Can You Believe It? Drivers That Are Too Polite!

Recently I've taken up cycling. No, I'm not a Lance Armstrong wanna-be (who would be, these days?). It's just something that I can do with my wife that gets my heart pumping without a lot of collateral damage.

But when you start a new activity you often develop a whole new set of pet peeves. And my new pet peeve is drivers who are too polite.

Most of the time people complain about drivers who act like idiots and drive like they're the only ones on the roads. They don't know or don't care about the rules of right of way. They are oblivious about stoplights and turn signals. I've almost been creamed by guys like this twice in two months. Drivers of black pickup trucks seem to be the worst offenders.

Those guys are dangerous, but far more frequent are the drivers who are too polite. These drivers see a bike at a trail crossing, so they stop and wait for you to cross. Now, I appreciate their intentions. But most of the time it's misplaced.

If you take a look at the picture on the right, you'll see the signs that are at nearly every intersection of a bike trail and a street in Minnesota. In the foreground is an octagonal red stop sign for the bike trail, and a notice that says "Cross traffic does not stop." In the background is the yellow diamond caution sign for the street that says "Trail Xing." The other day I even saw one of those programmable blinking signs at a trail crossing, reminding bikers that cars don't have to stop for them.

At such crossings (which is most of them) cars on the street have the right of way, and the pedestrians and bicycles on the trail must yield to cars. Cars are under no obligation to stop, though they should be on the alert for idiot bikers who just barrel across the street. But about half the time when I come to such an intersection the drivers seem to think they have to stop for me.

Again, I appreciate the intention. But that "half the time" is the problem. When three or four cars approach the trail crossing, one or two will stop. The others just continue through, as is their right. Which means that I've got to stop anyway. And, a lot of the time, there are cars approaching from further back, whose drivers I can only assume will be irritated by the delay, swerve around the stopped car, and roar by me. Which means I can't go until I see what they do, which means that I -- and the person who stopped for me -- have to wait even longer.

When this happens I wave the driver of the stopped car on, but most of the time they refuse to go. Sometimes there are more cars coming that aren't stopping, so I can't go. Sometimes I'm not ready to cross yet -- I might be waiting for my wife to catch up, or I'm in the wrong gear to get going quickly, or I'm about to take a drink, or check my cell phone, or I just don't want to be rushed. And once I've stopped, the car might as well go ahead because they can accelerate faster than I can.

So if a cyclist waves you on, and you're sure there's nothing else in your way, save yourself and the cars behind you some grief and time, and just exercise your right of way.

Now, there is one time when I really do appreciate a driver stopping: some streets at certain times are extremely busy, and there's never a break in traffic. If you know a bike has been waiting a long time, giving them a chance to cross safely makes you a hero.

But exercising your right of way doesn't make you a villain.

Halliburton's Handslap

Halliburton has pleaded guilty to destroying evidence in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill:

In a startling turn in the three-year-old criminal investigation, Halliburton said that on two occasions during the oil spill, it directed employees to destroy or “get rid of” simulations that would have helped clarify how to assign blame for the blowout — and possibly focused more attention on Halliburton’s role. 

They were charged with one count of criminal conduct and will pay a $200,000 fine. Which is how much money they make in 15 minutes.

Executives at Halliburton had a hand in the deaths of 11 people and tried to cover it up. Why isn't anyone going to jail?

This entire affair shows how preposterous the Republican claim that big business can be trusted to act responsibly all on their own, and that regulation and oversight are unnecessary and even harmful. The same Republicans want us to allow a foreign company to build the Keystone XL pipeline straight the the heartland of the United States -- trashing many American's property rights with eminent domain -- to allow Canadian oil to be more easily exported to China.

Execs at big companies -- especially ones that are headquartered in foreign countries -- don't give a damn about America. They just want to squeeze every last drop of oil and gas out of the land and sea at maximum profit, and they don't care that they leave a polluted and desolate wasteland. They know they'll never be held personally responsible for anything they do. In the worst case the company gets slapped with a meaningless fine and they'll get a golden parachute worth tens of millions of dollars and be forced into retirement on some luxurious island tax haven.

The entire purpose of a corporation is to diffuse responsibility so thinly that no one can ever be held personally accountable for their actions. So how can anyone possibly trust that a company like Halliburton will ever do the right thing when they have to choose between doing the right thing and making a ton of money?

I Guess I Must Be A Woman...

