Entries associated with the tag "Chicago":

Admit it. You've always wanted to know where Chicago's last wood-block pavement, tied houses, and black-on-yellow street signs are -- not to mention what became of Almond Street and DeKalb Avenue. Now you can, because the folks at Forgotten Chicago remember. (The "tied houses" are a parable of do-gooder regulation backfiring.) The site is Not Safe For Work...because if you are a true Chicago geek you may well forget to do any.

H/t to the Newberry Library.

From the website of the Chicago Reporter:

"Nearly half of Chicago police officers sued for fatally shooting civilians were previously sued for misconduct. Some say that should be a warning sign, but is anyone paying attention?"

For those who are, the Reporter and ColorLines magazine have developed a database of police shootings since 2000.

Lead reporter Jeff Kelly Lowenstein:

"The Chicago Reporter examined 85 fatal police shootings since 2000 and identified 17 wrongful death suits filed in federal court using the victims’ names. Though the Chicago Police Department does not disclose the names of officers who shoot civilians, the Reporter found the names of 20 officers who were identified in the lawsuits as a shooter. The Reporter’s investigation into the officers’ previous litigation history found that nine—or 45 percent—of them had been sued previously in either federal or circuit court."

Bear in mind that there are 13,000 Chicago cops. So this group is neither characteristic of the department nor too large to get the careful attention it deserves.

"These police officers’ actions, which have cost the city more than $7 million, resulted in lawsuits that were filed at the same time when most fatal police shootings appear to be declared justified."

Really, if you want to govern halfway decently, all you have to do is ask yourself, "What would George W. Bush do?" and then do the opposite. So I can't beef too much about the Progressive States Network. Except when they're simplistic and Pollyannaish.

Simplistic, as when they tout state or regional "cap and trade" systems for controlling carbon dioxide emissions, without acknowledging why such programs need to be national and, probably, international -- namely, that it may be cheaper for CO2 emitters to move their emissions than to curtail them. (I should add that this willful blindness to Econ 101 when trying to "do something" is not unique to PSN.)

Pollyannaish, as when they do a drive-by on Illinois' trainwreck of a legislative session using the hilariously inappropriate headline, "Progress Amidst Conflict." Their summary gives equal space to a new law forbidding state pension funds from investing in companies associated with Sudan and to the transit situation (which account I quote in its entirety): "The legislature also failed to pass any fiscal relief for the ailing Chicago Transit Authority, causing likely fare hikes, layoffs, and service cuts." Progressives are better served by Oregon US Rep. Peter DeFazio's harsh words, front-paged by the Chicago Tribune: "The state and the governor are walking away from a minimal responsibility to maintain an existing system."

You gotta like Witold Rybczynski. In Slate last week, not only did he praise Chicago's Harold Washington Library Center, he did so in the form of a slide show accompanied by actual reasoned text, not the jittery and isolated clauses of PowerPointspeak.

Rybczynski's making what I take to be a fairly conservative point, since he's riffing on a forthcoming book, The Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Disfigured a Practical Art, written by cranky former Boston University president John Silber and praised by (shudder) George Will. But it's also a point often made by those of us who wish architects paid more attention to the people who have to live and work in their creations.

In the case of our library, Rybczynski calls it "decorated architecture" and a "Beaux-Arts box," adding that its architects Hammond, Beeby & Babka "simplified the form of the building, which allowed them to increase the quality of the materials. The interior walls, for example, are hand-laid plaster, rather than cheap wallboard; furniture is durable oak, rather than metal and plastic."

OK, but I've never been crazy about the building's internal circulation -- I mean, the long and convoluted path one has to take to get to the books. At the risk of being accused of piling provincialism on reaction, I'd have to say that the new Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana (which also occupies an entire city block in a downtown), does a better job of welcoming its many users. And, in the sense we're using here, it's not an icon either.

My grandfather worked security at the 1933-34 Chicago world's fair, "A Century of Progress." But until I saw Lisa Schrenk's new book Building a Century of Progress, I had no idea what a non-sinecure that was:

"The start of the extravagant closing ceremony also served as a spontaneous signal for a growing crescendo of carnivalesque hysteria to spin out of control. Hordes of fairgoers began appropriating unique mementos of the magnificent event. In the Halloween-night frenzy, people broke into many of the exhibition pavilions and walked away with furniture, light fixtures, signs, and decorative building details. Not a shred of the sixty-five pennants that lined the Avenue of Flags that day survived. Even shrubs and trees were yanked out of the ground. Guards, many of whom ended the night requiring first aid, did their best to combat the full-scale pillaging. ...Fortunately, most of the damage was to objects that were already scheduled for disposal as part of the planned demolition of the exposition." (page 254)

Schrenk teaches at Norwich University and used to be education director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation. In fairness, her generously illustrated book is more concerned about the Apollonian architecture than the Dionysian society surrounding it. The designers, she writes, sought to create "a distinctively American modern architecture that was clearly relevant to the times." (page 4) Most regular people, however, opted for colonial. Evidently they didn't take to heart the fair's amazing motto: "SCIENCE FINDS -- INDUSTRY APPLIES -- MAN CONFORMS."

Hear from the author yourself Thursday evening 6:30 pm at Roosevelt University ($).

Reader readers knew about Wangari Maathai and her tree-planting Green Belt Movement more than a decade before she won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize -- and before a change of Kenyan government turned her from an activist on the run to Kenya's assistant minister for the environment.

She got her higher education in the US in the 1960s, and not all of it in the classroom. As she told the Progressive in 2005, "While I was in the United States, Kenya became independent from the British, in 1963. For me, it was a moment to celebrate that finally we were free, as Martin Luther King was crying out at that time. And I thought we were going to enjoy our freedom, we were going to be happy, we were not going to be oppressed anymore. Little did I know what lay ahead. But when I encountered violations of human rights by my own people, my experience in the United States gave me the courage to stand up and say this is not right."

She's back in town this weekend to discuss her book Unbowed: A Memoir at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel, cosponsored by the university and the Chicago Humanities Festival (Sunday -- free but reservations required), and to dedicate a native woodlands garden at the Al Raby High School for Community and Environment at 3545 West Fulton (Saturday). 

"No building can be considered truly green unless it's in a green urban neighborhood" -- that's how the Chicago-based Congress for New Urbanism puts it in the press release announcing the 238 pilot projects that will test out the LEED for Neighborhood Developments standard.

Chicagoans involved in the development of these standards include architect Doug Farr, the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Sharon Feigon, and CNU's John Norquist and Susan Mudd. Chicago-area developments involved in piloting the standards are 108 North State (AKA Block 37), South Chicago LEED ND initiative, Prairie Crossing's Station Village in Grayslake, Briar Ridge in Northbrook, and Whistler Crossing in Riverdale. (Full list in PDF here).

The voluntary rating system will rank neighborhoods on standards grouped into three categories:

* smart location and linkage, including "brownfield redevelopment" (worth up to 2 points) and "reduced automobile dependence" (up to 8 points);

* neighborhood pattern and design, including "affordable rental housing" (up to 2 points) and "walkable streets" (up to 8 points);

* green construction and technology, including "solar orientation" (1 point) and "stormwater management" (up to 5 points).

Read all the pilot standards so far in a 161-page PDF here.

Paul Street, formerly of the Chicago Urban League and now blogging from Iowa City, summarizes the Democratic front runners' position on reviving nuclear power, and questions Obama's image construction as opposed to his reality:

"Edwards has the right answer: nukes cost too much and are unsafe.  Hillary waffles but agrees with Edwards that nukes are too dangerous at present.  It's left to Obama to actually advocate 'explor[ing] nuclear power as part of the energy mix' (as if it hasn't already been deeply explored for decades and found to be [a] too expensive and [b] too unsafe)."

Whence Obama's position?

"For a big part of the answer, please follow this link to Barack Obama's  'Top Contributors' on the 'Open Secrets' web site of the Center for Responsive Politics - the venerable campaign finance watchdog group in Washington DC.  There you will see that Obama's third largest campaign contributor (after Goldman Sachs and Lehman Bros.) so far is Exelon Corporation ($191,000 through the second quarter of 2007).  Exelon is the parent company of Chicago's notorious Commonwealth Edison utility and is owner and operator of what it calls the "nation’s largest fleet of nuclear energy plants."

Obama's already shown a depressing willingness to truckle to the worst of the Democratic Party -- its unwanted and unnecessary intervention in the suburban primary race to replace Henry Hyde, and its coronation of an incompetent County Board chairman on the hereditary principle. Is this more of the same, or just a reasonable difference of opinion?

I wasn't too thrilled a few months back when Conscious Choice gave generous marks to the city of Chicago on sustainability ("Grade inflation in transit world"). Now in the new In These Times -- yet another can't-skip periodical on my list -- Michael Burgner reports that CC editor Charles Shaw has declined to provide the magazine's 11-point sustainability evaluation system to a senior fellow at the Army Environmental Policy Institute. Said Shaw, "Why would I want to make the army a more efficient, sustainable killing machine?....They see that green is sexy and cool and that people don’t like oil corporations right now. They think they can dress themselves up with it.”

I take his point: a torture prison with a green roof isn't something an American should be proud of. But did Shaw ever ask himself the same question about the corruption machine that is the city of Chicago under Richard M. Daley?

2007 isn't just the year of the money in Springfield, it may also be the year of the process -- and if you believe some good-government advocates, a better process might be just what the CTA needs for a life-saving cash transfusion. Now that the Capital Investment Accountability Act has passed out of committee and into the full house, here's the simple version; you can also check out the Daily Southtown opinion piece by Michael McLaughlin of the Metropolitan Planning Council.

The bill (House Bill 801, same as Senate Bill 1582) sets up four state transportation goals. Everything the state spends on transportation is supposed to contribute to:

(1) efficiency -- meaning reducing delays and unreliability, shifting modes (probably from cars to transit but it doesn't say) and managing demand,

(2) economic development -- that is, putting money back into local and state economies,

(3) integration of land use and transportation planning, and

(4) safety -- meaning reducing crashes, increasing security, and encouraging use of "physically active modes" (presumably walking and biking, as opposed to driving).

If the bill is passed, a new Statewide Prioritization Committee will turn these four goals into 5-10 specific criteria for judging all proposed highway, railroad, and transit projects. Judging will be done by each Metropolitan Planning Organization on the local level, a new District Prioritization Committee for each of the state's nine transportation districts at the regional level, and the statewide committee for statewide projects. (FYI Chicago's six-county region is one district.) Within limits, the lower-level groups can each choose how to weight the criteria but they can't just trash 'em.

Top-scoring projects get passed up to the statewide committee, which puts them all together, and on January 15, 2009, the statewide committee is to deliver its "comprehensive project prioritization plan" to the General Assembly and the governor. (If Illinois' political culture should reassert itself and members of the General Assembly decide to clout through something that didn't pass muster normally, they'd have to do it in public, but the law doesn't otherwise constrain them by requiring supermajority votes or anything.)

In other words, a public process to generate rail, road, and bus plans based on stated goals and professional expertise, not political clout. 

Will this complex but transparent and open process inspire more tax support for transportation, including Chicago-area mass transit? That's one of MPC's goals, but for the CTA there's little good news yet, as Sick Transit Chicago reports.

An hour and a half on the late train at the end of a long day is a recipe for walking insomnia -- can't get comfortable, can't sleep, can't concentrate on the day's mail, you know the drill. But the other night I got lucky, because my shoulder bag contained a fresh copy of Nothing: Something to Believe In, by Nica Lalli.

For Chicago history buffs it includes a child's-eye view of William Singer's mayoral campaign against Richard I. For religion buffs a dismayingly honest account of her various encounters with organized religion as the child of Italian and Jewish parents with no religious affiliations. For me, it did what a good book does. When I looked up, it was an hour later and my surroundings were unfamiliar. For a moment, I thought I'd read right past my stop.

The Chicago Tribune's 2-part series on families moving ever farther out from the city had a nice conceit -- watching how people cycle through an inner-suburban Berwyn bungalow and where they go afterward. But with all the talk about looking for the right shops in exurban Yorkville, there was little said about the tradeoff of more driving (to work and everywhere else) involved in spreading out so far. And nary a mention of the Center for Neighborhood Technology's ongoing work on a housing + transportation index, which will allow people to check suburban and exurban "affordability" more realistically by factoring transportation costs into the decision on where or whether to move. (In addition to what's on CNT's Web site, a user-friendly version of the index is expected to be out by July.)

Keep in mind, of course, that CNT's no fan of "sprawl." But why does the local paper of record need to be?

A recent Illinois law requires the 49 municipalities in the state with less than 10 percent affordable housing -- all affluent suburbs of Chicago -- to come up with plans to make it easier for working people to live there. Charles Hoch, who teaches urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has read the plans submitted by the 36 suburbs that chose to comply. His report appears in the winter issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association, not available online to nonmembers. A 2005 PDF version of the report is here; a recent press release here.

Hoch wasn't impressed. "Only five of the documents described how changes in local housing policy objectives and regulations could foster affordable housing on local sites. Most plans included short bullet lists of generalized regulatory, administrative, and fiscal incentives. They used vivid language to explain their commitment to current [i.e., exclusionary] land use, and vague language to explain their commitment to affordable housing. Each had a unique and compelling description of the hardship compliance would create, and a derived and dreamy description of the policies and regulations they would use to foster affordable housing."

He gives details on Highland Park's plan, which is serious, and Wilmette's, which is not. He also decries the state's lack of follow-up: "In Illinois the state housing development agency received no funds to implement the act. The most innovative leadership came from the planners and community development activists selected from local nonprofit organizations and the few municipalities with affordable housing policies in place. These people were invited by the state finance agency to help ccordinate subregional workshops for local municipal officials and staff in the months after the new state law was enacted. The lack of active, dedicated, and competent state planning staff in Illinois placed responsibility for sustained planning support of this type in the hands of nonprofit and philanthropic agencies."

There's something inherently funny (if not annoying) about "National Historic Chemical Landmarks," but organizers of the American Chemical Society convention at McCormick Place in March came up with five landmarks conferees can visit. Three of them are hours out of town -- two downstate (in Urbana and Peoria) and one on the far side of Indianapolis (in Greencastle).

In the Chicago area there's only Universal Oil Products' Riverside Laboratory in McCook, where scientists patented almost 9,000 commercial applications of petroleum between 1921 and '55 -- and Hull House, home base of pioneer industrial toxicologist and occupational-health physician Alice Hamilton. One landmark for the polluter, one for the pollution fighter. Hey, it all goes into the GDP.

Conscious Choice has graded the City of Chicago on 11 aspects of sustainability, one of which is whether we have a "world class transit system." The magazine didn't just pull their B- grade out of a hat, they asked some knowledgeable folks:

"Dr. Howard Ehrman from the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization says that no other city in the U.S. 'comes anywhere close to the lack of funding for public transportation than the city of Chicago.' Ehrman says that for the last 32 years the city has spent $3 million per year, or $1 per person out of the city’s budget, on the CTA. The next city up the ladder, Pittsburgh, spends $33 million, and only has a population of 334,562: ten times as much as Chicago spends, for just one-tenth of the people. New York City spends $200 million, Los Angeles, $165 million. Clearly, here is one obvious opportunity for rather substantial change.'

