still a lot of daylight between the U.S. and E.U.

The United States, she pointed out, agrees with Europe that it would be a great idea to improve the selection of arbiters so as to put them “above reproach” and let tribunals rapidly dismiss frivolous cases. She also allowed that Washington would smile upon greater transparency.

She then pointed out some wrinkles where it might be hard to find common ground. Frex, how early on can the new court dismiss frivolous claims? Can states provide binding guidance on treaty interpretation before cases are brought? Who pays attorneys fee? Current tribunals can award that to one side or another; the European proposal will award those to the winner. What will the special mechanisms to make it easier for small companies to sue look like? And will there be a binding review clause to evaluate the new system after five years?

But … you can forget an American administration signing on to an appeals mechanism, even if Congress likes it. Simply put, governments win at arbitration and the U.S. wins a lot. Like, always. An appeals process could change that. From Washington’s position, what ain’t broke don’t need fixing.

Anyway, interesting stuff. If the European reform happens, it will be yuuuge, another move from global governance to something more like actual global government. Which may be why, like D.C. statehood, I’m skeptical that the European proposal will fly.

The resemblance is a bit striking

 I made an oblique comment about my boy’s resemblance to a certain fictional politician here. But sometimes ...

Today he asked me to explain again how Barack Obama will still be real but not be President next year. I guess it is more confusing than I realize! 

Psychological evidence that supports my predilections!

 Well, now. Wearing a suit makes (presumably male) wearers more logical, more likely to accept criticism without taking umbrage (or getting depressed), and more big-picture in general. 

So says science!

I have been decrying the sloppification of America ever since I moved back from Mexico in 2005. There is nothing wrong with wearing a suit on vacation. As for shorts: here is a simple checklist:

Sartorial standards are important. My old friend Joe Berne explained why in a wonderful post, “Why should I dress like a grown-up?”

I have to wonder about the side-effects that come when a society decides to pretend that it does not have strong class markers when it really does. 

Norms and D.C. statehood

 There has been a slow disintegration of political norms in America. Filibusters, for example, are now commonplace. So are holds on executive appointments. Motherhood bills are politicized. Frex, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers (R-Kentucky) is holding up a bill to fight the Zika virus for some partisan reason. Zika! 

Which makes me wonder. The next time Democrats have full control of Congress, it would be very easy to pass a D.C. statehood bill. That would give the Democrats two additional safe seats in the Senate and one in the House. Moreover, it would force the Republicans to support an additional constitutional amendment, lest the inhabitants of the rump District of Columbia receive three automatic electoral votes under the 23rd Amendment. 

Giving D.C. statehood vaguely feels like gerrymandering. In fact, that is what some prominent political scientists told me in a car in Chicago. But they also told me that they think suburban representatives like their influence over the District more than they like being in the majority, and that does not make sense.

So it would seem that the only reason for the next fully Democratic congress to refrain from making a District statehood bill job one would be a sense of propriety. And why would anyone care about that anymore?

Yet, somehow, my gut is that the Democrats won’t do this obvious thing the next time they have untrammeled power.

Why do I think that? I need some clarification to explain why my gut disagrees so strongly with my brain.

Go SpaceX!

 All right! They landed on the water ship. One step closer to real spaceships!

Although we are still sadly far. And I continue to challenge Doug to defend his happiness at the tragic end of the space shuttle. After all, discovering that a dream was impossible and fraudulent is cause for tears, not celebration.

But, for now, a step closer to spaceships! Real actual spaceship-acting spaceships!

Children can handle the truth about American history

 So the other day the boy and I went down to the Lincoln Memorial. We started at the President’s house. He then wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial, because Lincoln is the best president. Why was he convinced that Lincoln was the best president? Well, he asked me, once he got over his consternation at learning that Barack Obama will not always be President, “Who was the best president?” Really, not a hard question. 

So we scooted over from the White House, down the Mall, to the Lincoln Memorial.

There is a tiny little bookstore inside the Memorial. My boy being like his father, he couldn’t resist. He ran in before I could intercept him and spotted a book by Laurie Calkhoven, called I Grew Up to be President, a bunch of short presidential bios accompanied by cute depictions of what the presidents probably looked like as little boys. 

