Eight More Years?

I was wondering why Laura Bush was touring the Mideast last week. It was a little out of character for her, she had been hiding in the background until now. I couldn't help but wonder if the GOP had a dark-horse, secret weapon up their sleeve for 2008-- a pretty little teacher from Texas with a 75% approval rating.

I thought it would be really funny, because the Democrats couldn't say that she had no political experience outside of sleeping with the president, and that the GOP was just using her as a way for the president to skirt the term limit and get an additional eight years. Not if they were running Hillary, they couldn't.

Now it seems that the feelers are out. In a Reuters article today, both the Cheneys have indicated that it was on their minds, which means it is probably being considered.

Chew Chew Train

Imagine if Jeffrey Dahmer had been paroled, became the US ambassador to the United Nations and eventually brought peace to the Mideast. According to the legend, Chief Hiawatha was a Native-American cannibal, who later reformed, and led the nations of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas to live in peace as the Five Nations of the Iroquois. It's a peculiar story if you think about it in modern terms.

It makes me wonder, if it really is possible for a cannibal to reform himself. I always thought cannibalism was a one way trip. Dinner always stops where the hand of the waitress begins.There is a very distinct line between a meal and a psychopathic criminal act, and once that border is crossed, it seems impossible to ever return to a normal life.

I wouldn't want to live next door to a recently paroled cannibal, and I think I might be pretty nervous if I did. I would always be imagining there was somebody sneaking up behind me. If you really develop a taste for your neighbors, can you ever look at them the same way again? Or do you often imagine them looking like giant hams and turkeys out watering the lawn and raking leaves, the way characters sometimes do in the Bugs Bunny cartoons?

I can't see a cannibal ever leading a normal life again. If you are a single woman, how you would feel if a guy you had been out on a couple dates with, confessed over drinks that he had spent some time in prison for cannibalism. I'm pretty sure that would be the last date, but if it wasn't I don't think you'd ever want to spend any time alone with him.

What got me thinking about this, is that the Minneapolis Light Rail System is getting close to its one year anniversary, and it is named the Hiawatha. Quite appropriate, to name the new light rail after a cannibal, since the line cannibalized more than 700 million dollars of Minnesota gas tax and licensing fees, that should have been spent more wisely fixing potholes and building new overpasses.

So much money was cannibalized from the Minnesota transportation budget that while I was there, the Democrat controlled State Senate passed a 10 cent a gallon gas tax, earmarked for road construction. (It was subsequently vetoed by the Republican governor.)

God love those Minnesota Democrats. (In Minnesota, they actually call themselves DFL for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party). Where else would anybody try to raise the price of gas while everybody is complaining about paying two and a quarter a gallon? Heck, back in 2000 even Al Gore was smart enough to scrap his plans to raise gas prices (see: Earth in the Balance, pg. 349) after he saw how ornery Americans got when it rose to only a buck fifty. Quote: "I hope the prices come down quickly, and I'm going to make sure they do."

The train was built with the promises of saving energy, relieving congestion, and looking really cool. They were successful on one promise, it does look cool. The trains are new and shiny and yellow, they look more like amusement park rides than urban transit. I hopped on one, and took a ride down to the Mall of America.

I originally paid $1.75 to get on the train, but after I got my ticket, I noticed that it was quite unnecessary. Whereas most urban transit has some form of turnstile that you have to put a token or a magnetic striped card through before passing onto the train, the Hiawatha does not. In typical Minnesota fashion, they just trust that you will buy a ticket before you get on the train. They claim that occasionally a ticket inspector will get on a train and ask to see a valid ticket, but in an entire afternoon of riding the rail back and forth, I never saw a single inspector. I think a lot of the riders have figured this out as well, because the only people I ever saw buying tickets were the Japanese tourists. It's this kind of trusting nature that helped Minnesota farmers survive together through long cold 19th century winters, and built a generous social welfare program that attracted indigents from all over the country.

I'm not certain why they didn't design a payment verification system into the train. Certainly if this were a private enterprise, with stockholders demanding a return on their 700 million dollar investment, there would be. 700 million is roughly the value of forty fully stocked K-Mart stores. Could you ever imagine a CEO building forty K-Mart stores, and forgetting to install the cash registers?

Perhaps the reason for the oversight is because it is a surface train, and building fences around the stations would have been unsightly in the downtown landscape. Or perhaps, there were two different bureaucratic agencies designing the system, and the people building the trains thought there would be turnstiles, like in a subway; and the people building the stations thought there would be cash machines on the trains, like on streetcars and busses. Most likely, they originally planned to have conductors on all the trains, but figured out later that would cost more in payroll, than the revenue they would be taking in.

Because the trains were quite empty. Even during rush hour, I only counted about 60 rides per train, which was built for 372. When I got to the Mall I noticed there were more people on the roller coaster at Camp Snoopy, than there were on the Hiawatha. Even if the rush hour pace continued throughout the day, it would still fall 20% short of the projected ridership of 19.000 for 2005.