Attack of the Zombie Voters

One of the best tools in the Republican arsenal of voter suppression is voter ID laws. These are usually justified by claims of huge numbers of impersonators, illegal immigrants, felons and dead people voting.

The Washington Post looked into one such case: numerous Republican politicians in South Carolina claimed that 900 dead people voted in elections there, and used these "facts" as evidence that voter ID laws were the only solution.

So South Carolina hastily passed a voter ID bill in time for the 2012 election, but the courts delayed its implementation until 2013. Oh, and an investigation was called for. But guess what?

The State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) conducted an extensive probe, which was completed May 11, 2012. But the final report was just made public this month after a 13-month review by Wilson’s office. In fact, the report was only released after Corey Hutchins of the Columbia (S.C.) Free Times submitted an open records request under the Freedom of Information Act. He received the report the day before the 4th of July holiday — perfect timing for news designed to be buried.

It turns out the claims of 953 votes by dead people actually involved not one election but 74 elections over a seven-year period. 

So SLED’s investigation centered on 207 votes that allegedly were made by dead people in the Nov. 2, 2010 election — when a total of 1,365,480 votes were cast — after officials concluded that that batch constituted a “representative sampling” of the alleged voting irregularities. (Note that the number of alleged dead votes was less than 2/10,000th of all of the votes cast in that election.)

The report confirms what the State Election Commission had found after preliminarily examining some of the allegations: The so-called votes by dead people were the result of clerical errors or mistaken identities.

In other words, zombie voters are just as fictional as the flesh-eating ones.

In addition to numerous clerical errors, the false positives included misidentifying living voters with the same name as deceased (sons with the same names as their dead fathers), bad data matching, scanners that incorrectly attributed a vote to a dead person, people who received absentee ballots who died without voting (not criminal in any sense), and one person whose absentee ballot was counted after they died -- which is exactly what South Carolina law calls for.

The episode in South Carolina is typical of Republican scandal-mongering. Phony up some voting data, misrepresent a tragedy in Benghazi, or solicit a bogus report from IRS inspector general. Cause a huge uproar and shout to the high heavens that there's a terrible conspiracy. Demand immediate action and a thorough investigation.

Then bury the results of the investigation when it turns out that there was never any kind of a scandal in the first place.

Yep

A Different Trial, a Different Outcome

The story of the old man who shot a 13-year-old black kid in cold blood has ended in a life sentence for the killer. The details are particularly revolting.

John Henry Spooner's home had been burglarized two days before the May 2012 shooting, and he suspected 13-year-old Darius Simmons as the thief. So he confronted the teen, demanded that he return the guns and then shot him in the chest in front of his mother when he denied stealing anything.

Spooner's own home surveillance cameras captured the shooting, and prosecutors aired the footage in court.

His defense:

The defense had argued that the killing might have been reckless but not intentional, and said Spooner didn't mean for the shot to be fatal.

The surveillance footage showed Spooner confronting Darius on a sidewalk, pointing a gun at the boy's chest and firing from a few feet away. Darius turned and fled, and then collapsed and died in the street moments later as his mother cradled him in her arms.

Spooner fired a second shot that missed. He tried to fire a third one but his gun jammed.

The part about the gun jamming instills very little confidence in me about the efficacy of firearms as "protection." What's incredible is that the defense argued that the killing was not intentional: he pulled the trigger three times! And then there's this:

During the trial, race — Spooner is white and Darius was black — was almost never mentioned, except when Spooner referred to his surveillance footage from the day of the burglary. It showed two black teenage males walking near his house from the direction of Darius' home. Their faces are difficult to identify and neither is carrying Spooner's guns. 

Finally — and the reason that the 76-year-old Spooner got life without the possibility of parole — there's the utter lack of remorse when he spoke at sentencing:

"They had to rob the house," he said. "Why'd they do that to me? ... They pushed me over the edge, I guess. I don't know. As far as being sorry, I don't know if I did right or wrong." 

He doesn't know if he did right or wrong? The cops searched the kids' house within hours of the murder and found nothing. The victim was standing on the street with his mom, not currently engaged in any kind of illegal activity or threatening Spooner in any way. How could this man possibly have any doubt about whether killing a 13-year-old child in cold blood was wrong?

This is exactly why the black community is so outraged by the Trayvon Martin killing. Because, in their minds, this is what they think was going through George Zimmerman's mind when he stalked and shot Martin. They believe Spooner and Zimmerman had exactly the same motivations (as indicated by Zimmerman's comment about punks who always get away).

