Ward 8: So close to the rest of Washington, but so far from God.

The Post story today on Marion Barry’s election challengers has some excellent nuggets.  If you thought aurugula was a “class” food of the well-to-do, single beers go the other way.  Sandra Seegers, one of Barry’s challengers is upset:

For Seegars, … [an improved Ward 8] means allowing Ward 8 residents to buy single 16-ounce beers at their corner store.

The D.C. Council, with Barry’s support, recently passed a bill to expand the ban on single sales to wards 7 and 8. The measure, meant to cut down on loitering and public drunkenness, awaits congressional approval. Seegars said the ban discriminates against people who can’t afford a six-pack or a case. Barry’s response is simple: “Some people can’t afford to drink.”

Add affordable beer to the list of political hot topics.

Source: maps.live.com

L’Enfant’s plan for Washington included a hierarchy of orthogonal streets. While he aligned numbered and lettered streets on the cardinal axes, he diagonally overlaid the more important grand avenues. At major intersections of these grand avenues, he plotted public spaces which were later drawn as circles by surveyor Andrew Ellicott.

Meridian Hill Park is perched on the edge of the escarpment that separates the original L’Enfant Plan from the rest of NW DC. At the southeast corner of the park lies an odd intersection convening 15th and W Streets with New Hampshire and Florida Avenues (see satellite photo above). Since everything in the northwest portion of this intersection—Meridian Hill Park and the block between 15th Street and Florida Avenue—was not a part of the L’Enfant plan, one can safely assume the Frenchman had not intended to terminate New Hampshire Avenue there with a grand public space. The intersection consequently is a sea of asphalt confusing drivers and intimidating pedestrians (see image below).

L'Enfant and Ellicott struck straight lines. Meridian Hill Park and the block to its east are just outside the L'Enfant Plan and did not fare so well. Image source: DC Atlas

The public street space between the private property lines affords the city plenty of space to redesign the intersection.  I have drawn a plan that includes traditional Washington elements (a circular public space) along with more modern innovations (bulb-outs and raised crosswalks) to transform the intersection into a safer and more inviting public space (see image below).  After drawing this plan I learned that the District is planning to construct a circle here eventually as part of a plan to improve 15th Street. Their draft study does not yet include any plan for the circle, nor any cost estimates, so though my idea is not unique, it cannot be accused of reinventing the wheel (or rotary, for that matter).

This plan benefits drivers, pedestrians, and residents, while improving safety and the environment. The design contains five features that benefit the community:

1. Increased public green space— This plan reclaims unnecessary street asphalt for public greenspace and sidewalks. Replacing asphalt with grass allows the ground to absorb more rainwater and thus reduces the burden placed on the cities sewers, which currently receive a high amount of street runoff during storms. Reducing the amount of surface covered by dark asphalt also reduces the amount of heat the city absorbs during the summer. The increased greenspace creates new opportunities to plant trees which clean the air, provide shade, and increase the pleasantness of a place.
2. Creation of a new public place identity— L’Enfant had originally intended for such intersections to serve as the center of neighborhoods. He had suggested giving properties lining today’s circles to the various states, which he predicted would spruce up their respective circles in order to compete with each another for prestige. Though the city never carried through with L’Enfant’s plan for allocating properties to states, the existing circles and squares, particularly Logan and Dupont Circles, have come to identify their entire neighborhoods. Creating a new circle park provides the neighborhood a similar opportunity.  Furthermore, the circle above is aligned with the New Hampshire Avenue axis, formally terminating the avenue that begins all the way at the Kennedy Center.
3. Elimination of a confusing traffic pattern— Washingtonians have long since become accustomed to navigating traffic circles. This plan is a sharp improvement over the current intersection, which relies on countless traffic lights, some of which are located on tiny island in the middle of the intersection. The number of traffic signs the city has posted is evidence of the current intersection’s confusing design.  Though most of Washington’s circles and squares have been appropriated to honor Civil War heroes both famous (Grant) and unknown (Farragut), this circle could honor a more recent worthy city resident.  Naming the circle and erecting a statue can be delayed to a later date following a public nomination process.  Many of the city’s original squares and circles remained unadorned for decades.
4. Enhanced pedestrian safety— Some circles intimidate pedestrians because of their shape and because of the flowing traffic. The raised crosswalks at the circle’s entrances and exits will physically highlight the crossing of pedestrians, who, lest we forget, maintain the right-of-way. The raised crosswalks will also slow drivers who may otherwise speed in and out of the circle. No matter what one says about the pedestrian compatibility of circles in general, a circle here is a vast improvement over the current intersection, which even features an unreasonably long east-west crosswalk that only the bravest residents use.  A closer observation of the plan would reveal the presence of bulb-outs, which extend the curb and sidewalk into the street at crosswalks, providing pedestrians with shorter distances of street to traverse and also increases their visibility to drivers.
5. Reduced speeds and additional parking— The plan also calls for a modification of 15th Street between V and W Streets. The current street, though technically two lanes, is wide enough to fit four cars traveling abreast. Traffic engineers know that the wider the travel lanes, the faster drivers tend to drive. By converting some of the unnecessary width of the left lane into angular parking, the new design will reduce speeding and provide more street parking for residents and churchgoers alike without eliminating any greenspace.

