An asylum for the preservation of illusion.

Raging against the machine

Newspapers around the world reported the protest against HR 5035 in Los Angles, but with typical media myopia, largely ignored the earlier, albiet slightly smaller protest held here in Chicago. That protest caught me by suprise and I didn't have a camera when it arrived downtown — a consequence of not speaking Spanish.

I was on the ball, though, at this year's anti-war protest, and now submit, for your approval, my account thereof.

Looks Like a Standard Cook County Election

Here's follow-up to the previous article about the election machines. The debacle in that election, for which the votes weren't fully counted until last Friday is primarily being blamed on "human error" although aldermen are calling for an investigation into the machines themselves. Regardless of if the machines would have performed properly with tech-savvy judges, however, the question remains, why do these machines have to be so high-tech?

In my precinct, the touch screen machine was not functioning so they gave everyone optical scan ballots. The ballots were huge and they gave us large sheets to cover them, but then the election judge took the sheet off to stick my ballot in the reader and the votes were visible to all. A friend of mine from Little Village said that when he voted on the touch screen machine, the thing did not give him a receipt. Of course that wouldn't be a problem if they had an actual person give you a receipt when you stick your punch card ballot in a cardboard box.

Seeing Green

I've added pictures to the Other Cities section. Specifically, in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Racine, and Waukegan from my bike ride to Milwaukee. I've added a subdirectory to the Loop neighborhood featuring the traditional dying of the Chicago Rive for St. Patrick's Day this year.

Thanks to a reader I also fixed a spelling error in the name of one of the neighborhoods (Montclare).

I also have a set of pictures from the war protest this year that are still being edited.

Hello, Dimitry?

Tonight on WBEZs pre-election coverage (which was surprisingly useful) was interviewing a representative of the Cook County Board of Elections about the new gee-wizz voting machines when a caller asked a pointed and topical question. Does there exist, he asked, a way for the new video touch-screen voting machines to produce a paper trail that will allow for an audit or recount of election results?

There has been a large amount of concern over this issue. Why is it that voting machines from such companies as Diebold do not include paper trails when Diebold consumer products — from ATM machines to grocery store checkout counters — have such features. Moreover, why do we need such complicated voting systems at all?

Do You Feel Sufficiently Patronized Yet?

A while back, the CTA created a plan to reroute the Douglas Branch of the Blue Line up to the Green Line and around the Loop. This means that there would be trains between 54/Cermak and The Loop rather than 54/Cermak and O'Hare. The plan was announced without public input and community reactions were fiercely negative. A great deal of noise came from UIC, where students wouldn't be able to use the L as a shuttle between East and West campuses, but even "real" residents of the neighborhood were angry, principally over the lost one-seat ride to O'Hare.

At the time I believed it was a good plan, and I still do, but I was working on other political things with the CTA and saw their poor handling of the Blue Line situation as being a mirror of our experiences with them. They are arrogant, presumptive, and heavy handed. At any rate, the plan fell apart and the CTA had to slink away with its tale between its legs.

Catholicism Is Not Just About Abortion

Catholic Democrats in Congress have issued a statement on the effect of their religion on their political views. They use the Clinton era line on abortion, that they will seek to minimize if not criminalize it, but primarily focus on how the Democratic message meshes with Catholic morality: care for the poor and the sick, avoiding unjust war, and ensuring education.

As badly needed as such a statement is, the problem is that it's not just Republicans who are trying to overemphasize abortion. The Church itself (at least, the American Catholic Bishops, as the Vatican has remained more holistic) has developed a laser-like political focus on abortion. The theology behind this is called "disqualifying issues." The idea is that there are some issues that are so central to Catholic teaching that someone who ignores them is irredeemably morally wrong no matter how many other values they uphold. As long as "disqualifying issues" remains the line of the American church, Catholic Democratic politicians can continue to expect virulent attacks by Church leaders.

I Spy with My Little Eye

I'm afraid I've broken my personal commitment to at least one update a week. It is very easy to fall out of the habit of making them, especially after falling out of the habit of keeping up on the news and Internet things in general. I can say that there are many things in the pipeline for March, including numerous Neighborhoods updates and book reviews, so stay tuned.

A quick look at the wires shows that the buzz around town is the proposal by Mayor Daley to require businesses to install cameras. This is, of course, in addition to the public cameras operated by the CPD. This is all old news at the time of this writing, but what has the wires aflame is a Tribune poll that shows that 80% of Chicagoans support the cameras. Count me among them, tentatively. Not that I'm not entirely unconcerned about privacy issues, or that I think that they'll make a real difference in crime, but anything that reduces the perception of crime or danger is potentially a step forward in this divided city.

