Man, you’d think I’d hear about this on the Vulgar Boatmen email list, but noooo…
Anyway, Eric notes that Dale Lawrence has an article in the August 8 Chicago Reader. Sadly, the Reader doesn’t do online content.
In slightly related news, I actually started my Dale Lawrence piece for this blog last week but was interrupted by various real-world duties. Hope to pick it up Real Soon Now.
When I moved to Seattle in 1990, I felt as though I’d come home. From excellent examples of progressive local governance to the burgeoning high-tech economy, I felt that this was where America’s real future had to lie. Great, well-funded public transit; an urban culture that encouraged abandonment of automobile-based transportation, a political culture that was commited to transparency and public input. Everything I ever wanted in a regional government. Best of all, failing sports teams which would surely relocate within the decade, leaving me alone with my fellow bookish rock nerds to play with our computers, walk to work while reading, and practice open democracy free of the warping effect of corporate politics.
When the day before the Gulf War began, people filled the streets of Seattle in protest, I knew I was home, and that whatever happened to the rest of my hopeless native country, the region would remain an island of sanity and a beacon of hope for late industrial democracy.
I was one-hundred percent wrong, and I must say, it pisses me off.
ITEM: Seattle libraries will close doors for a week to save money – including the library system’s web site. See the library’s press release. This despite Seattle being the home of Amazon and reputedly the urban area of the United States with the highest per-capita consumption of books (a totem of local boosters which I was unable to document on the web).
ITEM: not one, but TWO publicly funded sports stadiums built after Seattle city residents vote repeatedly against said monuments to the betrayal of the democratic process. After construction, stadium tenants sucessfully hijack an innovative “1% for art” tax on tourist-related activities (hotel, restaurants).
ITEM: Seattle traffic reported to be second worst in the nation, due to the inability of area political institutions to defuse the predictable effects of sprawl on the automotive population of the region. One consequence of the failure: Boeing’s decision to abandon the region, which will eventually move production away from Puget Sound, specifically because of traffic. Note to regional politicos: Sports team migration good, heavy industry migration bad. Why, I personally know a huge Mariners fan in New Jersey, which currently is shamefully bereft of pro baseball!
ITEM: A mature, well-thought out plan for regional light rail confirmed for construction by voters as early as 1996 becomes a monumentally expensive boondoggle, replete with bookeeping problems, closed governance practices, enormous cost overruns, and a complete lack of accountability – all without having laid one mile of track by 2002.
ITEM: a grass-roots effort to address two of these problems – transit and traffic – which also encapsulates the quirky, idealist vision of the future which drew many to Seattle in the 1990’s, an urban monorail project, is fought tooth and nail by members of the local political class. Despite the monorail having been overwhelmingly approved at the ballot box no less than three times thus far, there is another public vote upcoming, and news comes this week of the emergence of both a formal opposition group, led by the truly nasty Henry Aaronson, a Mr. Burns clone if ever there was one, and of the long-simmering rivalry between the monorail and light rail groups.
ITEM: Seattle suffers a riot at Mardi Gras in which one person is killed. The media presents coverage that clearly presents a message of profound racial division through video and photography only, while verbally scrupulously avoiding any mention of race. No serious discussion of the riot as an expression of racial tension in the region took root in the region’s media, despite notable attempts to initiate the discussion. Indeed, only one media organ, The Stranger, even had the courage to call bullshit on the use of racially charged imagery in the coverage, but even this paper avoids seriously looking at racial tension in the city.
ITEM: in the decade of the 1990’s, the price of a first-time home buyer’s purchase is documented to grow by 57 to 78 percent while at the same time the median home sales price moved from $97k to $197k, according to county data, effectively guaranteeing that a household with an aggregate income of less than $85k cannot own property in the city.
Add it up: ineffective political leadership. Loss of foundational industry. Inflationary housing prices. Loss of citizen faith in the political process. No solution to problems of growth and development.
