To my knowledge, this is one of the most significant acts of resistance to the war I have heard of. Maybe even the most significant: I’m unaware of any other attempts to go beyond purely symbolic protests and disrupt the war machine directly.
Given that it sprang out of nothing and was organized by some fairly inexperienced folks (for example, almost no outreach was done to Seattle and Portland), it was amazingly successful in grabbing media attention.
Link.
How much you wanna bet it won’t make the national news like all the instances of left-wing PC do? It’s certainly not going to get picked up by Faux Nooz and the rest of the rightist echo chamber, I can say that much.
It looks like Monkey Boy has ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to play fall guy for his administration’s well-documented failure to adequately fund levee maintenance in New Orleans. (Because, of course, there’s a war in Iraq to pay for.)
And judging by the the first article linked to, at least some reporters are falling for it.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there were some design flaws in the levees. But please — when the Corps asks for money to do levee work, doesn’t get enough, and complains about not having enough, you can’t honestly lay all the blame on their doorstep. That turkey just don’t fly.
And don’t forget: design flaws or no, most of those levees held. A few weak spots were all that was needed for disaster to happen. It’s entirely plausible that had maintenance been properly funded, at least some of those weak spots wouldn’t have been there last year. Flooding might not have happened or might have been much less severe.
Turns out the Corps knew about the very same subisdence the whitewashers are accusing them of ignorance about. And were planning to do something about it. Or at least they were until their funding was cut.
From: Xxxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Date: June 3, 2006 2:34:59 AM PDT
To: XX_XXXXXXXX <xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Site maintenance tonight 11PM-12:30AM
Site maintenance is complete. The site came back up at 1:25 rather then
12:30, as planned. A failure of a circuit breaker at the colo prevented
us from getting power to db server in the originally panned timeframe.
Xxxxx
Contrary to what the experts have to say, I find Kyle Huff’s purported suicide letter neither vague nor convoluted. Anxiety over sexuality figures prominently in it.
That’s my summation of this article. Read beyond the initial glad words and you find those urban “renewal” zones are far from “flourishing” economically:
On the whole, the urban renewal districts’ job growth was flat while the rest of the city lost 9 percent. Average wages across all five districts were up by 25 percent to $41,800 compared with 8 percent in the rest of the city to $38,100. And property values were up by more than 130 percent compared with 56 percent citywide. [Emphasis added.]
I hardly consider flat job growth to be indicative of a “flourishing” economy. About the best you can say is that the renewal zones are less of an abject economic basket case than the rest of Portland is.
The higher incomes are hardly anything to celebrate, either. Job loss is seldom associated with increasing incomes; it’s a simple consequence of the laws of supply and demand. In the absence of job growth, the most logical explanation of the rising incomes is immigration of well-off retirees from outside (primarily California). In other words, the existing residents (suffering in a depressed economy) are getting pushed out of their neighborhoods by the wealthy migrants.
It bears pointing out that the time frame covered by this study is 1996 to 2004. Those years are neatly bisected about fifty-fifty between the dot.com boom and the subsequent bust. From larger macroeconomic trends, you’d thus expect overall job growth to be about flat, not decreasing.
Some “success.”
I’ve been following David Gwynn’s otherstream blog for years now, primarily because he sometimes has interesting things to say about urban planning (even though I don’t find myself agreeing with him as much as I once did).
This entry of his brings to mind parallels (and lack thereof) with how I think of Seattle.
I find that Seattle has plenty to irritate me and much of the luster the place had when I first set eyes on it has vanished. It’s not all because of changes internal to myself, however: in the case of Seattle, the metropolitan area has also gradually gotten less livable year after year as a result of poor planning.
I don’t question my initial decision to come here in 1989; it definitely was a major improvement in my life. I had a lot more misgivings on my initial departure for the Bay Area in 1999. Well-grounded misgivings, it turns out: I didn’t end up staying there and was glad to return to the Pacific Northwest.
