February 2012
94 posts
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U.S. v. Pakistan on transparency and... →
Yet this type of accountability just brought to Pakistan’s intelligence service is simply inconceivable in the United States. It is virtually impossible to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the CIA to disclose documents about its treatment of detainees or, even more unrealistically, to permit the victims of CIA abuse to have their grievances heard in court. Anyone who doubts that can...
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Israel, MEK and state sponsor of Terror groups →
Meanwhile, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar yesterday patiently explained that drone strikes — which Americans widely support, including American liberals — are “completely illegal and unlawful” and “counterproductive” because they “fuel terrorism,” since people tend to become quite angry at the foreign power which slaughters their children…
So let me get this straight....
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Israel, MEK and state sponsor of Terror groups →
All of these mysteries received substantial clarity from an NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem yesterday. Citing two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that report makes two amazing claims: (1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and (2) the Terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.”...
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Bad Defunding →
Thus the House transportation bill is bad not only because it’s bad for transit, but also because it’s bad government. It’s not even selective worrying about cost-effectiveness, a charge often thrown by political transit supporters. It makes no attempt to decouple any funding from gas taxes, a decoupling that it necessary for the purpose of making it possible to tax pollution without demands...
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“In order to prevent smart scope changes from leaving the cost-ineffective parts...”
– Bad Defunding
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Jaywalking and the Motor Age →
It wasn’t just jaywalking. Seven centuries of children playing in the streets had to be abolished as well. Drawing at left is from the Chicago Motor Club, a safety poster for their Textbook for Schools in 1932.
This insidious notion, that it is not the responsibility of motorists to avoid hitting children but rather the duty of kindergarteners to survive motorists, has become so...
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Road Danger Reduction Forum » Blaming bollards and... →
Not only trees but stumps “as these can still be aggressive” (p. 541) should be removed, as well as fences since these are “a particularly aggressive form of man-made structure” (p. 544). Those people in the audience not members of the “road safety” community would laugh, while the highway engineers and other ”road safety” types would be unable to understand the laughter.
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“This issue is how – supposedly – trees, bollards and other inanimate objects are...”
– Road Danger Reduction Forum » Blaming bollards and trees – and why it’s important
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“However, having recently rewatched Phantom Menace to prepare for its upcoming...”
– zunguzungu — zunguzungu.wordpress.com — Readability
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“I mean, that’s what No Child Left Behind is about. It’s training for the Marine...”
– Chomsky
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“If that premise sounds familiar, it is because the movie fits the tried-and-true...”
– zunguzungu — Sunday reading
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“Today’s New York Times contains a fine example of how ideology works at the high...”
– zunguzungu — How to stop worrying about class
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“The Myrtle ave collision sounds like it was caused by the car’s failure to...”
– Today’s Headlines | Streetsblog New York City
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Do you know what it means to miss Penn Station? →
This, of course, is no secret for many of us. We’ve bemoaned the dollars to be sunk into Moynihan will little to no upgrade to train capacity. It’s a similar story at Fulton Street where the headhouse represents a large chunk of an expensive project and sits a block away from a $4 billion PATH hub that also won’t increase capacity.
It is harder to criticize auto boondoggles like the Tappan...
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Repulsive progressive hypocrisy →
When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume...
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Six Lies the GOP Is Telling About the House... →
If the House GOP really cared about local control of transportation funds, they could draft a bill that distributes federal funding to cities and towns. The problem for John Boehner and the oil companies who back this bill is that cities and towns spend transportation dollars on things like transit, biking, and walking.
Please work this angle, not the one that sounds like us asking for...
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“The Manhattan Bridge bicycle path will return to its usual place on the north...”
– Manhattan Bridge Bike Path Detour to End on March 5
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Chris Quinn’s Parking Agenda Out of Touch With New... →
Including public opinion, it appears. According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, a majority of city voters disagree with Quinn and the council that city sanitation stickers are “unnecessarily punitive.” The poll found that 60 percent of voters, including 57 percent who park on the street, support the use of the stickers.
It’s amazing how reliably New York motorists support harsh...
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DOT Shortens Pedestrian Crossings on Delancey,... →
Similarly, many community members complained that the traffic enforcement agents stationed at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge wave through traffic without the slightest regard for pedestrians or walk lights. When the agents are stationed there, said Crane, “there effectively is zero pedestrian crossing time.”
And as we all know, this is what “TEAs” are “told to...
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DOT Shortens Pedestrian Crossings on Delancey,... →
Half of all pedestrians hit on Delancey Street are struck while they have the walk signal, according to Benson.
Yet no where near this proportion of incidents leads to a criminal trial, where facts can be determined fairly. Is it not even potentially a crime in this city to drive vehicles over people following walk signals?
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“Yet movie companies threaten to put Netflix out of business by charging them...”
– You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You
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The Grave Threat of “Homegrown Terrorism” →
Lindsey Graham: “Homegrown terrorism is a real threat. There are a lot of people being radicalized on the Internet”
Graham wraps all his paranoid anxieties, whether genuine or for the benefit of his owners, into such a tidy package.
