Politico has a long-form article describing Evanston's efforts to rid its downtown of cars:
With stops for Chicago Transit Authority buses and its “L” rail line, Metra suburban rail’s Union Pacific North line and the Pace suburban bus, Evanston always had great transit bones. For much of its history it had also been a relatively prosperous North Shore city, its growth initially spurred by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, as Chicagoans fled its chaotic density, and in the 20th century, its share of once-famous industrial names, from Rust-Oleum Corp. to Shure, the audio products company, to Bell & Howell, then best known for its film cameras and projectors.
The answer to the suburb’s economic woes, as it turned out, lay in embracing Lerner’s theory that “city is not the problem, city is solution.” Beginning in 1986, a new plan for Evanston embraced the idea of a “24/7” downtown, pouring resources into increasing the density of its downtown—a density that also meant decreasing residents’ reliance on automobiles. As a compact city, Evanston couldn’t compete with the vast sprawling parking spots of the Old Orchard Mall. It had to build a different sort of appeal.
Evanston’s approach mixed investments in mass transit—including building a new downtown transportation center—and relaxing its zoning restrictions along two designated corridors, Main and Central Streets, to permit increased residential density. “Nobody wanted a 20-story building in their downtown,” recalls Aiello-Fantus, the former assistant city manager. “There was this perception that we’re just a little town and having something 20 stories changes that character.”
I'm glad Evanston's planning is getting national press. I love the place, which is why I lived there for many years (and may do again). For many years before then, my mom lived along the Main Street corridor mentioned in the article—and then moved up to Central Street later on. And, of course, I was just there a couple weeks ago.
Interesting aside: 116 years ago today, the village of Austin ceased to exist as it was absorbed into the City of Chicago by legislative fiat. The city might have swallowed Evanston as well. How Evanston avoided that is a story in itself.
As I mentioned yesterday, the European Court of Justice ruled yesterday that the US-EU Safe Harbor pact is illegal under European law:
The ruling, by the European Court of Justice, said the so-called safe harbor agreement was flawed because it allowed American government authorities to gain routine access to Europeans’ online information. The court said leaks from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, made it clear that American intelligence agencies had almost unfettered access to the data, infringing on Europeans’ rights to privacy.
The court said data protection regulators in each of the European Union’s 28 countries should have oversight over how companies collect and use online information of their countries’ citizens. European countries have widely varying stances toward privacy.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation examines the implications:
[I]f those reviews [of individual companies' transfers] continue to run against the fundamental incompatibility of U.S. mass surveillance with European data protection principles, the end result may well be a growing restriction of the commercial processing of European users' data to within the bounds of the European Union.
That would certainly force the companies to re-think and re-engineer how they manage the vast amount of data they collect. It will not, however, protect their customers from mass surveillance. The geographic siloing of data is of little practical help against mass surveillance if each and every country feels that ordinary customer data is a legitimate target for signals intelligence. If governments continue to permit intelligence agencies to indiscriminately scoop up data, then they will find a way to do that, wherever that data may be kept. Keep your data in Ireland, and GCHQ may well target it, and pass it onto the Americans. Keep your data in your own country, and you'll find the NSA—or other European states, or even your own government— breaking into those systems to extract it.
Harvard law student Alex Loomis highlighted the uncertainties for US-based companies:
But ultimately it is still hard to predict how national and EU authorities will try to enforce the ECJ decision in the short-run because, as one tech lobbyist put it, “[c]ompanies will be working in a legal vacuum.” Industry insiders are already calling for more guidance on how to act lawfully. That’s hard, because the EU Commission’s decision is no longer controlling and each individual country thus can now enforce EU law on its own. Industry experts suggest that the turmoil will hurt smaller tech companies the most, as the latter lack separate data centers and accordingly are more likely to rely on transferring data back to the United States. As I pointed out last week, that might have some anticompetitive effects.
In short, data transfers between the EU and US are now a problem. A big one. Fortunately at my company, we don't keep any personal information—but we still may have a heck of a time convincing our European partners of that, especially if Germany and France go off the deep end on privacy.
And so am I, about the immorality of the right's evolution on their pro-gun message:
As I wrote on Friday, the craze to refuse to name the names of mass shooters is a grand form of evasion. Unable to address the actual causes of mass gun violence we stumble around for some feel-good nonsense that allows us to pretend we're taking action. But you can see the same drive expanding in other directions as well: even to the level of blaming the victims themselves.
It's amazing that we're actually getting to the point of blaming the victims of these massacres. That's really what it is. There's no hyperbole about identifying this. Carson is saying that these 9 people and the others who were injured but didn't die just didn't get their shit together quick enough to do something.
On the same topic, Ed Kilgore takes another whack at the Cult of the Second Amendment:
the default position of conservatives has less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it’s based on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government.
This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement the government’s use of lethal force against criminals. Treating the Second Amendment as an integral legacy of the American Revolution appealed to gun rights advocates who sought firm ground against regulations with no possibility of compromise.