And ... the book is terrible. Really really bad. And really bad for a simple reason: it whitewashes 19th-century American history to the point of doing violence. But it does so in this annoying lawyerly way, so that you can’t outright say they’re leaving things out ... but which will also allow irresponsible parents to be able to pretend that American history is all sweetness and light until sometime in the early 1970s and the only bad presidents were Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

What sent me over the top was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. Here is the ridiculous passage:

By the time Lincoln was inaugurated, seven states had left the Union to form the Confederate States of America. They believed that Lincon, who was abolitionist, threatened their right to make their own decisions.

What the fuck? 

Andrew Jackson is worse. Nothing about him killing a man in a duel or the veto of the Second Bank of the United States, but I could forgive that. What I cannot forgive is this:

Instead of letting Congress lead the way in passing new laws, Jackson took charge and vetoed bills he didn’t like. Only one major law, the Indian Removal Act, was passed in his eight years in office.

Yes, that’s true. And that’s really all they have to say about that particular piece of legislation??

It isn’t a conservative bias: the book is age-appropriately critical of 37 and 43.

Listen, my children will be as flag-wavingly patriotic as they come. More than most, in fact, since at least one of their parents will want them to serve time in uniform. And they can handle the fact that Andrew Jackson was a racist genocidal maniac and the South seceded in order to keep their distant cousins in bondage. 

Scholastic should be ashamed of itself for publishing this dreck. 

Why would Bloomberg run?

 Blogging has been light. Blogging here is always light! But it has been light because we have been enjoying Snowzilla.

There is no “Winter Storm Jonas.” That’s a Weather Channel marketing term. The proper term for the recent storm is “storm.” Or Snowzilla!

Anyway, among other things, I just learned that Mike Bloomberg is thinking about running for President. I am sure that many others have pointed out that he can’t win and would likely throw the race to the Republicans.

My question is, why would he bother? What is the raison d’être for his candidacy? Hillary Clinton isn’t friendly enough to Wall Street? Bernie Sanders would insult rich people? Insufficient citizens are frisked by police?

I kid, but the question is serious. What in the name of God could possibly be driving Mr. Bloomberg to even think about such a thing? I don’t understand, and not just because this blog was not a huge fan of his mayoralty. Oh, he wasn’t a terrible mayor. The bureaucracy was efficient. PlaNYC was pretty cool, if a bit overrated.

But what is a Bloomberg presidency supposed to bring to America that a Clinton administration wouldn’t?

I am left with the possibility that he would run solely to spite Bernie Sanders, in the still unlikely event that the Senator from Vermont should get the nomination. That seems ... petty. And it is contradicted by the fact that he really does seem to be thinking about running against Hillary as well.

Help me out here. Why is he even thinking about this? What does he think he brings that she does not?

Even less sad (the blog post) but not quite yet happy

 There is a chain to this particular blog post. It starts in 2011 and continued in 2012, with comments on the latter post reaching into early this year.

Basically, I was sad to see the space shuttle go. Doug Muir said that he wasn’t sad to see it go. But he was wrong. (Yes, he was wrong about his own emotional state!) For the fact that we could not make work a giant reusable spaceship that looked like a real spaceship and not a “disintegrating totem pole” is very very sad. 

OK, to be fair, what annoyed Doug was that we tried to make a real spaceship work even though we knew that we couldn’t from the very beginning. But even so: there is something tragic about seeing a fraud recognized and then abandoned. Which is still sad, no?

A few days ago, however, we came a little bit closer to the dream of big giant spaceships that look and fly the way we were promised as kids: Falcon 9, Flight 20 successfully landed its first stage at Landing Zone 1 on Cape Canaveral. The first stage refired up its main engine and lowered itself down just like a real rocketship!  

There is still a way to go, of course. But we got a little closer. A little boy who wants to be Gene Cernan and loves this rocketship museum in his home town enjoyed watching it on a screen, even if I doubt he recognized the significance. And his father, who took long summer bus rides from Miami as a teenager to watch live space shuttle launches, became a little less sad.

Pointless subway geekery

 I somehow managed to score 100% on this quiz, which asks you to identify cities by real-scale maps of their heavy rail systems. In my case, I think the information comes from riding enough subways to be able to eliminate possibilities when I did not recognize the city, but who knows? Anyway, it was fun, so here it is.

