Album Art

There's nothing quite like old record album jackets.

















They're particularly beautiful to me, since I grew up with them, but I think they're legitimately notable even if you've never seen them before.

Finding Common Ground on the True Free Riders

The first thing I read this morning was Kevin Drum's essay on why members of the white working class mostly don't vote for Democrats anymore.

...when the economy stagnates and life gets harder, people get meaner. That's just human nature. And the economy has been stagnating for the working class for well over a decade—and then practically collapsing ever since 2008.

So who does the [white working class] take out its anger on? Largely, the answer is the poor. In particular, the undeserving poor. Liberals may hate this distinction, but it doesn't matter if we hate it. Lots of ordinary people make this distinction as a matter of simple common sense, and the WWC makes it more than any. That's because they're closer to it. For them, the poor aren't merely a set of statistics or a cause to be championed. They're the folks next door who don't do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars. For a lot of members of the WWC, this is personal in a way it just isn't for the kind of people who read this blog.

And who is it that's responsible for this infuriating flow of government money to the shiftless? Democrats. We fight to save food stamps. We fight for WIC. We fight for Medicaid expansion. We fight for Obamacare. We fight to move poor families into nearby housing.

I have the feeling Frank Luntz is lurking somewhere in the background of this successful framing by the Right, but I can't deny that there's true resonance in it for working-class people, based on the fairness principle. Fairness is one of the six key areas of morality identified by researcher Jonathan Haidt. As Haidt has said, [and here I'm quoting myself from the earlier post linked in the previous sentence]:

What a liberal and a conservative mean by the terms can differ. For instance, conservatives think of fairness in terms of self-sufficiency and free riders. Everyone needs to contribute, and no one should get anything for "free."

Drum's essay genuflects to the role of race in this tendency of white, working-class people to see the poor as free riders. I think it's more central than he does, but acknowledge that my working class friends and relatives aren't crazy about white people they know and perceive as slackers, either.

Given the moral underpinning of their feelings, let alone the possible racism that underlies it, I think it's unlikely anyone can get anti-Democrat members of the white working class to realize the small amount of true free-riding is worth it in return for the greater benefit that reaches the many people who need help (which is how I feel about it, and have said before).

So, instead, I think we should find common ground on a different type of free-riding and build political power on that: so-called corporate welfare.

Yesterday, a conservative friend shared this from Bernie Sanders (of all people!) on Facebook:


Her post was met by a chorus of agreement from her usual conservative friends, and me, saying, "That's something we can agree on."

Here are some other meme graphics that get across the point:










It's a place to start, right?

___

Past posts that came to mind while writing this:

Disability for Me, But Not Thee

Dean Baker and Economic Realities

These Problems Are About Policy

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Making the Case for Government Programs

Bonuses and Bolling

Is Your Grandma a Welfare Queen?

Skews of the World

Thanks to Jason Kottke at kottke.org, I just heard about the Ipsos/Mori quiz, which asks you to choose from among three answers to a range of demographic-oriented questions about your country.

Take the quiz here, if you want to, before reading further.

People in all the countries are woefully under-informed, but the U.S. was second worst on the index of stupidity (after Italy, huh). Believe it or not, most of us gave these answers:

• the teen birth rate is 8 times higher than it is (24 vs. 3 percent in reality... jeepers, how could anyone think a quarter of teenage girls have babies every year?)
• the number of immigrants is 2.5 times higher than it is (32 vs. 13 percent)
• the number of Muslims is 15 times higher than it is and the number of Christians is about 50 percent lower than it is (15 vs. 1 percent for Muslims, 56 vs. 78 percent for Christians... hence the "War on Christmas" and all the other perceived assaults on victimized Christianity)
• the unemployment rate is more than 5 times higher than it is (32 vs. 6 percent)
• and, finally, 70 percent of us think the murder rate is going up, even though it's been going down since 1992.

