Second Thoughts

Shelby Steele, also African-American, wrote an op/ed in the Wall Street Journal two days ago with this title. Here is an excerpt to tempt you to read the entire piece:

“Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If “hope and change” was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

“Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.”

Click here for Steele’s op/ed

Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT. The following 52-minute video is an excellent overview of global warming by the most senior of the “deniers” and one of the most prestigious scientists in the field.

Please recommend this video to your friends.

We take the secret ballot as so essential to our form of government that many think it is required by the Constitution. Thus it comes as a surprise to most people to find that the secret ballot was not adopted in the U.S. until 1892 — more than a hundred years after the country’s founding.

The secret ballot movement started in Australia in the mid-1800s but was quickly adopted around the world so that voters would be, as the French said, “exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful.”

Before this time when voting was not by secret ballot it was not the least unusual for votes to be openly bought and since the buyer could check on how people actually voted they were assured of getting their money’s worth.

We need to ensure that not only are our own ballots secret but also that other citizens’ ballots are kept secret so that we can be assured that they to are “exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful.”

Unfortunately, without giving the matter much thought we are drifting away from the secret ballot. We can no longer assure ourselves of the benefit we all enjoy when every voter votes in secret.

While we allow absentee voting in places where the secret ballot can be ensured, we also mail out “absentee” ballots by the thousands with absolutely no assurance that the recipient will vote while “exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful.”

We should be alarmed that over 15 percent of the votes cast in the 2008 Hawaii elections were mail-in votes. This is greater than the typical difference in votes cast for the winning and losing candidates. We may already be at the stage where some of Hawaii’s last political races were decided by unsavory influences on “absentee” ballots.

It would be astonishing if no attempt was made to influence these votes by people who have a great deal at stake on who wins elections. When groups like Acorn are involved in the electoral process, mail-in ballots are prone to all manner of influences.

The City Council seat that Barbara Marshall’s untimely death made available was voted on exclusively by mail-in votes. This was a very important race for those with a significant interest in the bed and breakfast and rail transit issues.

Construction unions spent a great deal of money influencing the vote on the rail referendum in November 2008. It would be surprising if absolutely no effort, albeit legal, was made to influence the outcome of this Council race through the mail-in ballot.

Union officials are working hard to rid their unionization activities of the hampering effects of the secret ballot. Under the recently passed Hawaii Card Check legislation, union leaders are now able to go into employees’ homes and ask them to sign a unionization card without any prospect of a subsequent secret election. The union then presents the signed union application cards to the National Labor Relations Board and the company is thereby unionized.

This is a perfect example of people who might sign the card only because have no protection from “the violence of the powerful.”

The amount of sheer fraud, let alone intimidation, from mail-ins in the U.S. may be seen by entering the following in a browser search window ( “mail-in (ballot OR election)” fraud ). The amount of fraud being reported is staggering.

Until such time as we can be assured of voters enjoying the secret ballot such as signing a blank ballot before a qualified official while unaccompanied, we should end the mail-in ballot.

Just a reminder that I have another hobby — photography. From time to time I post photos of a variety of images that I find attractive at the time. That include eagles, bears and flowers, among others. See the tab “Cliff’s photos” to the right.

In a speech given in 1961, famed for its use of the phrase “military-industrial complex,” President Eisenhower warned of the problems of federal control of scientific research because of “the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.” The full speech is linked below.

“In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”

Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

Possibly the most authoritative individual on climate change is Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT.

Here is a paragraph from an op/ed he wrote for the Wall Street Journal a few days ago. The link to the entire column is here.

“Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.”

There are some good brief explanations of what is really needed to reduce health care costs. This 8-minute video is one of the best:

The idea that we need a government option to provide competition to keep the insurance companies honest is laughable. When has the government ever been able to compete with any entity other than another government?
The success of privatization, fought fiercely by public worker unions, is based on private businesses taking over an existing government activity, be it garbage collection, sewage treatment, or prisons, and then making a profit, paying taxes and reducing taxpayers’ costs, all the while improving service.
Think of it this way: Imagine that people are grumbling about the high cost of garments and the government’s answer is to suggest that we need to establish a government garment manufacturer in order to keep the garment manufacturers honest. Imagine it.

Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Gathering Place
Cliff Slater
March 30, 2008

