Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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July 28, 2010StuckIn the August 2 issue of the New Yorker, Keth Gessen writes about the traffic in Moscow. People have swarmed there from all over the former Soviet Union, looking for prosperity, and they all want cars. The first people to get rich after the collapse of Communism had nothing to do with oil, gas, or nickel; they were selling cars, and the city is in a more or less permanent gridlock. Last December, during a snowfall, an ambulance was stuck in traffic so long the patient died.
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has been in power for 20 years. There is a Garden Ring within the city; Luzhkov has spent billions to to widen a beltway, the Moscow Ring Road, and completed a legendary Third Ring Road, which had been talked about for 40 years. They've all just filled up with traffic, so he has begun work on a Fourth Ring. Gessen writes:
The wise move would have been to invest in public transportation, to build up the city's justly famous but sparse metro network and bring back the trams that killed the literary editor at the start of The Master and Margarita; instead, Luzhkov has been cool toward the metro and actively hostile tro the trams. Public transportation is for losers.
I always knew that Russia and the USA had more in common than they wanted to admit.
July 28, 2010JobsworthsThe USA isn't alone; the European Union is in big trouble. From a recent issue of The Economist:
The barrier to reform has always been political, not economic. Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, put it best in 2007: "We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it."
That just about says it all. If we promised the politicians enormous pensions to just do the right thing and then retire, that wouldn't work either; they like being in office. Electing them is like giving candy to a baby.