The main difference was that Zimmerman made sure there was no surveillance video and no witnesses.

The net result of this stupid old man's love affair with firearms: he's in jail for the rest of his life, one kid is dead, and two shotguns are out on the streets in the hands of criminals. Spooner's behavior and remarks show that having guns is not about protection: his guns didn't stop his house from being broken into or prevent his shotguns from being stolen.

Having guns is all about revenge and being able to kill the bastards who cross you.

And About Keystone?

I'm not quite sure what to make of the Canadian oil train disaster that caused the deaths of 47 people. Certainly regulations were lax and Canada has stepped up and made moves to fix the problems in transporting hazardous goods. Of course, they don't have irrational adolescents in their country screaming about socialism so that makes it easier.

But what about Keystone? If the northern section of the pipeline is approved, what sort of guarantees do we have that the same thing won't happen here? Do we have regulations that are similar to the ones Canada is implementing? No more one man crews?

I really don't know. That's why I am asking.

Let The Free Market Sort It Out

This is what happens when you let the free market sort itself out.

This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal. It also increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country.

But wait, though, pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange?

The inflated aluminum pricing is just one way that Wall Street is flexing its financial muscle and capitalizing on loosened federal regulations to sway a variety of commodities markets, according to financial records, regulatory documents and interviews with people involved in the activities.

Ah, that explains it.

Now this is happening which never would have if Mitt Romney had won the election.

Personal Stories

Here's a piece from links file that I never got around to posting.

Sharing her story seemed like a way to break through her fears and to help others understand. And Nabil Laoudji's Mantle Project offers a unique way to do it: Put storytelling and civic sensibilities together to heal polarization. Mr. Laoudji does this by focusing on a controversial issue and producing performances by average citizens of diverse backgrounds who talk – entertainingly – about the experiences that have shaped their perspective on that issue.

Laoudji took this project to America and used a similar approach to bringing together very different political ideologies. The results were quite fascinating and are detailed in the article.

I've always pushed for more personal stories from people across the political spectrum. Rather than the knee jerk mouth foam, perhaps an individual story about how and why a person thinks the way they do politically. Anyone care to take a stab at it?

Bono Speaks!

Very interesting interview with Bono, lead singer of the band U2, regarding Jesus Christ from a couple of years ago. He says many things with which I agree and some that I do not.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love. What does that mean? What it means for me: a study of the life of Christ. Love here describes itself as a child born in straw poverty, the most vulnerable situation of all, without honor. I don’t let my religious world get too complicated. I just kind of go: Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond [sighs] in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that’s my religion. Where things get complicated for me, is when I try to live this love. Now that’s not so easy.

Agreed. Trying to live up to the perfect love that Jesus had for mankind and what he tasked us to do is indeed very difficult.

His next bit is very interesting.

But the way we would see it, those of us who are trying to figure out our Christian conundrum, is that the God of the Old Testament is like the journey from stern father to friend. When you’re a child, you need clear directions and some strict rules. But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

Also agree. God is different in the OT than the NT and that's because of Jesus Christ. It's pretty simple when you think about it. Right before this, though, he says this:

There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.

Christ may have not been the hippie his artistic portrayals make him out to be but he was a man of peace. I don't think that God's love is all that demanding, at least from the standpoint from Him as an authority figure. After all, it is your choice to believe. For me, having faith is the easy part, I guess.

More Falling Rates

From Reuters...

Many New York state residents who buy health insurance next year will most likely see their premiums cut by half as President Barack Obama's healthcare law creates subsidies that may increase the number of people in this market by the hundreds of thousands.

It's going to be interesting to see how the Right spins this one.

The View from the Other Side

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the George Zimmerman trial. When I saw who the jurors were (six middle-aged women) I knew that Zimmerman would get off. The jury would view him as a nice boy who was doing what he thought was right to protect middle-aged women just like them. They would think that he made an honest mistake that ended in a terrible accident.

I agree that the jury had no choice but to find Zimmerman not guilty under Florida law. But as two-thirds of the jury firmly believed, I also think that George Zimmerman was guilty of needlessly killing Trayvon Martin. The problem is, Florida doesn't have a law that they could charge for the crime that Zimmerman committed. In many other states it would have been an open-and-shut case of negligent homicide: Zimmerman instigated the entire confrontation, ignored the 911 operator's cautions instead of waiting for the police, and killed a kid whose only crime was walking while wearing a hoodie.