This place, still beautiful, is clearly on its’ way to abject, Detroit style civic collapse. Traffic is the single most important problem to solve, and unfortunately, no solutions appear. Geography alone guarantees that we can’t add freeways, and as demonstrated by LA, more freeways only bring more cars; and it’s clearly the car which is the root of our problem. It’s not possible to pry Americans out of their beloved rolling castles; my conclusion is that there is no solution to Seattle’s problems.
Ranch’s efforts at terror training detailed presents a detailed investigation, based mostly on an interview with a former tenant of the Oregon ranch the Feds allege Seattle-area activist James Ujaama helped lease with an eye to turning it into a terrorist training camp.
According to the article, Ujaama’s involvement has been accurately described in prior stories about the investigation – there really were jihadis living at the camp – but his interest in setting it up and running it was apparently based on the intriguing marketing concept of jihad adventure travel, from which he hoped to make a buck or two.
It’s an interesting read. The story reminds me of the various militia punch-and-judy stories from the Northwest in the mid-nineties.
The question that comes to my mind remains: is it acceptable to hold someone incommunicado because they have excercised poor judgement in life choices or posted inflammatory rhetoric to a web site?
Dan Anderson at BrainLog points to a debunking of the standard crap we hear from nattering robo-twits every time bogus product litigation comes up. Bottom line? The lawsuit, and the award, are justified.
On a side note, too much coffee man also debunked this particular totemic icon of our bootlicker buddies; sadly, his site makes the strip impossible to find.
Space.com’s Investigation Casts Light on the Mysterious Flying Black Triangle. Some Nevada-based nutball-science shop, the National Institute for Discovery Science, has been getting plenty of link with a recently released study concerning the contemporary “black triangle” variant of yoofo.
They theorize that said inky deltas are super-secret military LTA craft: that’s BLIMP to me and thee, English.
(Is it just me, or should someone tell NIDS that big purple triangles in a prominent graphic on the root page of a UFO site brings a certain Nike-wearing alienist death cult to mind?)
Well, Space.com summarizes some of the speculation from NIDS thusly:
“Among a range of NIDS observations, the group believes the BBDs are powered by electrokinetic/field drives, or airborne nuclear power units. These craft also fly at extreme altitudes, high above conventional aircraft and the pulsing of ground-based traffic control radar.”
To which, I gotta say, I am profoundly skeptical.
First, all of my reading on the US military and lighter-than-air aviation makes is absolutely clear: American military career people HATE the idea of LTA and fear it because of its’ failure (perceived or otherwise) as a military technology. Advocate LTA, lose your career. The idea that some portion of the Pentagon’s black budget is going to an LTA vehicle that operates with crew is just not realistic.
Second, although there are at least two serious, ongoing efforts to bring a heavy, cargo-oriented LTA vehicle to commercial service, it’s a hard sell, at least party because of military resistance to the technology. The military is the primary source of incubation and development capital for new aviation concepts, and without the brass and cash, both Zeppelin NT and Cargolifter are having hard times, uh, getting things off the ground.
Finally, I find the power-source speculation absurd, as well.
First, “electrokinetic/field” drives are unknown in practice, although apparently several patents have been granted on the idea; if I actually follow the theories the idea is based on, the effects only take place at the molecular level and therefore do not produce a propulsive or lifting force great enough to push anything around bigger than a molecule. But I’m no expert here, just a skeptic.
The alternative, nuclear power, while obviously a viable energy source, has in fact been considered, in one form or another, as a power supply for aircraft; but not for quite a long time. As I recall, the technology involved was not a standard reactor but rather some sort of ramjet, in the context of ICBMs, and was rejected because of the obvious problems in testing: what if the craft came apart while in flight?
The link above contains exhaustive coverage to the history of experimentation with nuke-powered flight; unfortunately some of the material appears not to have made the transition to HTML, including a lot of the non-rocket-and-space material; it additionally shows that reactor-based power-supplies were indeed the primary focus of the research. However, development was dropped in the early 1970s in the face of increasing public skepticism concerning the viability of nuclear power.
Obviously, the military has indeed kept using the power supply; so why do I doubt that a reactor would be at the heart of this secret airship?
