Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 17

My last beer before I leave Milwaukee on this trip is Viking Brewing Company’s “Vienna Woods” Vienna-style lager.  It doesn’t remind me a heck of a lot of the beer I found in Vienna — I found a local restaurant which would serve me Franziskaner Weissbier alongside cajun crab cakes; believe it or not, it works pretty well — but it’s a pretty damn good beer nonetheless.

Vienna Woods tastes a bit like Newcastle Brown, but for adults.  It’s surprisingly malty for a lager, with competing caramel and nutty flavours and a crisp aftertaste.  Good stuff if you’re in the mood for a bittersweet and complex beer, but if you pick it up expecting a standard Euro-lager you’ll be very surprised.

TransLink’s in the red?

A few weeks ago, we heard that TransLink — that’s the Greater Vancouver public-transit system — is having trouble coming up with enough money to handle increased business coming from high gas prices, despite receiving a $14,000,000,000 funding package from the province.  Now we discover that, while TransLink ran about a $90M surplus in 2007, they expect to run a $300M yearly deficit from 2012 on.

• TransLink faces $300M shortfall by 2012 (CBC.ca)
• Metro Vancouver mayors critical of transit authority (CBC.ca)

Figures released on Tuesday at Translink’s annual general meeting show that by 2012, the transportation authority’s budget will be short $300 million per year.

Despite reaping millions of dollars in surplus revenue in 2007, the figures show TransLink will use up much of its $400-million reserve over the next four years.  By 2012, the Metro Vancouver’s regional transit authority will need $150 million annually just to fund existing services, and another $150 million for planned expansions.

Well, now we know where that $14B is going — “planned expansions” which TransLink knows it can’t afford.  But hey, why not? It’s not their money, and the people building the budget probably don’t take the bus anyway.  They have no interest in the matter beyond looking good.

Of course, where the province giveth, the province can be expected to give more.  Just like Air Canada, TransLink expects to be bailed out:

The Metro Vancouver Board is asking for more transportation funding from the provincial and federal governments.

But at least that’s good for consumers, right?  I mean, they’re paying a hidden fare increase when their property and income taxes go up to fund TransLink’s profligacy, but that’ll keep transit costs down.  Won’t it?

Another fare increase is also on the table, said [Translink Chair Dale] Parker, who added TransLink is aware fare prices could go so high they would be prohibitive.

Let’s review: an appointed government agency which recently removed itself from public accountability and immediately voted itself a raise gets a ton of money from the province, which it allocates to fantastic and often unrealistic projects that it can’t afford to run.  Rather than curtail those projects and spend the province’s money on providing adequate service, the agency decides to spend its reserve money with no plan to replace it and will instead beg for more of the taxpayers’ labours.

This is where I’d wish for better luck next election, but the TransLink board is appointed, not elected, so it probably wouldn’t help.

So it goes.

Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 9

We begin this week’s Misanthropy in what used to be Lake Delton, Wisconsin.  I say “used to be” because the recent heavy rains and flooding have carved a channel between the artificial lake and the Wisconsin River, taking the lake’s water and much of the land on its shores down into the Mississippi river system.  The flooding and outflow destroyed five houses.

Well, the flooding and outflow physically destroyed five houses.  As far as the state’s concerned, those houses — and the land which used to support them — still exist in a legal and taxable sense.

• Lake Delton homeowners won’t get break on tax bill (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

The people who lost their homes last week in the Lake Delton flood are hearing more grim news: They will have to pay the entire 2008 tax bill for their homes even though their properties no longer exist.  Lake Delton Village Clerk-Treasurer Kay Mackesey said property taxes are owed for the value of property as it existed on Jan. 1 — six months before the flood wiped out five homes and drained the lake.

But that’s okay — FEMA will come to their rescue.  Right?  Isn’t that what massively-budgeted federal agencies are supposed to do?

The news about property taxes is a new frustration on top of a steady stream of bad news. [Lake Delton former homeowner Don] Kubenik and other homeowners couldn’t get flood insurance because the village opted out of free federal flood insurance in 2001 in the midst of a dispute with the Federal Emergency Management Agency over where the floodplain lies.

[...]

Tina Pekar, a neighbor who also lost her home in the flood, said FEMA has told her that she may qualify for about $27,000 because she is a year-round resident. That is little solace since she has now learned she has to pay full property taxes, as well as the cost of removing what remains of her home.