As Kottke put it, "Then again, what do Americans hear about constantly on the news? Unemployment, Muslims and immigration, murder, and teen pregnancy. It's little wonder the guesses on those are so high."

I would add one caveat about the incorrect unemployment guess: people may be thinking of friends who are underemployed, or who have dropped out of the workforce and are not counted in the official 6 percent number at all. When those are included, according to Forbes, the percentage is over 12 percent. And in some communities, say, I don't know... maybe among black men in some parts of the country... 32 percent isn't far off the actual unemployment rate.

The Condemnation of Blackness

I don't think it's an overstatement to say Americans have little recollection of history, whether recent or long-term. The frenetic pace of 24-hour news means even the most recent crisis is soon forgotten (Ebola, anyone?). Trends that have existed over time are often unknown, so that each moment seems to arise from nothing, without warning.

The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, is not quite as forgotten nationally as some recent news stories. His death -- following those of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and many others whose names are not as well known -- finally spurred me to read The Condemnation of Blackness by Khalil Gibran Muhammad. In it, Muhammad gives a scholarly, historical account of how black people, post-Reconstruction, came to be criminalized just for existing.

Some writers thought blacks were criminals because of inherent racial inferiority, while others thought it was because of their cultural inferiority (sound familiar?) -- but almost anyone with access to publishing wrote that blacks were more prone to breaking the law than whites.

Only W.E.B Du Bois, with newly minted degrees from Harvard, saw that unequal treatment based on race could lead to the statistics found in the 1890 census: that blacks made up 30 percent of the prison and jail population, while only making up 12 percent of the population. But even Du Bois didn't recognize the over-policing of black neighborhoods, and the use of vague laws like loitering, disorderly conduct, and "suspicious character" to prosecute blacks more than whites. (Just as today, blacks are much more likely to be arrested and convicted for marijuana possession even though they use it at about the same rate as whites.)

The most enlightening point Muhammad makes, for me, is the way he contrasts treatment of white European immigrants with black emigrants from the South in northern cities. Both were vastly overrepresented in the crime statistics. Yet the settlement house movement -- such as Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago -- was focused almost exclusively on white immigrants. White progressives like Addams saw themselves in opposition to nativist conservatives who thought immigrants were naturally immoral (just like black people, ahem). The progressives built infrastructure to rescue immigrant youth from the streets at the same time they ignored the needs of blacks, who, if anything, needed even more help than white immigrants.

Addams -- despite her involvement with the founding of the NAACP and work against lynching -- did "not include blacks in her repeated calls for public recreation, which she argued was a silver bullet against 'the number of arrests among juvenile delinquents'" (page 124).

On the next page of the book, Muhammad writes a passage describing one of the most illogical ways of thinking I believe I have ever encountered:

The problem...was that black male ignorance and inefficiency, like black female ignorance and immorality, were defined in relation to slavery and to white civilizationist discourses that already ranked all blacks at the bottom. Therefore black reform...ought to be separate and distinct since blacks, as the logic dictated, could rise to a higher plane only through their own struggle following emancipation. All whites of whatever nationality were, by definition (through centuries of struggle in the wilderness of Europe and colonial American), already on a higher plane capable of being saved by others (page 125, emphasis added).

So get that: If you're already part way up the mountain, you can be helped to the top, but if you're at the bottom, you have to do it yourself.

"Too often," Muhammad writes, "white reformers settled for indexing racial injustice rather than fighting it. For example, Jane Addams could point out the perilous consequences of residential segregation for black families without ending the practice of segregated activities at her own Hull House" (pages 125-126).

Facing housing and job discrimination at every turn, black people in general became the permanent underclass we still have today. White progressives did nothing to end either practice, if they even acknowledged that they existed.

Muhammad also documents the corruption of police and their too-frequent involvement in supporting anti-black violence from white mobs. That's when they themselves weren't killing black men:

...the 1929 Illinois Crime Survey found that African Americans made up 30 percent of the recorded killings by police in 1926-1927, though they represented only 5 percent of the population.... In the manhunt for a sixteen-year-old accused of breaking a restaurant window, [Ida B. Wells] reported, the police entered his home without a warrant, guns blazing. He died in a hail of thirty-five bullets (page 249).