Florida law allows armed vigilantes to roam the streets, pumped with the false courage that comes from the barrel of a gun. Florida law explicitly allows people to stalk, confront and threaten innocent pedestrians with firearms, and then shoot them when things go south and they suddenly fear for their own lives. In Florida gun rights trump all others, even the right to life.

The trial was all about George Zimmerman's fear and apprehension. But as the president pointed out today, someone else may have felt fear: Zimmerman's victim, Trayvon Martin. We know that George Zimmerman feared for his life when he described to the police how Martin struck his head on the sidewalk.

What we couldn't hear was Trayvon's description of what he felt when that "creepy-ass cracker" was stalking him on that dark rainy day. We don't know what Trayvon saw when Zimmerman get out of his car and approached the boy. All we have is the killer's word that he didn't draw his weapon until Martin attacked him.

Based on other cases in Florida where people used guns to threaten others (20 years for firing a warning shot), it's very possible that had Trayvon survived to tell us of the fear he felt from Zimmerman's stalking, Zimmerman would have gone to jail for a very long time. But because Zimmerman killed Trayvon, preventing the boy from testifying, a killer got off. Florida law is completely screwed up.

What truly astonishes me is how so many people blithely talk about the hoodie and how it represents something terrible and ominous, something that only hoodlums and gangsters wear.

In the past year I have walked through my neighborhood on a cold or rainy day wearing a raincoat or a sweatshirt with the hood up dozens of times. Many of the people I pass -- including middle-aged ladies -- are also wearing hoods. The entire point of the hood is to keep your head warm and dry. But the number of times in my entire life I have driven through my neighborhood squinting at pedestrians through steamed-up windows while packing a pistol is exactly zero. I am therefore in much greater danger from idiots like George Zimmerman than I am from kids like Trayvon Martin. I therefore have utterly no sympathy for Zimmerman.

I can sympathize with the middle-aged jury ladies worried about their houses getting broken into: a dozen years ago while we were at the movies some punks kicked in our front door and stole a 15-year-old stereo system (they also rifled the drawers of our nightstand, obviously looking for guns and money). It was a couple of weeks before Christmas. They couldn't have gotten more than a couple hundred bucks for the stereo. But it cost us more than $2,000 to replace the front door and frame.

The burglars who broke into my house obviously had a car, because they got away with two very bulky speakers, a CD player and a receiver. They were apparently cruising the neighborhood looking for dark houses to rob.

So a guy like George Zimmerman slowly cruising down the street checking out the neighborhood looks a lot more suspicious to me than a kid walking in the rain wearing a hood and carrying iced tea and a bag of Skittles.

Why Republicans are for Voter ID

A Pennsylvania Republican baldly admits the true purpose of the voter ID law:

Be Careful What You Wish For

When a corporation files for bankruptcy, it's the culmination of a series of unfortunate events that was likely caused by some sort of government over regulation. When a city like Detroit files for bankruptcy, it's a "win" for the Right and their minions in the blogsphere. Why? Well, it goes something like this.

Detroit is a city that has largely employed liberal polices.
Detroit has just gone bankrupt.
Employing liberal policies means every city every where will go bankrupt.

Indeed, the very definition of a logical fallacy. This is all they have. By this logic, San Francisco should be in deep, deep shit. The opposite, of course, is true. The city attracts the 4th most foreign tourists of any city in the world, ranking 35th out of 100 worldwide. Juxtaposed with the millions brought in by tourism are the 30 international financial institutions, seven Fortune 500 companies, and a large support infrastructure of professional services—including law, public relations, architecture and design. Liberal policies there certainly are not affecting that city in an adverse way. Or New York, for that matter. We don't see Wall Street relocating to a red state any time soon, right?

Once you get past the adolescent game of "See? I told you!!" it's easy to see that Detroit has gone bankrupt for a number of reasons, none of which have to do with liberal policies. The city's woes have piled up for generations. In the 1950s, its population grew to 1.8 million people, many of whom were lured by plentiful, well-paying auto jobs. Later that decade, Detroit began to decline as developers started building suburbs that lured away workers and businesses. Then beginning in the late 1960s, auto companies began opening plants in other cities. Property values and tax revenue fell, and police couldn't control crime. In later years, the rise of autos imported from Japan started to cut the size of the U.S. auto industry.