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The Grave Threat of “Homegrown Terrorism” →
Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.
Just consider what the constant hyping of this “miniscule threat” has enabled. The once-controversial Patriot Act was extended for another four years with no reforms whatsoever based on these...
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Cyclists in Paris can ignore the red traffic light... →
Parisian cyclists have won the right to go through red lights following a fierce debate over their claim that the move would reduce the risk of road accidents.
A three-year campaign by cyclists’ associations — which say it is idiotic for them to stop at traffic lights — bore fruit when the Government published a decree authorising councils to change the rules.
If only our leading New...
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Tappan Zee Stakeholder Meeting Cancelled →
For example, advocates want to know why bus rapid transit cost estimates increased so dramatically in the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS), why the state did not evaluate a range of alternatives (as required by NEPA), and how the state plans to follow through on its promise to build transit at a later date. None of these questions are likely to be answered at a public hearing.
Or...
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The Carbon Bubble →
If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.
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“When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely...”
– The Carbon Bubble
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“So if the New York Works Fund is so far just an act of political branding, why...”
– Why Won’t the “New York Works Fund” Pay for Transit?
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Why Won’t the “New York Works Fund” Pay for... →
The biggest unanswered questions involve Cuomo’s promise to leverage state investment with 20 private dollars for every public dollar. The private sector needs to make a return on its investment, of course, and alternative financing doesn’t eliminate the need to actually fund infrastructure investments. If Cuomo isn’t willing to pay for roadwork with a gas tax increase or tolls, it’s not clear...
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Walking a Hard Road – Connecticut Post Reporters... →
One reporter assured readers that biking doesn’t lead to excessive sweatiness, another found that her nighttime ride on a busy road wasn’t as perilous as expected, and a number of them found that walking to the station made them see their neighborhoods with fresh eyes.
The only time I sweat because of cycling is when I get all hot and bothered and from being asked dumbass questions about it....
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The Wrong Tools for Planning Our Streets →
The question that needs to be asked in urban settings is not whether you ever want to sit in congestion again. Who does? The question is whether you want to eliminate congestion on your Main Street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year — knowing that the consequence would be a community with decimated economic and social value, increased reliance on car use, increased crashes, and,...
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“For much less than the five billion dollars that Cuomo and friends want to spend...”
– The problem with the Northern Branch project
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Today’s Headlines | Streetsblog New York City →
This is really outrageous. DOT hired a corps of pedestrian safety managers in response to one politically motivated Daily News editorial about “pedestrian perdition” on the Manhattan Bridge, even though there had been no deaths, just the random complaint of an editor who got yelled at by a cyclist one day.
But a little girl died crossing the street and there’s no...
STFU, Islamobigotry!: 'Blow away' text lands... →
rcabbasi:
MONTREAL — A Muslim businessman in Canada became a terror suspect for telling his sales staff in a text message to “blow away” the competition at a New York City trade show, a religious association said Friday.
Moroccan-born Saad Allami, who works as a telecommunications company…
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All Screaming Id, No Brains, No Honor →
Your country is being stolen from you. I hope you are getting ready to re-occupy it with your bodies and minds. Don’t plan on giant magical robots flying to your rescue.
But giant nightmarish drones flying to end your mortal life are not such an outlandish thing to plan for. Coming soon, to a newly designated theater of war near you.
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“I wondered, of course, where these plucky fellows would look for their next...”
– All Screaming Id, No Brains, No Honor
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“great many people are affected by an individual’s decision to drive in NYC. I...”
– Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Wastefulness
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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Wastefulness →
That aside, consider what Gingrich is really saying when he derides New Yorkers as elitists because each uptick in the price of gas doesn’t make us itchy to start a new war. In one way, he has a point. Unlike our countrymen trapped in punishing commutes and paying off two-car garages, we big city dwellers are fairly well insulated from fluctuating gas prices.
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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Wastefulness →
The Republican presidential campaign recently produced a couple of characteristic bits of what Americans, for lack of a better word, call “news”: Newt Gingrich declaring that New Yorkers “live in high rises and ride the subway” and thus don’t care about gasoline prices; and Tea Party “activists” in Virginia, Florida and Maine convinced that smart-growth initiatives are — wait for it — a UN...
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Drone critics are Al Qaeda enablers →
The Bureau’s journalists and researchers spent months engaged in the painstaking and difficult task of gathering documentation on the effects of the top secret U.S. drone program in Waziristan — producing extraordinary findings — only to find themselves and their sources, many of whom are local villagers whose children have been killed, depicted as Al Qaeda’s witting or unwitting allies the...
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“according to some ‘senior’ Obama official, those who report...”
– drone critics are Al Qaeda enablers — www.salon.com — Readability
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“After all, where would be if it didn’t take nearly as long to rehab one of the...”
– Bleecker St. rehab now set for June completion date
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“To know that we have yet another New Hitler in our midst is alarming indeed.”
– The growing Iranian military behemoth
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“No one will explain why younger generations deserve so much less in retirement...”
– Younger Generations Have No Lobbyist Either
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“Whatever else is true, it seems highly likely that Barack Obama is the first...”
– U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners