Polls have closed in the UK, and early exit polling suggests a Tory plurality of 316 to Labour's 239. This puts the Conservatives withing 8 seats of forming a government—though with the Liberal Democrats apparently holding onto just 10 seats, and hating every fibre of the Tory party, they will have to count on the right-wing parties to push them over the top.
I'll have more later on.
The London borough of Barking and Dagenham (yes, really) will fine you £80 if you don't clean up your dog's poop. How will they catch you? Doggy DNA:
In its pilot stage, only one or two local dog parks will be involved in the DNA testing, according to Eric Mayer, head of business development for Biopet Vet Lab. Anyone who wants to use those facilities will have to submit a canine swab, which cost about $45. (The fee will probably be split between the owner, the borough and the lab.) But by 2016, all 27 of the borough's parks and open spaces could be patrolled.
That seems a little invasive on the one hand, but on the other, it hurts dog owners everywhere when one or two lazy bastards fail to clean up after their pets. Still, who wants the job of matching samples to dogs?
It must be so sad living as a right-winger. The world keeps changing, and it's scary. They just don't understand the things they see around them, so they get scared, and say things that make people laugh at them.
Today, for example, a sizable chunk of the wingnut crowd seems to believe that the U.S. Army is trying to take over Texas. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert have, predictably, run with this paranoia. New Republic's Brian Beutler examines why:
This particular kind of theory has a unique allure. And I think it’s directly traceable to a southern—and particularly a Texan—political culture that thrives on civil war–style fantasies.
There’s a good amount of mythical and self-important thinking going on here, but there is also a very real sense in which these conservatives conceive of themselves as beleaguered, bent over a barrel by the federal government, living every day at the breaking point. It helps explain why Cruz believed a missive about using the Second Amendment as an “ultimate check against government tyranny” would make for a winning fundraising pitch, and why South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham (also running for president) had to remind him that armed insurrection didn’t work out so well for his state a while back.
But this reasoning collapses without a foil. The secessionist impulse can’t be attributable to the ebbs and flows of social policy alone. If we live our lives on the razor’s edge of rebellion, there must be an equally reactionary adversary somewhere in the middle distance threatening our autonomy. That's what gives rise to a projection of the kind we’re seeing in Texas today. Without an enemy, real or imagined, threatening our autonomy, we're not patriots. We're merely zealots.
I...I just don't know, man.
British citizens go to the polls (or, as they say, Parliament goes to the country) the day after tomorrow. At the moment, neither the ruling Conservative party nor the opposition Labour party is predicted to win the 323 seats (out of 660) necessary to form a government. Most forecasts give Labor 267 seats to the Tories' 281, which means that once again they will need to form a coalition government.
The Economist has a tool to illustrate the problem facing the two major parties. With the UK Independence Party (similar to the Tea Party, but without the grace, subtlety, or Christianity) and Democaratic Unionists (Northern Irish protestants) supporting the Tories and the Greens, Welsh, and Northern Irish Catholic parties supporting Labour, the count is still only 275 to 290 in favor of the Tories.
The likely outcome will be the Scottish National Party and its 51 seats forming up with Labour. The Liberal Democrats 26 seats won't be enough to do it—but they will almost certainly join the government no matter who forms it.
This, then, is the likely outcome Thursday:
That looks great for Ed Miliband, except for the SNP. This is simply because the SNP's raison d'être is Scottish independence. Stay tuned...
Citylab has a must-read on Spiro Agnew and the legitimization of right-wing suburban fears that led to the current policing crisis in America:
Initially, Governor Agnew offered a rather moderate response to the riot. But he soon took the lead of a conservative backlash that blamed radical agitators (that should sound familiar) and liberalism for nurturing black misbehavior. Agnew's pivot to the right came as the riot subsided, on April 11, when he met the state's mainstream black leaders and accused them of harboring a "perverted concept of race loyalty" that "inflamed" militants. Baltimore's fires were not "lit from an overwhelming sense of frustration and despair," he said, but were instead "kindled at the suggestion and with the instruction of the advocates of violence," like Stokely Carmichael.
Agnew, who served as executive of Baltimore County before his election as governor, became the consummate new right suburbanite. Indeed, he was the nation's first high-profile suburban politician, according to Levy. Agnew was Nixon's attack dog, holding up the ideals of Nixon's silent majority over the loud minorities in the streets and promoting a conservative manliness in the face of what he saw as an effeminate liberalism that indulged black and student protesters. And for many suburban voters, he provided a more sober alternative to the rabid George Wallace.
There's a straight line from the civil unrest in 1967 and 1968 to the anger we're seeing today. People have been saying for years that increased policing and incarceration is not helping anyone. And here we are, less than 50 years from the last time we failed to deal with the problems faced by cities, facing the same problems again.
A massive effort to rebuild the hundred-year-old El tracks between Howard and Lawrence moved forward this week with the CTA's announcement that work will start in 2017:
Construction will be divided into two segments: The first is expected to keep the Lawrence and Berwyn stations closed for about 18 months; the second will involve closing the Berwyn, Argyle and Lawrence stations and restricting the Bryn Mawr station to southbound boarding only for 18 months to two years.
The station redesigns are expected to include new elevators; wider platforms to reduce boarding times; larger canopies to guard against the elements; and more benches. New bridges won't require pillars in the median, which should provide better sightlines for drivers, [CTA spokeswoman Tammy] Chase said.
This project will complement the ongoing UP-North improvements Metra has been working on since 2013.
This interests me even more than it used to because IDTWHQ is moving to the affected area in just under seven weeks.
I had my office door open most of the day and people kept walking in and speaking before I could acknowledge them. Hilarity ensued. Then I closed my office door and people who had appointments to talk to me simply walked away without knocking.
While that fun was happening, I didn't read any of these:
Off to more meetings.
To read:
Back to cleaning up after a production bug this weekend.
Wow, I have a lot of things on my Kindle. And I'm adding more:
Back to debugging...
Photo: Chicago at night. Note the yellow-orange sodium vapor lamps.
Now that Chicago's bike share has hundreds of stations, its efficiencies are becoming clearer:
But what about convenience? Recently Divvy held its second annual data visualization challenge, and one of the winners, by Shaun Jacobsen at Transitized, compares the speed of Divvy with the speed of the CTA. And Divvy wins by a nose.
Jacobsen’s “Who’s Faster” project starts with a look at the 1,000 top “station pairs"—i.e. the places that people most often go from point A to point B using Divvy. Then, those are compared to the same route on the CTA at noon on a Monday.
And a couple patterns emerge. One is that the bulk of station-to-station trips are faster, centering on five minutes’ savings. It might not sound like much, but it adds up; Jacobsen calculates 32,023 hours saved over 571,634 trips. The other is that the most heavily-used station pairs tend to save more time than less frequently-used ones, as if people are starting to figure out how it works.
Cool stuff.