Provacateur-Toi!

Le Monde ran an editorial yesterday that, without surprise, demonizes the Muslim protesters against the recent European cartoon troll, while utterly refusing to examine the motives of the newspapers who published the offensive material.

That the journal de référence of France can publish an editorial with such a glaring oversight is indicative of something seriously wicked in the state of Europe. And it sheds new light on the riots into which France descended last summer.

Uses of Oil

I tried to look this up for a discussion on a mailing list, but the information was very hard to google (it ended up being buried in a government-published PDF linked from wikipedia).

Common arguments about oil include:

1. Oil is not, in fact, used primarily for transportation but for generation of energy for other purposes. Therefore, reducing automobile use will not significantly reduce oil use and,
2. A large amount of oil pumped is used for things other than creating energy, for instance, it is turned into plastic, so even if we weren't using oil for energy we'd still need to pump a great deal of it.

According to government data (page 35 of that document), number 1 was true in 1973, 42.3% of oil pumped was used in transportation, with the rest used as energy for industry, "other sectors" (agriculture, etcetera) or for oil-based products. but by 2003, fully 57.8% of oil pumped went into transportation.

The growing share of oil used in transportation came at the expense of oil used as an energy source in production sectors, and non-energy uses remained about the same. All oil products, from pesticides to plastics to bike chain oil, consume only 6.6% of all oil pumped.

Click Read More below to see a table of the data, or look at the PDF for pie charts.

Long Way Down

I've added a new subdirectory to the Hermosa Neighborhood called From the Water Tower. It contains pictures I took some months ago from a (now dismantled) water tower atop a factory which was being converted to condos. After getting up there, I made a panorama of the skyline but I haven't decided how to incorporate it into the neighborhoods website yet.

I've also added photos to the River North neighborhood and to Milwaukee in the Other Cities section.

Prospect'n

You can pretty much assume that if someone is a developer, he's a dirtbag. That's not to say that there aren't some good ones out there, but the vast majority are looking to get rich by dumping crap on our neighborhoods. As wretched as the developer's inferno is, however, the deepest ring is reserved for the speculator. The speculator is a creature that drains money out of a neighborhood with no intention of ever putting anything back in. It sits on key property for years--sometimes decades--hoping for a higher price, while the neighborhood is left to suffer vacant lots or boarded buildings long after redevelopment would have become viable.

I mention this because of an article I came across from the Buisness Journal of Milwaukee which reports that the Chicago-based CMC Heartland Partners has been making promises to the City of Milwaukee for years so it could continue to buy low and sell high on properties around the city, driving up their eventual development costs. The excuse CMC gave for the failed projects is that the City of Milwaukee is too difficult to work with (their submitted projects failed to get approval because they violated city zoning), yet the eventual buyer of most of their properties ended up being state and local government agencies. Some were bought by the city itself.

Many, Many Changes

When I redesigned the neighborhoods website back in January of last year, I did so with the intention of making it easier for me to make updates. That was successful. At that time, the project was stalled after more than a year in existence with only a few dozen neighborhoods photographed. As of today, only 10 neighborhoods are left unavailable on the map. While the project has moved forward quickly over the past year, I've been much less diligent about maintaining the changelog. I hope to change that today. From now on, I resolve to make a new blog entry every time I make a major update to the project site.

What follows is a summary of the many changes made but not recorded in the past year.

Nothing to Do with Wicker Park

I keep a Google Alert for "urbaine," and it mostly turns up what one would expect: French articles about urban issues (there's been a lot of stuff recently about the cité, or the French housing projects.) So it was not without a little surprise that I found the alert dig up an article about none other than Our Faire City. What interest do the French have in Chicago? Millennium Park? Jazz? Al Capone? Nope, apparently it's our coyotes. "Coyotes?" you say? Indeed, according to Le Nouvel Observateur, scientists from the University of Ohio have discovered that ils sont partout, that they're everywhere here. But fear not. The French paper reports that they are rarely aggressive to people (unlike the stray dogs in the Dan Ryan Woods) and have even been used in Canada to control the barnacle population, as they like to eat the eggs. I wonder how effective they are against Asian Carp.

Quick, Somebody Think Up a Pun on "Istook"

One of my personal very favorite people in Washington is the representative of the good people of the 5^th district of the State of Oklahoma, Ernest Istook. Rep. Istook served for several years as the chair of the House Appropriations Transportation and Treasury Subcommittee. That powerful post allowed Rep. Istook to wage war against Amtrak and Urban Transit, which he considered wastes of money, while pumping transportation dollars into road projects in his district.

