Across the Great Divide

Defending Our Beaches from Alien Invasion.

Spent the weekend on the shore of Lake Michigan uprooting Phragmites australis, an invasive reed that is taking over expanses of beach and low-lying roadsides in Wisconsin. It's also found in Minnesota.

Phragmites is a semi-aquatic plant common around the world and not always regarded as an invader. In places in Germany, they still use it for roof thatch. Baby Moses may have been left in a Phragmites boat. There are native species [light green in the photo] and more aggressive Eurasian strains [dark green].You've probably seen stands of it running in ditches or along railroad tracks.

In swampy lands, you may not give it any thought, but when 12- to 16-foot tall, dense reeds (from the Greek phragma for fence) start taking over your sand beach, it's war.

Eradicating the tenacious plant is a perfect task for a slightly obsessive personality. The tuberous rhizomes that propagate the stuff lurk about eight inches under the surface, sending pale tusk-like runners in all directions to form root balls, from which a clump of reeds springs.

It’s fun digging down into seemingly benign areas and discovering the fugitive tubers, pulling them up through the sand and tossing their carcasses in a pile.

But eventually, they escape across the border into the neighbor’s land. Neighbors, it turns out, who tolerate the Phragmites. A collaborative effort to enlist all the landowners on this beach was only partially successful. Some used herbicide, some topical cutting, one brought in a farmer with a cultivator. Some did nothing.

They had other priorities.

Trusting to the free market, we are told, is better than relying on the government to solve problems. Often, that’s true. But sometimes, collective action is the only way, as the staggered march of Phragmites across this beach attests.

Who's Unintentionally Funny Now?

Chad the Elder — who kindly nominated this blog for Mitch Berg's Unintentionally Funniest Leftyblog Contest — loves the toll road connecting Denver with Denver International Airport. He praises the E-470's "wide-open, hassle free ride" and friendly attendants:

I have to believe that these attendants are not state employees and if that is the case, they--and the E-470--make a powerful argument for further privatization of our highways and byways.

Chad is right about the road, but he confuses efficient service with privatization. The E-470 was built and is run by a public authority composed of the municipalities bordering the road; the authority's transportation role is similar to Minnesota's Met Council's. It not only charges a toll; operations are partly financed by vehicle registration fees.

If that doesn't burst his bubble, the highway has been designed to allow for the addition of multi-use paths and, in the median, future mass transit.

Here, we don't "have to believe" anything. We may be funny, but we're factual.

Are We Still Eating Everything We're Fed?

The people who run our media are, after all, in the end, promoting a culture of consumption, not of engaged citizenship.
– Left Turn, America's Propaganda Factory: Manufacturing Apathy

In case you thought my previous Krispy Kreme post was only about mass produced doughnuts, read the full post by Left Turn, who writes at Jo Swift.

UPDATE: I missed a subhead link within the Jo Swift post that was the only attribution for the following quotation. Turns out this is the work of James Clay Fuller.

Remember how quickly the “news” outfits adopted the Bush Administration word “surge” to describe the escalation in the occupation (never called an occupation) and war in Iraq?

For at least a couple of months, you heard or read “surge” in every story about the escalation. You rarely saw “escalation” in a corporate newspaper or heard it on television.

“Surge,” a word chosen by the office of Karl Rove, conveys new strength. It says “increased power.” And that's the idea it sold. New strength, new power for our side in Iraq. And millions of Americans absorbed the word and its meaning and at least half believed it.

[...]

Another favorite, used very heavily right now by the tax haters in Minnesota, is “rather than taxes, we just have to reorder priorities.” That also has popped up in several letters to editors.

To those who created the phrase, it means “Take money from children's health programs, and education, and inner city police and fire departments and any government activity that doesn't directly and immediately serve me.”

And another: “bloated bureaucracy,” which simply means the people who do the public's work. It is never applied to the truly inefficient and fear-paralyzed bureaucracies of corporations.

