As I said, raze the Republican Party to the ground. Plough it under. Scatter salt in the furrows so it can never grow back.
We need another, very different opposition party to face the Democrats. We need it now.
I learned an interesting factoid from Michael Zimmer’s post on Banned Books Week 2008. The most commonly challenged library book in 2007 is a book about a same-sex penguin couple rearing an unwanted chick. I wonder if it was a bestseller in Wasilla, Alaska.
I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them.
The Battle Plan II: Sarah “Evita” Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State
Convivial City is a new cycling wiki from the guys behind The Practical Pedal magazine. Its purpose is to share information about cycling and cycling-oriented lifestyles in particular cities. Currently there is no information about Austin, but I suspect it was announced as soon as it came online.
The site uses the DokuWiki wiki platform, and I’ve got to say that I’m not a big fan of it. I know administrators like it because it does not require a database back-end like MediaWiki and other major wiki platforms, but it has some issues I do not care for. One issue is that its markup is different from MediaWiki, which is certainly the most widely used platform because of Wikipedia. Its markup requires more keystrokes and is somewhat less intuitive, which presents a barrier to entry for contribution, particularly when you consider MediaWiki’s user base. The other issue is that its URI structure makes it difficult to link to particular pages. In this case, I could not link directly to the list of cities. That said, I do hope this or another wiki becomes a useful source of practical cycling information online.
East Riverside is almost certainly the ugliest district in Austin. The closest competitor, I can think of, the Lamar/Rundberg area, gets a lot of bonus points from me since it has higher density development, and the traffic patterns are far more scrutable. The City has taken an interest in this seamy smear of eyesores and has a survey online to measure development preferences for the future. You can click here to take the Survey.
The major thing that sticks out to me about East Riverside is its profound unfriendliness to pedestrians and cyclists, and what sticks out about the survey is much the same. Nearly all of the examples lack bicycle lanes and racks, and many of the proposed parking solutions present substantial blind spots that make it easy for motorists to ignore and kill cyclists and pedestrians. I’m a little disappointed in the city for not offering more cycling-friendly options. Still, I think it’s a good thing the city is doing something to address this sprawl in the inner-city.
Responding to Microsoft’s “In Tents Computing” project to put datacenters in tents, Nicholas Carr offers some satirical new horizons in data centers.
Schtock is a blog-like site produced by an employee of a stock-photo service who creates collages from some of the stranger images in the collection. When I spent a lot of time looking at stock photos, I often thought of creating a blog of weird and unusual stock items, but these collages take it to a whole new level.
Over at Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz has a good explanation of the difference between push polling and opinion polling designed to test negative campaign messages. in short, push polling does not use sampling – it’s just phone canvassing disquised as a poll – while more legitimate opinion polls might present a barrage of politically tilted questions, but are actually used to gauge responses to the tilt. A few years ago, I was polled by an outfit out of Utah, asking questions like, “Do you support the repeal of the death tax.” At the time, I assumed it was a push poll because it was clear that they weren’t trying to get a real sense of public opinion, but now it seems like they were interested in what I had to say. I hung up on them, but I suspect they could use that data as well.
Science blog Effect Measure asks the important question, “Why would any sane person put a Level 4 biodefense lab in Galveston?” Fortunately for us all, the lab is still under construction and not operational – so we don’t have to worry about an Ebola outbreak during the Ike cleanup – but certainly millions of dollars have been wasted. One would think Homeland Security and the UT System could find a drier and less populated location in Texas. I’ll nominate Lubbock.
In other Ike-related news, the Galveston County Sherrif’s department decided not to evacuate the county jail, although it was expected that the entire island would be covered by Ike’s storm surge. Considering the outcry after New Orleans prisoners died in their cells after Katrina, this is a pretty brazen decision. But the Lone Star State has never been known for its compassion toward prisoners.