"According to Jackie Leavy, of the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, which looks out for the meaningful neighborhood use of tax money, Mayor Daley should use some of the money from the lease of the toll road and the underground parking garages to bolster the CTA. 'The city gives only three million dollars a year to the agency and goes begging to Springfield when fiscal crises loom. It is time for the mayor to use more city money to repair and improve the CTA. It is also time to get the universal fare card going to allow transfers between suburban and city transit.'"

There's more, but no discussion of the ghastly prospects on the Red Line, and no mention of the rampant corruption within the Daley administration. What were they thinking? For a realistic assessment, see Greg Hinz's piece at Crain's.

The sizzle may be in Chicago, but the steak is being cooked in Springfield. Our transit, roads, schools, health care, and planning in general are in the hands not of the City Council, but of a state government mired in deficit spending. For that reason, much as I hate the nonconcept "most underrated," I have to say I think the bipartisan Center on Tax and Budget Accountability is the most underrated Chicago policy shop going.

Among those who haven't drunk the anti-tax Kool-Aid, many think 2007 is the year something will finally get done in Springfield -- but not everyone agrees on what that should be. Key points from CTBA's annual fiscal symposium last week:

• CTBA released its own new study (summarized here) documenting Illinois' "structural deficit" -- showing that state taxes are both unfair and inefficient. Illinois' "low, flat income tax places a much greater tax burden on low and middle income taxpayers than affluent taxpayers," and "its sales tax structure fails to track the modern economy." So they fail to produce enough money to balance the budget even with zero growth in programs or expenditures.

• Mike Lawrence, longtime Springfield journalist and a top staffer in Governor Jim Edgar's administration, invoked the example of another Republican governor, Richard Ogilvie (who instituted the state income tax 38 years ago), but added that controlling spending is just as important as adding revenue.

• R. Eden Martin of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club reiterated both halves of that group's proposal: cut costs and raise revenues. In particular, change the public schools' incentive structure by allowing more charter schools. Putting more money into an unchanged monopoly would be "mostly wasted," he said. Many audience members didn't get it and others just disagreed. (Full report here, PDF.)

• You might think taxes for transportation maintenance and improvement would be a slam dunk, but Mary Sue Barrett of the Metropolitan Planning Council says Illinois needs a single transportation planning process to beat down public cynicism and make sure we actually build what's most needed. Such a priority-setting process would fall under the new Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (C-MAP) -- but how would it encompass Moving Beyond Congestion, the current campaign to lobby the General Assembly specifically for more money for the RTA, CTA, Metra, and Pace?

• Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First pushed Gold Collar (PDF), his group's new report on how state business incentives go where they're least needed (well covered by Stephen Franklin in the Tribune). In times of heightened capital mobility, he said, public money should be invested in things unlikely to move away, including a well-educated workforce.

CTBA director Ralph Martire had the last word:  "If Illinois were a separate country, its economy would be the 27th largest in the world, bigger than Ireland, Saudi Arabia, or Greece. And we can't talk about raising taxes?"

In September the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board allowed Advocate Health Care to downsize Bethany Hospital on the west side and turn it into a specialty hospital for long-term care. This past weekend Advocate announced it will seek to open a new hospital in the far-northwestern suburb of Round Lake. For details check out the Blogging Mayor of Round Lake, by mayor and real estate agent Bill Gentes, which includes links to newspaper stories. Crain's gives the most background. Round Lake will issue bonds to buy a key parcel for Advocate.

Advocate -- a chain whose hospitals have roots in Lutheranism, the United Church of Christ, and (at Bethany) the Church of the Brethren -- is the biggest health care provider in Illinois and the second largest private employer of any kind in Chicago. It has long denied that it's abandoning needy city residents for suburban ones. I covered the dispute in the Reader on December 16, 2005, where I wrote of the chain's biggest adversary, the Service Employees International Union:

"The union claims that the forces of health care capitalism are pulling Advocate away from its religious and charitable roots. 'Advocate isn't losing money,' says Joseph Geevarghese, an attorney and director of the union's Hospital Accountability Project. 'They have the resources to do more than just keep the doors open [which at that time was the issue at Bethany]. The incentives are all for hospitals to act like Wal-Mart and IBM.' For example, the chain has to borrow money for its big projects, and if it wants the best interest rates it needs to show healthy returns -- the lenders aren't asking themselves what Jesus would do."

What's the difference between West Garfield Park and western Lake County? Both areas have surpluses of hospital beds. As the map in Crain's makes clear, Round Lake isn't exactly in a hospital desert. And a for-profit chain is already seeking to open a hospital nearby. But the west side has a health care crisis, and Lake County has paying customers. Advocate has plenty of incentives to follow the money; what would it do if union and church people weren't dogging it at every turn?

Voters didn't seem much interested in Republican Judy Baar Topinka's fiscal-responsibility message in the November governor's race (perhaps because her party's president hasn't shown much interest in it either). But the dire consequences of Rod Blagojevich's spend-and-don't-tax regime can't be ignored forever. The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability issued a report on state pension funds November 28. We've been skipping payments again. Full report here (PDF). The gist from Illinois Channel:

"'Illinois public pension liabilities are growing out of control, and the state's failure to pay keeps making them worse,' said Chrissy Mancini, Director of Budget and Policy Analysis for CTBA, a bipartisan fiscal think tank based in Chicago. 'If lawmakers don't act to meet these obligations now, the cost of catching up later will force cuts to education, health care and other essential public services.'

"The report concluded that, because Illinois has the nation's fewest state employees per capita, ranks 42nd in state spending per capita, and offers public pension benefits no richer than the national average, the pension debt can only be solved by adding revenue. The best available option is to fix 'the state's poorly designed tax system [that] doesn't grow with the economy' or produce enough revenue to fund both state services and pension obligations."

You can argue with 'em here or attend CTBA's annual fiscal symposium in Chicago January 17.  John McCarron's Chicago Tribune column is also relevant.

Not everyone gets to choose, of course, but I was surprised to read colleenabean's experience comparing people catching the el to those catching a Metra train:

"Commuters on the CTA walk briskly but they aren't crazed. They move with purpose but not in a maddened state of panic like the Metra commuters do. Everyone is funneling themselves into different doorways with complete disregard for everyone else around. They have a train to catch dammit, they do this everyday, get the fuck out of the way."

Then she had to get into a Metra car:  "The vestibule was packed with standing passengers. Like the robot I am, I shoved my way on. I got many dirty looks. Oops. This isn't CTA where we all tolerate standing uncomfortably close to one another for a few stops. This is a long commute and I broke a rule of suburban commuting. I then noticed that while everyone's jammed in the vestibule, there's no one standing in the isles between the seated passengers."

She was happy to get back on the el, but some commenters report quite a difference between Union Station and other Metra venues, such as Northwestern (excuse me, Ogilvie) and Randolph Street.  How about you?

Writing at Carfree Chicago, Lake Claremont Press announces that it's entertaining proposals from anyone who'd like to write a guide to living car-free in Chicago. Possible topics include "lifestyle nuts and bolts and bonuses, societal/environmental/cost/health rewards for a carfree choice, the transportation gamut (public, car sharing, taxis, walking, cycling), and maybe even the far-out, just for fun (blading, scooters, canoe, boat taxis)."

And don't forget the need to lobby for a transit system that runs often enough, and fast enough, and far enough, to be a decent alternative. Hmmm... maybe you should skip the book and apply for Frank Kruesi's job instead.

For seasonally appropriate inspiration, please click on the adorable gingerbread replica of the el's Francisco station, from Wendy Mc (more at her flickr photostream) via broan33 at LiveJournal.  Gives new meaning to "Brown Line," doncha think? 

Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway get the 2007 muckraking season off to a great start with a Mother Jones story on the privatization of the Chicago Skyway and the Indiana Toll Road into which it feeds. As they see it, the city of Chicago and the state of Indiana got taken to the cleaners.

First, they were dealing with Goldman Sachs, which acted as an adviser to Chicago and Indiana -- and as an investor in both deals. "When Goldman Sachs began advising Indiana on selling its toll road, it failed to mention to the state that it was putting together a fund whose sole purpose would be to pick up infrastructure for the best price possible in order to maximize returns for its investors.  Nor did the bank advertise the fact that, even as it was advising Indiana on how to get the best return, its Australian subsidiary's mutual funds were ... becoming de facto investors in the deal."

Second, the deal screwed the public, particularly in Chicago. For instance, if the Skyway's new owners decided to start charging by the time of day, and long-haul truckers responded by taking surface streets instead, the city could face congestion problems it wouldn't be able to control until the lease runs out -- in 2103.

Finally, in the words of Oregon congressman Peter DeFazio, "When you look at the Chicago Skyway, that's even worse.  They are not even reinvesting the proceeds of the sale in transportation.  They're using them for operating costs.  That would be like anybody selling their assets in order to live.  You can't sell your assets very long to put food on the table -- before long you're out of assets."  [SEE UPDATE IN COMMENTS -- THIS IS ONLY PARTLY TRUE.]

Here's a brief and cogent critique (PDF) of both deals, as presented to a House subcommittee May 24 by privatization supporter John Foote of Harvard.

If you look at the entire country, excluding New York City, 4.5 million people work at home, and only 3.7 million take mass transit to work. That's from the Census Bureau's 2005 American Communities Survey, by way of Wendell Cox at the Heartland Institute.  He concludes, "Perhaps it is time to think about paying people to work at home rather than paying transit to not carry people."

Ever since the folks at Heartland went on an antiscience crusade I don't quote them without checking the source.  Sure enough, Cox is fudging -- not by falsifying the numbers but by aggregating them to support his thesis and by ignoring the fact that many people don't have access to mass transit (most people of course drive to work).

Take the Census Bureau's figures for the seven-county Chicago area: In Cook County 68,000 work at home and 388,000 take transit to work. In Du Page County:  21,000 and 28,000. Will County:  10,000 and 14,000. Lake County, Indiana:  4,000 and 6,000. McHenry County:  6,000 and 6,000.

Cox's thesis is borne out in only two counties. In Lake County:  14,000 work at home and 13,000 take transit. In Kane County:  10,000 and 6,000.

Clearly in Chicagoland, except at the fringes, more people take transit to work than work at home. 

Irony alert:  if you were determined to pass a uniform transportation policy for the whole country (minus NYC), then Cox's breakdown of the figures would make sense.  If you were a sincere conservative or libertarian, believing in local choice and adaptation, you'd be more interested in the numbers given above.

New rankings are out at America's Most Literate Cities, 2006, and Chicago's 39th -- up from 46th last year. Seattle and Minneapolis remain 1 and 2, and Portland joined the top ten, knocking out Boston. The cellar dweller is Stockton, California, in 70th place. 

Cities outranking Chicago include Tulsa, Tampa, Virginia Beach, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Louisville. 

The 15 cities that voted most heavily for John Kerry in 2004 have an average rank of #27; the 15 most pro-Bush cities have an average rank of #51.  Duh.

(Standings are based on per capita statistics on booksellers, educational attainment, internet resources, library resources, newspaper circulation, and periodical publications for cities of 250,000 people or more -- all compiled by John W. Miller of Central Connecticut State University.)

A Treehugger headline last weekend: "Powerwash Graffiti shows Chicago is Grey, Not Green," taking snarky note of the city's smoky in-town coal plants (covered in the Reader by Mick Dumke last December and Kari Lydersen in 2003) and the American Lung Association's ongoing campaign against them. Commenters at Treehugger debate whether the Crawford and Fisk plants are that big a deal, and in the new Atlantic James Fallows (paid subscriber only) turns an appalled eye on Beijing, where the smog is so bad he expects 2012 Olympians to fall like ninepins, clutching their chests.

Critics can always contrast Chicago's extravagant claims to ultimate greenness with its reality. But in intercity competition lies hope, whether it's for the Olympics or not.  After all, the U.S. took better care of its poor and minorities back when a Communist enemy stood ready to publicize every failure.

Judge Richard Posner is surprisingly skeptical about the late Milton Friedman's theories. He writes at the Becker-Posner Blog:

"I think his belief in the superior efficiency of free markets to government as a means of resource allocation, though fruitful and largely correct, was embraced by him as an article of faith and not merely as a hypothesis. I think he considered it almost a personal affront that the Scandinavian nations, particularly Sweden, could achieve and maintain very high levels of economic output despite very high rates of taxation, an enormous public sector, and extensive wealth redistribution resulting in much greater economic equality than in the United States. I don't think his analytic apparatus could explain such an anomaly.

"I also think that Friedman, again more as a matter of faith than of science, exaggerated the correlation between economic and political freedom. A country can be highly productive though it has an authoritarian political system, as in China, or democratic and impoverished, as was true for the first half-century or so of India's democracy and remains true to a considerable extent, since India remains extremely poor though it has a large and thriving middle class." 

Read the whole thing, and the intelligent criticism in the comments. The idea that good things go together dies hard, and Posner's a good person to drive a stake through its heart.

Dean Baker has a slightly more barbed personal reminiscence:

"About a decade ago, I stumbled into the wrong session at the American Economics Association Convention. Milton Friedman was . . . pointing out that many measures of considerable economic importance often get little scrutiny. The particular example I remember him discussing was the Americans With Disabilities Act, which requires businesses to make reasonable efforts to make their places of business accessible to employees and customers with disabilities. I stayed long enough to hear Mr. Friedman argue that this act imposed enormous costs on 'normal people.'"

After the Republican midterm win in 1994 Time's cover showed a gigantic elephant stomping on a donkey. After the Democrats' midterm win in 2006 the magazine ran a chaste Venn diagram and a headline encouraging "centrism."  Media Matters uncovered this bit of conservative bias in the mainstream media, but it was left to Ghost in the Machine to photoshop an improved version of this year's cover.

Which is the greenest city of them all?  Not Chicago.  Boulder, Colorado, voters have enacted a local carbon tax by a 58percent vote, reports Sarah Kraybill Burkhalter at Gristmill.  Of course, out there the mayor stood up to business lobbying.

For the reality-based community, here are some fine red/blue/purple maps of recent elections, by county and congressional district, created by Robert J. Vanderbei.  (Hat tip to Echidne of the Snakes.)

Strange Maps, which is what this blog wants to be when it grows up, resurrects a map of the ten alleged regions of the U.S. from a January 2004 Boston Globe story.  (Chicago's mapped as a non-contiguous outlier of the Great Lakes region, along with Detroit and Pittsburgh.)

2008 is happening, and Lindsay Beyerstein is already begging the Republicans to nominate Rudy Giuliani, that "pro-choice, Catholic, New Yorker," because she thinks that will let the Democrats run as far left as they please:  "Rudy winning the nomination in '08 would be the single biggest step towards social democracy in the US in our lifetimes."

From a San Francisco flea market comes a little book of sketches of Chicago life from more than 90 years ago.  Thanks to Mel Kadel and Travis Millard, you can see them all here and wonder who produced these vivid little cartoons.

Then you can read through the comments and watch the hivemind at work, learning why someone would bind up a book with only the first few pages actually printed (leaving great sketching space), and that the sketcher may have been Andy Hettinger, an early Chicago animator who died young. Can anyone else continue the detective work?

(Hat tip to Whet and Boing Boing.) 