Supposedly, there is always “plenty of fat” in public budgets, and government can do its work without people.

For a long time now, when I hear such phrases -- “too much fat in government budgets” or “bloated bureaucracy” I demand that the speaker give me specific examples, and they can't be fictional stories from the right wing myth machine. I have yet to get a straight answer.

 

Why Do Liberals Hate Doughnuts?

Four years after taking Minnesota by pseudo storm, Krispy Kreme has shuttered three of its last four metro-area stores. Coincidentally, the store near my Colorado place also closed this week. Both were owned by the same franchise.

You may remember when Krispy Kreme Doughnuts opened its first Minnesota stores in 2003. The promotional blitz and ensuing coverage was a model for marketers. How do you trump up excitement around a little store selling a nonessential commodity and get the media to bite — more than once?

First, give away doughnuts. A lot of doughnuts — to reporters, media personalities, politicians, business leaders, ball teams, people riding buses and walking their dogs. Use the word of mouth to synthesize a wave of long-pent-up demand that is about to break across the community.

Reinforce a sense of scarcity, find relocated locals who miss their KK doughnuts, and play up the mystique of a cult product. Leverage store-opening tales from other states — about awaiting fans camping out on store grounds and police called in to direct the hordes of traffic.

Sure enough, local media will write self-fulfilling stories about the irresistible arrival, followed by more stories about cops in parking lots, hovering TV helicopters and fanatical moms declaring their lives complete. Newspapers cover the coverage.

People will talk about it and ask each other if they've tried a Krispy Kreme. Many will check it out, possibly be impressed by the rare experience of eating fresh doughnut. But for those whose lives do not revolve around eating deep-fat-fried cake products, that's the end of it.

As investors in Krispy Kreme have discovered. The stock, which peaked at $49 in 2003, has tanked to around $6 per share.

Behind the hype was a business that lost its bearings, and perhaps its soul. After an IPO in 2000, a company that was once about delivering a perfect, hot fresh doughnut became a marketing company focused on jazzing its stock price. KK doughnuts started appearing in Target, Wal-Mart, SuperAmerica and other convenience and grocery stores.

The KK brand — based on convincing people to drive in for a dose of fresh doughnut theater — was badly undercut. In case they didn't know already, consumers learned that cold sugar-laced fat doesn't taste as good as hot sugar-laced fat.

Stores that opened across the country to great fanfare began to close as each artificial flame cooled. Franchisees and shareholders sued the company. The SEC launched an investigation into whether earnings were overstated and six top executives left the company. Stephen Cooper, who was running Enron post-bankruptcy, was brought in as CEO in 2005. The more recent closing of company-owned stores is "part of a company turnaround."

Meanwhile, technical analysts can be found who think the stock may be a "sweet opportunity."

Maybe for about five minutes.

Like Getting Blood from a Blogger.

Today's entertainment included a visit to Memorial Blood Center. I missed the post-bridge-collapse rush, since I'd donated in June and was still in a waiting period before I could give again.

At 1:30 in the afternoon, I was the only donor in the whole blood area (several people were in the area where platelets and double red cells are drawn). I asked the young tech drawing my blood if they'd seen a huge upsurge of donations in wake of the disaster. She said they learned in those days just how fast they could work.

Although the Center was quick to respond with extra blood supplies for area hospitals and Minnesotans turned out by the thousands, fortunately the victims of the bridge collapse didn't require substantial volumes of blood. However, donations normally drop off in the summer, so the influx of donors was still appreciated.

If you haven't donated before, or have gotten out of the habit, don't wait for a calamity. It's even better to show up during slow times of the year, since baseline demand also needs fillling. It's painless, relatively quick (allow about an hour), and you can eat all the cookies you want. Here's how.

*****
One unexpected challenge of managing a blood bank: Maintaining the inventory of bandages used to wrap the donation site.