Ida B. Wells features in several chapters of the book. My god, what a woman. Driven out of her native Memphis for her anti-lynching campaigns, she moved from city to city in the North, trying to find a home and funding for her work to uplift and protect her people. At one point in 1910, she was in Chicago and had secured funding for a Negro Fellowship League from a rich white woman, but it ended in 1912 when the woman died and her husband "withdrew funding, insisting that [the League] should have been 'self-supporting by that time'" (page 131).

A few years before that, also in Chicago, Wells helped open the Frederick Douglass Center with support from another wealthy white woman. Wells assumed that she herself would be the director of the new center, but to her surprise, a rich, white suffragist was chosen instead, with Wells as vice president. The organization soon fell apart over disagreements about its purpose and direction.

This pattern of black intellectuals and activists always being placed second to whites becomes a pattern repeated in history. Another example is the case of James Stemons, who spent years working in a post office while he wrote and spoke about the treatment of blacks and their supposedly natural criminality. When he finally managed to build and fund an organization, he found himself the vice president, rather than the president (pages 182-183). All of this underlies current sensitivities about tokenism in organizations and sidekicks in media.

The Condemnation of Blackness is a thorough examination of a 40-year period of American history, seen through a lens I never encountered in my history education. It makes me ache with the sheer stupidity of my liberal/progressive white ancestors. As the NAACP's Crisis magazine put it, "It is senseless to regard crime as racial or characteristic of certain individuals. Crime is one of the best indices of social conditions" (page 244).

___

If you'd like to check out a short version of the book, here's a five-minute video of Muhammad explaining his main points.

Wayzgoose 2014

I never know what I'll see at Hamilton Wood Type Museum's annual Wayzgoose gathering. This year it was a report on a paper-making project in Ghana, images and ideas from a letterpress shop in Nashville that does public art, a talk about how the museum's small staff and a gaggle of volunteers moved the museum in just five months, and a virtual visit to the Tipoteca Italiana, a printing and wood type museum located a few hours from Venice, Italy.

My photos this year are not so much about the presentations as they have been in the past, although there was one by collector Greg Walter about the use of bas-relief watermarks in handmade paper that I managed to get some shots of. Often, the watermarks are meant as stand-alone works of art, particularly in Italy and Japan, or as commemoratives to honor famous people like Charles Lindbergh just after his transatlantic flight:


But the ones that fascinated me the most were on currency, including these two:


A ruble note with an image of Lenin showing through.


A bill from Suriname with a toucan peeking out of the right side.

Other than that, I mostly recorded a few of the printed pieces that decorate the walls of the museum:


This poster marks the creation of the new wood typeface, Artz, by Erik Spiekermann. It's named in honor of one of the people who was employed by Hamilton to trim the wood type while it was still in regular production (which ended in the early 1990s).


I particularly like the overlapping transparent yellow and pink inks on this poster.


Three colors printed on brown kraft cardstock. Somehow, the art reminds me just a bit of the serpent in the Garden of Eden...


And black ink (appropriately) on chipboard.

The wall of wood type was recently reassembled in the museum's new space. It's hard to get it all one shot, so this will have to do:


Pretty stunning in person.

And one last thing, this beautiful sign:


It used to grace a printing business in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was hand-painted by the proprietor, and only recently came into the museum's collection. (His sons Jim and Bill are the director and artistic director of the museum, respectively.)

If you're ever anywhere near Milwaukee or Sheboygan, or heading up to Door County, Wisconsin -- check out the Hamilton. It's worth a trip.

______

Past posts about the Wayzgoose, which I've been attending for five years.

A Bunch of Tabs -- Now with Subheads!

