This, that is.
Though it is, of course, merely a battle and not the war. Will it be allowed to stand? Will government corruption turn it into what is effectively monopoly state capitalism? Is Morales now a marked man doomed to follow in the footsteps of Allende and Arbenz? Only time will tell, but at least some of these are pretty huge pitfalls indeed.
If the Sonics decide that Bellevue or Renton is a better location for their business facility, fine. There’s plenty of other entertainment options in Seattle, and it will cost less to simply hold the Sonics to the remaining terms of their existing lease than to tear it up and shovel more bribes at them from the public trough.
If Key Arena ends up a white elephant and has to be torn down as a result, so be it. It’s hardly as if it’s a historical structure of distinction. Seattle can use the additional open park space, and it costs less to dynamite a building than to build one. One less major venue in Lower Queen Anne means that much less traffic on the Mercer Mess. Looks like a big win all around to me.
That goes many times over if they move to Bellevue and the new facility is built with private funds. I care not if the deal is unrealistic and it later causes financial difficulties for either the team or Kemper Freeman. They paid their money, they took their chances.
Neither Freeman nor the Sonics are that economically important to the area. If the former goes under, there are plenty other real estate developers waiting to collectively fill his shoes. As for the Sonics, their payroll is relatively small potatoes, and whatever entertainment spending had taken place on them will merely shift to the myriad of other options available.
Regarding the nationalization of gas in Bolivia:
“This isn’t like Saudi Arabia, which over the years has developed a know-how to dominate the industry independently,” said Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a consultancy in Washington that studies energy issues.
Please. The House of Saud is afraid of the concept of educated subjects. Such subjects might get uppity and question the ruling family. Schools in Saudi Arabia tend to be preoccupied with shoveling religious garbage into the minds of their students. The Saudis operate their industrial machinery by hiring skilled foreigners to do the work. That is why you see ads in Western papers recruiting people to work in Saudi Arabia. That is why there are entire cities in Saudi Arabia dedicated to housing and employing skilled foreigners.
Money is money. If Bolivia is earning money exporting gas, they can use some of it to pay foreigners until they have enough domestic expertise. Why should foreign workers care whose name is on the paycheck as long as it clears when they deposit it? Bolivia already has foreigners there working for the private companies the previous government auctioned the gas off to, in fact. Simply let them stay. Bolivia, being an open society in a scenic land, is a far more attractive place to do a stint abroad than a totalitarian state in a drab desert. If Saudi Arabia can convince foreigners to work for them, it should be a slam dunk for the Bolivians to do same.
It’s all a textbook example of (a) how little capitalism and free trade have to do with actual freedom, and (b) how much even an expert can be blinded to reality by his own ideological prejudices.
Full article here.
This post has an interesting conjecture near its end: US imperialists will fund separatist movements to punish leftist governments in Latin America.
My first thought was to wonder if they’d do that, given how promoting internal divisions for purposes of imperialist competition is one of the reasons Africa is such a mess today. Such a mess, in fact, that it’s not a good place to do business — even from a strictly self-interested point of view on the part of the imperialists, it’s not been a good policy.
Then again, it was successfully exploited in Nicaragua with the Miskito together with a patchwork of other opponents to the regime. It has an advantage for propaganda purposes as well. A coup d’etat against an elected administration is a pretty bald-faced form foreign intervention that lays the imperialists contempt for democracy bare. Backing an insurgency lets the imperialists claim that they’re not anti-democracy, they’re pro-autonomy, pro-indigenous-rights, even.
So they just might.
What to think of Raban’s essay?
It first caught my attention while reading yet another instance of the sort of vapid boosteristic fluff that is the indispensable component of facilitating a decline period in any city. Basking in one’s own (increasingly past) glory makes it possible to ignore all the ways a city is falling short in providing a good quality of life for its residents.
I saw the end result of decades of such basking in San Francisco: residents waving off seedy parks, decaying public infrastructure, and a failing public transit system as the sort of problems all American urban areras have (as someone who had seen Boston and New York City recently, I knew this to be false). I see Seattle as being at merely an earlier stage in this decline.
As such, the following quote of Raban’s struck me as the lone breath of fresh air and reality in that article: “What’s crucially wrong with Seattle is that it has no real consciousness of its own urbanity. It has earned for itself a strange place in urban history as the first big city to which people have flocked in order to be closer to nature.” Quite so: Seattle is in denial about being a large city, and what it takes to successfully be one.
Raban moved to Seattle circa 1990, and his early descriptions of the place detailed much of what I loved (and still love) about it, especially the quality of the soft light you get here as a virtue of being far enough north. So I had high expectations for the piece that quote was extracted from. Alas, when I found it (link) I was disappointed.