Have you ever wished that you were at Wrigley Field on October 8 and 9, 1929, when the Cubs lost the first two games of the World Series to the Philadelphia Athletics? Me neither, but someone does, and that someone should get right over to YouTube for six and a half minutes of silent film. (I was more interested in the fans than the game: What's up with all those hats? And where are the women?)

"It is hard not to wonder what the last several years would have been like if President Bush and the Republican Party had, as winners, demonstrated the same kind of generosity and inclusiveness shown by Santorum and the White House as losers." -- Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago. Read the whole thing -- it's not long, and don't forget the commenters, many of whom think Sunstein is just too nice.

"AFV893342: Man on bike jumps makeshift ramp, crashes into tree. However, humor of footage compromised by subsequent close-up of compound fracture of humerus and squeals of horrific pain." More alleged rejects from "America's Funniest Home Videos" at McSweeney's. (Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily.)

I am "probably . . . from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri)" according to my answers to the What American Accent Do You Have? quiz. Take it if you like to ponder whether the first syllable of "horrible" rhymes with "whore." (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.)

WorldChanging -- the blog, Web site, and book based on the premise that "real solutions already exist for building the future we want. It's just a matter of grabbing hold and getting moving" -- will have team members flogging their book and more at the Shedd Aquarium Sunday, November 12, at 6:30 PM. The event is subtitled "a user's guide for the 21st century." (And yes, some commenters are already complaining that their chosen venue "imprisons fish.")

RSVP to worldchangingchi@gmail.com. Details here.

First post on their new Chicago blog, in which Greg Ehrendreich of the Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance notes the recent appearance of the city's Household Chemicals & Electronics Recycling Center, is here (though it looks like there may still be some formatting issues). The possibility that they may still be looking for knowledgeable local bloggers is here.

Previous mentions on this blog here and here.

These days we find the Indiana Dunes beautiful, refreshing, and maybe even "the earthly locus of a vision incorporating peace, oneness with nature, and brotherhood," as historians J. Ronald and Joan Gibb Engel put it.  But less than a century ago many saw them as sandy wastes unfit for anything except  steel mills. Artist and conservationist Frank Dudley (1868-1957), who painted landscapes of dunes almost exclusively for four decades, is now joining the roster of those, including Jens Jensen, who changed things around.

More than 200 of Dudley's works are on display through November 30 at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University, and the exhibition's catalog is now a lavishly illustrated large-format book, The Indiana Dunes Revealed: The Art of Frank V. Dudley. (The book includes a biography of Dudley by the Illinois Institute of Technology's James R. Dabbert; a condensed version with images appeared in the American Art Review (PDF) last summer.)

Dudley's story is replete with paradoxes. Just as the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore 40 years ago was sparked by Illinois U.S. Senator Paul Douglas, this book is being published by the University of Illinois.  Dudley's conservationism is now seen as a progressive cause. But from today's standpoint he fails to be a consistently progressive prophet: he stubbornly opposed modern art and idealized generic Indians in private and public performances. The outdoor "masques" and "pageants" that inspired him now seem overdone.

Much as Abraham Lincoln was an ambitious lawyer and canny politician as well as the savior of the union, Dudley was both an ardent lover of the dunes and an artist who found them an ideal niche in which to earn a living.  Writes Chicago art historian Wendy Greenhouse:

"For artists of Dudley's generation . . . the rise of both landscape painting and Impressionism were closely tied to the emergence of familiar, Midwestern subjects," and the realization that "their own home landscape -- authentic if humble -- could be the vehicle for genuine artistic expression. . . . The same qualities, in turn, promised to appeal to local buyers. . . . As modernism made increasing inroads on the Chicago art scene in the early 1920s, Dudley found unfailing support among the aesthetically conservative, civic-minded Chicagoans represented by such groups."

Near the end of his life Dudley was an advisor to the new Save the Dunes Council, which continues to watch over the "sacred sands."

One thing nonprofit groups can learn from business, according to Chicago nonprofit veteran Paul Botts over at dot-org: Set priorities and mean it. No more strategic plans that declare "ten top priorities (half of which begin 'Address issues of...')."

You totally owe it to yourself to check out these monster tricycles. (Hat tip to Mental Floss.)

Gabe at Buffalo Rising (that's the Buffalo in New York) idolizes Chicago neighborhood architecture, sort of: "The architecture itself of these new-builds is usually rather bland and uninspiring -- typically consisting half-baked historic copycat styles. But the real success is in the proportions, site planning, and density of these new structures." (Hat tip to Planetizen.)

The ever-vigilant University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is on to the horror of equine obesity.

Never be rude. "One year at a conference, I was at a social-professional event, and asked the organizer if there was anything to drink besides beer. He smirked and said to me 'If you don't like beer, you should get out of here,' then turned his back. When he arrived in my office a few weeks later as a candidate for a faculty position (I was on the search committee), he was very uncomfortable talking to me." (More tales of terror at Science + Professor + Woman = Me.)

The enterprising Greg Hinz of Crain's Chicago Business is already on the next election, getting strong hints from Jesse Jackson Jr. and Luis Gutierrez that they'll be able to accomplish more in the new Democratic House than trying to take down Boss II.

Jackson is to announce his actual decision Thursday noon.

Running for public office has been "the most humbling experience of my life," writes Debra Shore, candidate for  commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, in a recent e-mail.  (Chris Hayes' profile of Shore ran in the Reader October 28, 2005.)

"I was passing out campaign literature at the Glenview Metra station . . . I was reminded of the many mornings I spent in January, February, and March handing out literature and introducing myself to people at train stations prior to the primary. Sometimes I was so cold that I literally could no longer say my name. . . .

"I was also reminded of Dumpster diving -- the effort by candidates to retrieve perfectly good (and costly) campaign lit that was tossed, mere seconds after being handed out, into the nearest garbage can or el platform.  Once people board the train, you grab whatever lit lies on the top of the trash pile. At least the frugal candidates do."

Republican spinner Dan Curry speaks bipartisan truth at Reverse Spin: "If Rod pulls off a victory . . . it will mean Illinois has selected the following two governors: George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich, who both padded their campaign treasury with ill-gotten funds. Rejected along the way were four people who raised far less cash but according to the rules: Glenn Poshard, Paul Vallas, Jim Ryan and Topinka."

Michael McDonald of the Brookings Institution takes down five myths about voter turnout. He says apathy isn't on the rise, and negative commercials haven't caused it. (Hat tip to Rich Miller.)

What makes you think Bush is any better at planning for unpleasant contingencies in Iraq now than he was in 2003?  Billmon at Whiskey Bar notices an ominous parallel from 1942.

"Since announcing his candidacy for the Illinois Senate seat, Obama has raised the astonishing sum of nearly $21 million and has built close relationships with a number of traditional fat-cat donors." Ken Silverstein of Harper's magazine responds to the senator's response to his article (which you'll have to read on paper). Closer to home, why on earth does Obama embrace the Crown Prince of Cook County, when Boss Daley can't even stick up for John Kerry? Could it be that was just the easy way out?

 
Reader, May 26:  "[Hastert challenger John Laesch is] also aware that he can help his fellow candidates win or lose: a serious challenge might limit Hastert’s ability to help Republicans elsewhere." Tribune, November 4:  "Hastert homes in on his own district. . . . He's running an ad on cable television, an unusual move for a 20-year incumbent who has won almost every race by a margin of greater than 2-to-1."

There are so many ways to go off-message, especially if the intended victims of your message can deliver it cheaply. Check out this story from Fort Wayne about a Republican congressman siccing the state attorney general on Republican Party calls made in his cause. Speaking in heavily accented voices, the callers deliver an anti-immigration message. (Hat tip to Governing.com: 13th floor.)

Sam Smith at Undernews asks the unaskable: why is the military sacred? He prefers the teachings of Jesus Christ and midwestern socialist Eugene Debs, who said, "I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination."

George Schmidt may be a ranter, but you would be too if you knew what he knows: "Problems are festering or growing at every general high school on the west and south sides right now. And the cause of the increase in those problems, this year and for the last three school years, has been the school-closing and 'Renaissance' policies of CPS." All the details are at the District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog.

"Give everyone a personal carbon ration. If you run out, buy it from someone else," says Treehugger, summarizing the strong global-warming medicine prescribed by George Monbiot the UK Guardian.

Alon Levy of Abstract Nonsense tees off on libertarians who cling to a 60-year-old scripture: "When Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom that the growth of government spending was a threat to freedom, he had an excuse: at that time there was no evidence to the contrary."

Dudes, I swear he means it as a compliment!  Bill McKibben on the new WorldChanging book: "Their book, a compilation of their work over the last few years, is nothing less than The Whole Earth Catalog, that hippie bible, retooled for the iPod generation."

Orac at Respectful Insolence calls the Chicago Tribune's Sunday story on alternative medicine full of a "little too much credulity." For one thing, personal testimonials, "with few exceptions, do not constitute useful data regarding the efficacy of a therapy."

"The history of genetically modified foods doesn't feature a history of testing appropriate to their innovative character." That's Vivian Weil, longtime head of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She and University of Chicago geneticist Jocelyn Malamy did a thorough job of setting the table at the Illinois Humanities Council's genetics program last Saturday, identifying and distinguishing the issues around genetically modified foods, but that didn't leave the audience much time to eat. (IHC has an associated blog with some discussion.)

Malamy's key point is that not all GM plants pose the same questions. "Round-Up Ready" transgenic plants are resistant to herbicide, so that farmers can control weeds by spraying more and cultivating less. They pose questions of environmental damage from added chemical use. "Bt" transgenic plants have a bacterial gene inserted that makes them toxic to European corn borers; the issue is whether they might poison desirable insects or cause Bt-resistant borers to evolve over time.

Malamy also ran down questions (and her answers) that apply to both current GM plants and future ones:

Is the process of adding or altering genes harmful to consumers?  (No.)

Could specific transgenes be toxic?  (Maybe.)

Can transgenic pollen spread to other crops or wild relatives?  (Yes.)

Could specific transgenic plants be detrimental to the environment?  (Potentially.)

Other food issues don't apply specifically to GM crops but are problems with industrial farming in general: the use of pesticides, growing monocultures of the same crop, hybrid seeds that farmers can't save, and agribusinesses' aggressive enforcement of their patent claims.

Both GM plants and GM foods should be tested for safety, said Malamy. "I would advocate activism to make sure agencies are in place" to do this job properly, she added.

The panelists even had a little philosophical dust-up about how to put GM in context. Moderator Bruce Kraig of Roosevelt University and the Culinary Historians of Chicago began the day by saying, "Genetic manipulation began millennia ago," implying that GM foods are not significantly different from strains of cattle selectively bred over generations for milk or beef production. Malamy qualified this, saying, "There are limits to breeding. You can't breed for resistance to the corn borer, because no such trait exists in the plant to start with. But other plants have it." And Weil was equally hesitant: "This is an innovation in breeding. There is a break -- now we have the ability to bring genes from sources not previously available."

In a sentence: genetic modification isn't the end of the world, but it's definitely not business as usual, and so far the government hasn't regulated it well.

Roughly speaking, there is about half as much crime now in the U.S. and across Chicago as there was in 1991. How come?

Northwestern political scientist Wesley G. Skogan, best known for his studies of community policing in Chicago, calls this "one of the most significant social facts of the end of the 20th century," (PDF) and "one of the least understood." In plain language, more than 3,000 people are walking around today in Chicago who would have been murdered if the crime rate had stayed where it was 15 years ago.

Skogan is pretty sure it's not because there are fewer young people (there aren't), and it's not due to economic boom times (at least in Chicago).

Is it that we're putting more people in jail? Then why did crime continue to drop after 1999, even as rates of imprisonment fell?

Has gun control made a difference? But the number of crimes committed without guns is down too.

Skogan speculates that a decline this long and this large is probably due to more than one factor. Although data are hard to find, he suspects that incarceration of hard-core offenders in the early 1990s, community policing in the late 1990s, and smarter policing tactics since then may be the important ones.

Chicago's number one green-building architect isn't satisfied, according to a recent Grist magazine profile. Doug Farr's firm has produced more buildings that earned the platinum (highest) rating on the LEED green-building standard than any other architectural firm. (The number is two.) But a green building, after all, can be plunked down anywhere in a distinctly non-green way.

So Farr has been working on LEED-ND standards for entire neighborhoods. "There is so much effort that goes into designing and building this one small thing, this single green building," he tells Charles Shaw (who edits Chicago's edition of Conscious Choice, and was the subject of Mike Miner's Reader column for October 20). "The same amount of effort goes into planning two square miles of regular neighborhood, and that will serve us for the next 200 years. [The focus on individual buildings] just doesn't make any sense."

The firm's Web site briefly summarizes and maps (PDF) its work on the recent Chicago zoning reform, pushing "continuous streeetwalls [along sidewalks], high levels of window transparency, and entrances to shops at sidewalks. Any associated parking is to be located behind buildings, and auto-oriented uses, such as drive-thrus, will be prohibited on designated 'P Streets'" -- in other words, drawing a line against creeping suburbanism.

Farr's book -- you knew there was a book -- will be called Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature. There is already a shelf full of similar titles, but we can hope this one will be more specific.

No matter how good it is, though, it's really just a holding action. Farr knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men and women. No book and no set of standards will get very far as long as we can still afford not to go green. "There is no measure of shame or guilt that will stop people from unsustainable practices, only price will." When the prices go up, he aims to be ready.

• The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (PDF) isn't buying Mayor Daley's claim that the city has committed "$40 million in new money" for affordable rental housing and rental assistance. Policy director Julie Dworkin says the city is "just recounting existing resources." Says the press release: "This $40 million includes $13 million in state rental subsidies . . . funds previously committed by downtown housing developers who received a density bonus -- much of which has not actually been collected yet -- as well as a portion of existing TIF funds." Hmm, maybe what we need is a new TIF district established that is gerrymandered to include all existing homeless shelters in the city, so that they can get in on some of that slush-fund action.

• From the Chicago Recycling Coalition's Fall 2006 newsletter, "What Goes Around" (not online, best as I can tell): "Back in April 2005 the city launched a small, source-separated pilot program in the Beverly neighborhood. But with no expansion in sight, last January Alderman Joe Moore introduced an order requiring Chicago to abandon the blue bag for real recycling, and 25 of his colleagues joined as cosponsors. Then during the April 2006 Earth Week, the Commissioner of the Department of the Environment told the local press that within a month a new recycling program would be announced.  And now this September Mayor Daley confirmed that a source-separated multi-bin program would soon be installed in a number of wards . . . . but as of yet, the new bins, truck routes, and educational materials have yet to appear."  (Yesterday word came that curbside recycling will hit the 5th and 8th wards on the south side next April.)

• When bad theology meets bad biology. PZ Myers retells the story: "A woman donates one of her kidneys to another woman in need. Later, the recipient leaves the Christian faith. Now the donor wants her organ back. 'Smith [the donor] was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks [the recipient] to reconvert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses. "I feel helpless," she says. "Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who's going to hell."'" Myers probes the layers of idiocy here, and in the process reveals the denominational choices of several of his own organs.  [UPDATE AND APOLOGY:  THIS STORY IS BOGUS.  The fact that PZ and many others were also taken in doesn't make me feel any better.]