It's been a busy few weeks, so the tabs have grown heavy in the browser-boughs. Sagging to the ground once again. Time to clear them off and let the branches spring back into their skyward positions.

Education and Parenting

After the Star Tribune published teacher evaluations for the Minneapolis public schools and found that "worse" teachers were in the lowest performing schools (which also, coincidentally, have the lowest income students), the superintendent acted as though she was shocked, shocked, I tell you. Veteran teacher curmudgucation responded with a metaphor about classrooms without roofs. It's pretty apt.

On the same specific topic: Walk a mile in my teaching shoes by Minneapolis kindergarten teacher Greta Callahan, written in response to the Star Tribune story. "Blanket statements about 'bad' teachers in the 'poorest' schools simply aren’t real life. Here’s what it’s like in the trenches."

Why the Best Teachers Don't Give Tests by Alfie Kohn. A couple of great quotes: "Many years ago, the eminent University of Chicago educator Philip Jackson interviewed fifty teachers who had been identified as exceptional at their craft. Among his findings was a consistent lack of emphasis on testing, if not a deliberate decision to minimize the practice, on the part of these teachers." And "Assessment literally means to sit beside, and that's just what our most thoughtful educators urge us to do."

A veteran teacher turned coach shadows two high school students for two days; some sobering lessons are learned. Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting. High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes. You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.

Two stories about the so-called word gap (the number of words that young children hear before starting school, which varies based on class). First, from the New York Times, Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds. Then, from the Atlantic, Poor Kids and the "Word Gap."

America’s dangerous education myth: Why it isn’t the best anti-poverty program. By Matt Bruenig, writing for Salon:

Almost as if engaged in an elaborate troll, Finland has apparently organized its educational system in exactly the opposite way as the reform movement here claims is necessary. The reformers say we need longer school days, but the Finns have short ones. The reformers say we need extensive standardized testing, but the Finns have almost none. The reformers say we need to keep a close leash on teachers, but the Finns give their teachers considerable freedom. Despite all of these pedagogical mistakes, the Finns consistently find themselves at the top of the international education scoreboard.

In spite of all that goodness,

Education boosters bizarrely think that providing everyone a high-quality education will somehow magically result in them all having good-paying jobs. But, as Finland shows, this turns out not to be true. Apparently, it’s not possible for everyone to simultaneously hold jobs as well-paid upper-class professionals because at least some people have to actually do real work. A modern economy requires a whole army of lesser-skilled jobs that just don’t pay that well and the necessity of those jobs doesn’t go away simply because people are well-educated.

Finland solves this problem with income distribution programs that decrease inequality, and this is what Bruenig advocates for the U.S.

Countries with greater income inequality have stricter parenting. It's almost as if parents panic and try to protect their children from the unfairness out there. How rational, but sadly, how counterproductive.

High-achieving teacher sues state over evaluation labeling her "ineffective." From the Washington Post.

I am not a fan of charter schools generally, but I believe that their original purpose -- to serve as labs for reinventing education -- can happen once in a while. Here's an example from the Atlantic: A Philadelphia School's Big Bet on Nonviolence. Memphis Street Academy took over a prison-like middle school that students called "Jones Jail" and immediately took down the bars from the windows, removed the cops and metal detectors... and got these results: "Allowed to respond anonymously to questionnaires, 73% of students said they now felt safe at school, 100% said they feel there's an adult at school who cares about them and 95% said they hope to graduate from college one day. These are the same Jones Jail kids who 12 months ago were climbing over cars to get away from school."


Social Justice, Mass Incarceration

If you want to understand why and how Chicago came to be the perceived as the murder capital of the U.S., check this out.

A black woman IT professional describes her career with the kind of detail that lets the reader know what it's like. This is just one effect she lists: "I am constantly making micro-evaluations about whether or not my actions will be attributed to my being 'different.'"

An American Warden Visited A Norwegian Prison, And He Couldn't Believe What He Saw. From Business Insider.

