City Comforts, the blog

War on terror? What war on terror?

Texas Raises Its Limit to 80 MPH

"Our mission is to go and seek out whether we can fulfill the requests of the driving public," said Mark Cross, spokesman for the state transportation department. "And the request from the public is they want to go faster."

Or, depending on your politics, "Global climate change? What climate change?"

Which translation of the Constitution do you prefer?

I happened upon a timely post (by Pierre Tristam) which stated that English Is Not the National Language and in the comments he went further and suggested:

"Language is not the only thing that preserves us as a nation...And the Constitution (certainly a more defining glue than language) can be spoken in any language and have the same power."

The US Constitution in any language? Fascinating concept.

"the Constitution...can be spoken in any language and have the same power."

Well yes it would have a great deal of power, I am sure, in any language. But would you want to run our US courts under foreign translations? (I ask that literally as this whole business of "national" or "official" language is not a theoretical question but comes down to a whole lot of very practical and tangible things like pleadings in court and street signs.)

If anything suggests that we do have a national language — and that it is English — it would be the language of our law. It's so obvious — hat's off to Tristam for suggesting it — that I had never thought of it before. So I would ask this question of any who oppose (or disbelieve) the idea that we have (or should have) a "national language:"*

Should we allow translations of the Constitution to be used in US Courts as the basis for lawsuits?

Should you be allowed to plead that some planning department has overstepped its bounds by  issuing (or refusing to issue) a building permit and cite as your authority a version of the US Constitution in Dutch? Or Swahili? Or one of the dozens and dozens of mother tongues spoken by American citizens?

I really can't fathom that anyone could suggest "Yes, we should translate the Constitution into many languages. And use them all in our Courts."

So it seems to me that if you say "No, you have to cite the original version in English" then your are agreeing that we do have a national language. We do not have multiple versions of the Constitution and you have to refer back to it in the original language, which perforce becomes the baseline for all social agreement.

Such a rule — the Constitution can only be cited in English — is sensible in so many ways that I don't think I need to explore it beyond saying that the first and most obvious reason is that we already have enormous difficulty interpreting the Constitution in one language. To add more versions would be madness.

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* I'm leaving open what having a "national language" means in practice. Tristam makes some good points that having a "national academy" (as do the French) to keep the language pure would be stupid and self-defeating and really impossible to accomplish. But there are lots of questions — for example, Are there any rights or duties relating to bi- or multi-lingualism? — which I think can be fairly debated, though their answers to me are quite clear.

The Retrofit is the only politically-realistic solution.

Perhaps out-of-town readers are getting bored with the Viaduct. Well, so are we here in Seattle. But it's been more than 5 years since the earthquake and our political leadership doesn't know what to do, yet it wants us to pony-up billions. Here's my compressed take, much of which will make no sense without a knowledge of Seattle politics and geography. Sorry.

Additional & essential background (including the infamous the "Westlake Mall Phenomenon") in this post: 'You can't get there from here.'

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Now, we start the analysis:

1. The Surface Option will gain just-enough political traction (and I mean a fair amount but nothing close to a commanding plurality) to scare the Governor into seeing the big unavoidable political fact of what I call the "Westlake Mall Phenomenon": Once you tear down the viaduct, you can't replace it. (Or only with enormous political cost.)

2. One (and only one) of those political costs is to the Democratic Party, and there are national implications: 

Do we want the "D" in "Democrat" to become a standing joke for "Dither?"

That's what the public administration of this State (largely Democratic) and City (entirely Democratic) will stand for if it cannot make a decision on the Viaduct. The very worst thing which can happen to a politician — looking like a bumbler; anyone remember Jimmy Carter or Michael Dukakis? — is not that far away. Five years after the earthquake and we still don't have a plan, much less are under construction. It is embarrassing.

(And btw, that is not a comment on Carter or Dukakis, in substance. I think both got a bad rap. I am simply talking about the raw, mean politics of the sound bite. "D as in Dither" is not bad.)