At the same time, I can’t see those fourteen months in California as nothing but a misstep. They did get me out of a dangerous rut, and they also allowed me to experience a compare-and-contrast that illustrated all the ways in which Seattle was seriously lacking for me. Had I not made that leap, I’d probably never have left Seattle in the first place and wouldn’t have had five mostly very good years in Portland.
The big win, even though I’m back in Seattle for the time being, is that I no longer am mentally trapped here. For openers, I’m not as put off by the challenge of making friends in a new place. Seattle is a notoriously difficult place to make friends in; I never really realized this until I had a chance to live somewhere else for a while.
Which is not to say I dislike Seattle as much as Mr. Gwynn dislikes San Francisco. If I did, I would have never considered moving back here — some other city would have taken Seattle’s place on the out-of-town job search list. Seattle is not where I want to stay long term, but it is a useful economic opportunity for a few years. Then my desire to treat myself to someplace better will start kicking in.
Perhaps a look in the mirror might refresh your memory?
“Over the past several years no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent men, women and children on his hands,” Rumsfeld said at a meeting of NATO ministers in Brussels. But he cautioned al-Zarqawi’s death “will not mean the end of all violence in that country.”
Full story here.
It’s not just for eco-radicals anymore.
Since (a) I have a Mac on my desk, and (b) radio reception is awful at work, I quite frequently listen to iTunes radio stations. One such station is The 1920’s Radio Network. I’ve always liked old-time music.
It took me a long time to visit their web site and see the creepy neofascist* politics its owners espouse. The odd thing is that jazz (including Swing, which dominates their playlist) was not precisely a beloved art form by their ideological compatriots back “in the day.” Does the phrase “the devil’s music” ring a bell?
That’s not going to stop me from listening to them, of course. It’s practically commercial-free, so I figure my doing so is simply costing them money by imposing load on their servers†.
* And since I used the f-word yet again, time to review a few reasons why it’s an appropriate label and not just hyperbole.
† Update: Actually, it doesn’t cost them a thing. Like all good right-wing hypocrites, they get the government to bear their business costs. In this case, a public broadcaster that receives taxpayer monies via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting serves their streaming audio.
Most people accept such regimes because they expect jobs to be onerous and hope for nothing from their jobs except money. But for the hackers, hacking was more than “just” a job, it was a way of life. The original hackers made sure they would have no such problems by omitting security and file protection from the design of the system. Users of our system were free men, asked to behave responsibly. Instead of an elite of power, we had an elite of knowledge, composed of whoever was motivated to learn. Since nobody could dominate others on our machine, the lab ran as an anarchy. The visible success of this converted me to anarchism. To most people, “anarchy” means “wasteful, destructive disorder,” but to an anarchist like me it means “voluntary organization as needed, with emphasis on goals, not rules, and no insistence on uniformity for uniformity’s sake.” Anarchism does not mean advocating a dog-eat-dog jungle. American society is already a dog-eat-dog jungle, and its rules maintain it that way. We wish to replace these rules with a concern for constructive cooperation.Full article here.
Last night, the thought occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t ride my bike to work today. I have gotten increasingly pissed off at all the stupid cage drivers and that can lead to the temptation to take risks (which is definitely not a good idea when one is several orders of magnitude lighter). So I gave it a break today and took the bus.
That meant I didn’t get the resulting exercise, so I decided to ride to the arboretum and back this evening on a route that avoided traffic as much as possible. By the time I got there, dusk was falling. I decided to ride out to the end of Foster Island, then parked and took the foot path out to Marsh Island, which really lives up to its name this time of year*. Water was literally within inches of overtopping the trail, and the wood-chip surface made squishing noises underfoot.
While at a shore-side viewpoint, I hear a mammalian-sounding snort off to my right, then another. I look and at first see nothing in the deepening twilight. Then I spot them: several otters frolicking in the water near the shore. I watch for a minute or so and the snorting gets more regular. I decide it’s probably a sign of offense at my presence and leave. Wild animals in urban areas have enough stress from human contact as it is.
