Across the Great Divide

Just When I Thought Things Were Getting Clearer...

My appetite had returned and the fog seemed to have lifted, so I got some leftover soup out of the fridge and ladled it onto a plate.

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Minnesota Public Radio has been huffing about the location of the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit line running past its St. Paul headquarters and studios. MPR says:

the MPR broadcast center [...] was designed and located on Cedar Street nearly 30 years ago in 1979 and [...] was not designed in any way to mitigate the impact of a train in such close proximity

Cute. The center was massively remodeled and expanded just a few years ago, at a time when the Cedar Street route had already been identified. MPR's position is that the center was finished before the route was officially approved

St. Paul Issues Forum member Bob Spaulding provides a chronology that shows the route was picked in 2001 before MPR announced any plans, and that subsequent news stories about MPR's expansion mentioned the impact on LRT and vice versa. So one side says, you had the opportunity to plan for this and the other says they didn't really.

Then there's this reader comment over at Twin City Sidewalks:

This is the first I have heard about this flap, and I find it very amusing! Especially since I worked on the design team for the new MPR facility, and every effort was made to accommodate the well-known future LRT running down Cedar. The studios in the expansion are state of the art and should perform quite well even when trains start running in front of the building.

I have no dog in this hunt, but I'd guess MPR is positioning themselves for possible damage claims rather than trying to get the route changed.

I base this only on my experience with working around sound studios and putting in two of them myself. 1) I think the fears are overblown; think of all the non-studio locations from which you've heard modern broadcasts originate; 2) This is radio we're talking about, accessed by most listeners in city traffic or over crappy little speakers or headphones; 3) There will almost always be problems none of the designers (studio or LRT) anticipated.

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Not that this has anything to do with it.

Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.

“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”

What Petters Values.

Just months before being arrested for massive financial fraud, Tom Petters told a Carlson Business School audience about encountering the core values of a dotcom company he was thinking about acquiring.

Nick Coleman gave an account of how Petters admired the high-sounding words that were plastered all over the company, including the mens room.

"I thought, 'I have to plagiarize these,'" Petters said, according to a transcript of his talk. "'I've got to take them.'"

There it is. Core values, plagiarized from a bathroom.

Under the influence of flu-like symptoms, I tried to track down that transcript for some light reading. The best I could do was this recording.

It's amusing to think of a corrupt businessman off-handedly plagiarizing his core values, but it turns out Coleman doesn't tell the story the way Petters told it.

Petters went on to describe his meeting with the company's CEO, who had the values statement hung in his office.

"Who wrote that? It's phenomenal," Petters said.

"Oh, that. I don't know who wrote it."

Petters then claims to have walked out shortly after, cutting off a planned two-day due diligence. He offers the story up as proof of his own authenticity and ability to detect a phony — "You gotta mean what you say."

It's the setup for the Petters Company values, which he proceeds to breeze through in a barely coherent fashion. 

Integrity. That's not something that we want to try to aspire to. I tell people... There's some of these things you want people to aspire to. You want to "hire to aspire." But um build on connections and relationships. You can't survive without 'em... without trust you really can't do anything. People shake your hand and tell you they're gonna do something. People make mistakes. People in this world we're living in right now, it's tough. Agility. We move very fast...

Keeping moving may have been what Petters did best. Here's a page from the company magazine that says more about his values [click to enlarge].

Rick Warren Protestors are Picking the Wrong Battle.

Last night the dinner conversation came around to Barack Obama's invitation to pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural. Among the six of us, we counted a gay son, a sister, a college roommate and best man, a nephew, next door neighbors and best friends — some of whom are greatly aggrieved by Obama's decision.

We could all do without Warren on stage, and truth be told, without any invocation whatsoever. Those fatuous prayers are about as deep and meaningful as the "Your call is important to us" recordings you get when a company doesn't devote enough resources to answer your call.

If you watched the Democratic National Convention's daily bookends, the invocations and benedictions were where the party paid homage to all the constituencies that would never make the main event. I remember in particular an interminable and barely comprehensible benediction from a Korean pastoral couple.

Given the fact that someone had to draw the duty, and they had to provide some doctrinal balance and contrast with the speaker at the other end, why get so upset?

It's unacceptable. A political blunder. But most importantly and bottom line, it is morally reprehensible. It goes counter to everything that Obama stood for along the road to the White House. I am more than disgusted by it; I am utterly and thoroughly disenchanted.

Really? "It goes counter to everything that Obama stood for"? Does that mean we're bombing Iran on January 21st, too? Dude, the invocation is the rhetorical equivalent of the centerpiece at a holiday dinner!

I don't agree with Warren's position on Prop. 8, but I also don't agree he's the monster some of these protests make him out to be. He's a pastor, for Christ's sake, of an evangelical church, subject to all the  myopia of a man who bases his world view on the Bible. 