• "Appearances are not deceptive; it only seems as if they are." Considered by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber.

• A female science prof is married but doesn't wear a ring -- and many people in her life object. "I keep thinking that eventually some of my relatives might change their mind about the significance of a wedding ring, as my husband and I remain happily married and my ring-wearing siblings/cousins and others divorce, but it hasn't happened yet."

• What is the most absurd thing you believe? Some answers here and a few more here. Not sure I'd want to have lunch with these people, though. (Note: Not quite the same as the book What We Believe But Cannot Prove.)

• What would A. A. Dornfeld think?  The Beachwood Reporter isn't alone in being fed up with the Sun-Times's local-journalism-as-stenography these days. It is alone in finding the best put-down: "This is Chicago: If your mother says she loves you, you ask a few officials if it's true and then print it."

• Shakespeare's Sister isn't buying amateur anthropologist Robert Putnam's latest alleged finding -- that diverse communities are less trusting than homogeneous ones. Her experience in Chicago's northeasternmost neighborhood was quite different: "I lived in Chicago’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood, Rogers Park, for a decade, the last two years of which were spent as part of a condo association that looked like a mini-U.N. -- whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, Jews, mixed-race individuals and couples, straight people, gay people. We were, collectively, desk jockeys, teachers, nurses, actors, writers, hairstylists. Parents and not, religious and not. And we used to regularly hang out on each other’s back decks with a couple of beers and a grill going, talking about everything under the sun. We had each other’s spare keys. We fed each other’s pets during out-of-town holidays. We accepted each other’s packages. And I would find it simply astounding if we were some sort of crazy aberration."

• Unofficial word is out that George and Susan Sullivan's Eco Smart Building -- featured in the March 18, 2005 issue of the Reader -- will receive a 2006 Conservation and Native Landscaping Award from the Environmental Protection Agency and Chicago Wilderness. Official word is to come at Chicago Wilderness, and later at the umbrella group's November 15 Congress at Northwestern University. As I wrote then, "Rather than cover the backyard with asphalt, the Sullivans decided to cover it with an attached garage. They installed a heavy-duty roof, on top of which they built their recycled plastic deck and lined it with containers growing vegetables, native flowers, water plants, prairie grasses, shrubs, and small trees, which attract birds, bees, butterflies, and moths. In effect, says Susan, 'we elevated our backyard.'"

• 24/7 North of Howard Watchers, a blog by Toni and Hugh, focuses on the ever-changing if not always pleasing kaleidoscope that is the northernmost part of Rogers Park. Part photo-intensive critique of irresponsible landlords and tenants, and part an ongoing disputation with Ald. Joe Moore, it's a must-read if you live there, and a welcome politically-incorrect city chronicle if you don't.  (Hat tip to George Sullivan.)  I've been reading about Placeblogger, supposedly soon to be "a directory and live aggregator of headlines from placeblogs across the U.S." -- these folks should be on it.

Some days all you can do is laugh.

(1)  A Congressman has spent the last two years studying Waukegan's local zoning policies. When 10th district congressional challenger Dan Seals aired commercials criticizing President Bush's policies, incumbent North Shore Republican Mark Kirk's office told the Daily Herald that he’ll just be focusing on local issues. Kirk has run radio spots promising to work for stem cell research, without mentioning that Bush takes the exact opposite position. (Hat tip to Archpundit.)

(2)  You have to be able to say "Innovation comes from the top down" three times without breaking up.  Next Tuesday, October 24, at IIT the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce will cosponsor the Chicagoland Innovation Summit, which CEO Jerry Roper expects "will likely go down in history as one of the most important meetings in shaping the future of our economy and our competitive standing in the 21st century global marketplace."  Cosponsors include the Council on Competitiveness, a D.C. outfit that bills itself as "the only national organization whose membership is comprised exclusively of CEOs, university presidents, and labor leaders." 

Hear leading innovators like Bush's Secretary of Energy. Learn new buzzwords: "Senior leaders discuss how the region can develop its innovation ecosystem to be more competitive in the global economy." Just in case you doubt the cutting-edgeness here, according to one release, "An initial area of focus for the innovation initiative will be manufacturing." Earth to innovators: number of manufacturers in the top twelve of Crain's recent list of the fastest-growing public firms in Chicago? One, and it's actually Canadian. (Hat tip to Planetizen Radar.)

(3) The more things change, the more those who have the gold make the rules. 

1896: "The most effective tactic used to defeat [William Jennings] Bryan was the coercion of productive labor.  Orders labeled 'Cancel if Bryan Wins' and 'Double this Order if [William] McKinley Wins' or made 'contingent' upon McKinley's election directly affected industrialists and workers alike. . . . The Eastern insurance companies, which held many Western mortgages, also sent agents to contact every borrower and to offer a five year extension of loans at low interest rates if McKinley were elected."  (Paolo Coletta's William Jennings Bryan: Political Evangelist, 1860-1908, pages 201 and 202.)

2006:  "Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is offering up an election-time goodie to Mayor Richard M. Daley and his City Council allies: five Supercenter stores that would go into wards whose aldermen helped the mayor block a proposed minimum wage for big-box retailers like Wal-Mart."  (Greg Hinz in Crain's Chicago Business)

• Where have all the moderate Republicans gone? Well, a bunch of them in and around Chicago are now called Metropolis 2020, and are promoting their regional vision with the latest media, just as Daniel Burnham's followers did with his 1909 plan. So now we have Metro Joe, a collection of ten online quiz games that aims to be breezy and will soon come with eighth-grade curriculum materials. (Sample question: What would a local fish think about changes over the last 15 years -- "Nothing changes," "This place has gotten so empty," or "Gee, I sure am getting a lot of new neighbors"?)

• John J. Pitney reports at PolySigh that students at Claremont McKenna College "are launching a new internet politics game that could be a neat teaching tool. Fantasy Congress, which is available to anyone, lets players draft members of Congress into 'teams.' As 'team managers,' players get points based on the performance of their the team’s legislation." From the game's web site: "Because Fantasy Congress is running its beta version, you receive points on how far legislation gets in Congress (think passing yards, rushing yards, and touchdowns) when you manage the team." Mmmm, can I draft Nancy Pelosi for next season?

• Out on the frontiers of gaming, Jonathan Rauch describes the long road to truly dramatic real-life gaming (it's in the Atlantic, but you have to subscribe).  He reports finding "Facade" (free download here) way subtler than most games, in which as a rule it's easier to shoot characters than talk with them.  In "Facade," the player visits Grace and Tip, a married couple who are old friends. Rauch enjoyed it but found a few bugs in the system: "When I played as a woman (I could choose my sex) and announced I was pregnant with Trip's child, Grace and Trip thought I was flirting with them." (Some discussion at Grand Text Auto.)

I swear, most of the world's work gets done in autumn. Three local activities worthy of consideration:

(1)  The Chicago Architectural Club asks contenders for its 2007 Chicago Prize to answer the question, "How Does the Lakefront-Loving Chicagoan Cross the Road?"  All right, they didn't put it that way.  They said,  "There have been major violations of our open lakefront -- most notably the construction of an eight-lane highway known as Lake Shore Drive. As a result there are few points in which to safely cross Lake Shore Drive. The site of the 2007 Chicago Prize design competition remains one of the most dangerous pedestrian crossings in the center of the city.  This competition challenges entrants to design a connection from/between Buckingham Fountain and the Chicago lakefront by crossing Lake Shore Drive." Rules and info at CAC's website.

(2)  The Illinois Coalition for Political Reform finds that 77 people who gave more than $500 to a candidate for governor haven't told their occupations or where they work, as required by Illinois law since 1998. (For the record, most are Topinka donors.) Says the ICPR, "Some individuals can be hard to find, even after they’ve given you a big check. They must be, or both campaigns would have filed amended D2s with the information." Do you know these folks? Tell ICPR so that their campaign-finance database can be more complete than the state's.

(3)  In These Times, a 30-year-old Chicago left-wing institution (now a monthly), recently emailed its online readers to remind them that it doesn't take advertising and needs money. I don't always agree with ITT, but they're independent and they cover stuff the MSM won't touch--and more intelligently than it would if it did. Typical is David Moberg's report on UIC prof Walter Benn Michaels's new book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Money quote: "The obligation of diversity is to be nice to each other, Michaels writes, but the obligation of equality is to give up some money. Given the choice, diversity has the advantage of appearing to be morally righteous while at the same time preserving economic self-interest." Read the whole thing, or just throw money at 'em.

Why does Daniel Burnham appeal even to critics who don't care for his monumental vision of an all-classical city?  Northwestern University historian Carl Smith explains in his new book, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Burnham's big plan expressed our desire "to reach beyond piecemeal solutions and act efficaciously on the grandest scale," he writes. "At the very moment [1909] when life became modern and Americans realized that twentieth-century urban experience was fraught with limitations and contingencies, Burnham insisted that if we are just bold and brave and determined enough, it is possible to master time and space and make all things right. The Plan's very real historical appeal lies precisely in the fact that it proclaims history is no match for human will and cities can determine rather than merely accept their fate."

Assuming Burnham was right in 1909, how about 2006? 

(1) Then Chicago was dominated by locally run businesses and banks. Today few are headquartered here; the rich men who determine our city's fate may not even know how to get to a Cubs game!

(2) When a solid majority of the Chicago City Council recently passed and repassed an ordinance requiring some of those businesses to pay their help better, the mayor vetoed it on the grounds that those stores would simply choose to locate just outside the city limits.  In other words, nowadays cities must "accept their fate."

(3) To the extent that Burnham's plan is now written into our urban geography, it's because its authors convinced a majority of Chicagoans to tax themselves to build it. As Smith writes, "Between 1912 and 1931, Chicagoans approved some eighty-six Plan-related bond issues covering 17 different projects with a combined cost of $234 million." No more. Number of bond issues voted for Millennium Park? Zero. Mayor Richard M. Daley was "adamant about avoiding tax revenues to build Millennium Park," writes Loyola historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle in Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark. The mayor relied heavily on the fund-raising prowess of John Bryan, then CEO of the Sara Lee Corporation, to fund the half-billion-dollar project. For better and for worse, the park is what it is, not by virtue of an overall plan, but by virtue of which objects and projects could attract wealthy donors who wanted their names attached.

What would Burnham think?

Tom Roeser is old enough to have had Dennis Hastert in a summer-school politics class back when the current Speaker of the House was just a wrestling coach with a yen for politics. At his blog, Roeser traces Hastert's remarkably fortunate career, concluding with the envenomed truth of which only he is capable:   

"Denny Hastert is one who is wallowing alone without his old mentors to tell him what to do."

But Hastert's not the only one Roeser would throw under the bus. His fundamental conclusion from the scandal is that the Republican Party is--wait for it--excessively tolerant: 

"Sappy tolerance for homosexuality should be eradicated from the Republican party. Just as a congressional candidate has to account for excessive drinking, womanizing, gambling, business improprieties, and other vices, there should be no silent murmur that forbids the raising of the issue of homosexuality. For that matter, the Bush White House has a staffer who manages liaison with homosexuals. Why? The official Republican party has what it calls the 'Log Cabin Republicans'--a caucus of homosexuals. It is an open secret that GOP presidential candidates try to schmooze them."

Well. Unlike Bush and Cheney, he's no hypocrite. The moral for gays--even the conservative-minded--is bleak but obvious: Being attracted to the same sex isn't a choice. Voting Republican is.

• Just be sure to pick up more than you leave behind.  Openlands Project and the Forest Preserve District are sponsoring a cleanup day along the Little Calumet River, which flows through south suburbs including Calumet City, Harvey, and Blue Island.  (Sign up at 312/863-6253.)  According to the email announcement, "This event is sponsored by McDonald's and participants will receive a free McDonald's lunch!"

• How hard is it to say, "Less Sports"?  In Minnesota, the Center for School Change, headed by Joe Nathan, reports that last spring the local Star-Tribune newspaper published about six times as much on high-school athletes as on high-school academic stars.  (Sounds like an undercount to me.)  The center and allied groups want the paper (and the electronic media) to do better.  But, writes Nathan, "We're not urging reduced attention to high school sports, just more coverage of students who excel in academics."  Huh?  If they're not urging that, they're not urging anything.  News coverage, like attention in general, is a zero-sum game.

• Sure, Speaker Hastert will take your call, Mr. Mayor!  Mayor Daley to the Sun-Times:  “If you took the impropriety of every congressman and senator in Washington D.C. [as an excuse to demand resignations], I don’t think anybody would be left.” 

• Once more with feeling.  Downstate Peoria Republican U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood urges that the Congressional page program be abolished, on CNN: "M. O'BRIEN: Well, that's kind of a sorry state of affairs. In essence, what you're saying is that members of Congress can't be trusted to be around young people.  LAHOOD: Well, that's pretty obvious."

Fresh from University of Chicago Press is a nice, nuanced read by Northwestern historian Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City.

The famous 1909 plan came from the city's business elite, of which Burnham himself was a member. And yet, Smith writes,

"The Plan speaks with surprising directness of the city's need and right to place limits on speculators and landowners. It does so not only when it states that the lakefront 'by right belongs to the people,' but also when it defends the public appropriation of real estate needed to widen streets and to eradicate threats to sanitation and health. 'It is no attack on private property,' the plan contends, 'to argue that society has the inherent right to protect itself against abuses.' If society does not exercise this right, the planners [i.e. businessmen] warned, it might be necessary to resort to socialism in some form. Chicago, unlike London, had not yet reached the point at which the city must intervene and provide housing for people living in unaaceptable conditions. Unless timely action was taken, however, the Plan predicts that 'such a course will be required in common justice to men and women so degraded by long life in the slums that they have lost all power of caring for themselves.'"

Leave aside the condescension, and the irony (in the subsequent 97 years Chicago's done public housing, and undone it -- the book to read, Where Are Poor People To Live?, is also new), and the eerie voice of a long-moribund brand of Republicanism, what strikes me in this passage is how important the specter of socialism was in keeping the excesses of capitalism in check. It's been at least a generation now since that specter was real, and the excesses keep piling up, extending even to brazen attempts to undo collective protections like insurance (which right-wingers would replace with individual medical savings accounts) and rudimentary elements of fairness like the estate tax (which respects the principle of a fair start for all individuals).

I'm not a fan of the city's now-aborted big-box minimum-wage ordinance. But in this light I'm scratching my head. Even an ill-conceived opposition is better than none. Maybe capitalism itself needs competition.

Jason Kuznicki puts real numbers into the big-box discussion at Positive Liberty:  

"Wal-Mart is a corporation, not a fountain of limitless cash that we can approach with a pail and a shovel. We can shame Wal-Mart all we like, but it will not enrich the chain’s employees. . . .

"Let’s imagine, though, a perfectly altruistic Wal-Mart, a Wal-Mart that took every bit of its net income and returned it directly to the employees. We shall forget, for the moment, that this would also drop Wal-Mart’s stock price to zero (no dividend and no possibility of growth means no reason to invest). We shall also forget that our new firm—call it Charity-Mart—will entirely lack the ability to meet unforseen contingencies. We shall even put out of our minds the imminent dissolution of the firm, which would surely be the result of this disastrous policy. Hey, whatever. Imagine no possessions and all that. . . . So here are the numbers, if we returned absolutely everything Wal-Mart made to the employees:

"10.267 billion net income / 1.6 million employees = A one-time cash payoff of . . . $6,626.25. Which they will have to spend wisely, since they will momentarily be out of a job." (Read the whole thing; the comments are intelligent and civil as well.)