By the time the auto industry melted down in 2009, only a few factories from GM and Chrysler were left. GM is the only one with headquarters in Detroit, though it has huge research and testing centers with thousands of jobs outside the city. Detroit lost a quarter-million residents between 2000 and 2010. Today, the population struggles to stay above 700,000.Detroit lost a quarter-million residents between 2000 and 2010. Today, the population struggles to stay above 700,000.

Add in the usual amount of corruption that goes on in big cities and it's easy to see how Detroit has fallen so far. Cory Williams over at AP has an interesting piece told from the perspective a primary source. The over riding diagnosis is severe mismanagement of public funds and a decided lack of even basic fundamental services. Of course, it's much more than that.

Detroit is a metaphor for globalization. It represents how the spread of free market capitalism around the world ended up eroding it here at home. It was the epicenter of the Golden Age of American Manufacturing at the heart of the Rust Belt. The various factors above brought about its fall and the main lesson to heed from this devolution is that if we want the world to be a democratic place rooted in free markets and liberal economic theory in practice, we must be careful what we wish for.

Because we got it.

This Is How You Talk to Corporate America

Willingly In A Prison

In the suburban town where I coach tennis, there is an infamous gated community called Blackstone. I say infamous because most everyone around the seven country metro area of the Twin Cities knows that's where some of the richest people in the state make their home.

There is a security check in when you drive in and 20 foot high stone walls around the several mile area of land that Blackstone envelops. There is a massive country club where the wealthy are served by those lucky few who are granted access as loyal servants to the many whims of the community. Some people have fairly large swaths of land while others have "simple" homes with "ordinary" back yards. Many people in the Twin Cities consider it a Shangri-La worthy of envy and a place they can someday live themselves.

I am not one of those people.

I've always been amused by the Right and their continued insistence that the only reason why liberals are teed off at the rich  is jealousy. It must be, right? Wrong. Because (projection) the Right are actually the ones that want to live in places like Blackstone. In fact, that's what they want to turn our entire country into...a gated community.

They want a huge fence that runs along our southern border that doesn't let in the undesireables (interestingly, there doesn't seem to be much call for a northern border fence. I wonder why that is...:)). The irrational, frightened old people in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas want protection, damnit! Just like the people of Sanford, Florida wanted George Zimmerman on the case. In fact, it seems they want more than that.

They want to be willingly put in a prison.

That's what I see when I drive by Blackstone from time to time on my way to a tennis lesson. The walls are so high that you don't get a view of the outside world...just the pale stone. I suppose they could look up to the sky if they really wanted to but I just don't get it. Sure, they can come and go as they please but when they are hanging out at home, they are surrounded by giant walls.  I have the same level of puzzlement when it comes to building a wall around our country. By trying to keep people out, we are actually keeping ourselves in.

But that's just the problem with those who do not support the immigration bill that was passed by the Senate. They are those paranoid old people around the country who want to feel safe in the gigantic, gated community. Only a certain type of person is allowed and very few fit the bill.

An Illegal Foreign Land Grab?

There is a myth out there that basically states the Right is all for the Keystone Pipleline expansion and the left is all against it. It's simply not true. There are many people who feel that the approval of the pipeline will amount to government failure to protect eminent domain. Michael Bishop is one of them.

My name is Michael Bishop and I am a landowner in Douglass, TX in Nacogdoches County. I have been fighting TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline for almost five years now and, except for a handful of good Americans, was told there was no interest in eminent domain cases or that I “couldn’t win a case against TransCanada.”

There are many landowners like Bishop. No one is listening to them.

What I find further disturbing during my research in the cases I have filed against TransCanada, the Texas Railroad Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is the level of corruption I have uncovered and witnessed in our judiciary and legislative representatives. Sadly, this allegation goes all the way to the White House. During my fight against this illegal foreign land grab, I have seen many good people in Texas and other states destroyed by the actions of TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline, and their dreams (along with mine) for the future of their children and grandchildren shattered by greed, lies, propaganda and bullying tactics of a private, foreign corporation that has the complete and overwhelming support of these corrupt local leaders, politicians and judges. It is time for change.

Wow. Doesn't exactly sound like your typical Texan portrayed in the media...except maybe the anti-government part. One would think they would be all pro oil on everything (at least, that's what the right wing blogsphere tells me) but clearly they aren't.  It's also sort of amusing, in a hypocritical way, that some on the Right are all for a foreign country taking American land for their own profit.

The rest of his letter raise many interesting points that haven't hit the mainstream media. I'd like to see his view get some more attention as we debate whether or not this project go forward.

Amazing!