The disappointment sprung first of all from a sense of priorities that is evident upon reading the essay’s title: Deference to nature keeps Seattle from becoming world-class city. The concept of living in a world-class city holds no appeal to me. World-class cities are full of the annoying world-class ruling elite, who use their money to run housing costs into the stratosphere and make it impossible for genuine bohemians to live in the city. The latter are the real attraction of cities to me; the role of cities as centers of power (especially power over others) is one I dislike.
The “bohemians” you see in today’s world-class cities tend to be faux-bohemians: image-obsessed workaholics who are willing to work two full-time jobs to afford a room in a shared apartment, the trustafarians who get money from their families, the sellouts who pander to the tastes of the establishment. There’s a few cracks and gaps where the lucky rare genuine bohemian can survive, bit they are distinctly the exception and not the rule.
I don’t want Seattle to become a world-class city; I merely want it to act like a city, period. It could be a very nice regional city and that would suit me fine.
Ultimately, I disagree with the nature-based argument Raban comes up with. If Seattle were really nature-obsessed, its poorly-planned growth would not have happened. That growth is undermining Seattle’s connection to nature, as such, a truly nature-obsessed place in Seattle’s location would not have let the events of the past several decades happen.
Such as Seattle’s failure to set aside large adjacent natural areas. Portland has its West Hills, Oakland its East Bay Hills; both contain significant areas of parkland where one can hike for dozens of miles, right on the edge of the city. Nothing but suburbs adjoin Seattle’s land borders.
Or consider the horrible transportation situation that makes leaving the city so stressful and unpleasant.
Further, if nature (and hills!) are so effective at hampering urbanity, how does one explain San Francisco, which from its earliest days was noteworthy as a cultural center?
Rather, I think mass denial is the key. Bask in an increasingly past glory, and you’re not thinking about all the unpleasant realities of today. That is what lead to San Francisco’s tatty parks and grimy, unreliable buses and streetcars. That is why Seattle is so far behind in addressing its transportation woes. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, unpleasant things merely become more unpleasant if you refuse to face them.
As a postscript, I’ll note that I’m less than impressed with the new library that Raban is all ga-ga over. I haven’t seen much of it, but what I saw left me with the impression of being just the sort of building someone with too much money and too little sense would erect to show everyone how much he can spend. Consider the silly book-conveyor system near the entrance. Why? It’s a library, not a factory. What’s wrong with nice, simple cargo cart to collect the books from the book drop? Not only would that have been less costly, push-cars (unlike automated machinery) operate with a minimum of noise. Wasn’t silence supposed to be part of a library experience?
The other thing that sticks in my mind is the flooring. How cute — it has letters in bas-relief. Letters, books, get it? Of course, being a floor in a public space, it also gets heavy traffic and needs to be cleaned frequently. Already, the letters are getting rimmed by tasteful margins of grime. Charming. In service for just a couple years, and already it looks tired, worn, and dirty.
Maybe I’ll change my mind when I see more of it. Then again, it often is possible to judge a book by its covers.
Note: All pictures that follow are thumbnails; click to enlarge.
This month’s Harper’s had an interesting article on the coming housing bubble that I wanted to read. Being basically a cheapskate, I might as well read a library copy. The Central Library being on the way between the office and home, an opportunity to see more of the new library presented itself.
Modern architecture is product of a struggle to use freedom responsibly, that freedom being from traditional restrictions of building form and design that modern materials have purchased. Instead of architecture being basically a closed issue, with only a few workable possibilities given the materials available, the available possibilities are vast. The pitfall is that a successful building must meet an extraordinarily long list of requirements. If you’re breaking with tradition, you no longer have the evolved wisdom of the ages to fall back on. The freedom to soar comes with the freedom to crash.
In the men’s washroom, meanwhile, the floors have been painted with a substance of unmatched efficiency for attracting every little bit of dirt. I’m sure it gets mopped every day, yet its overall effect is that of a worn painted floor in a grimy public park restroom.
The lighting seems as well thought-out as the floors were poorly. The shimmering diffusers that cover the entire ceiling of the books spiral do such a good job that even four inches away from the page of my magazine, I could discern only the faintest of shadows. The light is bright (that exposure was 1/160 at f/2.8 on the ISO 200 setting of my camera) without being painful.
I’m not so sure about the books spiral itself. I found it made for a confusing locator map: I had difficulty finding the periodicals section. I’ve never had the slightest trouble finding things on the locator maps in Portland’s old traditional central library. If the price to be paid for not having to change floors to follow sequence is more searching to find a given number, it’s a loss.