Memorial's supplier offers a variety of colors in assorted pre-packaged shipments. I'm partial to the bright line, which includes neon lime, violet, orange and pink. None of those colors were available last time, and I was told they'd stopped ordering that set because they could never get rid of the pink wrap.

The tech started unrolling a white bandage.

Not white! I flinched.

She said they were having a White Thursday because no one — except for a few people who wanted "a professional look" — would accept the white bandages contained in the more conventional color pack. I told her I'd skip  donating on Thursdays, then. She said it could happen any day they had a big surplus.

She showed me a card with the supplier's lines. They didn't use the kids pack, either, because Target, a big sponsor, didn't like that it featured smiley faces — Wal-Mart's semi-logo.

Tough business, blood.

Rumsfeld's Knowns.

I've lightened up on national politics and Iraq this year, in part because too much of the nonsense is too obvious and my tiny roar hardly amps up the volume.

This must be how it feels to be family of the 17th victim of a serial killer who's already moved on to number 32. You feel plenty of outrage, but nobody needs to hear your version.

Still, I'm going to note that the verbose and ever-qualifying Donald Rumsfeld managed to resign as Secretary of Defense without mentioning "Iraq" or "war" in his letter to Pres. Bush. Nobody expect to read the words "torture" or "failure" and certainly not "victory," but the Iraq War was a known we all knew, so he coulda mentioned it.

The letter finally surfaced after repeated Freedom of Information Act Requests, without explanation for the delay. Could it be the Secretary's letter, dated the day before the 2006 election, was buried to avoid confirming  Bush had withheld the news until after the election?

Just days before Bush had said Rumsfeld should stay in office and was quoted as saying he would remain "for the foreseeable future."

Given the president's foresight and attention span, Bush may have been speaking the truth.

[Looking in the other direction, Spot has evidence of the administration's memory lapse on Iraq.]

Bridge Villains.

I've been dipping back into my China photos because they offer new resonance as we in Minnesota debate how to maintain our infrastructure.

China, of course, is on an entirely different arc of development, with different pressures, systems of finance, sources of capital and political decision making.

But it is getting a lot done, despite great barriers and a very long way to go.

It is also starting to free itself from the scourge of the bicycle, the hand cart, the scooter, the river boat and the pedestrian that we discover is so endangering America's roads and bridges. 

Conservative Thomas Sowell is typical in his assessment of the problem:

Even if we were to assume that higher tax rates will automatically result in significantly higher tax revenues, the case for throwing more money at infrastructure would still be weak.

Some of the money already appropriated for maintaining and repairing infrastructure is being diverted into other pet projects of politicians.

Money supposedly set aside for repairing potholes and maintaining bridges is diverted to the building of bicycle paths or subsidizing ferries or buses. These other things have more of a political pay-off.

Money thrown at bicycle paths made the bridge fall. On a bicycle path.

Conservatives are not the only ones to make this kind of argument. We hear it about the Twins Stadium and Iraq war spending, too. If only we weren't pouring our money into those things, we'd have better schools and more accessible health care.

If China weren't spending money on spying and oppression, it would have more freedom. And if the crackhead stopped filling the pipe, think of the money for baby formula!

Our urban schools were in trouble long before the stadium bill, and the I-35W bridge didn't start crumbling  because Jim Oberstar got an old rail line turned into a limestone trail.

Most things don't fail to get done — in society or personal life — for lack of money. It's for lack of will.

"Political pay-off" is another term for public will.

Seeing the City Anew.

One of my life's great pleasures is discovering meaning in mundane surroundings. Pattern-seeking applied to the commonplace can be rewarding because that's where most patterns hide, after all.

Walking or cycling permits the required pace and level of detail, but you also need to educate your eye and equip your brain with models you can apply. This is not about seeing a city as a collection of sights or attractions. Or even of composing through a viewfinder. It's an attempt to understand and respond to visible details and invisible connections that give a place its character.