3. So the Rebuild is a non-starter. (Once you tear down the viaduct, you can't replace it.) The entire notion of tearing down a structure (which only a small part of the population actually like) and then putting up the same thing (or worse) is bizarre. (We all know the Rebuild was only a stalking-horse for the Tunnel i.e. to make the Tunnel look not-that-expensive.)

4. There is not enough money for any Tunnel, much less doing it right (i.e. which would be tunneling all the way to Mercer so as to re-connect the street-grid between South Lake Union and Queen Anne.)

5. The Retrofit is the only option left standing. Btw, it also leaves money left over to work on SR 520 which is a nice side-benefit for the Eastside. Handled intelligently, it would make the Mayor and City Council look like heroes — "We saved a  billion dollars by going with the Retrofit! So let's use it for the benefit of the Eastside!"

The Governor is a smart woman. She will get tired of all the blather about twenty blocks of highway and realize that she will get tarred with the brush — there goes that Cabinet post (Attorney General?) in a Democratic Presidency — if "D as In Dither" is traced back to her State. She will get it in due course.

The Governor will end up declaring an emergency based on "new engineering information" and adopt the Retrofit as an immediate necessity. Such an emergency action would foreclose any environmental lawsuits and make her look decisive in the face of bumbling local officials, which would be so.

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Just an aside. It's easy to confuse what one wants with what is realistic. I seem to give short-shrift here to the so-called "surface option" but not because I think it an unrealistic option in reality. In some form such as a 35 MPH Boulevard it might very well work. But the real world does not work in reality but in mental perception. And I do not believe it is within the political imagination over the next 18 months to deal with the complexity of the surface option. It's just too dammed complicated and contentious. The pay-back for politicians — the perceived risk-to-reward — is simply too high. It's too unconventional etc etc. Its adoption by the electeds would unleash numerous lawsuits, reinforcing the idea that Democrats offer "inept management," an issue on which they are all too vulnerable.

•••

Stefan Sharkanksy's take:

While I agree that the Retrofit is the only objectively realistic solution, I've been in Seattle just long enough to see that realism only rarely contaminates the decision process of Seattle's political leadership. If I had to guess, I'd say that a political tug-of-war between competing unrealistic solutions will continue indefinitely.

1:1...which could have been titled "Co-Starring Le Corbusier"

The Seattle Film Festival is on and I've just returned from the world premier (indeed!) of 1:1 (En til En):

The love affair between a Danish girl and a Palestinian emigrant is rocked to its core when her brother is found beaten half to death and all suspicions point towards the local Arab community. Mistrust and racial animosity bubble to the surface in this tough drama about the lack of tolerance and understanding between cultures.

It was quite good and timely on several counts. The issue of immigration and the relations between Christian and Muslim cultures in Europe appears paramount.

But I wonder if a "co-star" of the movie was the housing project — inspired by Le Corbusier and Robert Moses? — where the protagonists and their families lived. The film-makers made sure we didn't miss the importance of the physical context. The movie starts with a view of the town's plan which then morphs into an aerial photo. Then we see flashbacks to the 50s or 60s (real ones, not staged, I think) showing the origins of the place, with voice-over by its designer specifically explaining his philosophy: a perfect place where "cars and pedestrians would never mix." It's only after that explicit placement of the drama in a 1950s-60s housing project that the drama begins. And to my eyes, which I admit are always looking for a spatial hook, the violence in the movie was clearly abetted by the vulnerability of solitary isolated pedestrians in the midst of sterile "open space."

Highly recommended if only as a story of two families.

The local hippie paper, The Stranger, says:.

As far as I know, there's no equivalent Danish term for the banlieus that ring Paris, but this excellent feature about racial tension among teens in a "prefabricated township" outside Copenhagen follows in the well-marked footsteps of French films like Lila Says and Games of Love and Chance (both SIFF 2005). The girl (Joy Petersen) is European and extremely pretty; the boy (Mohammed-Ali Baker) is Palestinian and also extremely pretty. Their siblings are thugs (the Palestinian is a boxer; the Dane uses racist slang), and violence between the thugs poisons their pretty love. Despite the familiar plot, the drama is precise and harrowing. Annie Wagner

(I don't see Annie Wagner's attempt at equivalence; the genesis of the problem is from dishonesty in only one family. But see the movie yourself.)