Perhaps in an attempt to compensate, the elevators had unusually fancy control panels.
Another flooring material I noted (generally in reading areas) was novel, and again, troublesome: aluminum squares, which have a beautiful futuristic look but alas which are also starting to work loose and make noise when walked upon.
The patterns made by the windows do present all sorts of opportunities for interesting photographic subjects. It’s probably my favorite feature of the building.
I won’t go so far as to call it an unworkable design (there are things, like the lighting, that work very well), but it’s definitely obvious that showing off took first priority and actual usable design came second. How much of that was the fault of the architect (Rem Koolhaas, who is apparently highly regarded internationally) and how much is the fault of the client (and we all know about how insecure and driven to show off Seattle is) I have yet to conclude.
Upon thinking, that’s my final conclusion about the new library: it’s not now bad enough to be a failure, but it soon will become one.
To understand why, consider the spiral and the stated reason for it. Its biggest advantage is said to be that books can be added without reorganizing them amongst different rooms. (The advantage of not introducing gaps in the call numbers is a non-advantage: as I pointed out previously, patrons don’t browse through call number ranges anyhow.)
The problem is: what happens when the spiral becomes full? Answer: you have a white elephant on your hands. The conceptual (and physical) gap between the spiral and the rest of the building is far greater than the gap between rooms or even floors in a more traditional building.
And the spiral will fill up faster than a conventional room. Libraries tend to run out of space. In response, aisles get narrowed as shelves are put closer together. Never in the spiral: in order to both be an ascending spiral and to have level spots for shelves, the floors in it undulate*. Shelving can only be placed on the flat spots, and there’s room only for one shelf per flat area. It will never be possible to adjust the shelf spacing in the new library.
Manufacturers have come up with all sorts of ingenious sliding shelf systems to enable space-strapped libraries to house more volumes. Again, never in the spiral: such systems require flat floors. It’s an absolutely reasonable requirement given that almost all buildings satisfy it. Not the new library.
In the name removing a constraint, a far more serious and limiting constraint has been created.
This is a bigger problem than the spiral; it pervades the whole structure. Its irregular geometry means it will never be possible to gracefully add on to the building. The simple expedient of adding a new floor or two is unthinkable. When the library runs out of space, there will be no recourse save to demolish it and build anew.
Yes, demolish. A more conventional structure could be put to some other use (offices, say) after its replacement is complete. Consider the spiral again: how on earth could one convert that to offices? The new library is useful only as a library… of a certain size, in a certain era, with a certain mix of features and a particular type of collection. Change any of those parameters (and change they will) and to reiterate you have a white elephant.
Accommodating change is the core lesson that should have been learned from Seattle’s previous two libraries, both of which had to be demolished as they became hopelessly obsolete. Modern building technology could have served admirably in this regard.
Structurally, build it like a modern office building, with as few load-bearing walls as possible so rooms can be easily reconfigured as needs change and evolve. Maybe even design a system of modular walls that can be relocated by workmen in the scope of a weekend. Have the shape be conventional and over-design the structural frame so that new floors can be added later. Enlarge the central service core office buildings normally have to create an atrium space that ties the floors together. Get those basics down then go about figuring out how to implement them while creating a functional work of art.
A library with a central atrium that ties its floors together — now where have I seen that before? Oh yes, in Portland. A.E. Doyle came up with such a design back in 1913. It works as well today as the day it was built. Each landing in the atrium has a map of what’s on that (and other) floors and usually an information desk. You’re never at a loss as to where you are or how to get where you’re going.
Because of its far-thinking design, Portland’s building is still in use as a library over ninety years after it first opened. And so continues the unhappy Seattle tradition — born of insecurity and image-obsession — of creating public spaces that don’t last.
* A feature that makes it feel awkward to use, I may add. One expects floors to be flat. The undulating floor violates this expectation and gives one the feel of a landlubber getting his sea-legs.
Wasn’t going to post anything else on the library, since I’ve already had my say. But this page has a reprint from the Post-Intelligencer that claims there’s plenty of extra space in the spiral:
There’s enough room to double the current holdings of around 750,000 books, The spiral is brightly lit and the stacks have a sense of openness and space.
So it’s hardly in immediate danger of running out of space. But once it does, that’s it. And if the book collection grows more slowly than anticipated (which it might) that space isn’t particularly useful for anything else that that might grow more quickly than anticipated.
It should be pretty obvious here that I have no plans to remain in Seattle long-term (by which I mean longer then a few years); for a variety of reasons Seattle just doesn’t have enough of what I’m looking for in a place to call home.