So it is not without a bit of schadenfreude that I see that Rep. Istook's boat has been caught in the ever-widening whirlpool of the Congressional lobbying scandal. Like Tom Delay, Rep. Istook has been caught using lobbyist money to fund Oklahoma state candidates, some of it from Jack Abramoff. Granted, it looks like criminal charges are unlikely (Rep. Istook wasn't skirting state campaign financing laws in funding the candidates, like Rep. Delay) but the taint of the scandal will undoubtedly weigh heavily on his Oklahoma gubernatorial bid.

No Way to Run a Railroad

There's been a lot of Amtrak news recently as the fight for the railroad's existence heats up. this article contains a welcome image: a protest in East Lansing Michigan to save the train. Related is President Bush's recent recess appointments to the board. The recess appointments allow Bush to put people on the board who have not been vetted by Congress. Given, that a majority of Congressmen consisting of senators and representatives from both sides of the isle have made it clear that they are not willing to let Mr. Bush dismantle the system, it is understandable why they don't like his choices: an oil man and a Kmart executive who's admitted to never riding the train.

Diversity Is Chic (Sorta)

Planning Magazine discusses the way suburban municipalities are slipping multi-family housing into formerly homogeneous single-family areas through the use of small projects--often consisting of a single building of 5-6 flats or rowhouses--that fit into the prevailing lot pattern. There's a good analysis of why mixture is good for the neighborhood, financing issues faced by small but non-standardized projects, and perhaps most amusingly, the still virulent and sometimes personal attacks against the developers by NIMBYs.

Most interesting is that the typical New Urbanist canard about providing for an economically diverse neighborhood is only hinted at, but never directly asserted. New Urbanism provides many good things but economic diversity is not one of them. Given that the single biggest unspoken (and oftentimes spoken) fear of these NIMBYs is of having to live next to the racial or economic other, perhaps the the key to "infiltration" is dropping the pretense that you're solving social problems.

So Would That be a Pollock-Projection?

A Google Alert recently brought to my attention the existence of the blog http://www.chicagoist.com/. I'm not quite sure what it was, but something about the tone--the pretentious folksiness of it--made me smell a carpet-bagger. And as it turns out, I was right! The site is run by the New York company Gothamist LLC who, in their desire to add all trendy cities to their repertoire, seem have located Toronto a wee bit north of Montréal.

High Speed Rail: Slowly Getting There

Here's an unfortunately not-too-detailed look at the technology behind the "high-speed rail" being developed in Michigan and Illinois (former Amtrak president David Gunn, among others have argued that the 110mph trains should be called "higher-speed" rather than diluting the term "high-speed," which in Europe only applies to trains traveling faster than 250kph, or about 155mph.)

Still, the system appears to be working on the test track in Michigan, which is impressive in itself, and it is cheap enough that it can be funded by states without a strong Federal commitment (which is not going to come in the near future). David Gunn has previously said that the way to rebuild the national railroad network is in small improvements in service and reliability: new sidings and flyovers, better signaling, new passenger carriages, and a better attitude from the freight railroads, rather than glitzy and expensive technological showcases like Acela. The excellent organization, Midwest High Speed Rail Association has a vision of what a Chicago-centered 110mph "higher speed" rail network built on those principles would look like.

Who Are the Rats Now?

The Nation has an analysis of the strike in New York which is very harsh (somewhat surprisingly given their neo-liberal ideological bent) towards the MTA board and Governor Pataki. While mercifully holding their ideological punches against the Union's attempt to save the pension, they paint a picture of a corrupt, politically motivated board. A board which acts as a sock puppet for the Governor, wasting billions of dollars to reward cronies with lucrative contracts, running up huge deficits to pay for the largess, manipulating financial records to deceive the public, and flirting with the mob.

The Mediator between the Heart and the Hands

That mediator, according to Fritz Lang's fantastic classic movie Metropolis, is the heart. In that movie, a sinister magnate named Johnathan Fredersen finds that his subterranean workers are being compelled by the gentle heroine Maria to seek a mythic "mediator" who will bargain for their rights. In an attempt to destroy the Union movement, Fredersen disguises a newly developed robot as Maria and orders the robot to incite the workers to revolution.

The workers begin destroying the machines of the Metropolis, which they needed to survive, at the insistence of the magnate's provocateur robot. Caught up in the passion of the moment, they fail to realize that they've left their children behind to be drowned in the depths as the demolished "heart machine" is unable to retain the water in the city's reservoirs.

Warning: Spoilers Follow