* Lake Washington acts as the storage reservoir for the locks in Ballard. Since summers are dry, by June the Army Corps of Engineers tries to have the lake as full as possible.
Link (mp3 player required).
This widely-held belief amongst Europeans is actually quite logical.
If the most powerful nation on earth abandons diplomacy over a non-security issue and launches an offensive war, it's far more damaging to world peace and international law than some minor-league saber rattling by a tinpot dictatorship.
Stupid kid stuff that I steer well clear of after having one too many bad crashes on my bike. Fun to watch, though.
Just have to try avoiding putting any of those dangerous tricks into practice in Downtown Seattle. Because, as much as my responsible side hates to admit it, there’s still something tempting about the idea of doing that.
Not that liberals aren’t generally in favor of disarming the public, but the gun nuts are getting increasingly nutty as the years pass. As this amply indicates.
It’s a shame really. Civil rights deserve all the quality arguments for their existence they can get. And the ones in favor of the right to keep and bear arms (RKBA) are generally poor-quality ones that revolve around “Crime! Others! Conspiracies! Fear!”.
Alone amongst the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, RKBA had its reason for existence explicitly stated. The underpinnings of the others were taken to be so evidently obvious that they were simply enumerated with no explanations. But RKBA was clearly enumerated to be part of a collective and cooperative obligation (emphasis, of course, added):
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
No, “militia” doesn’t have to mean a National Guard or the Army, operating under tight government control; that notion should be dispelled by the “shall not be infringed” phrasing. It’s clear that it’s a general right of all that’s just been enumerated.
But it’s also quite clear that the desired goal is miles away from today’s hyper-individualized nation of terrified crime-victims-to-be arming themselves against each other amidst a social breakdown. The only way to square the first part of the Second Amendment with the second is to presume the vision behind the right was a populace that’s free to arm itself for the purpose of collectively defending its freedom.
Given how fear and isolation (the very same things the gun nuts pander to) can be used to herd people and stampede them into servitude, I think it’s no accident the Second Amendment was written precisely how it was.
Getting back to the notion of quality arguments, the scary thing is that once the right wing gets thoroughly discredited (which may happen sooner rather than later), so may RKBA by association. And I, for one, don’t want a world where all the Rodney Kings are disarmed and only the Laurence Powells are legally armed.
Drill down to the end of this article and we find Yet Another Example (as if one were needed) of how little the right wing actually honors the concept of states’ rights (emphasis added):
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers — which pegs the average price increase closer to $3,000 a vehicle — has fiercely opposed the rules in Oregon and other states. It sued Kulongoski in state court last year, arguing he lacked the authority to direct the environmental agency to take up the California rules.Earlier this year, a Marion County Circuit Court judge sided with Kulongoski, and now the alliance has pinned its hopes on a federal lawsuit arguing that California overstepped its authority by dictating fuel economy standards, which only the federal government can set. Trial is set for January.
94% of the Representatives from the alleged Party of States’ Rights just voted for a bill that unambiguously federalizes all food labeling law.
Why am I not surprised?
This is an argument I’ve been waiting for someone to make. Instead of announcing a newfound personal opposition to all war, 1st Lt. Ehren Watada has simply announced that he’s cannot legally to not obey his orders to deploy because they are unlawful.
Many civilians are unaware of it, but in the US servicemen do not agree to blindly obey all orders given to them. They are only required to obey lawful orders. Servicemen can be — and occasionally have been — prosecuted for obeying unlawful orders.
Moreover, the oath they take has interesting wording as well (emphasis added):
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The Constitution contains a procedure for declaration of war. It was not followed in the case of Iraq. Moreover, the United States Government has entered into international treaties forbidding wars of aggression. Treaties also carry the force of law. This war is unlawful as well as immoral.
It is, simply, not necessary to ask particularly big or earth-shaking questions in order to be against it. It’s one of the reasons I believe most so-called “conservatives” are actually a species of fascist: if they actually believed in conserving existing laws and traditions, they would be dead-set against much of what Monkey Boy is doing. But I digress.
And this is precisely what Watada is doing: asserting that his orders to deploy are illegal and it is therefore his duty as a soldier to disobey them. It’s all stated in those UCMJ regulations the oath alludes to.
At the very least, Watada’s action is going to make some powerful propaganda. The most likely result is for him to be punished regardless of the strength of the arguments he makes. In that case, the lie behind the façade is made clear: it is blind obedience that is being sought after all.
And, of course, in the unlikely event Watada wins at court-martial, all hell is going to break loose. Watada apparently has had at least a few other servicemen on base privately confess their support for his argument. How many more believe it in their hearts but are currently afraid to say anything?
It’s about time more things like this are allowed in Seattle, a city with a crisis in both housing affordability and desirable rental housing availability. Allowing homeowners to convert garages into apartments is an excellent way to increase the amount of housing (and in desirable, non-distressed, residential areas) while minimizing the amount of disruption to existing housing stock.
For openers, there’s plenty of room for more residents inside the city limits. Take a look at the population densities of some US cities. Think Seattle is a dense, older city, unlike, say Los Angeles so there’s just not the room here? Think again. Sprawled-out LA is actually more dense then Seattle. How about Buffalo, a rust-belt has-been that’s been losing population for decades? Nope, denser than Seattle. Detroit, with its hollowed-out neighborhoods of only a few remaining homes per block? More density then Seattle. Maybe Miami, a postwar Sunbelt city that came of age in the auto era? Sorry, higher population density than Seattle.
There is, quite simply, plenty of room to add significantly more people inside the city limits without having to become a Manhattan or a Tokyo in the process. And doing so will result in making mass transit — essential to reducing per-capita energy consumption — increasingly practical, all the while reducing the need for housing out in Sprawlsville where folks have to drive everywhere.
And the scenario given by the fear-mongering representative of the NIMBY community should simply be ignored, because his comment has no meaningful content whatsoever:
Greg Hill, former land-use chairman of the Wallingford Community Council, is probably the city’s leading opponent of detached apartments.With a backyard house nearby, Hill says, come uncomfortably close neighbors, noise, parking hassles, lower property values, and shadows that will make tomato plants wither.
“Picture yourself going out to the backyard. There’s a DADU next door. The windows are open. The stereo is blasting. Beer bottles are flying out. The city sells it like it’s for grandma and really sweet. But I live next to the U District and it’ll be for frat brothers.”
Give me a break. It’s already legal to invest in rental housing in Wallingford as well as any other Seattle neighborhood, simply by purchasing an existing house and renting it out. In such a case, the landlord almost never lives in the neighborhood, and thus never is the wiser if a bunch of wild partiers move in and cause problems for the neighbors. The proposal for legalizing garage conversions explicitly requires landlords to live on the same lot. Get a clue: it’s not the tenants in the converted garages that are going get away with being disruptive partiers.
Something tells me Greg wouldn’t be too terribly happy if the school in his neighborhood was next on the chopping block in response to the Seattle Public Schools ever-decreasing enrollment. Wonder why school enrollment is tumbling in the city? Because housing is too scarce (and thus too expensive), driving families out to the suburbs. Want to save neighborhood schools? Encourage housing creation.
How much you wanna bet Greg is also your typical Seattle bourgeois liberal environmentalist who’s in favor of growth controls that make it harder to build sprawl? In other words, no sprawl, no density. Why should he care about housing affordability, after all? He’s got his, everybody else can go rot.
Much fear is sometimes bandied around about the “Californication” of the Pacific Northwest. One of the major drawbacks of living in California is stratospheric housing costs, costs that got that way precisely because NIMBY’s like Greg were against both density and sprawl. Please keep this in mind the next time you hear a NIMBY open his or her mouth.
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