At the same time, there’s one very good reason why I’m probably not moving back to Portland, or anywhere else in the Willamette Valley for that matter (emphasis added; full article here):
…Grass pollen counts in the southern Willamette Valley are off the charts compared with other regions of the country, allergists say. Any grass pollen count over 200 pollens per cubic meter is considered “very high” by the national allergy group. We get counts of 400 and 500 per cubic meter routinely, and sometimes they surpass 1,000 pollens per cubic meter. Sometimes the pollen here is so thick that even nonallergy sufferers start feeling allergylike symptoms when the pollen starts clogging their mucous membranes. The valley’s geography and agriculture conspire to create perfect conditions to make life miserable for people allergic to grass pollen. About 80 percent of the world supply of rye grass seed is grown on 200,000 acres in Lane and Linn counties.…
That’s Eugene they’re talking above, but Portland is pretty awful as it is. I truly shudder to think how awful a place Eugene would be for me.
An upshot of this is it probably means my big-city days are drawing to a close. I want to stay in the Pacific Northwest, and every major city here has something major wrong with it (aside from Seattle and Portland, there’s Vancouver, BC, with the attendant supreme headaches of getting a work visa for a foreign nation).
They have a pretty serious scandal on their hands: Hal Salwasser, dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State, attempted to muzzle an article in Science (on page 1 nonetheless!) published by a graduate student in his department that provided evidence that logging burned forests can be harmful.
Most academic departments would be overjoyed to see a tenured professor score a first-page placement in a journal of that calibre. For a grad student to achieve such an accomplishment is quite the coup indeed. One would normally expect a fair measure of self-congratulatory horn-tooting from various publicity departments.
Unless, that is, the subject matter annoys the corporate fat cats that underwrite the department, in which case it quickly becomes a mere embarrassment.
The panel’s report and recommendations are a good start to doing something about such threats to academic freedom at that institution, but they’re merely nonbinding recommendations. Whether or not meaningful concrete measures get put into place remains to be seen.
Why am I not surprised that this instance of attempted censorship (unlike ones where left-leaning academics are guilty) is getting no coverage in the national news?
Full article here.
So Congress has voted to spend millions building yet another barrier between the US and Mexico. A few obvious conclusions immediately spring to mind:
Any doubt over that assertion should be cleared up by taking a look at the entries pertaining to astrology. In short, way too much pussyfooting around the cold hard fact that astrology is not a science, has never been shown to have objective truth, and has repeatedly been shown to arrive at outright false conclusions.
That doesn’t make it useless; objective truth in the scientific sense is not the sole measure of value in the world. Many people seem to derive some value in some spiritual/emotional sense from practicing the tradition of astrology (though I am definitely not one of them).
But too bad. The fact that lots of people like something or have a deep-seated desire to believe it does not constitute evidence that it is objectively true. Unfortunately, add in Wikipedia’s open-to-all editorial policy and it does provide the means by which a purportedly neutral and factual article about a subject can be biased in favor of it.
The establishment media seems to be launching an effort to ensure that the Democrats field a sufficiently right-of-center candidate in 2008. The target of their efforts right now appears to be Russ Feingold, whom their so-called conventional wisdom has almost universally proclaimed “unelectable.”
They never do much explaining why the Senator from Wisconsin is unelectable; it’s far more important to simply repeat the mantra (with little or no supporting evidence) in the hopes that enough people will eventually believe it. Then it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What little argument for unelectability there is centers on Feingold’s political views, which are indeed at the left end of the congressional spectrum. That’s far less relevant than it’s commonly made out to be.
First, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, when opinion polls prevent separate issues to Americans, they often express sentiments that are significantly to the left of the politicians they elect. This suggests that if a liberal could do as good a job at selling his ideas as the right does theirs, he could easily win.
And all the evidence indicates that Feingold is such a liberal. Wisconsin closely mirrors the US; voters split down the middle in the last two Presidential elections. Yet Feingold walked away with an easy victory in 2004. Many counties that went for Bush also went for Feingold.
Or, for that matter, consider this discussion thread on the Drudge Report. Drudge readers hardly tend to be self-professed liberals, yet many of this crowd is sufficiently impressed with Feingold to be enthusiastic about the possibility of voting for him.
Second, Feingold is really not that far left. (How can he be, being part of the political establishment?) It’s more like he’s one of the few senators that has simply resisted the stampede to the right orchestrated by right-wingers who more closely resemble fascists than conservatives. His was the lone vote in the upper house against the ill-considered Patriot Act.
