Federal Officials Shut Down 26 Bus Operators
Ugh. You know what’s actually and continually having a “wave of crashes”? Personal cars.
But the show must go on!
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3 June 2012
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10:50
A Tramp Around Hudson
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10:32
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
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2 June 2012
I like that they call them TED ‘talks,’ when only one person speaks.
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14:19
Millions of tons of petroplastic are buried in landfills, waiting for the day when the cost of excavating them becomes less than the cost of squeezing the last drops oil from the ground. Although we may develop workable alternatives, petroplastic’s killer combo of persistence, moldability, and sterilizability will make it valuable for centuries to come.
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10:39
I was startled to find, in the wake of this story, that there are THOUSANDS of these TED talks, all of which people pay to go to. It’s like finding out that the people in a David Brooks book are real.
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1 June 2012
The problem, of course, is that drunken sports fans rioting sends one kind of message, the protest sends another. The former lets us know the massive narcotizing effect of professional sports is, shall we say, ‘in full effect’; the latter lets us know the medication is wearing off.
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16:30
There’s no surer sign of springtime in New York City than when the anti-cycling cockblockers emerge from their hidey-holes and resume their seasonal efforts to outlaw the act of riding a bicycle. Usually these efforts involve some sort of licensing or registration scheme. This time though, it’s a mandatory helment law, since the imminent bike share program is evidently sending them into a state of panic.
—Bike Snob (via andrewgreene)
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14:23
Police or Prosperity
both functioned under a siege mentality that seems more appropriate for war than for what have been entirely peaceful protest movements (unless you somehow believe that the breaking of windows and property consitutes violence, in which case you’d be wrong, but would still have to use the phrase ‘overwhelmingly peaceful protest movements’).
We can approve (or not) of police violently reacting to protesters who destroy property, but we should do it without conflating the meaning of violence: it is about actions against humans, and possibly animals. In these cases, police are the ones introducing violence.
Even snarky city blogs can fall for the statist line. As very lame post in Gothamist about the May Day protests put it, all the protesters were “anarchists” because some declared themselves so, and they “trashed” half of Manhattan by knocking over a few of those hated plastic stands distributing shitty free flyers. Luckily for all wholesome blog readers, our wildly expensive police force “hit back”.
Never mind that those stands are probably themselves illegal and represent the supreme devaluation of public space for soulless rock-bottom advertising. Never mind that as pedestrians we knock them over accidentally / on purpose all the time. If you do it as a political act, you’re in big trouble! And Gothamist, which should know a thing or two about how annoying those pieces of commercial sidewalk garbage are to pedestrians, is after these miscreants who relocate the trash.
Meh.
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10:45
The name of the game is to cast city dwellers either as parasitic government dependents, invoking racial stereotypes, or as snooty liberals, whose tastes and values are suspicious and un-American.