But more importantly, it gave a dangerous edge to the claims of conservative extremists—who recently began calling themselves “constitutional conservatives”—that their ideology of absolute property rights, religious rights and even fetal rights had been permanently established by the Founders who added in the Second Amendment to ensure any trespassing on their “design” by “tyrants” or popular majorities could and should be resisted.
White, male, right wingers are afraid of something they can't stop: demographics. They're unable to adapt to the world as it is and they're becoming irrelevant. That fear is fueling this insane drive to arm up in defense against a revolution that they, themselves, are most likely to start.
Meanwhile, the guns these people are collecting have become a menace to society unlike anything we've experienced, to the point where we collectively shake our heads when a fifth-grader shoots a second-grader over a puppy. And still these nut jobs think the problem is the government.
Last note for now. Josh Marshall makes an excellent point:
What would make a real difference would be a society where there were radically fewer guns, where buying a gun meant getting a license, needing to follow specific safety guidelines, where you couldn't build your own armory, where you had to carry insurance to own a weapon (like you do with a car and most everything else), etc.
Those of us who see the current situation as not just non-ideal but actually a sort of societal sickness need to start thinking way beyond things like closing the gun hole loophole.
Yes. How come you have to get 20 hours of training to drive a car but not to carry a firearm in public?
Larry Wilmore gives a primer on how the right change the conversation:
Welcome to the Shining Beacon on a Hill, the example to the rest of the world, where we've had 294 mass shootings in 274 days so far this year:
We've gone no more than eight days without one of these incidents this year. On six days in September, there were 3 mass shootings or more. If the initial casualty figures in Oregon hold up, that would bring the total of deaths by mass shooting this year to 380 so far, with well over one thousand injured.
And of course, there's the broader universe of nearly 10,000 people killed and 20,000 wounded in nearly 40,000 gun violence incidents so far this year.
This is the United States, where a group dedicated to selling guns has successfully captured firearms regulations, subverted a Constitutional protection for states (not individuals) against central government over-reach, and shut down rational argument on the merits of having this much firepower available to this many people for this long.
Canadian Julia Cordray created an app described as a "Yelp for people," and apparently failed to predict the future:
Except of course it took the rest of the world about two seconds to figure out that filtering the world to only include those with positive feelings was not exactly realistic, and all the app was likely to do was invite an endless stream of abuse, bullying, and stalking.
It wasn't long before people were posting Cordray's personal details online – seemingly culled from the Whois information for domain names she owns. Just to highlight how out of control these things can get, one heavily quoted tweet providing her phone number and home address actually provided the wrong information.
Meanwhile, the company's website at ForThePeeple.com has fallen over.
We'll have this app, of course. I'm interested to see how U.S. and U.K. libel laws deal with it. Or not.
Update: Just looking at their Facebook page, I can't help but wonder if this is just a parody. But no, these women are delusional, and their app is not a new idea—just one that no one before them has ever had the immorality to produce.
Sadly, I think it will be a success.
A Texas high school called the police yesterday when a kid brought a homemade alarm clock to school:
Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.
Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.
So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.
Two questions have been circulating worldwide: Would a kid named Tim Smith have been arrested in similar circumstances? And just how stupid are these people?
Glenn Greenwald reminds us of the obvious:
There are all sorts of obvious, extreme harms that come from being a nation at permanent war. Your country ends up killing huge numbers of innocent people all over the world. Vast resources are drained away from individuals and programs of social good into the pockets of weapons manufacturers. Core freedoms are inexorably and inevitably eroded — seized — in its name. The groups being targeted are marginalized and demonized in order to maximize fear levels and tolerance for violence.
But perhaps the worst of all harms is how endless war degrades the culture and populace of the country that perpetrates it. You can’t have a government that has spent decades waging various forms of war against predominantly Muslim countries — bombing seven of them in the last six years alone — and then act surprised when a Muslim 14-year-old triggers vindictive fear and persecution because he makes a clock for school. That’s no more surprising than watching carrots sprout after you plant carrot seeds in fertile ground and then carefully water them. It’s natural and inevitable, not surprising or at all difficult to understand.
This kind of thing happened in Rome towards the end of the Republic, too.
Senate Democrats blocked a Republican move to kill the Iran nuclear deal, meaning it's pretty much done:
The outcome means the disapproval resolution will not reach Obama's desk, and the nuclear deal will move forward unchecked by Congress.
Senate Republicans are vowing they'll keep on fighting. House Republicans also are still
maneuvering to find a way to stop the international agreement to curb Iran's nuclear program. But those efforts seem unlikely to produce results.
The deal, which Israel's right-wing government vehemently opposes, is clearly in U.S. interests.
I lost my Kindle on the flight to London last week, and only just got its replacement yesterday afternoon. Good thing, too, because I'm loading it up with articles I can't read until later:
And now I have to draft a statement of work...