Kuznicki has hold of an important part of the truth, but not the whole thing. He leans heavily on the fact that lots and lots of people apply for jobs at Wal-Mart--so by definition, no matter how menial or ill-paid they are, they've decided that they're better off with those jobs than with the alternatives.

Does the voluntary presence of employees prove Wal-Mart's critics wrong? No. That argument proves too much. It would also justify the repugnant situation in which people were applying for jobs that paid one cent an hour because the alternative was chattel slavery.

The market system that enables Wal-Mart to find ways to sell cheaply is legally bound by our collective decision that some forms of employment are not tolerable. Minimum-wage laws, laws against slavery, occupational health and safety laws, environmental laws, all define the market playing field. Within that field wealth is created. If the play gets too rough, we pass laws to change the shape of the field. That's what the City Council tried to do--and eventually that fiasco may force people like Mayor Daley to actually lobby at the state or federal level for a more effective minimum-wage law than any single city can pass.

• What may be the best television show ever aired gets a good going-over by Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James at Slate. (Hat tip to Whet Moser.)  Money quote: "I have repeatedly discovered as a documentary filmmaker what you, Alex, so brilliantly captured in There Are No Children Here: There's no substitute for putting in the time it takes to really get past seeing people as mere symbols—be they symbols of good or bad, or the powerful or desperate. This is what David Simon and his team have done now for four years."

• If you thought all the trouble was just on your CTA rail line, learn the depressing truth (and the number of energetic activists laying it out) at Scott Gordon's place in the Beachwood Reporter. Money quote: "We can't quantify any of the aforementioned problems. The CTA has released some specific data about slow zones and how long it takes certain lines to go around the Loop, but so far has not released much in the way of empirical data that tells us how specific train lines and bus routes are performing. (The CTA just waits for the Campaign for Better Transit to release its own independent reports and then dispatches its flaks to dismiss them.)"

• Mike Klonsky at Small Talk on a study in which Cornell researchers were shocked--shocked!--to find that students average only 16 minutes of activity per physical education class: "Well, duh! Didn't these researchers ever go to high school? . . . But seriously, is gym any different from other traditional high school classes, which are usually about 45-50 minutes long and where, after taking roll and getting things 'on task' they're lucky if there's 16 minutes where students are really engaged?"

When you can't untie the Gordian knot, cut it.

That's what Ellen Shepard (executive director of the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce) and Michael Shuman (author of The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition) propose with regard to the big-box wage ordinance. It was a no-win decision: pass the bill and lose jobs to the burbs, or veto the bill and endorse poverty-wage jobs. "This quandary could have been avoided," they write, "if the city's eggs had been in the right basket all along--with an economic development policy emphasizing locally owned business."

Until now we've been doing the opposite. Shuman and Shepard cite the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group's Tax Increment Financing Almanac (available here; they're referring to pages 48 and following), which found that "of the $237 million in money from tax-increment financing (TIF) that funded commercial projects outside of the central Loop, only about $2 million had gone to developments that benefited local small businesses." Most of the money went to shopping centers, big box retail, movie theaters, and corporate office space. A single Home Depot received more than $3 million in taxes  ("we can do it, you can help").

"A smarter policy by the city would be not to waste another penny--whether in the form of grants, loans, loan guarantees, industrial bonds, capital improvements, or TIFs--on nonlocal business. Precious taxpayer dollars should be reserved exclusively for the local businesses we know contribute the most to the city's well being." (Background on this theory in the Andersonville Study and in my article in the July 7 Reader.)

Meanwhile, we have civic slapstick. A city that's pumped millions into big-box-centric economic development is shocked--shocked!--to learn that the beneficiaries don't pay well. And big-box retailers who've received millions from City Hall are shocked--shocked!--when City Hall asks for a quid pro quo.

If the jobs are that bad, why subsidize them? If they're necessary stepping stones that require subsidies, then why not direct the subsidies as Shuman and Shepard suggest, to locally owned businesses that have actual roots here and aren't going to pull up stakes whenever they don't get their way?

Prolific U. of C. law prof Cass Sunstein smacks down John McWhorter's preposterous assertion that "Take away Mr. Obama's race and he's some relatively anonymous rookie."

Sunstein: 

"It's not clear whether the proper response is to laugh or to cry.

"After graduating from Harvard Law School, and serving as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for about a decade, and I know him from his time as a colleague here. He first came to our attention when then-professor, now-judge Michael McConnell suggested him for appointment to the faculty because of Obama's first-rate work on one of McConnell's articles for the Harvard Law Review. (Is it necessary to add that McConnell is a conservative and doesn't much like affirmative action?) Obama, we quickly learned, was a person of truly exceptional ability. We asked him to teach at the law school, and he turned out to be a terrific though part-time teacher of constitutional law (serving, for most of his time here, in the state legislature as well).

"Because of his evident excellence, and his academic potential, we would have been happy to hire Obama as a full-time faculty member. (Take away Obama's race, and he was a complete star, hardly a relatively anonymous rookie.) But he declined, and the reason was obvious: He was interested in political life. The interest fit well with his personal characteristics; he has an extraordinary ability to connect with people, and he also has an exceptionally independent mind."

There's more--read the whole thing.

Sunstein bends over backwards to be civil--an uncommon and endearing trait these days.  He does his best to figure out what genuine issue McWhorter might have been addressing. That's always worth a try, as we learned in college. But in this context, it doesn't work. There's no there there--or, to be more precise, McWhorter's article comes straight out of the right-wing noise machine:

• McWhorter claims to be judging Obama on the merits alone, when he has no idea what those merits are.  His list, in full: "crinkly smile, sincere concern for the little man, fine speech a couple of years ago about bringing the nation together, a certain charisma, wrote a touching autobiography."

• Second and perhaps worse, McWhorter creates a straw liberal, referring to "the racial healing many might see him [Obama] as portending." He names no one who thinks this way. (Nor does Martin Peretz, who should know better.) Does he know anybody who does? I don't. Or is he just making things up, using his perch at the Manhattan Institute to act as an advance guard of the far right in 2008 or 2012--slinging mud to see what will stick?

• The So-Called Austin Mayor doesn't talk as much as I do, but when he does he makes it count. Here he impeaches the supposed integrity of retiring suburban rep Henry Hyde, without even getting into that gentleman's walloping double standard on the subject of presidential impeachment.

• Jessa Crispin at Bookslut will never have to read the New Yorker again, thanks to haiku! Who would've thunk it?

• Alexander Russo's District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog is fast becoming to CPS what Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and Illinoize are to politics--sources of both information and intelligent discussion from many viewpoints. Victor at Chicago Teachers Speak Out rescues the following from a number of insightful comments responding to CPS's Peter Cunningham, who was invited to make a statement on college-graduation data. The anonymous commenter asks, "Why free a group of schools from bureaucratic oversight? If that oversight is harmful, free all schools. If it is supportive, don't 'free' any. If it is harmful, change it. It's like Cunningham is saying, 'we not imposing our stupid rules and regs on everyone, just the bad schools.'"

• Steve Rhodes at Beachwood Reporter explains in painstaking detail why the Sun-Times's coverage of Daley's Olympic brainstorm would get an F in any reputable J-school. 

• Beachwood Reporter on Daley II: "Corruption and scandal have been part and parcel of this mayor's tenure; he tolerates it because he, like Ryan, believes in it. Daley is a slightly more complicated man than Ryan, but not so complicated that we should be confused about who he is and what he's about. Daley's flowers are Ryan's Death Row prisoners. It's not important what they really believe in, only what they hope to gain by said beliefs."

• Michael Bérubé on the convergence of Christianists and Islamists: "According to [Dinesh] D’Souza [in The Enemy at Home], 9/11 was brought to you by people legitimately outraged by the sexual liberty of women, gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce. Not to mention Bill Moyers." (Hat tip to Project Sanguine.)
  

• Echidne of the Snakes on conservatives' attempts to make us feel better about the super-rich: "Suppose that income differences really don't matter that much anymore, that it's in fact quite comfy to be poor or at least middle-class. If this is true, why would the rich want to get rid of the estate tax? Why would they want their taxes lowered? What do they have to gain by trying to have more than the iPods and the cars and the cell phones? Clearly nothing much. And then add to that the sadness that follows greater incomes, and you have a fairly drastic case for a more progressive system of taxation."

• Hunter at Random on the notion that "strict constructionism" supports the ultraconservative political agenda: "The whole point of the Bill of Rights is not that it 'grants rights' to the people . . . but that it limits what restrictions the government may impose on the behavior of the people and under what circumstances. . . . So the correct approach to the question of same-sex marriage is not whether the U.S. Constitution (or any state constitution) specifically grants such a right, but whether any government has the authority to deny it."

• University of California--Berkeley economist Brad DeLong on Bush's unkept promise to cut taxes: "As Milton Friedman puts it, to spend is to tax. Bush's spending increases--defense, Iraq, the Republican porkfest, the Medicare drug benefit--are still there, just as things you have charged to your Visa don't go away if you make only the minimum monthly payment. What George W. Bush has done has been to shift taxes from the present to the future--and also made future taxes uncertain, random, and thus extra-costly from a standard public-finance view."

• Bob Park on Bush's euphemism of "alternative procedures" for "torture": "How’s this for an 'alternative procedure': inform prisoners of the charges, treat them humanely, try them openly to expose their crimes to the entire world. This is America."

We're slowly catching up to the fact that video games are not only games but a new medium on par with newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and the Internet. Columbia College Chicago now offers a four-year undergraduate major in game design. Their FAQ starts with, "Can I really get a degree in Game Design? Is this a 'real' degree?" Yes and yes.

Now the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists makes a pitch for the public-radio crowd by highlighting how "serious games" are being used to train soldiers and firefighters.

Hazmat: Hotzone, writes Josh Schollmeyer, puts firefighters "on the scene, forcing quick decisions and testing their assumptions in a safe, virtual environment." One gaming test featured a sarin attack in a shopping mall:

"Almost immediately, a cyber firefighter collapsed. 'I thought if I could see, it was safe to go in,' the firefighter controlling the character told his instructor. 'Not when you have suspicion of a hazmat,' the instructor responded."

Which medium is more likely to produce a knowledgeable professional? A text medium like this one, or the game?

Things get more interesting as games move into less cut-and-dried subject matter. A Force More Powerful--the Game of Nonviolent Strategy is described on its Web site as "the first and only interactive teaching tool in the field of nonviolent conflict." Interactive media are on the verge of teaching things that others really can't.

In the market, however, serious games are still what one advocate calls a "rounding error." Schollmeyer: "A Force More Powerful will ship 4,000 copies in its first six months of release. . . . Halo 2 . . . sold 2.4 million copies within the first 24 hours it hit retail shelves in 2004."

James Redfield teaches Greek at the University of Chicago. He also knows a thing or two about different styles of teaching. Students, he observes, often prefer that he "take control" of a class and just tell them what he knows. In an essay on the Web site of the U. of C.'s Center for Teaching and Learning he writes:

"One of the major issues about discussion teaching . . . is that everybody is for it, except maybe the students.  I have a short list of the things that everybody knows are good, but nobody is quite clear why.  Discussion teaching is on that list. . . . 

"Some people seem to think that somehow discussion is a way in which people individualize themselves, and everybody gets to have their own opinion. The lecture is much better for that because, as I say, it leaves you alone. Discussion is a consensus process, and, insofar as it is working, it creates a group that tends to draw people closer and closer together and cuts off the edges on them."

Read the whole thing--even if you don't buy it, the thoughts per word ratio is off the charts. (Yes, I know, it originally was a talk he gave in 1988.)

I love that list of "things that everybody knows are good, but nobody is quite clear why." What would you add to it? Or should I just tell you?

(Hat tip to Savage Minds.)

• "I feel almost like I'm living in the last movement of Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony," writes the indispensable Lynn Becker on the impending euthanasia of Carson's and the slow death of State Street.  The usual crop of analysts "are little more than a cross between Pangloss and Polonius. No matter what happens, they, of course, saw it coming, it was inevitable, and it will ultimately prove a very positive thing." His blog.

• At Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, Ed Darrell picks up 10 familiar laments from a teacher--but commenter R. Becker steals the show: "About 20 years ago, I was doing a summer teacher institute [American History] in Baton Rouge, Louisiana . . . three-hour sessions twice a week. Had about a dozen techers, mostly high school, all veterans of at least a decade. . . . Chatting one morning, I asked them this: What one change, ONE change, that would not cost your school or district money, would make your jobs easier and more satisfying? . . .  Instantly, and I mean NO time elapsed from the end of my question to the reply, one nearly shouted 'Rip out the God damned PA system.' The rest applauded her."

• At Illinois Review, Fran Eaton writes that Republican Judy Baar Topinka has basically bet her campaign for governor on a land-based Chicago casino (as a substitute for tax hikes to pay for schools). Eaton observes in passing, "Topinka doesn't like conservatives and wants nothing to do with them."  Well, duh. It wasn't moderates who brought wacko blowhard Alan Keyes to Illinois in 2004 for a Senatorial flameout.

• Larry Griffin at Four Red Stars thinks Topinka made the wrong bet anyway:  "With plenty of casinos scattered around the Midwest as is, who, exactly, is going to come here to visit one casino in Chicago? Even if it does draw more tourists to the city, the folks who are losing all their money to the casinos aren’t going to be filling up the coffers on the Magnificent Mile later that day.  . . . I’m with the social conservatives on this one. As a society, we should not allow the exploitation of our citizens to save property owners a couple dollars on taxes."

• Rousseau checkmates David Hume in 17 moves? Get out! You can watch Jean-Jacques's smash in their alleged chess game from 1765.  Then check the kibitzers' comments. They suspect that Rousseau wasn't a strong enough player to have seen the sacrificial checkmate. For some reason that makes me feel better.

• Troubled by sagging? Need concealment? NRAstore.com has a mesh undershirt if your small revolver is giving you problems. (People who bought this item also bought "tactical pants"--don't ask--in waist sizes up to 42.)

• Union strategy? Over at Tapped, Ezra Klein calls Chicago's big-box ordinance "basically useless for the unions (and possibly counterproductive)" on the grounds that it will likely make Wal-Mart "forsake Chicago entirely in order to warn other city councils not to try the same trick. What it won't do is achieve [store] density in urban areas, which would be the easiest for the unions to target" in an organizing drive.

• Why even go there? The other day Pseudo-Polymath quoted a theologian who foresees the disappearance of Lutheran, Episcopal, and Presbyterian denominations, after which time "the churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation [for him, Baptists and Methodists don't count]."  Pseudo responded with the $64 trillion question: "What do we do with that information? Where do we go from here? If the Reformation is to end, what then was God’s purpose in inspiring it in the first place?"  . . . [Long pause.]  Gee, I don't know, Pseudo. While you're at it, let us know his or her purpose in inspiring the Inquisition and the Crusades and the pogroms too, OK?

