…don’t believe anyone who says Obama’s health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.

- Robert Reich, The Final Health Care Vote and What it Really Means

I thought I would post a bunch of snapshots I took on the train ride. Shooting from a train is far from optimal conditions, and the Amtrak cars had a weird tinted laminate on the windows for which I’ve tried to correct.

The sun rises over Oklahoma City's Bricktown district

OKC has one daily train departure from the old Santa Fe Railroad station

some high-rise in downtown OKC.

The Arbuckle mountains are between OKC and Ardmore.

I tried to make a panorama out of some shots of cattle grazing.

I have no idea what this body of water is named.

The soil in central Oklahoma is really quite red, but the rivers aren't usually this red unless there's been a lot of precipitation.

Seeing a refinery this close to the tracks reminded me of Portugal.

The greens really seem to pop when snow falls. I think this may be winter wheat.

I think a trip from Oklahoma to Texas requires a shot of the Red River, even if it is a pretty lame shot like this one.

Anyway, I’ve finally gotten it cleaned up, and I’ve had the need to dump content in a personal space, so the blog is back in action. I don’t intend to return to some kind of daily or obsessive blogging, but you may want to check back in from time to time.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: the American right has a deep-seated problem with political violence. It’s deep-seated; it’s recurrent and it’s real. And it endangers the country.

via Troubled History | TPM.

For what it’s worth, I sent him these articles.

• An etiology of the hipster
• Zolius: A Specter is Haunting Culture
• Adbusters: Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

I thought I would post my review of Eastside Commons here, in case it’s deleted for whatever reason. It’s difficult to know what information would violate the site’s terms of service. Do readers have any strategies for writing apartment reviews?

The manager of this building continues to astonish me with her inaction and hateful attitude toward tenants, which is a shame because the building itself is kind of cute and in a nice location.

I don’t mean to say that Eastside Commons is without maintenance problems; the building is old and poorly maintained. Still, when problems are reported, management is slow to address or even acknowledge them. For example, the hot water heater shared by the entire building went out on a Saturday night, and, on Thursday, the manager still contended that it wasn’t broken, but “it is just taking longer for the water to get hot.” Tenants had gone the better part of a week without hot water, and she refused even admit there was a problem!

Other major problems with this place include pests, security, parking and noise.

About a month after I moved in, my apartment developed a major roach problem. I’ve lived in a variety of apartments over the past 15 years, and I’ve never seen a roach problem like this. It’s not a matter of a few roaches here, and there, but swarms of roaches teeming over kitchen surfaces and my computer desk at night, and many surfaces, such as my computer desk are dusted with the brown powder of roach feces. I have also seen what looked like a rat scurrying around the courtyard.

There are also human pests. It’s not at all unusual to see vagrants camping out by the dumpster in the back, which erodes my sense of security. I’ve had people hit me up for change inside the courtyard, despite the security gates, and people have even tried to sell me drugs!

Eastside Commons management seems to be aware of the security problems, but uninterested in addressing them. There are three sets of security gates on the property and all three are currently broken. On the front of the property, there is a parking lot gate, which is intended to protect the cars for folks who pay $25 a month for “secure parking.” The car gate seems to be broken more often than it seems to be working There is also a pedestrian gate which used to be opened with a digital security code. This was replaced with a simple mechanical lock, which is never locked.

Prospective tenants should be aware that there are also two gates in the rear of the building that present greater problems. These have been in various states of disrepair since I moved in two years ago. These gates are often propped open so tenants can let in their party buddies, and currently someone has bent pieces of steel to permanently prop them open. Other times, a gate will be locked, and, thanks to poor maintenance, be impossible to open from the outside. It’s easy to imagine someone getting mugged while struggling to get inside the building. I frankly think it would feel more secure management simply removed the gates than keep them in a permanent state of disrepair.

I should also note that I submitted a repair request in writing describing these problems to the manager, and after being locked out on a Saturday, sent her a frustrated email. When she responded she acted completely unaware of them. It’s not clear whether she was being disingenuous or simply incompetent, but given her other actions, I think she has a cavalier attitude toward the truth.

In addition to the broken parking lot gate, there are additional problems with parking. The Eastside Commons management offers two tiers of parking, the $25/mo secure parking with reserved spaces and unreserved spaces in the back. There are fewer unreserved spaces than there are people who would like to use them, so tenants frequently have to park on the street. When the new manager took over at Eastside Commons, she implemented a parking sticker system to cut down on the number of guests using these spots.

In principle, this parking policy sounds fine, but, in practice, it created substantial problems for me and other tenants. When she first announced the new policy, she instructed tenants to fill out an attached form, but failed to actually attach the form. This left me confused about how to get a parking sticker. Since the manager only held office hours during regular business hours and no weekend hours, I decided to wait for her to realize her mistake and post the forms on the door. This was a mistake. She towed my car. I was not alone, too. At least three other tenants said Chelsea had their cars towed, and when they complained she was nothing but standoff-ish. I still don’t have a parking sticker because I’m never able to find her at the office, and she refuses to take care of this over email.

There’s not much to say about noise. There’s a lot of it. If you like to have loud parties, this might be a good place for you. The previous manager lived on site, which cut down on some of the parties, but the new manager lives off site, so there are parties every night of the week and pool noise at all hours of the day. Pool rules such as no alcohol are routinely violated and people brazenly smoke marijuana in the common areas of the building. Last August, the pool was broken for nearly the entire month. While it speaks poorly of Eastside Commons management, I welcomed it because it cut down on the amount of party noise outside my unit. That is, until it looked like mosquitoes were breeding in the stagnant water.

There is so much more I have yet to mention, like the un-air-conditioned “fitness center” filled with broken equipment or the cancellation of internet service. Still, I want to end by saying that the major factor making Eastside Commons a miserable place to live is its management. The current manager is spiteful, performs maintenance only when it is critically necessary, and seems to be dishonest. I would strongly discourage anyone from living here.

Shortly after learning composer Maurice Jarre died, an Irish undergrad concocted a cheesy quote from the deceased, and posted it to Wikipedia. News outlets around the world cherry-picked the quote and ran it without first doing a fact-check.

What does it mean that Yahoo was willing to pay $3.5 billion for GeoCities, but not $3 billion a few years later for Google?

– Owen Thomas, “The Billion-Dollar Blackhole of Social Media”

We need to make the social norms clear: Twitter is where you talk about the consistency of your oatmeal. E-mail is for when you are running late for a meeting.

-Saul Hansen,  What Annoys Me About Twitter – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.