I originally thought that the ridership was up slightly during rush hour because the southbound trains looked fuller. Instead of the usual ten to twelve passengers, It was more like thirty . I then noticed they had reconfigured the train slightly. During the day, most of the trains were two-car trains. During rush hour, all the trains were switched to one-car trains forcing more passengers into each car. I found out later that the project went so over budget (300 million), that they couldn't afford to buy enough cars to keep two-car trains on the rush hour schedule. By splitting each two-car train, into two one-car trains, they were able to provide enough trains to cover the schedule. It really doesn't seem to make sense, because there are the same amount of cars during rush hour as the rest of the day, they just come more often. Instead of two cars coming by every fifteen minutes, one car comes by every seven and one half minutes. It reminds me of the old joke where a moron orders a twelve inch pizza, and asks that it only be cut into four pieces, because he doesn't think he can eat six.

I don't know how running a nearly empty train back and forth across the city all day is supposed to save energy, but there was even a worse renege on the congestion promise. Since the trains run on surface rails, automobile traffic has to stop every time they come by. Since they run a lot of trains (about 256 per day) this causes traffic to back up. Especially during rush hour, when a train crosses from either direction about every three minutes. I tried to count all the irritated motorists at each crossing; there were usually more automobiles waiting, than there were people on the train. Hence, there is more congestion now, than before the train was built. Curiously, Hiawatha means "River Maker," and rivers are always tough to cross without a bridge.

Perhaps these problems, are just because the train is new. It is possible that bugs will get worked out, and the Hiawatha Line will become a viable mass transit system. Someday, it might even turn a profit. But even if there are eight thousand paid fares per day, it will still require a county and state contribution of over 10 million dollars per year just to keep the trains running. Can a cannibal ever really reform?

Good for ME!

Here it is again. Another story about how America is slipping back towards a third world lifestyle, now that DDT has been eliminated. Bedbugs are making a comeback, and not just in sleazy hotels.

from Reuters: "Although common in many countries, bed bugs were all but eliminated in America in the late 1940s and 1950s when the insecticide DDT was used to rid infestations in hotels, houses and boarding rooms."

Due to the transient nature of the comedy business, I travel a lot, and have spent countless nights on strange beds courtesy of the hospitality industry. Having been bitten by bed bugs at a hotel that shall remain nameless (only to protect my reputation-- I refuse to publicly admit that I ever stayed in a less-than-five-star establishment) I can assure you that DDT exposure is far less annoying than little bloodsucking insects crawling all over you in the middle of the night.

For those of you who are skeptical, and are certain that there must be something equally effective at controlling bed bugs, but less dangerous: Let me point out that any substance capable of killing insects is still going to have a big scary chemical name. Why look for something else, when we know that the old reliable is highly effective? It is probably your dirty chemo-phobic hippie lifestyle that brought the bedbugs into these hotels in the first place.

Sunshine Day

So I'm having my morning coffee, and reading the Drudge Report®, when I stumble across this article from Nature. According to two reports published in Science there has been more sunshine in the past ten years than there was fifty years ago. It would seem that the air has gotten so much cleaner since the fall of Communism, that there is a measurable amount of increased sunlight reaching the earth. Because antiquated manufacturing facilities in the Eastern Bloc have been closed, or brought up to Western standards, there is less pollution in the atmosphere worldwide. Not only does that mean the air we breathe is cleaner, it is more transparent. Sunny days are measurably brighter. The Journal Nature, whose reputation is always seeing the beaker as half empty, concluded that the extra sunshine will exacerbate global warming.
I have two thoughts on the topic. First of all, I am mystified how anybody can find fault in more sunshine. (I've always enjoyed it, and most people plan their vacations around pursuit of it.) Environmentalists continually complain about man's influence on the planet, and how we should strive to leave lighter footprints. This is probably the first time that reverting back to a more natural state is considered a problem. Perhaps the scientists over at Nature think that Communism is the natural state of Eastern Europe.
Secondly, I am mystified by the remark in the article by Andreas Macke, a meteorologist at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, "It is clear that the greenhouse effect has been partly masked in the past by air pollution." In other words, global warming would have been a lot worse by now, had the pollution not been shading us.
Here's the strange part: It wasn't until now that climate science has been aware of the effect, which means it wasn't included in the models that climatologists rely on to predict global warming. Martin Wild, an atmospheric scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich said that "The widespread brightening has remained unnoticed until now simply because there wasn't enough data for a statistically significant analysis." But yet we are told the climate models predicting a warming earth were severely accurate.
Perhaps I'm just not well trained in the ways of science, but it would seem to me, that cannot be true. If the models were incomplete, they should have been spitting out the wrong numbers for the past ten years and the earth should have been getting warmer at a rate higher than the predictions. But scientists have denied this, they've been saying their models are deadly accurate. So If the model predictions directly correspond to observations, and the additional sunlight was never taken into account, it means the models have been wrong. Either way, the result is the same; climatology is a very hypothetical science, still in its adolescence. Also note, this proves another speculation I've always held, that atmospheric scientists have a tendency to look on the darker side of things, and always err on the side of apocalypse. Remember that the next time you hear somebody suggest Americans were foolish to ignore the Kyoto Accord.