• Why don't artificial sweeteners make me thin? Burkhard Bilger's New Yorker piece explains it so even I can understand: "Like the dream of the paperless office or the superhighway that will untangle traffic for good, [the hope behind NutraSweet] presumes that there is a natural limit to our needs--that humanity's sweet tooth can be satisfied. Yet our sweet receptors evolved in environments with so little sugar that they may not have a shutoff point." Read the whole thing here or here.

Around this time in 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard J. Daley sat opposite one another at the negotiating table. King wanted fair housing in Chicago; Daley wanted the black leader's nonviolent demonstrations to end, as the hatred displayed by southwest-side whites was tarnishing the city's image.

In their book on Daley, American Pharaoh, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor quote the mayor's top housing advisor, James Downs, who reported on the meeting of the two leaders: 

"I could just see the mayor decide at that moment how he was going to handle King, that he was going to lie to him. I could just see the moment in which he decided the only way he could get rid of the guy was to tell him a whole lot of lies."

The "summit agreement" both sides agreed to was vague and toothless. Its one lasting product was the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, which did yeoman work for racial integration before closing its doors June 2 of this year for lack of funding. (Fragments of its Web site continue a ghostly afterlife in Google caches, for the moment.)

The newsletter Poverty & Race devoted a special issue to King's sortie against northern prejudice. Contributors include James Ralph, Jr., Middlebury College history professor and author of the book Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement. Ralph does his best to make the difficult case that King's ambitious campaign was moderately successful, at least in the long view.

Former Chicago alderman and political scientist Dick Simpson describes Chicago's racial progress since 1966 as "slow but steady," but his honesty overcomes his optimism: "It may not seem like much to have gone from a segregation index of 94 percent to 86 percent." Considering that the movement's motto was "End the Slums," no, it doesn't. Simpson concludes realistically that Chicago is now governed by "a White/Latino coalition . . . although Latinos are distinctly the junior partners in the arrangement."

The national scene looks little better. The latest issue of In These Times asks, "How can the cultural force of hip-hop be directed to affect social change?" The answer that Glen Ford's article suggests is, nobody knows.

 
FYI:  Audio interviews from participants and other experts on WBEZ's 848 here. 

You may know the Cheney doctrine, as described by Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine:

"Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.'"

You may also know the Precautionary Principle, a guiding light for some parts of the environmental movement: 

"When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically."

But you've never seen them both in the same room at the same time, because they're the same idea: act first, ask questions later.

And, as University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has shown here and here and elsewhere, it's a bad idea, one that seems to make sense only as long as you selectively apply it. "From the standpoint of decision theory, Vice President Cheney's remark, and the Precautionary Principle, run into a serious problem: a 1/100 chance of a bad outcome just isn't equivalent to a certainty of a bad outcome. (You wouldn't spend the same amount to avoid a 1/100 likelihood of a loss as a 100/100 likelihood of a loss.)"

Both versions are rooted in impatience and frustration.  Cheney has long hated the idea of limits on presidential action.  Environmentalists have long hated the way cost-benefit analyses get skewed to make development projects and new chemicals look benign.

But once you move beyond frustration and take either version of the principle seriously, it collapses. No environmentalist would apply the precautionary principle to the issuance of car fuel-economy regulations, even though they might threaten human health if they result in the production of non-crashworthy vehicles. And as John Allen Paulos says, hopefully no young male Cheneyite would shoot a guy in a bar for giving him a hard stare, just because there was a 1 percent chance that the other guy might shoot him later.

There's no bumper-sticker way out. In any and all cases, you have to weigh costs and benefits, the possible amount of harm, and the degree of certainty on both sides.  Why doesn't this go without saying?

Web designer Dan Cederholm asks himself that question over at Simple Bits, provoking a discussion about early-20th-century analogues to Web designing and the like. Does anyone else remember the science-fiction story about a medieval serf who was "strange" because he kept thinking of flying machines and fast-moving objects with wheels, things he couldn't even begin to describe so that anyone else could understand?

Interestingly, very few commenters mention what their grandparents and great-grandparents actually were doing at that time. Sometimes that makes the retro-extrapolation pretty easy: two of my three great-grandfathers were living in Chicago in 1906--one (pictured) was a former English teacher turned manuscript reader at McClurg's publishing house, the other was a stenographer/editor/translator of Swedish sermons for the Mission-Friend movement. (The third was a Methodist preacher downstate.)

Try it:

• Theodore Roosevelt is president (think Clinton's energy added to Cheney's arrogance).

• Mayor Edward F. Dunne is trying to get the City Council to take over the streetcar system.

• Cars are toys for rich people; the word itself refers to railroad cars.

• The White Sox beat the Cubs in the World Series.

• The Chicago Defender and the Industrial Workers of the World are just a year old.

• Society architect Daniel Burnham is working up a big plan.

• Jane Addams is managing Hull House, working for the reform of practices not even conservatives would defend today, and writing a book about it.

Where were "you" in 1906?

(Hat tip to kottke.org remaindered links.)

Some welcome additions to my (burp) overstuffed RSS feed:

• As other see us. Ellen Perlman of Governing magazine visits the McDonald's Cycle Center at Millennium Park: "It's NICE."

• The last word (I wish) on the mommy wars, from Redneck Mother: "You know who I like to read on the topics of children and mothers? Mothers. Why? Because we know what we're talking about, because we share a common language despite our many differences, and because we are practical. We mothers are busy people. As much as I'd like to put in my two cents whenever a childless blogger holds forth on parentude, I often simply don't have time. And I've learned that hubris is best cured not by a lecture but by the direct experience of parenting. As my sister-in-law says, 'I was a great parenting expert until I had children.'"  In particular, don't assume that "mothers are deluded souls who need a wake-up call from others to throw off the shackles of their oppression."

• Why writing a negative book review is fun. Sam Harris on Francis Collins's attempt to move from science to religion: "To say that he fails at his task does not quite get at the inadequacy of his efforts. He fails the way a surgeon would fail if he attempted to operate using only his toes."

• Why does Barack Obama repeat the bogus Republican talking point that Democrats are always against wars? Ilyayavitz at SoapBlox Chicago: "It seems Democrats believe they can increase their popularity only by criticizing unnamed and confabulated elements within their own party. It reminds me of members of my family who tell Jewish jokes to their goy friends in order to curry favor with those who are not Jewish.  It also recalls the tragic and predictable manner whereby my gay friends attempt to gain recognition with heterosexuals by complaining about stereotyped behavioral traits heterosexuals assign to gay men." Dude, it totally doesn't work and it's not even funny.
  

Appalachian State University economist John Whitehead scribbles on the back of the envelope at Environmental Economics:

"According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. generates almost 6,000 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. At four dollars per metric ton, the cost of reducing carbon emissions by 70 percent, about what scientists say needs to be cut to avoid climate change problems, is $16.8 billion, about 0.14 percent of annual GDP. Not too costly with the help of market forces, right? My guess is that this is a case of low hanging fruit and the marginal cost is increasing."

Note #1:  $16.8 billion is very roughly one-twentieth of what has been spent so far on the Iraq war.

Note #2:  where did Whitehead come up with the four-dollars-per-metric-ton figure?  Well, from the Chicago Climate Exchange, where 175 participants (corporations and governments) pay real money for the "right" to emit defined amounts of greenhouse gases.

The New York Times profiled Chicago Climate Exchange founder Richard Sandor July 30 (in an article not available for free online).  The exchange describes itself as "North America’s only, and the world’s first, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission registry, reduction and trading system for all six greenhouse gases (GHGs). . . . Members make a voluntary but legally binding commitment to reduce GHG emissions. By the end of Phase I (December, 2006) all Members will have reduced direct emissions four percent below a baseline period of 1998-2001."

So how do you actually make the reductions so as to have something to trade on the exchange? Writing in National Journal, Margaret Kriz lays out the means we have at hand. According to the best expert opinion, these are all we've to to work with to avoid disastrous climate change, and none of them is a silver bullet.  They are:

• Energy Efficiency: could handle "15 percent, possibly more, of your overall [electric] generation load," according to an industry researcher.  (Most of the solutions now being pushed by the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center fall into this category.)

• Nuclear Power: expensive, and there's nowhere to put the waste. (Questions raised elsewhere: is there enough uranium or cooling water?)

• "Clean" Coal: it's about time for a new generation of power plants, and the question is, will they use new technology?

• Hybrid Vehicles: Plug-ins would save more.  (So would more politicians like Jimmy Carter, the kind who can set a good example.)

• Wind Power: benefits from a federal production tax credit, but needs high-power transmission lines to get the electricity from the Great Plains (where the wind is) to where the people are.

• Biofuels: ethanol from corn is the biggie, but it cuts CO2 emissions by only about 10 percent, "once you factor in the petroleum used in the farm equipment and the fertilizer used to grow and harvest the corn." Duh.

• Sequestration: capture the carbon dioxide and stuff it underground or under the ocean. Feasible but not cheap.

Unfortunately, picking the right combination of technologies is harder with the Cheney administration bollixing things up. Here's David Talbot introducing a special issue of Technology Review:

"Cleaner technology--in which carbon dioxide could be captured and sequestered--is ready to go into new coal plants now (see 'The Dirty Secret,' by David Talbot). Similarly, improved versions of today's nuclear power plants await construction (see 'The Best Nuclear Option,' by Matthew L. Wald). Unfortunately, implementation of cleaner technologies has been thwarted by federal aimlessness. The Energy Department keeps changing its nuclear-research strategy, and a 'FutureGen' zero-emission coal demonstration project announced three and a half years ago by President Bush hasn't yet picked a site."

When he's home, Erik Olsen is in Lakeview. When he's at work, he's at the city's Department of Construction and Permits, running the accelerated permit program for city buildings that meet some basic green standards. (As Olsen told me earlier this year, "Routine projects involving three or fewer units can typically be approved on a fast track within ten days, following a process that can be diagrammed on a Post-it.")

In his spare time he runs GreenBean, "a news and discussion forum dedicated to reporting on built, in-progress, and unbuilt green building projects in Chicago."  Projects--eight so far in the 312 and 773--are posted with owners' consent independent of the City of Chicago.

There's plenty of technical talk on the site-- hey, the guy's an engineer!--but Olsen, true to the blog medium, isn't all promotional all the time. He has both praise for and misgivings about One South Dearborn, for instance:

"Like essentially all new office towers in Chicago, this is an all-electric building, including electric resistance heat, which is almost never environmentally preferable (see here or here--scroll almost to bottom--to understand why). Although one man's rantings can't change the market in Chicago, I will always complain about this. For commercial office towers it isn't quite as egregious because they primarily require cooling, but the electric heat trend seems to be growing in residential buildings as well."

On a happier note, he has this to say about the Washington Park SRO (5000 S. Indiana). Its architect, Piekarz Associates PC, "had little prior green experience, but because of the owner's directive, was and is willing to learn how to meet the project's green goals. There are many other local architects with little green experience diving in head-first, and they are to be applauded for the efforts."

The MSM and blogs are coevolving into . . . who knows what. I'll leave the details for the techies to sort out in the future, but right now no one with even a passing interest in politics can keep up with the conversation without reading certain blogs--or talking to someone who does.

• In Illinois, Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and its cousin Illinoize--a metablog incorporating many points of view--are the best. This morning Miller drew on Tribune reporting to make clear the fact that Gov. Blagojevich's administration is setting up the same defense that Mayor Daley patronage chief Robert Sorich tried. Sorich claimed he only made "recommendations." That defense didn't save him, and Miller thinks it's unlikely to work for Blago.

• In the U.S., Brad De Long's Semi-Daily Journal is a gateway drug. Thursday morning he drew on New York Times analysis and other sources to explain why the upset of incumbent Senator Joseph Lieberman in the Connecticut primary was an uprising of "irate moderates." In the process he pulverized what little is left of Washington Post columnist David Broder's reputation.

• For those who'd rather think about politics than commit it, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a splendid post ("The Libertarian Vice") explaining how libertarians often beg the question: "The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. . . . But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government. The Finnish government has supported superb architecture. The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state. The interstate highway system in the U.S. was a high-return investment. In the area of foreign policy, we have done a good job juggling the China-Taiwan relationship. . . . It is possible to agree with the positive claims of libertarians about the virtues of markets but still think that improving the quality of government is the central task before us. One could love markets yet be some version of a modern liberal rather than a classical liberal. This possibility makes libertarians nervous, thus their desire to fix the quality of government in advance of making an argument."  Oh, just read the whole thing.  (FYI:  He links to his May 2, 2005, post on the characteristic vice of liberalism:  "The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of.")

A few years ago, I had to subscribe to multiple magazines--and wait up to a month--to find this much great reading. Now all this and more is at our fingertips every day.

• Chicago's downtown is bigger than midtown Manhattan, better-educated than downtown Boston, has more homeowners than any other, and grew faster than downtown Atlanta between 1990 and 2000. More from Penn planning prof Eugenie Birch at the Brookings Institution and at her home school.

• Louis Sullivan's 150th birthday is September 3, and the Chicago Historical Museum knows all about the festivities. (Hat tip to Lynn Becker.)

• I know they play a lot more games, but I'm still astonished to learn from Crain's that the Kane County Cougars (the what who?) put more bodies in the seats than the Bears did last year. Final: Cougars 518,394, Bears 496,965.

• Have you been to the world's largest and greenest laundromat?  Me neither. Would you believe it's in Berwyn? (Hat tip to Sustainablog.)

• The astute Salim Muwakkil writes in In These Times that the arrest of "terrorism" suspects in Miami is "a case of governmental entrapment even more threatening than the NSA spying program." It looks to him like "a reprise of the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program that ran from 1956 to 1971 and was designed to 'neutralize' black nationalists and other domestic dissidents."

• Are conservatives and libertarians no longer BFF? And why did anyone ever think they could be?
  

Chicago has a distinctive past but a familiar-sounding (i.e., ominous) future, writes DePaul sociologist John P. Koval, introducing a new collection of articles he co-edited, The New Chicago: A Social and Cultural Analysis:

"Chicago . . . is our only major city that had, from its beginning, an immigrant core contained within an immigrant skin." Unlike Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, it was never a WASP town. "It has no colonial past:  only an immigrant and industrial history and a postindustrial present." (BTW, Jacqueline Peterson paints a dizzying and unforgettable picture of Chicago's non-WASP past in "The Founding Fathers," a chapter in the book Ethnic Chicago, the first few pages of which can be read online. For the full impact you'll have to find the book.)

But the past is past. Nowadays, business needs fewer workers, and those it does need come more and more from "a radically new creation: the contingent labor force. This innovation reduces the labor force to a few 'core' jobs and, as need dictates, brings in a 'just-in-time' contingent labor force . . . . The workforce mobilized by temporary help agencies doubled in size between 1982 and 1989 and doubled again between 1989 and 1997.  One temp agency executive refers to his and other agencies as the ATM's of the job market."

The big picture? "Chicago has two different yet coexisting economies. One is a shrinking but still very much alive industrial-based economy characterized by good pay and a large white- and blue-collar middle class . . . .

"The other economy consists of service and IT occupations with a two-tiered system of inequality. The upper segment is characterized by high skill and pay, job security, and high prestige. The lower tier"--well, you know.  "The metaphor is an hourglass."

Years ago I wrote a little book about life on one particular day in 1914.