Cute.

—-

We’ll head a short way northeast and visit Toronto next, whose mayor, David Miller, is a bit confused about security matters:

• Confused security reasoning (Schneier on Security)

“In a day when you can’t bring a large tube of toothpaste on a plane how can you allow guns to wander through Union Station, the biggest transit hub in Canada?” [Miller] asked his colleagues on city council.

Schneier points out that

By that logic, I think we can ban anything from anywhere.

Indeed.  Bringing a large tube of toothpaste onto a plane is a rather benign act.  You’d probably endanger more people by buying groceries.  Shall we ban that?

Leaving aside Miller’s jihad against legally-owned guns (which are apparently haunted, if they can “wander through Union Station”), comparing anything to toothpaste-on-airliners regulation is an abject failure of argument by analogy.

—-

Speaking of bizarre security reasoning: pools in Shanghai are banning liquids.

• Liquid ban gone weird (Schneier on Security)

“Pool guests who bring these items must allow them to be opened and inspected. Security personnel will smell them to see whether they are safe or not,” a separate report posted on the city’s sport bureau’s website said (www.shsports.gov.cn).

Something tells me that these security guards are considered trivially expendable by the PRC Leviathan.

But… why pools? Why not schools or libraries or stadia?

—-

And while we’re on the subject of security overreactions:

• Armed police arrest man over MP3 player in Staffordshire (The Guardian)

This is related, but not isomorphic, to the NYPD’s shooting of Amadou Diallo when he produced a wallet.  In the New York fuckup, the cops reacted instinctively and wrongly to something which they thought was a gun.  In the Staffordshire fuckup, the cops carefully surveilled their victim before hauling him in.

Armed police arrested a man listening to his MP3 player and took a sample of his DNA after a fellow commuter mistook the music player for a gun.

Darren Nixon had been waiting at a bus stop in Stoke-on-Trent on his way home from work when a woman saw him reach into his pocket and take out a black Phillips MP3 player. The woman thought it was a pistol and called 999.

Police tracked 28-year-old Nixon using CCTV, sending three cars to follow him. When he got off the bus, armed officers surrounded him. He was driven to a police station, kept in a cell and had his fingerprints, photograph and DNA taken.

He was freed when Staffordshire police realised it was a false alarm – but will now have his DNA stored on a national database for life with a record that he was arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence.

Unusually, Mr. Nixon has received an apology from the Staffordshire plods, though the latter seem awfully pleased with themselves for the efficiency with which they violated Nixon’s person.

Risk, fanciful disasters, and the LHC

Apparently we’re still doing the “OMG what if it makes a black hole and kills us all???” dance around the Large Hadron Collider.  Enough people have taken these scary stories seriously that the LHC Safety Assessment Group has produced a fifteen-page report (PDF) telling them to get a life.

Even Scott Aaronson has broken his silence on the issue:

• Better safe than sorry (Shtetl-Optimized)

As a concerned citizen of Planet Earth, I demand that the LHC begin operations as soon as possible, at as high energies as possible, and continue operating until such time as it is proven completely safe to turn it off.

Given our present state of knowledge, we simply cannot exclude the possibility that aliens will visit the Earth next year, and, on finding that we have not yet produced a Higgs boson, find us laughably primitive and enslave us.  Or that a wormhole mouth or a chunk of antimatter will be discovered on a collision course with Earth, which can only be neutralized or deflected using new knowledge gleaned from the LHC.  Yes, admittedly, the probabilities of these events might be vanishingly small, but the fact remains that they have not been conclusively ruled out.

I fully endorse Dr. Aaronson’s position.

Airport security outdoes itself

As if air travel wasn’t sufficiently humiliating and dehumanizing:

• Passengers virtually stripped naked by 3-D airport scanner (CBC.ca)

Yeah.  Millimetre-wave scanners bounce off of skin, rather than clothes, to scan passengers for, uh, “suspicious items”.  (Is that a suspicious item in your pocket, citizen, or are you just unnaturally attracted to me?)  Airport security goons get a full reconstruction of your naked self (which, really, would probably turn the randiest sex addict off for good — but this is less about sex and more about dignity).  What could possibly go wrong?

If you need any proof that the terrorists have already won, read just a little bit further:

But Deena Kamozi, who had just dropped off her 14-year-old son, said anything that makes flying safer is a good thing.