The work of Christopher Alexander is one place to start. Another is William Morrish, with whom I collaborated on Planning to Stay: Learning to See the Physical Features of Your Neighborhood. But an even more accessible place is Twin City Sidewalks.

Today, blogger Bill Lindeke explores the concept of increasing returns:

[O]ne popular nightclub in Minneapolis's warehouse district spawns another across the street, until the entire area becomes known for its nightclubs. So instead of competing for the same pool of club-goers, the neighborhood's identity grows the total number of club-goers, and everyone comes out ahead.

At the same time, increasing returns creates a generalized, overall neighborhood prosperity. In other words, customers to one successful business create pedestrian traffic which can support other, unlike businesses in the immediate vicinity. The more people you have walking around a certain area, the more easily a hardware store or a grocery can grab and extra customer or two, so that vibrant walkable sidewalks tend to grow and thrive in tightly contiguous clusters. Sidewalks aren't fighting over a set amount of retail business, but instead can increase their retail return by encouraging neighboring businesses.

Lindeke names "walkery" another Principle of Sidewalkery. You can read about both here.

What Should Safety Cost?

Some of my progressive friends think I have a loony streak when it comes to tolerating certain conservatives. But, hey, this blog isn't called "Catcalling Across the Great Divide," "One Way Across the Great Divide," or "I Went Across the Great Divide and All I Got Was This Dumb Troll." (Admittedly, a case could be made for "Across the Great Divide, At Least Sometimes.")

Off and on, I've been looking for ways that thinkers from two sides of the aisle could sit down together and start a discussion about their common ground, gradually expanding outward to the point of disagreement. Too often, acknowledging shared ideas and values is merely teeing up the opposition, sort of like a statement that starts with "with all due respect." You know you're about to get it right between the eyes.

But look at notions we actually do share.

Public money shouldn't be wasted. Children deserve a good education. Hard work should be a way to get ahead in America. Elections should be fair. Our lakes and rivers should be clean enough to support life. Roads should be safe and traffic not too congested.

Sure, the devil is in the details, but we could find some ideas we all could support on each of those topics if we didn't start from a partisan mindset.

This Thursday, MPR has scheduled one of its "Public Insight Forums" on the question: What Does Safety Cost? A panel that includes eight public policy figures will discuss:

Catastrophes such as the 35W bridge collapse and 9/11 raise the question of how much the government should invest in the safety and security of its population. While it may be possible to ensure that every bridge in America is sturdy and every airport secure, it may come at a cost that is too great for the government to bear.

Well, of course. If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

The program looks set up to examine safety to within an inch of its life. It could be good. But with eight acts, you're only Dinah Washington and the guy with spinning plates away from the Ed Sullivan Show. So many individuals trying to differentiate themselves and their organizations will make it hard to establish real dialogue.

Personally, I like to hear pairs of panelists for a half-hour each. Say, David Strom, president of the Minnesota Free Market Institute, and Dane Smith, president of Growth and Justice. Or Peter Hutchinson, former Finance Commissioner, consultant and candidate for Governor — who's on the panel — with Carol Molnau, who isn't.

Two Reasons Not to Be Bridge Commissioner in China.

A new bridge collapses in China. Although MnDOT Commissioner Carol Molnau was just there, I think everyone will give her and fellow Republicans a pass on that disaster.

During a late 2005 trip through China, we passed under a lot of bridges and saw a lot of construction. Through much of China, rivers are still the highways and they divide large sections of the country unless you travel by boat.

But the rush to develop is on, and it was clear that much of what was being thrown up was not built to our standards. A country where structures had survived many centuries was now fast-tracking. Modern cranes and bamboo scaffolding might surround the same building.

We're seeing other consequences from rapid development and lax controls — in imported food, toothpaste and toys. While China may not enforce quality on the front end, it has its own way of dealing with poor outcomes on the back end. One owner of the factory that produced lead-painted toys for Mattel committed suicide, and federal agency officials have received the death penalty for corruption that might earn a "not-so heckuva job" wrist slap here.