Update: A DDOT official emailed me to let me know that the agency has no plans for a circle at that location and that both the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service, which is reposible for Meridian Hill Park, were not fond of the concept several years ago.

Having lived four years without a car in Prince George’s County, Maryland, I can attest to the utter contempt for pedestrians that afflicts the county.  Even when sidewalks are present along busy roadways, they are often too narrow, too close to the roadway and frequently lack crosswalks.  Several recent pedestrain deaths are highlighting the issue and the Maryland State Highway Administration is looking into pedestrian improvements along stretches of Pennsylvania Avenue in P.G.

Whereas other jurisdictions have launched initiatives to improve pedestrian safety, the concept seems to be completely foreign in P.G., despite the fact that is the jurisdiction (other than DC) whose residents are least likely to afford a car.

All together now.

I have complained before of the arrogance of Western liberals who wish to judge other societies by Western standards of human rights and democracy.  Some societies traditionally care more about social harmony and the respect for authority than they care about constitutional government and individual liberty.

Two op-eds this week interpret the well-choreographed Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing as a sign that success is also possible with collectivist, non-Western values.  Harold Meyerson in the Post writes:

If ever there was a display of affable collectivism, it was filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s opening ceremonies, which in their reduction of humans to a mass precision abstraction seemed to derive in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl.  …. The subject of Zhang’s ceremonies was a celebration of Chinese achievement and power, at all times stressing China’s harmonious relations with the rest of the world.

David Brooks in the NYT agrees:

The opening ceremony … was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.

Brooks discusses some interesting psychological studies in which Westerners tend to see people as individuals whereas Asians tend to see people as parts of their contexts.  The submission of individual rights to group interests illustrates a political philosophy perfectly aligned with the latter weltanschauung.  Any Western critique of Confucianist authoritarianism is arrogant at most and culturally insensitive at least.  The imposition of more liberal policies on these societies, either by force or through economic or political coercion smacks of modern-day imperialism.

Does this make the Western human rights campaigner wrong to advocate human rights?  Only if he, like many on the Left, truly believes in the importance of “celebrating diversity” and promoting tolerance of other cultures.  To avoid hypocrisy, the Westerner must admit that Western notions of government and rights should precede the traditional values of other cultures.  I’m not sure, though, how many of these advocates are willing to admit that.

Park Avenue and No Middle Class in Sight.

Houston and New York may seem like very different cities.  The former has no zoning regulation to restrict developers and tends to vote Republican.  The latter hosts bitter fights pitting long-time residents against “greedy” developers and votes reliably for liberal politicians.  Which city do you suppose is friendlier to the middle class?

The New York Sun says Houston and they’ve got the numbers to prove it.  Though you’ll earn a bit less in Houston, the cost of housing is significantly cheaper than in New York.  Even with the higher family transportation costs in car-dependent Houston, the lone star city is still far more affordable for the middle class family.

Furthermore, though Federal income taxes are roughly the same nationwide, state and local taxes are much lower in Houston the city than on Houston the Street.

After housing, taxes, and transportation, the New Yorkers have $26,000 left. The Houston family has $30,500, and those dollars go a lot further than they would in New York. The American Chamber of Commerce produces local price indexes for various areas, including Houston and Queens (though not Staten Island). The overall price index for Queens is 150, which means that it costs 50% more to live there than it does in the average American locale. The price index for Houston is 88.

It would seem that Houston, a city demonized for unruly cowboy capitalism is gentler to the common man than is the self-congratulatory left-leaning metropolis on the Hudson.

We obey.

The American Prospect writes that globalization’s western hallmarks such as IBM, Google, Cisco, and Yahoo! are not globalizing democracy as many techno-utopians had expected, but are frequently enabling authoritarian governments, especially China’s, to suppress domestic dissent.  In order to win and maintain their contracts, these companies curry favor with authoritarian governments by apologizing for their clients’ behavior.

Like nearly every western media outlet, the American Prospect is critical of the practice of enabling authoritarianism.  However, if certain societies are more docile, compliant, and welcoming of authoritarianism than most, why should western companies try to change that?  Thus, the modern western liberal is conflicted: in standing for human rights (or at least the western notion of human rights), he is likely to criticize these companies for their complicity in Chinese oppression.  The multiculturalist in him, however, must defend the authoritarian leanings of cultures that have never known anything else.  Among the western Left, their notions of human rights usually trump multicultural tolerance.  Thus, the western Left really needs to admit what it really believes: that multiculturalism is dead and that western ideas of human rights should triumph over all else.