Well, primarily because the culture of LTA technology development has always emphasized light materials as the basic design and construction principle. While a giant blimp can obviously offer sufficient bouyancy (as NIDS notes) to loft considerably larger loads than any other form of flight technology, I have a hard time imagining an LTA engineer opting for a power supply which requires a fuel and equipment density the likes of nukes.
Additionally, while the Navy’s LTA program was winding down in the early to mid sixties, some very large, and very ambitious, blimp designs were, um, floated. If ever someone was going to propose a reactor as the powersupply for a blimp, this would have been the time and place. Blimps, in the Navy, are not disssimilar to subs, just slower, easier to shoot down, and in the air. The Navy got its’ nuclear subs and carriers; it cancelled its’ LTA program altogether.
So, while the idea of a supersecret nuclear-powered LTA flying wing (I’m not even gonna bother taking on the form factor) is cool, and definitely entertaining, I’m gonna have to come down on the “uh – I don’t think so” side of the equation. YMMV, natch.
Where Warriors and Ogres Lock Arms Instead of Swords
…and…
Cinescape’s managing editor just told me that ComiCon in San Diego attracted 75,000 people this time, including the full weight of the Hollywood star machine due to upcomoing comics-based flicks.
When comics events become more popular than sporting events and the paper of record covers a player con for a MMOL role-playing game, does it signify something? Are the two events related at all?
In researching grad schools, I have learned that the newly revised UW Tuition Rates are insanely complex.
See, starting this fall, there are no fewer than SIXTEEN possible rates – each of which will be hiked every quarter for the next year.
Taking the hikes into account, that’s up to SIXTY-FOUR varying rates a given grad student might find themselves paying over the upcoming academic year, depending upon which quarter it is and which school they are enrolled in.
Determining which rate is for you is, naturally, left for you, potential consumer or ensnared enrollee, to sort out.
One potential effect is that in a particularly popular course, each student might be enrolled from different program, and therefore each student is paying a different price for the exact same product.
How modern! How abusive! How arrogant!
Why, it’s a brand-new Y2k voodoo doll, complete with pins!
Congratulations, Paul, now you can hold off that pesky Millennium Bug with ease as long as necessary! Please email shipping info as soon as is convenient, and we’ll move heaven and Earth to get your prize to you.
p h o b e . c o m is a roundup of silliness that I stumbled across whilst looking for a sufficently offbeat virtual otter pop. I chuckled; perhaps you will too.
Of note: the obsessively detailed life of Harold Haxton, the director of such notable B-flicks as “I was a Monkey’s Uncle” and “The Mummy’s Foot”.
Who can forget the scenery-chewing antics of T. Ross Mancini in “Green Doom”?
In July 25th’s En cas d’urgence gardez votre calme I acknowledged that I’d recieved my fabulous prize from Paul Frankenstein Light Industries by posting a shot of me in the shirt.
Blabbing on at length, I eventually proposed this site’s inaugural contest: who ever first identified all of the items in the photo (not counting your humble host) which had been previously featured in individual entries here would recieve a randomly drawn gimcrack from our household Big Bag o’ Mystery Stuff, a bag which was manufactured by none other than your pal and mine, Archie McPhee.
How fitting, then, that the winner of the contest should prove to be Paul Frankenstein (“Stine”, to his personal trainer and entourage). Mr. Frankenstein correctly identified the two items immediately behind my head as having been the subject of blog entries: the infamous KG Bobblehead and the less-well-beloved Blue King.
Oops! In looking into that last entry I realized that I’m overdue to provide my wife with a special prize of her own. So here it is:
Mr. Frankenstein, in the comments section on the entry which launched his winning observations, also felt that he recognized the “Redneck Rock” LP seen on the floor of my apartment in the lower right of the large picture. I assured him that it was doubtful, as the LP was an independent release originating in Vancuver, WA in the mid-seventies, and that I had found it in a free pile recently but been afraid to listen to it to date.
Rest assured, I’ll listen soon, and you’ll get to share the love, dear readers.