This half-baked history gave me the chance to read a lot of old newspapers. With one exception, they were hopelessly dated, mired in the conventional wisdom of the time. Only the black press sometimes ran articles with an undeceived perspective on society, one that made sense decades later.

So I read the latest commentary by Chicago Defender executive editor Roland Martin with interest. Money quote:

"The Summer Games in Athens, Greece, cost that government billions of dollars, and are you more interested in traveling to the city because of it? I recall the NBA superstars doing their thing in Barcelona, Spain, but I haven't booked a trip to the country lately. Heck, how many of you are really that interested in traveling to Atlanta because they hosted the Summer Games in 1996? . . .

"The happiest people in the world today should be those in Houston and Philadelphia. The U.S. Olympic Committee notified them that they are no longer in the running to be the city put into the world mix in 2016," and thus no longer in danger of taking an expensive ego trip.

I don't know if he's right, but he is upholding a tradition that's at least 92 years old: asking questions that the white media rarely imagine.

Over at the Becker-Posner Blog, Seventh Circuit Federal Appellate Judge Richard Posner declines to comment on the constitutionality of Chicago's new big-box minimum wage.  (That question is likely to wind up in his in box one of these years.)  Meanwhile, he makes some interesting admissions, in his characteristically Olympian way.  Final paragraph: 

"At the current minimum wage in Illinois of $7.75 an hour, an employee who works 2000 hours a year (a 40-hour week with two weeks of annual vacation) and is paid the minimum wage earns only $15,500 a year. This is a pittance,"

You're coming in loud and clear, judge. 

"though if the minimum-wage employee's spouse is employed at a significantly higher wage, the family's income may not be at a hardship level. Similarly, the minimum-wage employee may be an elderly person who receives social security and Medicare and may have a company pension in addition."

Also true for some. 

"These possibilities show that minimum wage laws, even if they had no disemployment effects, would be a clumsy instrument for combating poverty. A better approach than raising the mininum wage would be increasing the earned-income tax credit (negative income tax), which is a method of increasing the earnings of marginal workers without confronting their employer with a higher cost of labor and thus inducing the employer to discharge those workers whose marginal product is lower than the minimum wage."

Illinois has a state EITC. 

"But this would be difficult for an individual city or even state to do; it would require federal action."

Gee, I wonder which party would be more likely to enact this.  But, further deponent sayeth not.

In January 2002 Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago published a four-page article in Nature.  A  contribution to Antarctic climatology, after almost five years it's still newsworthy enough that he wrote about it in the July 27 New York Times. (A fuller free version is available here .)

"My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report . . . found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent [58 percent] had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change."

That's how science works:  a theory (or model) makes predictions, researchers check them out and report the results.  When they don't fit, it's time to check the research findings, and if they seem valid, to revise the model.

This patient iterative process is too slow for the mainstream media, and too impartial to suit climate-change denialists.  Writes Doran, "Our results have been misused as 'evidence' against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel 'State of Fear' and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, 'Godless: The Church of Liberalism.'"

Chicago's Heartland Institute, which purports to champion "sound science," joined this company with an article in 2002 that overgeneralized Doran's findings and linked them to unrelated studies, in order to create the impression (well known to be false) that the globe as a whole isn't warming.  Much as creationists take any revision in evolutionary theory (no matter how slight) as proof that the whole theory of evolution by natural selection is worthless, these special pleaders misread the very process of science in order to deny its results. 

The media echo chamber continues to resound with these misrepresentations.  A newspaper in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, fabricated a Doran quote to suit its purposes on June 25.  In the on-line comments section June 29, Doran denied ever saying or thinking it, and asked that it be removed.  It's still up.

(Which reminds me -- has any denialist outfit ever explained Doran's actual findings and apologized for misrepresenting them?)

Of course, science has been plodding on meantime.  Writes Doran, "Climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet."

Doran includes a fuller version of his Times op-ed and additional materials at his UIC web site.  One of his side comments pretty much summarizes the whole sorry business:

"It has always amazed me that skeptics of climate warming are quite ready to distrust 99% of the scientific community, but they immediately trust me only because I wrote a paper they 'thought' supported their argument."

In the 1910s and 1920s, "Zoning . . . was advocated as a tool that could be used with surgical precision to alleviate problems that had plagued cities for decades," such as congestion and noise, write Joseph Schwieterman of DePaul University and coauthor Dana Caspall in The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago.

The city's landmark 1923 zoning ordinance was also supposed to create a real-estate bonanza and "rid Chicago of its image as a crowded, dirty, and corrupt city." But once zoning became law, "residents began to push their alderman and the Zoning Board of Appeals for zoning changes that would benefit them." Today much of the zoning in the city is negotiable.

And zoning reflects the conventional wisdom of the time when it was passed. In the 1960s, for instance, on-street parking became a major headache because "far more of the tenants of apartment buildings owned cars than had been expected when the city drafted its parking regulations in the mid-1950s."

Let's not forget Alderman Emil Pacini, chairman of the City Council Committee on Buildings and Zoning, who described the city's 1957 zoning ordinance as "the greatest weapon the city can use to stop the flight to the suburbs."

These are the juicy parts of the book--Schwieterman and Caspall are low-key if not bland in their approach, but the lesson shines through. Cities are not designed by experts, whatever they may think; the experts' designs are shaped by the city.

On some days UIC's Robert Bruegmann has trouble telling his neighborhood in the city from the burbs:

"The same big-box retail establishments and rowhouses visible in far suburban Gurnee or Tinley Park, 40 or 50 miles from Chicago, were sprouting in my own neighborhood, originally a German working-class community but now in the process of rapid gentrification. . . . As an increasingly affluent population moved in, [population] densities plummeted and automobile usage soared. Increasingly, although my neighborhood looked like a traditional city neighborhood . . . it started to function in ways that made it similar to any suburb." (Sprawl:  A Compact History, page 7)

Whether or not you agree with all his conclusions, Bruegmann's the rare person who sees what he's looking at, and not what he expected to see. For years most of my interview subjects assumed that I'd travel by car to meet them. But it never occurred to me just how marginal life without a car really is, even in the American city best suited for it (after New York of course).

A city ought to be a place where you can live without having to support an automobile.  Here's a partial collection of links on the subject:

• Carfree Chicago: half blog, half web site: "The deck often seems stacked against those of us who can’t or choose not to drive. There are few places in the nation where we can live without cars, and we’re lucky to be in a place like Chicago where there’s decent public transportation and plenty of walkable neighborhoods. But we need to stay informed" on both policy and how-to.  Still a tad sketchy, but aren't we all?

• CTA Tattler: a blog consisting mainly of anecdotes, plus some survival tips for Chicago Transit Authority riders and connoisseurs. Blog critic Malcolm Gladwell should drop by--this is all first-hand stuff, nothing "derivative."

• Cycling Sisters: web site of a women's cycling group in Chicago whose mission is "to increase the number of women who ride bicycles for transportation." E-mail list as well. These people are serious:  "I ride my bike year round, almost always with my 3 kids in tow. This is what I typically carry in my trailer during the summer months . . . "

• Chicagoland Bicycle Federation: lots of help here, and if you didn't know about these folks already, you may need 'em.

• I-GO Car Sharing: four-year-old nonprofit spun off from the Center for Neighborhood Technology. OK, sometimes you really need a car.

• The Slow and the Curious: first-person blog of a mother in downstate Normal who's spending July with a two-year-old and no car.  Worth a look, because she's not strongly pushing an agenda, and because she's doing it in a far more hostile environment than Chicago.

• The Year of Living Carlessly Experiment: Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute blogs the same thing in Seattle.

• Moving Beyond Congestion: Long-run policy stuff, RTA's plan to beef up funding and service.  I'm congenitally skeptical of big plans, Burnham notwithstanding. But without good transit Chicago's in a world of hurt. 

Please feel free to add suggestions.  More later, and maybe some stories.  As a friend says, for middle-class folks "the experience of being marginalized, while never pleasant, is illuminating."

Over at Gristmill, Jason Scorse--an environmentalist who believes in market principles, and an economist teaching at the Monterey Institute of International Studies--posted his four favorite policies for cleaning up the world:

"Eliminate all natural-resource subsidies.  Subsidies to timber companies, fishermen, farmers, and the oil and gas industry are by far the most damaging environmental policies engaged in by governments around the world." These subsidies both encourage environmental degradation and make natural resources seem cheaper than they are, making it hard for alternatives to compete.

"Expand property rights in areas where they are weak or non-existent.  The areas in the world where we witness the greatest levels of environmental degradation (the oceans, many large tropical forests, and the atmosphere) are those where property rights are absent, unclear, or poorly enforced." Whether held by individuals, groups, or governments, make those rights clear.

"Empower society with information.  Basic environmental science is something that will be underfunded in a pure 'free market,' because it is rarely profitable; therefore, governments should do more to support scientific research."

"Enlarge green markets through government purchases.  Since governments are some of the largest buyers of natural resources in the world (e.g. paper, power, food), their purchases have a huge impact on markets and the environment."

There are some interesting comments both at Gristmill and at Environmental Economics, where Scorse also posted.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Adam Bilsky (aabilsky@comcast.net) of DePaul's Management of Public Services Graduate Program would like to know "what obstacles currently face supporters of green residential building in Chicago, and what action steps might remove them to stimulate market demand." If you'd like to help, take  his survey (confidentiality promised) before Thursday at surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=355372368977. It's not excessively long.

You just know the flood of words for and against Wal-Mart and Chicago's regulation of its wages is just starting. Here are the best thoughts I've seen:

Scott Gordon at the Beachwood Reporter investigates Wal-Mart's claim that the council vote cost the city $6.5 billion, and calls bullshit on it.

Michael Van Winkle at the Heartland Institute keeps the libertarian case short, cool, and simple. Most commentators talk as if the big boxes will either walk or stay. But the real effects will be subtle, at the margins, and based on profitability, whether they involve building slightly smaller stores, stores just outside the city limits, automating more entry-level jobs, or opening stores that later close. "ANY law that decreases a store's profitability relative to other stores in the same system also puts that store a disadvantage in the internal competition for resources," he writes. If you prefer your libertarians angrier and more expansive, try this.

Saul Levmore, dean of the University of Chicago Law School, observes that a progressive city income tax could have been used for the same purpose, and more efficiently--if anyone trusted the city to spend the proceeds appropriately.

Soap Blox Chicago has a map showing the location of wards of aldermen voting against the ordinance.

Alysia Tate of the Chicago Reporter writes in the Tribune that the council ducked the issue of underdevelopment in the inner city.

If you're not confused enough yet, there's a nice summary of the bottom-line-driven "greening" of Wal-Mart over at the environmental site Gristmill. 

Writing for the BBC, Finlo Rohrer notes the pull of fast-growing megacities like London and Shanghai toward independence, or at least sharp differentiation from their own particular hinterlands. He quotes sociologist Richard Sennett: "London belongs to a country composed of itself and New York." (Hat tip to Remaindered Links.)

Within the US, a cute cartographic project on the 2004 presidential election by Anandaroop Roy shows how the political divide isn't so much between blue states and red states as between blue metropolitan areas and everywhere else. (Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily.)

What do you think?  Is Chicago basically midwestern (as I always imagined), or does it have more in common these days with New York and Tokyo than with Des Moines and Columbus?

"The midwest is the fulcrum for global warming solutions," argues the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center. "The midwest has the largest concentration of old, dirty coal plants that produce large amounts of CO2 which cause global warming, and the Midwest is the center of the United States' transportation industry. The midwest is the most important region in the most important country in the world when it comes to solving our global warming problems." Full strategy paper here.

The ELPC is best known for serving as the legal firm for the midwestern environmental movement on public-policy issues like logging of national forests in Wisconsin, high-speed rail, and renewable-energy portfolio standards. Now it's going beyond policy to the personal, with a list of seven steps anyone can take to retard global warming.

The first step the center recommends is to replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescents. Like many environmental improvements, this requires you to put up more money up front in order to save $11.38 per bulb per year--plus one slightly less damaged planet. 

Fun: Feministing finds the most baffling abstinence poster yet.

Not so much fun:  The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals tries to put the opposition to gay marriage on a scholarly, non-bigoted, non-religious basis. Co-editors Robert George of Princeton and Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago present eleven papers delivered at a Princeton conference in December 2004.

Admiring reviewer Glenn Stanton writes in Christianity Today:

"We are moving from this natural, universal model to a greater embrace of what I call 'disembodied procreation' in same-sex unions, where sperm and egg meet only in a Petri dish and foreplay is a legal contract.  [In one article] Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, considers family changes during the past 40 years. The pill and legalized abortion, says Wilcox, have dramatically separated sex, procreation, and the larger family unit. Each now stands on its own. Undermining the need for marriage and family, these medical 'advances' have disproportionately hurt the poor."

The people making these arguments--whether they use sectarian language or not--are, technically, not bigots.  They're not just out to stigmatize gay people. They want to see a world without contraception, so that the version of marriage they grew up with can be forever frozen in amber. 

Which counts more: high-priced houses or clean air? Money magazine's "best places to live" feature is a crock, like all such rating systems, because it depends on weighing one incommensurable factor against another. They report, they decide. It's more fun to check out which midwestern places closest to Chicago rank best in particular categories.

Richest: Naperville (#11 overall with $99,863 median household income)

Best-educated: Evanston (#4 overall with 31.2 percent of residents holding graduate degrees), closely followed by Oak Park (#7 overall wirh 29.1 percent)

Safest, maybe: Wheaton (#16 overall lowest reported rate of violent crime)

Quickest to work: Bloomington (#14 overall shortest commute, median 12.6 minutes)

Fastest job growth: Bolingbrook (#16 overall at 34.6 percent)

Skinniest and most singles: Champaign

Youngest: Cicero (#23 overall, median age 26.95 years). Hah!  You thought we were going to say Champaign!

Cheapest housing: Decatur

Cleanest air: Ames, Iowa (#15 overall with 98.1 percent of "good" days on the Air Quality Index)

Having fooled around with this, it strikes me there's another reason "best city" rankings are a crock. They pull in the extremes, which are usually smaller places. Certain Chicago neighborhoods could compete on most of these rankings--OK, maybe not cleanest air--but they don't get counted as places to live, and Chicago as a whole averages out. Maybe it's just that suburbanites buy more middlebrow magazines, so they get catered to. 

• Hell is hot but entertaining. Rich people dress like bums, top executives have no title on their cards,  beautiful women dress down: it's called "counter signaling." More examples over at Marginal Revolution.

• Hell has a mild day. Local ultracon Tom Roeser endorses and seeks to expand the century-old progressive reform of primary elections, calling for a state law requiring that the runner-up in any primary election should automatically succeed to the candidacy if the winner cannot continue. Thus Jim Oberweis would have run against Barack Obama for Senate in 2004, and Forrest Claypool would now be running for Cook County Board chair against Tony Peraica. Conservatives are just liberals who take longer to get it.
  

• Hell is air-conditioned. Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post, "The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." (Hat tip to Cliopatria.)

• Hailstorms in hell. The New Standard ("Independent. Commercial-free. Nonprofit. Uncompromised.") reports that Illinois will offer extra subsidies to companies locating "near affordable housing units or public-transportation routes," a move that has sucked some subsidy foes into speaking kindly of this form of boodle.
  