Blight and glitz, a tale of two Washingtons united in liberalism.

Marc Fisher in the Post today writes about Marion Barry’s return to life as a civic organizer.  The voice that once denounced the evils of gentrification now seeks more redevelopment in his home ward east of the Anacostia.  The article sports one especially telling paragraph:

In public settings, Barry still says that “if we are not careful, we are going to become a city of the very, very rich and the very, very poor.” But alone in his car, he sounds like a developer, touting the idea that bringing in residents with stable jobs and a stake in the community will do more to stabilize neighborhoods in Southeast than any government giveaway.

Too late, Barry.  Washington is a city of the very, very rich and the very, very poor.  Moreover, the very, very rich are well-educated and typically white whereas the very, very poor are almost always black and are victims of the city’s miserable public schools.  The only thing these two Washingtons share is a long-standing affinity for liberalism and the Democratic Party.

However, it is nice to see that Barry has moved away from the angry separatism of his earlier years and toward an integrationist attitude.  Ward 8 has enough poverty as it is and it could use some wealthier residents to move in and share their wealth.  Whereas good fences make good neighbors, sometimes good neighbors make good neighbors.

CNN never fails to remind me why I don’t take it as a respectable news source.  One article today states that

Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer miles in May compared with a year earlier, according to a report Monday from the Federal Highway Administration.

However, there is not a single mention of what the number was one year earlier.  Was it 50 billion miles, 500 billion miles, or 15 billion miles?  The denominator can make a huge difference but since CNN’s journalism is often an product by the brain-dead for the brain-dead, readers of the story will never know whether this drop is significant or minuscule.  Just toss out a big number the public is supposed to infer a vague “bigness”.

Such shoddyness.

One’s IQ depends significantly (or mostly, as some would argue) on genetic influence.  If this is the case, individual ability and life prospects are distributed in a cruel manner.  Combine this unearned intellectual inheritance with the egalitarian mandate of meritocracy and society starts to develop a merited elite, an intelligentsia, or to put it more cruelly, a caste system.

John Derbyshire in The National Review argues that meritocracy dismantles old elites, as its proponents expect, but also constructs new elites in its wake:

This means that our cognitive elites are increasingly inbred. Doctors used to marry nurses, professors used to marry their secretaries, business moguls used to marry starlets. Now doctors marry doctors, professors professors, moguls moguls, lawyers lawyers, etc. Those “modest origins” of our meritocratic elites are less modest by the year. We might be drifting towards a caste system, except that meritocracy requires some openness, some vacuuming-up of high-I.Q. outliers from the lower classes, some dumping of low-I.Q. duffers from the elites.

This new elite will elicit considerable resentment as the merely average masses feel shortchanged in the genetic lottery.  Fortunately for them, Derbyshire fails to mention, the emerging intellectual underclass may not have the smarts to realize the cause of their state.

Gregorius Nekschot

In left-leaning modern democracies, one wonders what happens when the freedom of expressions is brought to the high altar of multiculturalism?  In Canada, as we have reported, it may be illegal to publish speech “hateful and contemptuous” of any ethnic group.  In the Netherlands, long a safe haven for political and religious dissenters, one particular cartoonist by the pen name Gregorius Nekschot (Gregory Shot in the Neck) has been arrested for drawing offensive cartoons of Muslims and other minority groups.

The Dutch police have released him, but he is to face a trial in the near future.  One can rest assured, however, that Dutch intolerance of undesirable speech is not only reserved for the ethnic majority:

The prosecutor’s office notes that it has also taken action against Muslims suspected of discrimination. A Moroccan-born Dutchman was recently convicted of discrimination for writing in a blog that homosexuals should be tossed from rooftops and thrown down stairs. A court ordered him to do community-service work.

Smoking weed may be legalized, but voicing unpopular opinions is not.  The Dutch parliament is investigating the cartoonists arrest, lest the prosecutor’s office reverse the country’s famous permissive speech policies.

A former manager of the International Space Station writes that it may be possible to harvest solar energy from satellites and the beam the power back down to earth.  The main advantage is that there is no interferance from clouds and that a network of satellites can relay solar power at night.

The writer also beleives that such a project might make NASA relevant again.

In fact, in a time of some skepticism about the utility of our space program, NASA should realize that the American public would be inspired by our astronauts working in space to meet critical energy needs here on Earth.

Of course, a former NASA scientist would say that.