“I’m not a big fan of flying anyway, so the safer I feel, the better,” she said.

Kamozi said she had no privacy concerns about the body image.

“Not if it’s going to protect my family on the plane.”

“Anything that makes flying safer is a good thing.”  Right.  Shooting people full of Thorazine and nailing them to their seats makes flying (infinitessimaly) safer.  Is that a straw-man argument?  Perhaps… but eight years ago, bringing up virtual strip searches via millimetre-wave radar was a straw-man argument.

We’re addressing the wrong problem.  We’ve cranked up passenger screening to absurd levels already:

• Federal law-enforcement agents are being flagged by no-fly lists
• The TSA will destroy your property even though it doesn’t consider you a threat
• We’re kicking people off of planes for wearing t-shirts with robots holding guns

but the weakest link in the chain isn’t passenger screening.  Staff aren’t being screened to anywhere near the same level as passengers, for example.  Hell, if you wanted to, you could probably build an improvised shiv with materials from the plane itself (they can’t stop this shit in maximum-security prisons; what makes you think they can stop it in airplanes?).

It’s not like this is having no effect on air travel, either.  Between increasingly demeaning and intrusive treatment of passengers and rising fuel prices, Air Canada’s getting it right up the shitter:

• Air Canada cutting 2,000 jobs, trimming capacity (CBC.ca)

and other airlines aren’t doing much better:

• Airlines try to make up for rising fuel costs, keep passengers (NBC)

I guess air travel will be perfectly secure when the cost and hassle associated with flying commercially has driven off enough customers to bankrupt every airline.  Take that, terrorists!

Essential liberty, temporary security; you know how it goes by now.

Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 8

The big political news lately is California’s legalization of same-sex marriages.  Predictably, the usual fetid heap of opportunistic demagogues is using the threat of state-sanctioned gay sex to stir up the usual shit about society’s edifices crashing down, the end of civilization, parallels to the fall of Rome, and so on.  The reader with an adequate grasp of history will not need to be reminded that opponents of emancipation and universal suffrage — for example — used precisely the same arguments.  It really doesn’t matter what’s going on: this sort of hackeneyed ass will climb upon s/h/its soap-box regardless.

I really shouldn’t be offended or even surprised at this behaviour.  After all, when a dog shits on your lawn, it’s not because he hates you: it’s because he’s a dog.  So it is with knee-jerk reactionaries.  Still, as at least nominally human beings these snivelling dipshits ought to be able to outgrow (or at least medicate) their pathological fear of change.

It does give one to wonder, though: what do the perpetually bile-spewing reactionaries whinge about when their more enlightened compatriots aren’t sanctioning gay marriages (or developing heliocentric models of the solar system, or teaching evolution, or giving women the vote)?  Well, thanks to Below the Beltway’s Doug Mataconis, one need wonder no more:

• Idiot Politicians, Texas Edition

They bitch about nude sculpture.

Robert Hurt went to Washington and didn’t like what he saw – nudity in the nation’s capital.  “Nude women, sculptured women,” he told the state Republican platform committee, which sat in rapt attention.

This is, of course, nothing new.  John Ashcroft (remember him?) had the statue of Justice’s bare breast covered during his tenure as Attorney General.

Most people grow out of any fascination they might have with incidental nudity (in art as well as anatomy textbooks and National Geographic back-issues) at about the same time they enter puberty (and their imaginations take over).  Those who don’t, it seems, enter politics.

—-

Let’s stick with D.C. for our next story.  This should shock no-one: the House Democratic majority, won on the promise to end the Iraq war most fucking pronto, has tossed aside its last opportunity to end the Iraq war before the next House elections.

• U.S. Democrats to back down on Iraq war conditions (Reuters)

Democrats in the U.S. Congress, who came to power last year on a call to end the combat in Iraq, will soon give President George W. Bush the last war-funding bill of his presidency without any of the conditions they sought for withdrawing U.S. troops, congressional aides said on Monday.  Lawmakers are arranging to send Bush $165 billion in new money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enough to last for about a year and well beyond when Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.

Now, here I thought the House was empowered (if it wanted) to end the war by withholding funds:

The Congress shall have Power [...] to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States

(the power to provide for the common Defence also includes the power to decline such)

or to declare (and end, by treaty) war:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water

by this Constitution thing, entirely without the consent or even influence of the executive branch.