The Washington Metro was not, sadly, included.

Halloween horror story

 A strange and horrible thing happened on Halloween this year. 

Trick-or-treating in the neighborhood, as always, was awesome. If you live in D.C. and are looking for a place to send your children hunting for candy, I heartily recommend Friendship Heights. Nothing weird happened while trick-or-treating. We marched around everywhere and had a lot of fun, just like last year.

No, the weird thing happened at a party after trick-or-treating was done. We had come home. We put my little girl to bed. I watched the third inning of the fourth World Series game with my boy (ah, such a hopeful inning) then put it on record. The boy and I then got in the car to drive down to a halloween party at a friend’s house in nearby A.U. Park. It was one of those parties where most of the guests were families with children but adults without children were also invited, in costume if desired.

I was not in costume. 

So we walk in, and the front room is filled with dancing kids, ranging from three to maybe 10 or 11. And across the room, standing there, is a man in a Adolf Hitler costume.

I do a double-take, tell myself he must be dressed as Charlie Chaplin. 

I go up to him. He is standing next to his wife. Nope, it’s Adolf. No swastika, but lest there be any doubt, the woman next to him said, “This is my husband, Adolf.” (They were in fact married.)

Now, I have to note here that ten years ago in Mexico I got into one fight with a fellow wearing a swastika T-shirt on the street and angrily chased another out of a concert. (There was a weird fad for such shirts in Mexico; sometimes the place feels like the far suburbs of Western Civilization. I still don’t think I’ve told the story of the two middle-class women I met reading Mein Kampf at a bar?)  

But I am older and I was at a friend’s house with my young son. (Plus, I stopped wearing contact lenses around 2006.) So I go looking for the party organizer. I can’t get her alone, so I decide to leave. My boy and I get in the car and start driving home.

No, can’t let this one go. Not gonna happen. I turn around; we go back inside. I find the woman organizing the party and this time I insist that I need to talk to her. I ask if there’s a story behind Adolf and his blonde wife over there. (The wife was not in costume.) She says no, friends of a friend. I tell her that I am going to ask them to remove the costume or leave. She says of course, but asks me not to make a fuss.

I was surprised that there was no exculpatory backstory, because I would not have imagined that this friend would have permitted somebody into her house in an Adolf Hitler costume without one. 

So I go up to the gentleman with a sleepy three-year-old in my arms and tell him that he needs to remove the mustache or leave.

He does not seem to understand the question. He asks me where I from. I say “Brooklyn” and repeat my statement. To which I add,  “It would be completely acceptable for me to punch you in the face, but this is not my house and there are children here.” One of which I am holding in my arms. A few people are watching, but this cannot be called a “scene.”

At this point he claims to be Danish and tells me that the costume is fine in Europe. I tell him, “Tell that to Prince Harry.” I followed by saying that Germans would not tolerate this. (I do believe that it may in fact be against the law there.)

He says (really) that I have no sense of humor. I ask him to explain the joke, he says it’s Halloween. I say — truly, I am astounding myself with my adult patience — that I have seen many funny comedies depicting Hitler and Nazis, but he is projecting no humor or satire, especially being a blond man from northern Europe. 

Surprisingly, I am as calm as the above sounds. I am of course paraphrasing, but I am not translating from Brooklynese. If he had been able to give me an explanation of why he had a point that didn’t involve making light of the man who caused World War 2 and the Holocaust, I would have been happy to hear it. 

His wife say, with exasperation, “There are vampires here!” I point out, obviously, that vampires aren’t real. He says, “Neither is Adolf Hitler anymore!” That deserves no response.

In response to my silence, he starts to go about how many memorials they have in Germany to the Jews while we have none here in the United States to the slaves. I remind him that he said he was Danish. He says he has German cousins and goes back to his rant about slavery. (Note that he can see my son in my arms. I think he thought that this comparison was supposed to make me more sympathetic.) 

I interrupt. “That is true but irrelevant. Next time wear a sheet and see what happens. Or come as Colonel Sanders.”

At his point my patience has run out. I tell him that if he does not shave or leave right now I will ask one of the several black women at the party what they think. (There were no black men; the fathers, unlike me, were watching the World Series live.) He leaves.