Transit-oriented developments (TODs) proponents envision building or redeveloping higher-density sustainable communities around rail stations that are to be pedestrian-oriented with mixed retail, workplace and residential components together. This provides vibrant communities where people can work, play and live.
There is far less need for automobiles or parking space, since all activities are within walking distance of the rail station. It increases transit ridership, decreases automobile use and thereby reduces traffic congestion.
However, the reality is far different in places that have TODs.
First, the public does not generally value the “higher density, vibrant neighborhood” features of TODs. We know that because home buyers and retailers will not pay the full costs of the apartments, houses and shops that have been built. To make them saleable, taxpayers have had to provide heavy subsidies.
TODs are now often being touted as a major reason for building rail transit even though there are no TODs that are not heavily subsidized. Are our planners and elected officials proposing heavily subsidizing rail transit in order to heavily subsidize TODs? You gotta love the way these folks think.
The problem here is that planners are looking backward, not forward, with rail transit and TODs. For example, rail transit took off in the late 19th century, before there were automobiles, with the advent of electrically powered rail transit. Rapid expansion followed until ridership peaked in 1923 stymied by the growth of automobile ownership. From then on, rail transit ridership declined to today’s levels that, in riders as a percent of city populations, is only 5 percent of what it once was.
TOD websites often show images of old European inner cities with small stores and living quarters over them. In those days the problem was also congestion – people congestion. Planners, needing to improve the health of the population, looked for a way to provide “dispersal,” now known pejoratively as “sprawl” and rail transit was the answer.
With city populations somewhat dispersed by the early 1900s, we were commuting on rail transit to the city center for work and then, once back home, we shopped at the corner grocery. The children walked to school and we adults did not play or exercise that much.
It was the advent of the family automobile and the paved highway that changed our lives so dramatically.
Today, since the first automobile-oriented shopping mall opened in 1923, the supermarkets of the 1950s, the shopping centers of the 1960s, to the big box stores of today, we no longer shop at corner stores. And we go to exercise class, drive our children to school (public or private), and drive them to soccer games..
This is why when we examine the effects of existing Mainland TODs we find, for example, that those in Portland have had little impact on commuting. The percentage using public transportation of any kind there is 6 percent, down from 7 percent before rail or TODs. And two-thirds of those commuters use the bus, not rail.
And the percentage is the key factor. A 100,000 population increase in the work force means that 80,000 more will commute by car while only 6,000 more will use transit of any kind. So, unsurprisingly, Portland had the 17th worst increase in traffic congestion in the nation for 1982-2005.
The dawning realization that “Smart Growth,” TODs and the like are not so ‘smart’ is occurring across the political spectrum. For example, the Progressive Policy Institute, an affiliate of the Democrat Leadership Council, has the following in their Politics of Gridlock:
The anti-auto coalition through masterful use of rhetoric and oversimplified analysis, have succeeded in dramatically influencing not just federal, state, and local policies, but the entire orientation of the transportation debate. Terms like “smart growth,” “increasing access to choices instead of building freeways,” and “sustainable, holistic solutions” sound great. Yet these are code words that mask an anti-automobile, anti-highway agenda.
These anti-highway “Smart Growth” policies are being surreptitiously promoted by planning and political alliances without much awareness on the public’s part of what is going on. These social-engineering policies are damaging to our quality of life if allowed to progress.
Cliff Slater chairs HONOLULUTRAFFIC.COM where the footnoted version of this may be found.

By Cliff Slater
Gathering Place, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 13, 2007
A pdf version for printing is available at:
www.honolulutraffic.com/GatheringPlace2.pdf

One of the primary reasons given for building a rail transit line is that on average rail uses less energy than a regular automobile. Rail uses 2,750 British Thermal Units per passenger mile (BPM) and automobiles 3,445 BPM.[i] While this difference holds true for the U.S. as a whole, it is unlikely to be the case for a new rail transit line in cities like ours.

What transit agencies mean by average is weighted average — the BPM of large rail passenger carries more weight than small carriers. New York carries 57 percent of all U.S. rail transit trips and is an energy-efficient rail system at 2,200 BPM.[ii] Accordingly, on a weighted average basis it swamps the dismal performance of other rail lines, many of which are energy inefficient relative to the automobile.

If we do a simple un-weighted average, while still including New York, the average nearly doubles to 4,400 BPM from the weighted average of 2,750 BPM, such is the impact of New York on the weighted average.

Essentially, we must examine the details (the devil is always in the details), to find that among light rail cities, the energy usage ranges wildly from an efficient San Diego at 1,900 BPM to a grossly inefficient Baltimore at 8,400 BPM.

Heavy rail has the same kind of spread from New York’s 2,200 BPM to Miami’s 6,600 BPM with both heavy and light rail averaging 4,400 BPM on an un-weighted basis.

Judging whether a new rail system, such as that for Honolulu, is likely to be an efficient energy user relative to the automobile depends on the kind of average occupancy it is likely to achieve.

The U.S. Dept. Energy recognizes this and says, “Because of the inherent differences in the nature of services, routes available, and many additional factors, the energy intensity of transit rail systems can vary substantially among systems.”[iii]

The efficient systems, such as New York, have a great deal of traffic going in both directions in their core areas in the off-peak while the energy-inefficient systems, such as Miami, tend to be those that are highly directional during the peak hours — full going from suburbs into town in the morning and empty going back out, with the opposite being true in the afternoon.

Rail transit cannot just discontinue service during the off-peak hours as our suburban express buses do, and so a certain amount of passengers during the off-peak is critical for energy efficiency. In New York, London and Hong Kong the relative difference between peak-hour passengers and off-peak passengers is much less than those rail lines with a heavily suburban orientation.

What also needs to be taken into account is that BPMs are calculated on the miles traveled by the vehicle, not as the crow flies. The route traveled by passengers on transit vehicles tend to be more circuitous and thus longer, especially where transfers are involved, than the door-to-door travel by automobile. For this reason, automobile BPMs must be adjusted down for the difference in trip mileage between autos and rail transit if we are to compare them accurately.

In short, the City must do a great deal of work during their current environmental impact process to persuade us that the projected Honolulu rail line will be as energy efficient as our automobiles. At the moment, it appears they have their work cut out.

Cliff Slater’s footnoted op/eds can be found at www.cliffslater.com. He is grateful to Randal O’Toole, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, for developing the detailed data of energy use by passenger mile and to UH Prof. Panos Prevedouros for refinement of the data.

Endnotes:
[i] http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb26/Edition26_Chapter02.pdf Tables 2.12 & 2.13
[ii] http://www.honolulutraffic.com/BTU_per_PM.xls
[iii] http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/favorites/fcvt_fotw221.html