You wonder, as with all these guys, how selectively he reads it. Warren says: "I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Which, according to my reading of the first 3,000 years or so would indicate that marriage is a union of one man and as many women as he can get his hands on.

There's a lot of that religious mindset going around, and if you're going to president for the entire country, you might as well acknowledge it, because you aren't going to change it by calling them out. And if you're going to lead a social transformation in this country, you're going to have to involve churches, because they are one of the major non-tax-funded sources of good works we have going for us.

The premise of Obama's administration has been that he will uphold his own beliefs, while agreeing to disagree in order to find other areas of common ground. America is a very long way from electing a president who reflects my nonreligious orientation, but we've come very close to getting one that reflects Across the Great Dividism.

Mixed Signals.

Four years ago today, I started Across the Great Divide. Despite my desire for reaching understanding across the divide, I have to admit that more than anyone else on the planet, George W. Bush and Katherine Kersten were responsible for getting me blogging.

Now both are on the way out.

Does that mean my work is done here?

That first post was about divided reading habits.

The mapper of red and blue books who inspired that post updated his work in October, and for what it's worth, we may be more divided than ever.

Does that mean I don't get my year-end bonus?

The Weight of Pictures Not Taken.

This morning, I received an email forwarded from my former company that contained parenthetical greetings from a client I had not seen for almost two years. Two hours later, I ran into him as he was leaving a camera store on the opposite site of the metro from where he lives. Ten seconds later and we would have passed unknowingly through each others' vapor trails.

We spoke, briefly but warmly. He is a good man and we carry certain invisible things in common, for better and worse. He knows me, but doesn't, and the imperfect picture is mutual.

I had ridden there on an impromptu shopping trip for a woman who wants nothing — or, perhaps, does not want what she does not have. This is better than having everything, I think.

Because I arrived knowing what was right, I did not try to purchase the bookends made from old cameras. (These were not the novelty bookends or similar ones made from cheap '50s Kodaks, but SLRs with metal bodies and hefty lenses.) These dead weight cameras propped up paper tomes in a still life of obsolescence that did not lift my holiday spirits.

Mission completed, I went out the door and set off the alarm, remembering then that I'd also set it off coming in. My package inspected and re-demagnitized, I headed through again to more chirping and blinking lights.

One more mystery unsolved.

Why I'm Not Laughing at the Minikahda Shoot-Up.

Earlier this week, local news reports told of a suspended country club member who'd pulled up in his vintage red Ferrari and fired six bullets through the front door.

Driving a Ferrari on Minneapolis streets last Monday is not just drunken behavior — it's crazier than riding a bike up and down the Greenway at 8 pm trailing dollar bills. And it fits quite satisfyingly into a stereotypical story about rich drunk bully shooting up a snooty country club.

Here's why I'm not laughing.

A Minikahda Club employee told police that [Joseph] Rice, a longtime member of the club, had recently been acting erratically, including threatening the lives of staff members, and that he had a "serious drinking problem," which led to the suspension of his membership.

The Southwest Journal even published a scary-looking booking photo.

I don't know any more than I read, but there are details surrounding the story, beyond the Ferrari and the recent erratic behavior, that suggest something more than a country club member with a drinking problem.

Mr. Rice was a middling golfer who only posted two or three rounds a year since 2002. Was he careless about maintaining his handicap, or had his love of the game cooled? This account makes it seem like golf was once an important pastime.

It was a gorgeous Indian Summer day in October. The leaves had turned burnt orange, and it was a perfect afternoon for one final round of golf before the chill of autumn set in. Joe Rice had played 18 holes and was headed home, the top down on his classic 1971 Ferrari convertible. What could be more perfect?

Rice was hit by truck on the way home and received life-threatening injuries, including a lacerated liver. After receiving emergency treatment at Hennepin County Hospital, he became a donor and board member of  the hospital's medical foundation. His photo on the current board of directors page seems to portray a different man.

I don't know Rice or how long ago the accident occurred, but I hope he sees his doctor as well as his lawyer.

Executive Pay: Not Exactly Steak Knives for Coming in Second.

It seems like half the business page over the past week has been crime stories.

Actually, more than half, if you count the articles about company layoffs and plant closures as crime stories from the victim's side of things.

No, I'm not saying companies doing layoffs are committing crimes. But the layoffs may be the result of bad behavior somewhere down the line. In this economy, for many of them, it's the only choice they have. I've been there, and it's not fun to lay off good people because you don't have enough business to keep them employed.

Nor do I think CEOs collecting big pay checks are necessarily guilty of anything. Leaders whose companies perform well for their customers, grow and make money for shareholders deserve some of the rewards. But the spread between the top and rest of the people who contribute is often out of whack.

A first line supervisor at Hormel Foods makes about $46,000 salary plus $2,000 bonus. The Hormel CEO draws about 20 times the salary, and counting only cash payments, not stock options, he earned about 583  times more bonus for the year 2008.