• Hell just froze over. Environmental Defense is hiring a "project manager" to work with Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Arkansas, "to create substantive, measurable and lasting environmental progress." (Hat tip to worldchanging.)

If you didn't get the e-mail, you can go here to find out about the Regional Transportation Authority's latest plan for a plan to improve mass transit in the Chicago area. It's called "Moving Beyond Congestion."

The email says, "We are engaged in a strategic plan for modern transit and we seek input and participation from residents throughout the six-county region" to create a plan that reduces traffic congestion. There's a July 25 media kickoff at Union Station for those who sign up to be "Partners for Transit."

Here's one of the ten goals:

"Ensure that the passenger experience is of one seamless public transportation system."

Great idea, RTA folks, but maybe you could get your own people to stop feuding and agree to this before dragging the rest of us into a bunch of meetings?

To see part of the problem, check out this July 5 report from WBBM 780's Bob Roberts. The suburban Pace bus system is still threatening to cut off CTA seven-day passholders because Pace claims it's not getting enough money from CTA to compensate for honoring them. Other CTA passes and cards are still good there, and I'm sure everyone using them has plenty of spare time to keep track.

In a development reported in the August issue of the Lutheran magazine--but apparently not in the Chicago media--the Lutheran church's Metropolitan Chicago Synod voted in June to ask Advocate Health Care to change its policies in order to be true to the teachings of Jesus and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. By a 197-159 vote, the synod called upon Advocate to:

• restore emergency room services at Bethany Hospital;

• maintain full acute care health services, including obstetrics/gynecology and mental health and addiction services;

• invest as much in Bethany Hospital as it invests in its suburban hospitals.

The first few paragraphs of the article by Nicole Adamson are here (free registration required for the whole thing). The full text of the resolution is here.

Advocate is the product of a 1995 merger between hospitals with roots in the traditions of Lutheranism and the United Church of Christ. Advocate's 21-member board of directors includes three Lutheran officials and isn't bound by the synod's opinion.

Advocate spokesperson Tony Mitchell told Adamson the chain is "happy to engage in dialogue," but insisted that both the chain's investment practices and its plans to cut Bethany back to a long-term care facility are consistent with its faith-based values and philosophy.

As I reported in the Reader on December 16 (available in our paid archives), Advocate's claim that it invests equally in suburban and inner-city hospitals rests on detailed figures it won't disclose. Those figures that are publicly available don't support its claim.

Until now, Advocate has consistently blamed all criticism of its policies on the Service Employees International Union, which is engaged in a corporate campaign with the goal of organizing Advocate employees.  If nothing else, the Lutheran vote shows that the controversy over Advocate grows out of a basic moral issue, not an organizing campaign.

The moral issue is how to serve two masters. Advocate is by heritage a religiously based nonprofit. But it must operate in a cutthroat capitalist environment in which lenders read financial losses in some parts of the chain as a sign of weakness, not a sign of meritorious devotion to "the least of these."

That tension would still dog Advocate even if Bethany and the SEIU disappeared tomorrow.

For years the Neighborhood Works, the newsletter of Chicago's Center for Neighborhood Technology, ran on its masthead the maxim, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," signaling the organization's ongoing suspicion of one-size-fits-all approaches to urban problems.

Now Jim Wallis, writing in Sojourners, uses the phrase in a parallel way (registration req'd) to critique what passes these days for American foreign policy:

"If we don't know how to solve a problem, we just fight," Wallis writes. "Diplomacy has become a weak word to those who run our foreign policy and, in the House debate on Iraq in June, Republicans made numerous references to those who are 'afraid to fight.' Right on cue, Fox News Sunday's Brit Hume accused Democrats of being a party that just doesn't like to fight. And according to the neoconservatives masquerading as journalists, such as Hume and William Kristol, continuous fighting is the only foreign policy that makes any sense.

". . . Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have the same strong preference for fighting over talking. If they had their way, we would have fought or would still be fighting several wars by now--all at the same time--in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Iran at least, and probably against North Korea, too, if they thought we could win the war. They act as if talking and negotiating with potential adversaries is just a waste of time."

Andrew Sullivan, who comes at these issues from a very different place than Wallis, reflects on George Washington's renunciation of power at the end of the Revolution and again after eight years as president, and makes a similar point: "This capacity for restraint, for embracing the limits of power rather than its ends, is at the core of constitutional democracy (and, I would argue, conservatism, properly understood). I wish our current leaders grasped it better. Sharing power is often more powerful . . ."

Where are the presidential and congressional candidates, of either party, who can make this non-obvious message seem just as American as pulling a hammer from your holster and banging away? 

Guest-blogging at the University of Chicago Law School's Faculty Blog, NYU's Barry Adler offers an intelligent rationale for something I've been thinking about ever since my 1978 Chevrolet Chevette ran up hundreds of dollars in repairs and still left me stranded successively in downstate Bloomington, on west Armitage's factory row, and miles from home on U.S. 20 with ice cream in the back seat, two decades ago.

"Perhaps GM should not attempt to survive," writes Adler. "The company's financial losses have not been visited upon it randomly. Rather the losses have been earned the old fashioned way, through the manufacture of expensive, unpopular products. Of the $10.6 billion in 2005 red ink, $3.4 billion was operating loss, which reflects not debt burden but real resources consumed in excess of revenues received. This is not a problem that can be fixed with new loans . . . . GM's market share--though roughly a quarter of U.S. new vehicles--has fallen and continues to fall. Perhaps the best course for General Motors, then, is to give up any attempt to continue in its current form.

"The company might instead voluntarily file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition, which would free it from debt payments and premit a rational disposition of its assets. GM's profitable brands could be retained or sold to competitors, who could also stand behind warranty commitments and assure the availability of parts for current models . . . . Workers would suffer, but fewer might lose their jobs than will be the case if GM holds out until the last penny is spent, when there may be nothing left for anyone to salvage."

Following the corruption convictions of four mayoral aides, Friday’s Tribune listed Mayor Richard M. Daley’s “five certifiable successes” to contrast with his failure to clean up city government. (I believe it was Don Rose who described Daley’s tenure as state’s attorney in the Reader--quoting from memory--to the effect that he promised to look for corruption in high places but wasn’t tall enough to find any.) At the Beachwood Reporter, Rhodes annihilates the Trib’s conventional wisdoms like a master chef filleting and dicing without seeming to move or breaking a sweat. One of the five:

Oh, but he fixed the Chicago Housing Authority, didn’t he?

“No one opposed tearing down the towers--if a workable plan for where those residents would go was in place. It wasn't. Just as the critics predicted, most former CHA residents are not returning to affordable, mixed-income neighborhoods promised by the city. Instead, they have largely resegregated in worse conditions than where they started. The point of public housing reform wasn't a beautification plan to remove the eyesores, but to provide a decent place for people in need to live.”

Leave this blog and go read the whole thing. (It’s quick.) Then put TBR on your RSS feed.

A few random links:

• Why it might not be a good thing that you can afford to hire someone to scoop your dog’s poop.

• Was criminologist Samuel Walker right to be “horrified” that our hometown Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, cited his work in the recent decision OKing some no-knock police raids? A deep-ranging and civil discussion.
  

• Congressional Quarterly’s map of Congressional races, backed by detail. (They have the Republicans losing ground but hanging on--most races with “no clear favorite” are in the midwest.)

• Is American conservatism “degenerate”? Andrew Sullivan thinks so and offers an example.

• Your best, and probably only, chance to see Bush and Cheney likened to philosophers Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume.

Well-off and white people get more sleep than nonrich and nonwhite people, according to a recent University of Chicago study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The study didn’t address the reasons why--its main finding was that people in general sleep less than they think--but Diane Lauderdale, an associate professor of health studies, speculated that people who make more money may have fewer worries or more control over their sleep environment. That bored one blogger, who wrote, “I can't believe money--taxpayer money, probably--was spent on a study like this. Is it just me or does this seem like a no-brainer?”

She missed the odd part. The study also found that, on average, women sleep more than men. Scorecard: white women 6.7 hours, white men 6.1, black women 5.9, black men 5.1.

If privileges like wealth and whiteness confer the additional privilege of more sleep, what happens to the privilege of maleness when we hit the sack? Or, in Chicago terms, where’s mine?

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg uncovered a similar oddity in his 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Short version from my Reader review (July 26, 2002):

“Not all of the vulnerable people are the usual suspects, and not all of the usual suspects are vulnerable. Yes, blacks died half again as often as whites [during Chicago’s 1995 killer heat wave]. But Latinos--comparably poor and downtrodden--died much less often than either . . . . Most surprisingly, men died at almost three times the rate of women--19 men per 100,000, compared to just 7 women per 100,000. This is a dramatically greater difference than that between racial and ethnic groups . . . .

“According to the usual left-liberal analysis, the victims of incipient social breakdown are supposed to be women and people of color, not just men and blacks. The heat wave does indeed reveal some social faultlines, but not quite the ones you might expect.”

Has anyone taken a probe to this anomaly? Heck, does anyone even have a good guess as to what’s going on here?

Is it legal to say that you love a new book when all you've done so far is look at the pictures? That’s my story with Northwestern University geographer John C. Hudson’s Chicago: A Geography of a City and Its Region (University of Chicago Press). There’s a lot of geographical theory inside; here's a short summary of Hudson's account of how, since the 1950s, racism has tilted the region's economy away from the south and toward the northwest.  But even without having tasted that, no cartographilic Chicagoan could resist this volume on the basis of the maps alone.

One that surprised me: City planners have long since fallen out of love with highway construction, so we aren’t usually treated to uberarchitect Daniel Burnham’s “General Diagram of Exterior Highways Encircling and Radiating from the City. Hudson does point out that any resemblance between today’s expressway system and Burnham’s 97-year-old vision is “rather superficial.” Burnham expected Chicago to be fed from nearby farms and didn’t foresee the scope of suburban development.

But four circumferential expressways!  The first one appears to run from Uptown to Austin to South Shore. The next, Winnetka-Des Plaines-Summit-Hegewisch. The third, Waukegan-Elgin-Joliet-Gary.  And the fourth, even farther out than the Hastert Highway and as yet unbuilt, runs Kenosha-Woodstock-De Kalb-Morris-Kankakee-La Porte.

Blogging political scientist Daniel Drezner shipped out from the University of Chicago for Tufts University in Boston in early June, leaving an idiosyncratic farewell letter--and, of course, an ongoing RSS feed streaming useful instruction as to what and how an intelligent nonliberal thinks.

Drezner's number-one regret is losing touch with the university's workshop system, where "ideas and theories were ripped apart and then stitched back together by the faculty and graduate students. I will sorely miss the looks of shock and awe from visiting presenters when they see their paper expertly dissected by a second-year graduate student."

His number-one pleasure about leaving? Being able to put half a continent between himself and the Hyde Park Co-op: "Never have I seen a better advertisement for the evils of barriers to entry than that sorry excuse of a store."
 

“From time to time, most people discuss important matters with other people.  Looking back over the last six months--who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?”

The General Social Survey, a project of the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, asked that question in 1985 and again in 2004. The results were surprising.

(FYI, this isn’t just any poll. The GSS is the gold standard of impartial public opinion research, conducted face-to-face with a random sample of 3,000 Americans every other year. It's been a model of caution and care in tracking public opinion on general subjects since 1972, and on some subjects well before that. More.)

Twenty years ago the average person had a “network” of three people with whom he or she could talk over important matters. Now it’s down to two, and those two are more likely than before to be family members, rather than neighbors or coworkers. In 1985 about 10 percent said they had nobody to talk to; now it’s 25 percent.

Miller McPherson of the University of Arizona and two other sociologists report the findings in the American Sociological Review. Money quote:

“In his groundbreaking [1982] study of social networks, To Dwell Among Friends, Claude Fischer labeled those who had only one or no discussion ties with whom to discuss personal matters as having marginal or inadequate counseling support. By those criteria, we have gone from a quarter of the American population being isolated from counseling support to almost half of the population falling into that category.”

No one study is conclusive but this is a solid piece of evidence that’s pretty hard to spin as good news. Unlike many GSS questions, this one hasn’t been asked in every survey, so there aren’t as many data points as one would like. And perhaps most people define “important” differently now than before, though I know of no evidence for this.

According to Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, this is the best media summary. Discussion here and a determinedly skeptical take here. Gross overstatement here that's well answered here.

Leon Kass is entitled to his opinion, bizarre as it may seem:

“At present we have a President as friendly to the concerns of human dignity as we have had in a long time, or are likely to have for a long time to come,” he tells the magazine of his current employer, the American Enterprise Institute. “We have a Congress that is equally sympathetic.”

I suppose when you’re a former professor at the University of Chicago and former chair of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, you can think about human dignity without worrying about small things like civil liberties, extraordinary rendition, and respect for the Geneva Conventions. Let’s narrow our vision to match his for a minute, and consider his response when his interviewer asked him about the Terri Schiavo case. “Since I did not have the facts I stayed out of the Terri Schiavo case," he says. "The facts were very hard to get. But I regret very much that it became the political controversy that it did.”

Excuse me?  If “the facts were very hard to get,” how did Bill Frist--leader of the supposedly sympathetic-to-human-dignity Senate--manage to diagnose Schiavo’s condition by video?

And if Kass does “regret very much” that it became a political firefight, why can’t he say who started the fire and poured gasoline on it for political advantage? Which President does he think urged Congress to pass a special law that literally made a federal case out of a family decision?

Kass has always been impressed with his own moral seriousness.  You’d think he could have traded it for more than a gig as a Republican hack.

Last month Crain's Chicago Business published its "Fortunate 100"--its annual list of Chicago’s best-paid CEOs.  (Nonsubscribers can check out the Fortunate Five.)  The millions and tens of millions are just business porn--MEGO. Let's measure the numbers in an understandable way.

The median annual income for an Illinois college graduate aged 21-64, according to the Census Bureau, was $45,689 in 1999.  (I’m being generous with the education level to make up for the old data. If you’ve got better, lay it on me.)

If you started working at age 21 and retired or died at age 64--and spent all that time at the median income (you wish), then your lifetime earnings would be just over $1.96 million. Total.

In order to match last year’s most fortunate CEO, W. James McNerney Jr. of Boeing, at $29.3 million, you'd need to work for 15 lifetimes. And then another 15 next year. Get busy!

Wikipedia says that blogs combine "text, images, and links."  By that standard, the Reader has had one since August 16, 1985, when the ink for "The City File" first hit the back pages of the paper. (Check out an image of that column below.)

Of course, back then we had neither the word "blog" nor hyperlink technology. "Google" was just a way to misspell a very large number, and any reader who questioned the information in an item had to make phone calls and/or visit a public library.  But a bloggy substance was already there in that first column--short snips that referred to original sources and occasionally provoked conversation.  
 
In that first blog entry I noted that local entrepreneurs had to find venture capital in Minneapolis; today Marshall Field's is set to become Macy's, dancing to a tune played at regional headquarters in--Minneapolis. Other items back then chronicled drug-war insanity and racism in schools and public housing, and one quoted now-famous new urbanist Peter Calthorpe's case that city dwellers are doing the environment a favor just by . . . being city dwellers.  

The medium has changed, but the stroboscopic alternation of insight and idiocy goes on.