In other news, the governor of Texas is asking the EPA to waive the ethanol mandate for gas sold in the state as the demand for corn ethanol has driven up the cost of food and feed.  The corn lobby is understandably upset, but certainly the affordability of food for everyone is more important that the need of midwestern farmers to grow rich.  Furthermore, if ethanol were so important Congress would consider eliminating the import tariff on Brazillian sugar cane ethanol, which is much more environmentally sustainable than its corn cousin and would lower the cost of food.  Thus the trade wall for Brazillian ethanol could be converted into a sea wall protecting the world’s vulnerable from the “silent tsunami“.

Cultivating One's Mind. Source: New York Times.

Berea College in Kentucky doesn’t charge its students tuition.  This contrasts sharply with many of the nation’s most prestigious schools, which charge hefty sums for tuition despite their astounding endowments.  Are the Ivies just become havens of America’s intellectual and economic elite?  The New York Times thinks so:

[A]ccording to 2002 data, only one in 10 of the students at the nation’s most selective institutions come from the bottom 40 percent of the income scale. And the proportion of low-income undergraduates at the nation’s wealthiest colleges has been declining, as measured by the percentage receiving federal Pell Grants, for families with income under about $40,000. At most top colleges, only 8 to 15 percent of students receive Pell grants.

The Senate and IRS are now investigating whether universities should be required to spend 5% of their endowments on education annually in order to maintain their tax exempt status.  The IRS and Congress tend to prefer that tax exemptions apply only on income that suits the public good.  If hefty endowments aren’t being used to broaden access to higher education, what public good do they serve?

Several of the Ivies have stepped up tuition assistance for students from low-income families, but, as the Times points out, the student bodies are becoming ever more priviledged.  Harvard, Yale, et al., beware: continue to lock out the poor and you may have to hire more accountants.

The high cost of living in Washington is changing the city in some unexpected ways.  Artists require lots of cheap space for their shows and cheap housing since they tend to make little money.  Washington provides little of either and so it’s no wonder that the city’s creative scene is weak for a city of its size.

The Baltimore City Paper writes about how many musicians in Washington are slowly being priced out to the suburbs; many others are simply choosing to move to Baltimore, where rents are much cheaper.  The canaries are in the coal mine in Tenleytown:

Fort Reno concert organizer Amanda MacKaye sees musicians as being priced out of Washington. MacKaye books the twice-weekly summer concert series, held in a Tenleytown park, through an open application process. In keeping with Fort Reno’s mission to serve the local community, only musicians hailing from within the District of Columbia are eligible. So it’s no small matter that MacKaye, who has booked the series for four years, has seen a drop in the number of Washington-based acts seeking the series’ coveted spots and an increase of applicants from just outside the city.

All the high-priced lawyers and lobbyists are pricing out the artists, who, admittedly, have always been a sideshow in Washington.  The city is not one where someone can afford to show up without a plan—only the rich can afford that.  Since the city is too expensive for artists, the city will naturally continue to suffer from a lack of artists and the homegrown art that takes patience few can financially afford.

Thus Washington faces an odd paradox: the preponderance of bourgeois bohemians provides a market for alternative music and art scenes, but also makes the economics for such a scene impractical:

Jason Urick, a member of electronic noise outfit WZT Hearts and resident of warehouse concert space Floristree, also sees Baltimore as more affordable for artists, where they can spend more time on their art and less on the job. “[Washington] is an affluent city,” says Urick, who grew up in the D.C. suburb of Gaithersburg and settled in Baltimore eight years ago. “I think that [Baltimore] does attract more artists because they [can] do less and eke by here rather than what it takes to eke by in D.C.”

Ironically, a housing market crash in the District just might enhance the city’s cultural vitality.

Thomas Friedman at the New York Times condemns Thabo Mbeke’s defense of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.  The South African president has refused to apply strong pressure to the Zimbabwean autocrat and has also arranged for South Africa’s U.N. Security Council minister to vote against a resolution targeting sanctions at Mugabe and his ruling clique.  You would think that a South African president would be well aware of the usefulness of international pressure in removing odious regimes, especially since it was international pressure that led to the end of apartheid.

Friedman laments:

So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.

Friedman’s cyncism is sadly true, but this particular criticism often goes unrecogznied.  The world narative, particularly on the Left, holds that it is the West—or rather, the whites of the West—who are responsible for all the world’s misery.  This view fails to account for much of the violence and mayhem in Africa that has occured since the sunset of European imperial rule.  It is time to change the narative lest we continue to excuse internecine violence and thuggery in poor countries.

As for the emotional element of atheism – one may observe, rationally, that he doesn’t see or perceive a certain thing, but to deny its existence, at any level of vehemence, goes beyond rational thinking and into the realm of an emotional – sometimes very emotional – anti-belief. As anti-matter is only matter arranged in a slightly different order, anti-belief is almost the same kind of belief, even though it has minuses instead of pluses. (My emphasis)

Thus spake Adin Steinsaltz.