The 19th Floor

Wide Open Space

Apr 142006

Kudos to the Minneapolis City Council for approving plans to develop a park on the last parcel of city-owned downtown riverfront property. Instead of letting the land be used for yet another condo development, the Council wisely chose to add a bit of greenery to a downtown that is sorely lacking much in the way of trees or any other chlorophyll-based lifeform. The park should nicely complement the new Guthrie and I look forward to checking it out once it’s complete.

Head In The Sand

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Apr 132006

There are times when I feel sorry for creationists and their incrementally better-dressed cousins, intelligent design advocates. It must take a tremendous act of willful ignorance to maintain blind adherence to an archaic worldview that is crumbling under the weight of an ever-growing mountain of scientific evidence. Every week brings news of the unearthing of yet another marker on evolution’s long and winding road. Why, it’s enough to make the average creationist want to cancel his/her newspaper subscription. The effort to tune out the media’s coverage of discoveries of new fossils must be exhausting. I wonder if they get migraines from the strain. I’m offering an aspirin to the next creationist I meet, right before I start making denigrating remarks about their intelligence.

Banana Republic

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Apr 122006

A young Florida man with Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy is going home to die after an extended hospitalization. He was placed on a portable ventilator, but the State of Florida is putting him on a waiting list for home nursing care. Florida’s community-based services program is dramatically underfunded and it’s unlikely he’ll be moved off the waiting list anytime soon, so this young man is going home knowing that he will probably die shortly thereafter.

You would think that a country like ours could establish a uniform standard of services for people with disabilities, regardless of geography. Seven years after Olmstead, people with disabilities in certain regions :cough the South :cough can only choose between institutionalization or near-certain death. I’ll probably get flak from any Southerners reading this, but I remain convinced that Reconstruction is a task that remains unfinished.

Thanks to Nick Dupree for bringing this story to my attention.

I Turn My Camera On

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Apr 112006

YouTube is the latest Web 2.0 application to generate ear-shattering decibels of buzz amongst tech journalists and bloggers. It’s basically Flickr, but with videos instead of photos. However, after browsing through some of its offerings, I’d say that the promise of YouTube is not yet fully realized. A lot of the videos are copyrighted material–clips of television shows, especially anime. Then there are the homebrewed videos of cute young women doing something naughty or seductive or whatever. Yawn. Perhaps the next Kevin Smith will one day be discovered via YouTube, but for now the site is firmly in the grips of narcissists and voyeurs. Oh, and the anime freaks. Can’t forget the anime freaks.

Keeping The Peace

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Apr 102006

A couple of recent homicides have generated a lot of press concerning the relative “safety” of Minneapolis. Now, like any city, Minneapolis has neighborhoods where crime is more prevalent, particularly the North Side. Unfortunately, as in most cities, homicides in the more impoverished neighborhoods don’t receive much attention in the media. These two particular murders–one about eight blocks from my building in Downtown and the other in the trendy Uptown area, arguably received more attention because the victims were middle-class and white and they occurred in neighborhoods that get a lot of visitors from the suburbs.

I don’t see either of these shootings as anything more than aberrations. But it was discouraging, albeit unexpected, to see Governor Pawlenty make a clumsy attempt to make political hay out of these events. He accused our mayor of slashing the budget for police officers. The Mayor shot back, and rightly so, that cuts in state aid to local government forced Minneapolis to reduce the number of officers on the street. The Twin Cities, along with the Iron Range, are favorite scapegoats of Republican state lawmakers and they never miss a chance to score points with suburban and rural voters by painting these areas as crime-ridden and/or replete with people dependent on welfare.

Of course, all of this bickering ignores the fact that both state and local governments, along with the business community, could do a lot more to provide opportunities to the kids I see congregating outside Block E. I have no illusions that we can save every kid, but surely we could give them better options than hanging around a sterile urban mall.

Ready, Set, Go!

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Apr 092006

I just returned from the Race for Justice, a charity event to raise money for the Loan Repayment Assistance Program. LRAP provides subsidies to public interest attorneys with outstanding loans. I finished the 5K route in approximately 53 minutes without even breaking a sweat. I’m pretty sure I could have easily done another five or even ten kilometers before I would start cramping up. The key is to stretch properly and load up on carbs the night before. You would not believe what a pain in the ass it is to push spaghetti noodles down my g-tube.

And a big shoutout to my friend Erin and the other race organizers who made sure those of us on wheels could safely traverse the course. I was especially grateful for the pieces of plywood across some rather menacing rail tracks.

Accolades

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Apr 082006

Battlestar Galactica recently won a prestigious Peabody award. While some of the episodes in the second season were of middling quality, the finale had me completely engrossed (even though my TiVo accidentally lopped off the last 60-90 seconds). If the SciFi Channel keeps getting awards like this, perhaps it will stop churning out those awful cheese-laden Saturday night “original movies” and greenlight more thoughtful content like BG. I’d love to see the network do a miniseries adaptation of Ender’s Game or Rendezvous with Rama, both of which seem to be stuck in development hell.

Surely This Is A Sign Of The Apocalypse

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Apr 072006

Now that Windows XP can run on Macs, I’ve flirted with the idea of making the switch to one of those stylish white boxes. After some consideration, however, I’ve decided to maintain my allegiance to the Wintel empire. I like the modularity of PCs and being able to pick and choose the components that will go in my rig. And I have enough legacy software, especially games, to make me wary of investing in a new system that may or may not run those titles. One never knows when one will be consumed with the desire to fire up Alpha Centauri at 2 a.m. and nuke those whiny Lord’s Believers back to the Stone Age.

It’s Hard Out There For A Gimp

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Apr 062006

The Man is still keeping us down. Subway systems are inaccessible, driving schools are refusing to offer ASL interpreters to deaf students, and the unemployment rate of people with disabilities is stuck in the high 60s. It’s time to accerate my preparations for the revolution. Let’s see, I need to move the weapons cache to that abandoned barn. And I need to set up my Internet recruitment efforts? Anyone out there have a knack for forging documents? I already have an explosives guy, so I can scratch that off the list.

I am so going to get a visit from Homeland Security because of this post.

Just What The Doctor Ordered

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Apr 052006

Massachusetts has passed a law to mandate health care coverage for nearly all of its residents. As the New York Times notes, the legislation has elements that should appeal to both sides of the political aisle. Conservatives will like the emphasis on personal responsibility. The bill requires every Massachusetts resident to obtain health insurance by July 1, 2007. Those who can afford health insurance but do not purchase it by the deadline will be subject to a penalty through the state income tax return. Progressives will cheer the expansion of publicly subsidized health care coverage to children and more affordable coverage for people with low to moderate incomes. Private insurance companies will receive subsidies to provide most of the coverage to the 500,000+ uninsured individuals in Massachusetts.

It is said that the states are America’s laboratories for testing innovative policies. If Massachusetts’ experiment is successful, other states could be convinced of the merits of providing something approximating universal health care coverage for their own residents. And until politicians come to grips with the fact that a single-payer system is the only way to restrain spiraling costs, public-private hybrids like this are probably the next best solution. Of course, the devil is in the details. I don’t envy the policymakers who will need to decide what services to cover, what the deductibles and co-pays will be, how to assure parity between physical and mental health benefits, and so forth. But it’s good to see states tackling universal health care while the federal government remains asleep at the wheel.

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