The Daily Parker

I'm a little busy today, preparing for three different projects even though I can only actually do 1.5 of them. So as is common on days like this, I have a list of things I don't have time to read:

• Jeff Atwood suggests ways of minimizing online douchery.
• The Economist Gulliver blog maps how many times French people kiss when greeting each other. Hint: It's more than Americans.
• Pilot and journalist Jim Fallows explains yesterday's aviation accident outside D.C. involving a helicopter and a small plane.
• Cranky Flier debunks the myth of cheap airfares on Sunday.
• Krugman gets annoyed at people who call for moderate Obama policies without seeming to understand that they're advocating proposals the Republican Congress has already killed.
• A Barnes and Noble in the Bronx is the last general bookstore there, sadly.

I really would have liked another week in London...

The New Republic today looks into the Mormon practice of baptizing dead people, and the church's related efforts to preserve genealogical information:

“The core concept of why this church cares so much about genealogy stems back to the notion that families can be eternal organizations past death,” [Jay] Verkler, [CEO of Family Search, the Mormon organization that manages the vault's records and promotes genealogy throughout the world], explained. “Members of the church seek out their ancestors because we think we have a duty to them to help them understand this gospel that we understand, and we think we can actually be together.”

The church’s most ambitious project is its online tree. Anyone who logs in to Family Search may record and research his or her family history there, but what distinguishes this tree from all the other online services is that the church is trying to connect all the branches, using its massive records and the activities of users to build a big tree of all of humanity. The endeavor must be, to some extent, possible. If anyone has the records to create this structure—a family history of all of the documented individual members of the human race, this group does. But the distinctive element of the LDS tree is that it’s collaborative: People can log on and add names and link them to documents and write personal stories—and once they have done that, their fifth cousin once removed may also jump online and edit that information, changing a relative’s name, linking it to other documents, or deleting the story altogether. No one I spoke to at Family Search seemed to think this would be a problem, but surely everyone’s version of her own family is different from that of her cousins?

In the religion I'll someday build a church around—The Church of Latter-Day Atheists—people will be able to make a record of their ancestors and note that the ancestors truly don't care about the living, for the simple reason that the dead don't have anything to care with. But hey, if the Mormon church wants to spend tens of millions on building a complete genealogical database, mazel tov. A few centuries from now either everyone alive today will be Mormon or no one will. I'm not sure how either side of that divide will prove it, though.

The Cranky Flyer took note of an application American Airlines filed last week requesting the Department of Transportation force Delta to give up one of its Tokyo Haneda slots:

Haneda is just much closer to Central Tokyo and is generally the preferred airport if you can get there. Plus, you avoid having to deal with Godzilla. For years after Narita opened, however, only Narita was allowed to handle international traffic. Haneda was still an incredibly important airport with 747s packed to the gills flying around Japan, but it wasn’t until the last few years that international flights were allowed to start creeping in to Haneda.

The crux of the argument is that Delta isn’t really using its [Seattle-to-Haneda] slot.... American calls it “near-dormant,” and that is true. This winter, Delta is doing the bare minimum. It’s flying one week every 90 days on the route and that’s it. In other words, between now and March 29, Delta will fly from Seattle to Haneda only 17 times. That’s nuts, but it’s technically enough to consider the slot active. What American is saying is that even if it meets the rules, we only have 4 slots and the feds should think about how to get the most value out of them.

This doesn't affect Chicago, from which American, JAL, United, and ANA all have daily non-stops to Narita. Getting to Haneda from Chicago requires a lengthy or retrograde connection that obviates the time savings in Japan. (By "retrograde," the fastest routing to Haneda from Chicago goes through Toronto.)

Speaking of Chicago aviation, as of this morning the Aurora ARTCC is back to full operations after the arson attack last month.

The Chicago Tribune has been plugging away on the scandal of Chicago's red-light camera program. Yesterday the city's Inspector General weighed in:

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson reported that city transportation officials identified likely causes for just three of the dozen most dramatic spikes cited in the Tribune's 10-month investigation, putting the blame on faulty equipment and inaccurate camera settings.

Ferguson said his office was unable to find reasons for any of the other anomalies, citing missing or destroyed records and his office's desire to quickly respond to public concerns raised by the Tribune's July report. The inspector general relied heavily on work conducted by the city Transportation Department and longtime camera operator Redflex Traffic Systems Inc., which was fired amid charges top company executives paid up to $2 million in bribes to win the Chicago contract.

At the same time, Ferguson said City Hall's oversight "was insufficient to identify and resolve the types of issues identified in the Tribune report."

Yes, that's right. The IG couldn't find anything because the relevant records had been destroyed. Well, except for this:

The inspector general did resolve a more recent controversy involving the red light program — disclosing that the Emanuel administration quietly issued a new, shorter yellow light standard this spring that generated 77,000 tickets that would not have been allowed before the rule change.