Kate Beaton uses her Hark a Vagrant web comic to explain just how great Ida B. Wells was.

In Interrogation, Teenagers Are Too Young to Know Better -- a New York Times article that outlines all the reasons why the justice system and its practices are a bad match for the young. Including the story of a 12-year-old boy who recognized the Miranda warnings from watching “Law & Order,” but thought “It means that you don’t have to say anything until the police officer asks you a question.”

Tweeted by writer Josh Barro with this sentence: "I can't believe civil asset forfeiture is even legal at all." From the New York Times, Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize.

Depressing, but oh, so clarifying as an example of how white privilege exists, regardless of class: I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig on the conservative argument for private charity instead of government supports and safety nets, even as private people are arrested for feeding the homeless.


Climate Change, Environment, and Sustainable Cities

The 10 things you need to know from the new IPCC climate report. Most importantly: "We have the necessary technologies available, and economic growth will not be strongly affected if we take action, the report argues. As the cliché goes, all it takes is the will to act."

How climate change is like street harassment by David Rogers at Grist.

The future of low-carbon cement, from Ensia magazine. Cement production creates 5 percent of all CO2 output worldwide, so if technology could cut its carbon footprint by even half, that would take a significant chunk out of our greenhouse gas output.

You could spend a good bit of time playing with National Geographic's "What the World Eats" calculator. I did.

How can we get power to the poor without frying the planet? Another one by David Rogers at Grist.

Drivers of cars think they pay for all the roads and bridges through their state and local gas taxes, but the median percent of costs paid through these taxes is only 51 percent, with the rest being made up through general funds (aka state income or sales taxes paid by everyone, whether they drive or not). Remember that, the next time someone complains that bicyclists don't pay their fair share of road maintenance.

How Suburban Sprawl, Inadequate Transit Worsen Unemployment. By F. Kaid Benfield, Natural Resources Defense Council.

If you've caught the Strong Towns bug as I have, you might want to start with their compilation of eight posts that give the background and analysis that make the case for Strong Towns.

Here's a particular post from Strong Towns' Chuck Marohn advocating height limits on buildings. I thought I would disagree with him, since we need to increase density in cities to make transit more usable and use resources better, but Marohn makes the argument for incrementalism and, damn, he sure makes a lot of sense. (Not to mention that his description of incrementalism made me think about the Little House by Virginia Lee Burton.)


Miscellaneous Hobby Horses

Medical quackery and pseudoscience have a cost. That's not news, and in fact, it was assessed pretty thoroughly back in 1984 by former member of Congress Claude Pepper. Those were the days.

Why Banksy is probably a woman. Love this, but of course, it feeds my bias.

And finally --  there's a clear correlation between living in a country with a left-leaning government and individual life satisfaction. Being married and having a job are two factors that strongly influence personal happiness, as researchers know from previous studies. But “The effects of living in a country where the government intervenes in the economy is larger than both those effects.”

Trampled Under the Hooves

Seen at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum as part of their current show, Large Prints:


By Gail Panske, titled "Citizens United, After 1940 May Day Parade Banner." 2014, relief on plywood.

Panske is a professor of art at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. I don't have to work very hard to imagine what she thinks of the recent election results in her state.

Two Bad Logos for the Road

Two from the trucks of the American interstate system. First, this from Pucker vodka:


The concept isn't necessarily bad, but the transformation of the "e" into a mouth doesn't work in the particular. Adding the pointy mouth corner on the left side of the letter makes it barely recognizable as an "e," and the open cross bar, ending in a point, makes matters worse.

Then there was this odd character from Shaffer Trucking:


Our car full of people was debating what it was. Our best guess was an angel (with blue wings and long hair), facing to the right as it flails its arms and looks confused, perhaps falling out of the sky.


When we finally got close enough, we could see that it's supposed to be a toucan facing to the left, maybe making a landing, while wearing a scarf. Not sure what all of the extra markings on its face are supposed to be or what they add to the design except creating a phantom second eye and a mouth.