The recent payday for Hormel Foods Corp. CEO Jeffrey Ettinger, which was reported today, isn't quite as extreme as it looks, because $3.5 million of his $5.38 million was earned as incentive pay for a three-year period. The payout was based on the company's Total Shareholder Return versus 32 peer companies over that time.

Fair enough? Well, there's more. Hormel was at the 48.5 percentile, which means its performance was about average compared to similar companies. That average performance "resulted in a payout at 97 percent of the target award assigned to each participant in the plan." (Total return to shareholders was a minus 20.9 percent over the last year.)

This strikes me as a plan designed to encourage hanging around the shallow end of the pool.

One of the arguments against raising income taxes by a percent or two on high earners is that it would create a disincentive to take risks and grow the company. Maybe one of those economists could tell me how the Hormel plan — where average is 97 percent as good as super-duper — creates incentives for hard chargers. Or how much more below average an executive would have to sink to lose another 3 percent of his bonus.

Greenway Safety is About More Than Enforcement.

The Star Tribune editorial, "Don't let thugs derail bike trail use," is right in spirit. But in response to a rash of muggings along the popular central bikeway, it makes an array of suggestions — better lighting, increased police presence, night-vision security cameras, citizen bike patrols and avoiding riding alone — that miss a larger point about safe infrastructure and its use by the public.

Safety strategies that rely on counter-measures and modified user behavior represent a design failure. And a purely engineering- or cost-driven approach to infrastructure almost guarantees we will end up with issues later.

The editorial notes that "portions of the greenway and Hiawatha trails are more dangerous because of the surrounding geography and inadequate lighting."

Another way of putting it would be: The danger comes from treating commuting purely as a problem of moving most efficiently from point-to-point. The trail fails to recognize its true connections to the surrounding city.

The trails are more dangerous because they were built like roadways and rail lines — for specialized vehicle use through a featureless trench or concrete wasteland — rather than as human-scaled outdoor passageways that naturally connect people and destinations. This problem "geography" along Hiawatha was created decades ago by scrubbing the landscape of trees, residences and commercial buildings so it could be remade as a transportation corridor. Then the entire area was neglected until recently.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Midtown Greenway and use it at all times and seasons. The designers and community advocates who championed the trail were well aware of its challenges, and they incorporated features to mitigate problems with the location. It will only get better as more community connections are made and more people discover it.

But here's what real safety looks like along a bike trail or city street.

We can design our infrastructure like parking ramps and equip them with cameras, emergency phones and occasional patrols. Or we can emulate our parks and most beloved commercial streets — places that encourage a mix of activities and promote gathering, visibility and access year-round.

Reaching our destination safely and efficiently is indeed important, but we ignore the quality of the journey at our peril.

– Crossposted at Growth and Justice Blog

"There's nothing wrong with a little shooting as long as the right people get shot."

On July 22nd, 2005, a Brazilian electrician named Jean Charles de Menezes was killed by police who believed he was one of the bombers responsible for a failed attack on the London Underground system.

As I wrote at the time, the rumors and misinformation surrounding his death provided a telling look at our terrorist fears, racial prejudices, attitudes toward guns and the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

More than three years later, the jury at an inquest decided on an "open verdict" — the most critical finding possible after the coroner ruled out the option of returning a verdict of "unlawful killing" by police.

The jury was instructed it could not "return a verdict which found any individual or institution criminally or civilly liable." That meant lawful killing or open verdict were the only possible outcomes of the inquiry.

It's unlikely the inquest will erase the falsehoods that became embedded in the original story — that he wore a bulky jacket that could've concealed a bomb; that he hurdled the turnstile and ran from police; that he ignored police warnings and made a move as if to attack.

Several video works have gone back and recreated that day. One is evocative, simply reenacting de Menezes' mundane trip to the station. Another is forensic, annotating the CCTV security tapes. The last is stupid, pretenious and badly-executed all at once. Finally, Hollywood provided an inadvertant commentary on this sad affair.

In September when the jury visited Stockwell station where de Menezes was killed, a poster for the movie Righteous Kill was on the wall, featuring this line: "There's nothing wrong with a little shooting as long as the right people get shot." Ironically, most versions of the movie posters said: "Most people respect the badge. Everybody respects the gun."

As the facts gradually trickled out, it appeared de Menezes was never given a chance to respect the badge.

Slow Day at the Office.

It's great a few dozen cyclists showed up to "take back the Greenway" after reports of after-dark assaults in Minneapolis. But I think it would've been an even more effective signal to muggers if the ride had been at 8:30 pm.

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Readers wanting to receive my Twitters should send me self-addressed, stamped envelopes.

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In free Iraq, insulting a foreign leader apparently carries up to a two-year prison sentence. I'm not sure if the judge can take into account whether the shoe-hurler tossed dress shoes instead of Uggs.