The administration defended the $100 tickets as valid but agreed to Ferguson's recommendation to end the new practice of issuing citations with yellow light times below 3 seconds.

Yes, Chicago's yellow lights are only 3 seconds long. That may be fine at a small intersection between two-lane roads, but it's completely inadequate for larger intersections, according to proposed standards.

It's also dangerous. And when intersections become less dangerous, red-light cameras cease to be effective. It's a strange phenomenon.

On Monday, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to lower-court rulings upholding marriage equality in five states, effectively ending the fight in 14 states. Yesterday, the 9th Circuit, which covers the Pacific Coast and much of the Mountain states, ruled in favor of equality, making it the law in 35 states plus DC:

The Ninth Circuit already was on record for striking down California’s ban, “Proposition 8,” although that decision did not remain on the books because of a procedural flaw when the case went to the Supreme Court last year. Even so, same-sex marriage is legal in California under an earlier ruling by a federal trial judge.

In addition, the Ninth Circuit applies a tougher standard — heightened scrutiny — for laws that are challenged as discriminating against gays, lesbians and transgender people, and no marriage ban has yet survived that test.

In the Idaho case, the new decision upholds a federal trial judge’s decision against that state’s ban. In the Nevada case, the ruling overturns a decision by a federal trial judge in favor of that state’s ban.

It is possible that Idaho officials could try to get the full Ninth Circuit bench to reconsider the ruling, or they could seek to take the case on to the Supreme Court. However, the Ninth Circuit previously refused en banc review in the “Proposition 8″ case. And, the Supreme Court’s refusal on Monday to review the three other federal appeals courts’ decisions that came out the same way might suggest little hope of succeeding with a challenge before the Justices.

Sullivan is, as one would expect, beside himself:

An idea that once seemed preposterous now appears close to banal. The legal strategy that Evan Wolfson crafted from the early 1990s onward – a critical mass of states with marriage equality before a definitive Supreme Court ruling – has been vindicated and then some. The political and cultural strategy we pioneered at the same time – shifting public opinion slowly from the ground up, tapping into the deepest longings of gay people to become fully part of their own families and their own country for the first time, talking to so many heterosexual men and women about ourselves for the first time – also succeeded.

What I also love about this conservative but extraordinary decision from SCOTUS is that it affirms the power of federalism against the alternatives. Marriage equality will not have been prematurely foisted on the country by one single decision; it will have emerged and taken root because it slowly gained democratic legitimacy, from state to state, because the legal and constitutional arguments slowly won in the court of public opinion, and because an experiment in one state, Massachusetts, and then others, helped persuade the sincere skeptics that the consequences were, in fact, the strengthening of families, not their weakening.

I think of all those who never saw this day, the countless people who lived lives of terror and self-loathing for so, so long, crippled by the deep psychic wound of being told that the very source of your happiness – the love for someone else – was somehow evil, or criminal, or unmentionable. I think of the fathomless oceans of pain we swam through, with no sight of dry land, for so long. I think of the courage of so many who, in far, far darker times than these, summoned up the courage to live with integrity, even at the risk of their lives. And I cherish America, a place where this debate properly began, a place where the opposition was relentless and impassioned, a country which allowed a truly democratic debate over decades to change minds and hearts, where the Supreme Court guided, but never pre-empted, the kind of change that is all the more durable for having taken its time.

I'm glad my friends can marry in Indiana now, and I'm glad that, within a year or two, every committed couple will have the option regardless of their sexes.

While I'm up to my eyeballs at work, I've got a backlog of articles to catch up on:

• Why 12-foot traffic lanes are bad, which people have known for decades but policymakers are just starting to notice. It's related to the fading distinction between city and suburb that Richard Florida notes this week.
• Loop invariants are a good thing. Not that many Daily Parker readers will care, but it's still interesting.
• Reviews for the Lyric Opera's production of Don Giovanni, have gushed. I'm excited to see it this weekend.
• Getting hit by lightning almost never kills people. It's still not a pleasant experience.
• Scott Guthrie has a rundown of new Azure features that matter to me.
• I live in a home where the buffalo roam for the first time in almost two centuries.
• "Baby Doc" Duvalier died over the weekend. Good riddance.
• Congress is proposing new rules to speed up boarding on Amtrak trains.

Once I've got some free time (maybe this afternoon) I'll talk about yesterday's Supreme Court non-decision that changes civil rights in the U.S. forever.

Krugman this morning reminds everyone that Clinton and Obama are better than Bush at growing the economy:

Both administrations began with a period of falling employment thanks to a burst bubble — but can you see how much more vigorous private job creation was after the Bush trough than after the Obama trough? Neither can I. If job growth has seemed slow under Obama, it’s entirely because of public sector austerity.