Actually, the Constitution is a pretty nifty document.  Someone ought to tell Pelosi, Reid, and Bush about it — they might find it handy for properly running the fucking country.

—-

Moving back to Canada for the time being, we consider the magic of public education.  Or is that the magic in public education?

• Board use of psychic blasted (Toronto Sun)

Seems the Barrie public school board was told by a fucking psychic that “a youngster whose name started with ‘V’” was being sexually abused.  The school system, which Can’t Be Too Careful When A Child May Be At Risk, Of Course, decided that Victoria Nolet — who’d not been behaving like a normal eleven-year-old — must be under threat, and called in the Children’s Aid Society to investigate.

Of course, Ms. Nolet is severely autistic; expecting her to behave like a normal eleven-year-old is fantastically ignorant.  But the Barrie school board clearly has fantastic ignorance well in hand.

Needless to say, the Barrie school board insists that they did the right thing.

Dr. Lindy Zaretsky, a school board superintendent whose portfolio includes special education, said the school was just following protocol, adding the board is bound by the same legislation (Child and Family Services Act) as the CAS when it comes to suspected neglect or sexual abuse.

“It is clear in all cases that this (information) must be reported,” Zaretsky said.

—-

Meanwhile, the PRC has developed an official Olympic cheer:

• Beijing approves Olympics ‘cheer’ (The Beeb)

The authoritative, four-part Olympic cheer, accompanied by detailed instructions, will be promoted on TV, in schools and with a poster campaign.

[...]

The Beijing Olympic Organising Committee has hired 30 cheering squads who will show spectators how it is done at Games stadia, reports Xinhua state media.  A committee official said the simple chants and gestures were designed to help spectators cheer for their favourite athletes in a smooth, civilized manner.

The Ministry of Education is also arranging special training sessions in schools for the 800,000 students who are expected to attend the Games.

So now Leviathan’s coming up with officially-approved ways for people to celebrate, and is training kids to celebrate in an orderly, state-sanctioned manner.  That sounds like a plot point rejected both by George Orwell (whose Two-Minute Hates were wild and uncontrolled) and by Ayn Rand as unbelievably contrived and unrealistic.  Well, reality doesn’t have to be plausible.

—-

Right-wing nutjob of the week: Republicanmarket

I’m rather surprised that Ann Coulter didn’t come up with this one first:

• Stupid Republicans, Texas edition (Below the Beltway)

They’re selling buttons printed with “If Obama is President… will we still call it the White House?”.

Classy.

A toast to Edith Macefield

Edith Macefield died on Sunday.

Who?

• Edith Macefield and her house were symbols of Old Ballard (Seattle Times)

Edith Macefield poignantly expressed Heinlein’s dictum that “you cannot conquer a free woman: the most you can do is kill her”.  She held onto her house in the face of great pressure to sell from developers and local governments (let’s save the Kelo comments for another time), because:

More than anything, she said, she wanted to be left alone.

There is no better statement of libertarianism than that.  I feel a bit dirty even bringing this up: Ms. Macefield didn’t want to be a hero:

“I’m no hero,” she said. “I meant it. I just want to be left alone.”

Perhaps she isn’t a hero.  She is, however, a role model:

“She got what she wanted,” said Charlie Peck, a longtime friend. “She wanted to die at home, in the same house, on the same couch, where her mother had died. That’s what she was so stubborn about.”

He said she was never trying to stick it to The Man. Or to make any larger statement against development or money or anything else.

That’s how it ought to work.  Every issue, whether it’s microscopically local or sweepingly global, has its heart in the actions of, and consequences to, individuals.  Edith Macefield was no martyr to the image of the neighbourhood in which she grew up, and that’s what makes her story so damned powerful.  She isn’t diluted in the stories of her erstwhile neighbours, or the history of decades gone by — she is (was, I suppose) an individual, one bright light among so many others who simply wanted to burn in peace.

Good for her.  May she never be forgotten.

More search string follies

I can’t resist this one:

“i haskell today i has the dumb”

Either this is my friend Reid taking the piss, or it’s a case of epic undergraduate misfortune.  If you “has the dumb”, you have no business getting anywhere near Haskell.  (You’d probably prefer Java, or maybe PHP.)

(Mid-week Misanthropy will appear presently.)