Third, realignments happen. To say someone can’t win simply because of his political distance from his predecessor is to say it was impossible for Reagan to win in 1980.
Finally, with the right’s policies increasingly being recognized as the abject disasters they are amongst the mainstream, and with the popularity ratings of the Bush Regime in the toilet, the raw material for a realignment exists.
In short he’s completely electable. It’s just that a lot of powerful people don’t want to see him elected.
When I lived here before, I always thought most other places had better customer service. Now I know so.
Nowhere else have I lived someplace where it’s apparently considered acceptable to have customers wait fifteen or even twenty minutes in line at the supermarket (staff is available to open other checkstands, but they won’t bother). Oftentimes, one or more of the few clerks on duty will be chatting it up with a customer he or she knows instead of serving that person as a customer.
I was just made to wait in the same line three times at Bartell Drugs to collect a single prescription. Foolishly, I assumed that I’d be prioritized on the third time. No such luck; in retrospect I should have started complaining and interrupting the pharmacy clerks. Complaints have been filed after the fact and I’ve now resolved to become a more consistently assertive customer in the future.
I don’t think this could have happened in any other American city. I’m certain I would have been prioritized that third time in Portland.
I think it all has to do with the horrible transportation mess here. Wherever you go, however you travel (buses get stuck in traffic jams, too, and there is almost no rail transit) you’ll probably end up sitting and waiting. Travel is almost never simple or fast.
Not only has this become accepted, but it’s been extended to the rest of life: nothing is ever expected to be simple or quick. Unreasonable delays have become such a dominant experience that they’re now accepted, even expected, in all situations.
The surprise being that the black crook was returned to office instead of the white crook being voted in.
Meanwhile, this is the guy that would have been elected mayor if politics were something other than a cruel farce.
This actually got front-page billing in one of Seattle’s major daily newspapers, complete with color photograph lead-in.
This is a neat trend. I’ve noticed a few newly-built roundabouts in the Olympia area and was wondering what was up with them.
Ever since seeing a traffic circle for the first time as a kid, I was impressed by the trick of being able to regulate traffic at an intersection without having to make it stop for red lights and without having to build expensive bridges and ramps. I wondered why, if they worked in Europe and a few Eastern states, they weren’t building roundabouts everywhere.
The answer turns out to be part safety (unless you get alignment and other construction details right, the result is significantly more dangerous than a traffic signal), and big part NIH (“not invented here”) syndrome.
And yes, they can be intimidating to the first-timer. Initially. I remember my experience with “rotaries” in Massachusetts: the first one was terrifying, the second one was merely intimidating, and by No. 3 it was no big deal at all.
A certain left-wing MP has shown less than the normal level of deference to western imperialism and placed killing in response to it on the same moral level as killing in the name of it.
It’s an outrage, I tell you! An absolute outrage!
The real problem is that his recent remarks placed the killing of an imperialist on the same moral platform as the imperialist’s killing of civilians. By any reasonable measure, it’s easier to justify.
The world would be a far more humane place if its ruling classes would kill each other rather than send the ruled to die in their stead.
This has got to be one of the oddest crimes I’ve ever heard of.
I’m not going to call them the “9-11 Truth Movement” because I find their self-chosen label to be dishonest. Such self-proclaimed members I’ve met all react more like a doubted religious dogmatist rather than a truth-seeker when their theories are questioned: they get upset, they cut me off and refuse to listen to my reasoning when it becomes evident that their pet beliefs are being undermined, they accuse me of being part of the conspiracy, they repeat statements that have just been freshly discredited, and so on.
Perhaps the most egregious example of the lack of logic is the oft-cited argument that since the fire could not have been hot enough to melt steel, it could not have been hot enough to make the buildings collapse. That fails a basic sanity test, and displays a basic failure to think for oneself: I think everyone has either seen a blacksmith at work or seen one at work on TV or in the movies. The blacksmith’s iron, though orange-hot, is not molten. Yet it’s soft, plastic, and clearly incapable of furnishing much rigidity.* It is thus obvious that it is not necessary to melt steel in order to induce structural failure of it.
Obvious, that is, if one is willing to pause and think for a moment. That unquestioned acceptance of the belief is so common in the “truth” movement is evidence that it’s not a truth movement at all — it’s primarily a faith- and belief-based movement.
It’s sad, as there actually are some significant holes in the official story. Most notable of those is the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, which to my knowledge has yet to be adequately explained by anyone.
* And if you read the article you’ll learn that it’s not even necessary to heat it to the point of red-hot plasticity.
Monthly Index for 2006 |
Index of Years