But of course, Republicans hope that repeating the lie that tax cuts spur job growth will distract people from the actual evidence. Sadly, they might be right.

The latest infliction of Haredi nonsense on innocent victims comes via Gulliver this week, as religious nutters apparently can't deal with sitting next to women on airplanes:

One flight last week, from New York’s JFK airport to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, descended into chaos according to passengers, after a large group of haredim, or ultra-orthodox Jews, refused to take their seats next to women, in accordance with strict religious customs.

Amit Ben-Natan, a passenger on last week’s El Al flight from New York, said take-off was delayed after numerous and repeated requests by ultra-orthodox men for female passengers to be moved.

“People stood in the aisles and refused to go forward,” she told the Ynet website. “Although everyone had tickets with seat numbers that they purchased in advance, they asked us to trade seats with them, and even offered to pay money, since they cannot sit next to a woman. It was obvious that the plane won’t take off as long as they keep standing in the aisles.”

All right, you clowns. In Israel, you're essentially parasites, contributing nothing to Israeli society except to push their foreign policy into conflict with every ally you've got, and your entire worldview is based on a literal reading of only some parts of a 3,000-year-old book of fables. If you want to participate in the real, 21st-century world—for example, by using air transport—then you can sit down and shut up.

</rant>

Institutional irrationality is fine, as long as it's private. As one of my college professors once said, "Hey, man, do anything you want, but don't push your trip on me." Good advice.

Little coincidences like this amuse me. I'm currently flying over Kansas, and I just got a New Republic update containing a readout by John Judis on the conservative hell that is below me:

And yet for all his easygoing appeal, [Republican Kansas governor Sam] Brownback—who has long been fascinated by John Brown—is a true radical at heart. According to the author Jeff Sharlet, Brownback became involved with the Fellowship, a secret group that fused political conservatism with fervent Christian belief, as early as 1979, when he was an intern for Dole in the capitol. When he ran for Congress in 1994, he became a vocal leader in the pro-life crusade. And once in Washington, Brownback positioned himself even to the right of Speaker Newt Gingrich, admonishing Gingrich for failing to balance the budget and championing a bill that would have eliminated four Cabinet departments. In 1996, after Dole resigned from the Senate, Brownback won Dole’s seat. As a senator, his greatest triumph came when he led the charge against Bush’s Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, whom he suspected of being squishy on abortion.

After he had ousted the moderate Republicans, Brownback was able to push an ideologically pure agenda with almost no real opposition. He obtained the power to nominate judges. He reduced tax cuts on the wealthy even more: The rate for the top bracket fell from 6.45 percent to 3.9 percent, and Brownback promised to eventually reduce it to zero when revenues from other sources made up for any potential losses. The economic benefits, he boasted, would be immense.

By June of 2014, the results of Brownback’s economic reforms began to come in, and they weren’t pretty. During the first fiscal year that his plan was in operation, which ended in June, the tax cuts had produced a staggering loss in revenue—$687.9 million, or 10.84 percent. According to the nonpartisan Kansas Legislative Research Department, the state risks running deficits through fiscal year 2019. Moody’s downgraded the state’s credit rating from AA1 to AA2; Standard & Poor’s followed suit, which will increase the state’s borrowing costs and further enlarge its deficit.

By the way, Thomas Frank's book about the state's descent into madness is worth a read.

A friend living in Greensboro, N.C., flagged a Times article about North Carolina's struggling to deal with the influx of northern progressives:

Last year, aided by a new Republican governor, Pat McCrory, the legislature enacted one of the most far-reaching conservative agendas in the country, passing a “flattened” income tax that gives big breaks to the wealthy as well as new rules that limit access to voting, expand rights for gun owners and add restrictions for abortion providers.

And yet, in a tight race that could decide control of the United States Senate, it is Democrats who hold the advantage here in registered voters. Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, is preparing to face Thom Tillis, the state House speaker, a Republican, and Democrats have 2.7 million registered voters to the Republicans’ two million. About 1.8 million registered voters are not affiliated with a party.

The North Carolina of 2014, it seems, is neither red nor blue, but a shade of deep Dixie purple. It is a state where Republicans could retain control of the legislature for years, thanks to an aggressive 2011 redistricting and also because of white conservatives’ abandonment of the Democratic Party after years of post-Civil War fealty.

But it is also a state where a modern-day Democratic candidate like Ms. Hagan — or even like Hillary Rodham Clinton — may still dream of a statewide victory.

I remember the big joke in the Triangle was about the town of Cary. The name, locals said, stood for "Containment Area for Relocated Yankees." Seems like the Yankees might have busted out.