A Dog in Transit

Seen in an airport a few days ago:


This young dog was being escorted to Helena, Montana, to start her new career as a diabetic-alert dog. Her trainer said they were taking three planes that day, and that on the first flight there was a person nearby with high blood sugar. The dog kept "flagging" the whole time.

Ankle, Schmankle -- You Go, Girl

The big news is that I broke my ankle last Sunday. Because there are lots of changes and adaptations to deal with, I was sitting in a home medical supply store yesterday, getting ready to rent a knee walker, when I saw this box on the counter:


At first I didn't know what it was, but then I remembered hearing about a product that allows women to urinate while standing up:


The company's website talks about its many uses for camping, skiing, or just being an active woman. But given its presence at the medical supply store, I'm thinking it must be popular as one of the many adaptations needed for women with mobility impairments. I didn't buy one. Yet.

Pedestrian Thoughts About Dangerous Streets

I started my morning by reading bike/pedestrian activist Andy Singer's excellent piece about the War on Pedestrians, which reminded me of a case I wrote about earlier. I realized I didn't know what had happened and wanted to follow up.

To summarize, Raquel Nelson, mother of three from Marietta, Georgia, was crossing a four-lane divided street (not a highway) with her three young kids and several other adults who had gotten off a city bus near her apartment building. There is no crosswalk or light at the intersection by the bus stop; the nearest one is 3/10 of a mile away. Then, of course, you would have to walk 3/10 of a mile back to get to the apartment building. After crossing safely to the median with the group, her 4-year-old ran out into the traffic lanes when some of the other adults did. The child was hit by a drunk driver and later died. The driver fled the scene, was caught, and later was convicted. He served six months.

The state of Georgia responded by charging Nelson with vehicular manslaughter. That's where the case was at the last time I wrote about it in 2011.

Here's what has happened over the last several years as the case proceeded (quoting HLNtv.com):

In July 2011, she was convicted of all three misdemeanors: second-degree homicide by a vehicle, crossing roadway elsewhere than a crosswalk and reckless conduct.

Nelson received a sentence of one year probation and 40 hours of community service, with the option of a retrial. She chose that retrial, but before it was scheduled to begin Thursday, two of the charges were dropped. She pleaded no contest to the jaywalking charge and paid a $200 fine, Steve Sadow, Nelson’s attorney confirmed to HLN.

After not setting foot in jail over this incident, she had faced up to two years behind bars. The driver, who initially fled the scene, was out of prison in six months after being sentenced to five years for the hit and run. He remains on probation for the rest of his sentence.

The news post then asked readers what they would have done in Nelson's shoes. Would they have crossed at the intersection or gone to the crosswalk?

Most responders sympathized with Nelson, but there were several trolls (shockingly, all appear to be white men) who wrote things like this:

She knowingly put her children in harms way, the driver is the victim.

[In response to a commenter who said the mom must be busy and needed to get across the street in a reasonable amount of time, another guy wrote]: we are all busy. She should have been busy holding her childs hand. We are so "busy" that we are endangering our children? I havent heard that she was so busy or even had a job. I heard she crossed from a bus stop, had groceries and allowed her child to run out into traffic. I never read anything that explained the rest of her days schedule. For all you know she was in a hurry to get home and sit back in front of the tv and ignore the children the rest of the night. [This troll never met an apostrophe he couldn't forget to use.]

If she would have just did what was right, instead of what was easy this never would have happened.

And when one woman asked, "What parent hasn't had a 4 year old escape their grasp and run? Fortunately, it usually doesn't lead to tragedy," one of the trolls responded: "I haven't." To which someone should have responded: "Well, that tells me you never spent much time with your kids in public."