I was then approached and thanked by several bystanders. We see the fellow’s wife come back looking for something. The wife comes up to me (I am standing in a small group now) and asks, “Do you know [the party organizer]?”

I say yes.

She says, “You should apologize to her!”

To this, I finally break. “Get out of here, Eva Braun.”

There is an redeeming addendum. After the man leaves, while I am talking with my thankers, my boy asks, “What are Nazis?”

“They were bad people, son. They made people work and beat them and killed them because they did not like them and took their stuff. Your grandfather shot Nazis.”

He thought about this for a moment and says, “I shoot tigers, when they are coming to eat me!”

And that is the end of my no-good horrible weird and unexpected Halloween night. It did not, oddly, occur to me to whip out my phone and take a picture. I sort of wish I had, but then again, I do not approve of internet mob justice and likely would have refused to post it. Instead I give to you a picture that is not one of the two Mexican gentlemen with whom I got into a physical altercation ten years ago, but which perfectly captures the scene immediately preceding both fights. (A close friend took this one, and went on to have a big argument with the fellow.) 

The lesson, if there needs to be one, is that neither Nazi symbols nor the Confederate flag should be taken lightly. A good rule of thumb is that if you are not in the Finnish Air Force nor a practicing Hindu, then anything resembling Nazi wear is best avoided. Unless you want to be politely thrown out of a D.C. Halloween party or less politely punched on a Mexico City street. 

I admit to being perplexed as why my friend did not tell the gentleman that he could not enter her house dressed as he was. I also admit to being perplexed as to why no one had told him to leave before I did.

Bloom County is back! Is Donald Trump to credit?

 As a teenager, Bloom County was one of my favorite comic strips.

But it went away in 1989, six years before the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes followed it into oblivion. So I was a little surprised to pick up Politico today and read, at the back of the print edition, what looked like a Bloom County comic strip about Donald Trump. 

And it was Bloom County! You can see the strip at the link. And according to this article, Donald Trump may actually deserve the credit! “This creator can’t precisely deny that the chap you mention had nothing do with it.” 

For those of you who did not follow the strip back in the day, the storyline that I followed over my freshman year at college involved Donald Trump’s decision to buy the strip and fire all the main characters. (His brain had also been transferred into Bill the Cat, but that is probably not worth explaining. Even if I remembered any more, which I don’t.) 

Anyway, I did mention that Politico is to blame for the fact that my boy can recognize the faces of Marky Rubio and John Boehner. But informing me that Bloom County was back more than made up for it. Thank you. Politico!

Now, please, stop hurting America.

Isaac Asimov’s easiest prediction for 2014

 A while back, we went over Isaac Asimov’s  1964 predictions for 2014. In the penultimate comment, Damien RS points out that Boston-Washington has not merged into a single city.

But who the hell knows what Asimov was talking about! He predicts that the corridor will have a population of 40 million by 2014. That is a pretty easy prediction to make, considering as it had a population of 37.2 million in 1960. (It hit 51.8 million in 2010.)

Moreover, the place was already almost an unbroken streak of urban areas, using the standard definition of 1,000 people per square mile. (Definition on page 3.) 

The map is from page 6 of Megalopolis, published in 1961. Maybe Asimov meant to predict: “By 2014, there will be a bunch of suburbs built in Harford and Cecil County, MD, central New Jersey, coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island.” 

To be frank, I would call this an even bigger fail than Damien did, because it shows that Asimov had basically no clue about geography or demography. This is in fact pretty obvious in Caves of Steel, where a world population of only 8 billion has somehow forced everyone to live in super-dense urban arcologies. Ditto the Foundation novels, where Asimov somehow predicted that a population of 40 billion on an Earth-sized world would require a planet-spanning structures hundreds (or thousands) of feet high. Predicting that an urban area would grow 7½% over 40 years is sort of less than perspicacious ... let alone stating that a 7½% population increase would imply the creation of a single city where one did not yet exist.

A little bit crazy about these things, Asimov was. Anyone know why?

Scooters and another rumination on zoning

 One of the things about owning a home is raking up leaves. It’s actually not un-fun, it’s just that the boy wants to help. That said, when your neighbors succeed in making big piles, they are perfect for getting your new scooter stuck.