It's worth repeating

Don't look to higher oil prices as a savior.

MoMA's prison wall

Culture Girl takes note of The 54th Street Prison Wall:

This is understated elegance? What was Taniguchi thinking when he decked out MoMA's northern facade in unsightly, instantly dirty-looking corrugated metal siding? And what are those forbidding prison gates, blocking the man-on-the-street from getting a view of the beloved sculpture garden? I was at the City Planning Commission deliberations where they said they wanted some "transparency" from the garden to the street. Instead, it's "Keep Out."

I am actually partial to metal siding but in it's proper place. The problem with the sculpture garden facade is of course not that it is made of metal siding but that it is a blank wall and blank walls do not belong on any street which is meant to attract pedestrians. (Some wag will now tell me that it's part of Taniguchi's overall intention to create a buffer of fear around the Museum...and that that is part of the art...blah blah blah.)

My overall take on MoMA? Not even a precious object. And that's about as low as I can go.

Come the floods, Seattle will be in good shape

I don't want to make light of global climate change*.

But if global climate change continues and the seas rise further, Seattle will not be a bad place to be after the deluge.

via Crooked Timber's "Swimming with the fishes".

*(Yes, I believe the vast majority of scientists who both state that it is happening and that human agency is the major cause. It's a bit more of a question about what to do. The great failure of GW Bush, besides Iraq, is not that he rejected Kyoto but that he has not suggested anything to replace it. )

Should France and Holland have different laws on landfills?

Tim Worstall comments on an article by Garton Ash on Diversity and suggests "No.":

The EU is setting rules at the centre which apply to all, undermining that vital diversity and thus cocking up the system. Just as one trivial example, countries such as France, with masses of wild open space and low population density, must follow the same laws on landfill as tiny crowded places like Holland.

I am fascinated that he would use landfill as an example.

Knowing little of Europe, but the same applies here — just substitute King County (fairly urban) and Okanogan County (mountain & ranchland) in my own State of Washington — I wonder if there should be very different laws.

Certainly the limitations on what and how should be the same pretty-much everywhere e.g. no toxics, must be compactable/compacted, layers of soil etc etc...I am not upon the details but I am pretty sure that there is a proper way to do a garbage dump (that's what it is, of course) and a sloppy, careless way which leads to water pollution problems and doesn't produce usable, buildable land when the site is completely filled. (Of course compaction requirements might be different in the rural place. Maybe. And I say "maybe" because none of these rural places are so far off the beaten path that we should not expect and encourage development in them over the next 50 - 100 years.)

I might imagine the locational criteria might be looser in the rural area. But not really, as I suspect you want to keep minimum distances from settlements, which of course is a whole lot easier in the low-density area. But that is not a matter of regulations but simply the fact that you have fewer people. And you certainly wouldn't want to put a garbage dump in a marsh — there are so many reasons for prohibiting that, water pollution problems at the top of the list.

So is there a principled way — will of the local people aside — to regulate landfills differently in very rural areas (but not "wilderness" in the American legal sense) versus more built-up areas?

The old school speaks

One old boy says don't leave viaduct decision up to voters.

The Mayor and City Council should make the decision even though he clearly doesn't trust their competence either.

Seattle is getting stranger and stranger.

I'd be cautious about spoofing when my own proposal is a "big-dig"

Nickels tries satire to drum up interest in waterfront tunnel

Mayor Greg Nickels, in a speech Wednesday touting the tunnel to the Rotary Club of Seattle, played a two-minute video spoofing the viaduct controversy by quoting an imaginary "Committee to Save Big Ugly Things," whose spokesman uttered tongue-in-cheek warnings about removing the viaduct from the waterfront.

(video link at newsstory)

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And judging from that headline — "Nickels tries satire to drum up interest in waterfront tunnel" — the thinking at the P-I must be that the tunnel is a dead duck.