Some of Andy Singer's most cogent points that relate to the trolls' arguments have to do with the way streets and roads are designed so they cue drivers to go faster:

When Bikram Phuyel was hit by a car last Monday, [St. Paul traffic engineer John] Maczko told the Pioneer Press:

The city reviews a streetscape “when incidents happen that are particularly tragic like this one to see if there’s anything that can be done,” . . . But he said he doesn’t think a painted crosswalk at the intersection would have prevented the crash, saying they can give people an illusion of safety. . . . “Everyone needs to be part of the solution,” Maczko said. “Vehicles that are driving around other vehicles need to wonder why that other vehicle is stopped and understand if a car is stopped, it’s stopped for a reason. . . . As pedestrians, when we cross these four-lane roads, we have to cross every lane as an individual roadway.”

Let’s parse this response. Maczko is blaming drivers, who are driving at the design speeds of his roadway and are unaware that an unmarked intersection is a crosswalk that could have pedestrians. He’s blaming the victims themselves, saying “People need to treat crossing a 4-lane road like crossing four individual roadways (which the victim didn’t),” and he’s implying that, “There’s nothing we in engineering could do. Crosswalks wouldn’t have helped.” He fails to suggest anything more radical like signage, pavement markings, traffic signals, HAWK signals [pedestrian activated traffic lights], a pedestrian refuge island or a 4-lane to 3-lane conversion of Rice Street—all things that, individually or in combination, can dramatically reduce both pedestrian and motor vehicle crashes. Put another way, Maczko begins by saying “We all need to do our part,” but ends by implying, “except me. I can’t do anything.”

He also expains the reality that pedestrians have to work a lot harder than cars to travel distances. Therefore, crossings should strongly prioritize pedestrians:

Another line I often hear from Pedestrian War leaders, pundits and supporters is “There’s a traffic signal two blocks away. Why didn’t the victim cross there?” Two blocks on streets like Snelling or Rice can often be as much as a quarter mile. So, if a pedestrian wishes to cross a street to a destination on the other side (like a store, bus-stop or school), that’s a quarter mile walk to the light and a quarter mile walk back down the other side of the street, for a total of a half-mile of extra walking. At an average speed of 3 miles per hour, these leaders are asking pedestrians to spend ten extra minutes and a lot of extra energy every time they want to cross a street – things they would never accept as drivers.

If all of this interests you, you might want to follow up by reading Bill Lindeke's recent post, Four Lane Death Roads Should Be Illegal.

One Statement I'd Like to Hear

Let's say an elected politician is talking to constituents at a town hall meeting or debate, and an audience member asks a question about a paroled prisoner who killed someone. (Or it could be about Ebola or another issue of government overreaction).

Here's how I wish that politician would answer:

I am very sorry about what happened to this person and their family. It's a tragedy when anyone dies by violence. However, I am a person who helps govern this country, and that has more to do with what happens to MOST of us as a group and less to do with what happens to one person or even one family.

People of the XXrd district, people of America, we can't keep legislating and running our country based on edge cases that happen once in a great while. You hear about the one parolee who kills a person, but you DON'T hear about the thousands who don't. Trying to make sure everyone is "safe" in some narrow sense has side effects that cause worse problems for more people. Prisons and sentencing in our ally nations are run in much less harsh ways with much shorter sentences -- sentences Americans would think were crazy -- yet those countries have lower crime rates and much lower repeat offender levels. It doesn't mean ex-cons never commit another crime. You can't make laws to make things NEVER happen.

If I had one wish to grant, it would be that all of us start to recognize the real risks that affect us all the time, and stop worrying about the ones that affect only a few. Car accidents kill us at least ten times more than homicidal maniacs, the flu kills us millions of times more -- if we haven't had a flu shot -- than Ebola in this country ever will.

The media don't help any of this, of course, since the companies that own them only make money if people watch the ads, and what better way to get viewers than to scare all of us human beings? Our minds are geared to watch for weird threats rather than the regular things that become background noise, like obesity and lack of exercise.

I know my answer isn't what anyone is used to hearing from politicians. But I've wanted someone to say this for years, and now it was finally time.