I admit, I do like living in a single-family house right around the corner from a Metro station and within walking distance of everything; we own a car, but need it only for my wife to get to work. Other than that and the occasional day trip to Baltimore or Prince George’s County, we never use it, not even for groceries. 

I am aware that my house only exists because of zoning. But I would still gladly vote to abolish that zoning, even though I know that I would run the risk of having somebody build something that would put my house in shadow. It is just the right thing to do.

It also opens the possibility that somebody would come along and make us an amazing offer on our house (my friend Bernard nods here in satisfaction) which is why all the people on the border of downtown Bethesda want the area of high density extended to them. Of course, the people who would then be on the border have shorter time horizons and oppose said extension. Ni modo.

Anyway, there is the answer to your question, NYCMT! How are yours, by the way?

The American housing crisis

I am beginning to think that the United States is facing a terrible housing crisis. The fact that we are is pathetic. We know how to build high-density housing in inexpensive ways. But we do not allow it. So places that boom in the northeast and California see little housing growth. But they see price explosions.

We are moving to Washington this summer. Our rent on a two-bedroom apartment (big enough for two adults and two small children) is $2525. When we moved in back in 2009 it was $2300. That is an increase of only 1.9% per year. In real terms, no change.

But the owners want to charge the new tenants $3200 for the same unit. That is an increase of 6.8% per year: well over inflation and a clear indication that something is off the rails in the Boston housing market.

The ultimate problem, of course, is that you simply can’t knock down the short buildings on this block and build more high-rises like the one in the background. It’s ridiculous. We are less than a quarter-mile from a T station; residential buildings here should reach 20, 30, 40 stories. But you can’t build them because, uh, Franklin Street is just so pretty as-is.

WTF? What in the name of God is wrong with Brooklyn? Build Brooklyn here! And for those of you in Brooklyn, go build Manhattan over there. Manhattan is great!

Here is my proposal for a tough tight restrictive zoning code.

1. Adjacent units shall not lose more than two hours of sunlight on the shortest day of the year unless their current occupants so agree.
2. Monthly rents on a third of the units in any new rental buildings shall not exceed 0.003% of the median household income in the municipality per square foot. The price of one-third of any new for-sale units shall not exceed 2.5% of the median household income in the municipality per square foot.
3. New developments must at least double the number of units of any housing structures demolished in their construction.

And we’re done! No parking requirements, no height restrictions, nada. Just the above. And truth be told, I would prefer to replace clause (2) with a tax on luxury units. Calling Bill de Blasio! (Or Muriel Bowser.)

Note that this is an incredibly restrictive code. Just less so than the bullshit we currently have. Historical preservation is stupid, un-American, and contributes to income inequality.

Massively. How much of the increase in income inequality is due to changes in housing costs? I suspect it is large; someone should do the decomposition.

Cars

 So I was just in Washington on business.  But I managed to get in some fun, visiting the Auto Show on Saturday evening.  Very cool.  In one sign of the recession, they have put all of the spokesmodels in more clothes than is usual. 

Here's the car I want.

Here's the car I don't want, but would feel very patriotic to have.

Here's the car I really want, but can't possibly justify.  As in, its existence.  On any level.

And here's the car I really really want.  It even has a five-point safety belt and a racing roll bar, which I'm sure would make my wife much happier about spending $39,990 on a tricked-out death machine.

What I'm going to get, however, will probably be either a Mini Cooper Clubman S or the Honda Insight.  Unless I think of something better.  What car do you want?

El Caribe americano

  Lots of Stars-and-Stripes on the Mall of course, a few Texan ones, two French tricolors, one Ghanaian Black Star, a Californian red-star-and-bear ... and multiple Trinidadian, Jamaican, Haitian, Grenadine, Grenadian, and Guyanese flags. 

The Commonwealth Caribbean has an interesting emotional relationship with the United States, all the more so with this inauguration. 

P.S.  Why is Washington overrun with the Miami P.D.?  Dude.  Miami??

P.P.S.  Did Governor Paterson just call Hillary Clinton the best senator that New York City has every had?

P.P.P.S.  That's a lot of booing for the still-President.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.  I much prefer the singing, "Hey hey hey, good bye."