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Over the last 3 years, $250 million worth of new nonresidential space has been built. That includes schools, churches, public projects and commercial developments. In commercial alone, the city added 800,000 square feet worth $60 million last year.I think Anderson might have a lot of space open but why are we not getting it filled?
Equipped with an AC induction motor that's no larger than a watermelon, it does zero to 60 in about 4 seconds. But it's not just the acceleration that amazes. It's the way this car accelerates. Unlike a gasoline-powered car, which has very little torque at low RPMs, the Tesla reaches 100 percent torque from the instant it starts forward. You don't wait even a moment for that acceleration to kick in. It kicks in immediately. The effect is like nothing you've ever experienced.
And that's not the half of it. Even as it reaches the performance of leading sports cars, emissions are non-existent—when I say 100 percent electric, I mean 100 percent electric—and according to the company, the car gets the equivalent of 135 miles to the gallon. Translation: If you charge your car at night, during off-peak hours, when it makes the most sense to charge it, you're paying as little as one cent per mile.
The Tesla has yet to be independently tested—the final version doesn't roll off the assembly line until the fall—and what you may save powering the car is certainly offset by the initial $92,000 price tag. But it's hard not to admire the Tesla simply as a feat of engineering.
A friend sends me these quotes from Leno and Letterman. I found this one to be pretty darned good.
"President Bush held a news conference where he accused the Democrats
of playing politics with the firing of U.S. attorneys. You know, the
attorneys he fired for not playing politics." --Jay Leno
For Immediate Release – March 28, 2007
Contact: Dan Funk 317- 371-9073
Statewide religious coalition speaks out against SJR-7
Indianapolis – The Interfaith Coalition on Nondiscrimination (ICON) today spoke out against Senate Joint Resolution 7 (SJR-7) in a letter to the Indiana General Assembly.
The letter, which is signed by 130 Indiana clergy, leaders of faith communities, and other religious professionals, opens with, “Our backgrounds and those of the people we serve vary widely. Our views on marriage differ. But we speak with one voice to oppose amending the Indiana Constitution to define marriage.”
Signatories on the letter to legislators all believe that the Marriage Discrimination Amendment would strip civil rights from committed unmarried couples and undermine the guarantee in the Indiana Bill of Rights for free exercise and enjoyment of religious opinions by giving a legal preference to a specific set of religious beliefs. The text of the letter is attached.
“People are growing tired of religious and political leaders using religious teaching to justify discrimination,” said Executive Director Dan Funk. “ICON is identifying, uniting and giving voice to people of faith who believe that religious-based bigotry has no place in the Indiana Constitution.”
ICON, which is based in Indianapolis , is a growing coalition of people of faith in Indiana representing 26 different faith traditions. Members of this coalition believe that each of their faith traditions place great emphasis on the importance of justice. Members also teach that they must respect the inherent dignity of every human being, even those of differing opinions.
Over the past several years, ICON has built a relationship of trust with clergy and people of faith by advocating civil rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in a dignified, responsible manner. It is supported by Christian, Jewish, nondenominational, and other responsible religious voices throughout Indiana .
“The debate about SJR-7 is too important for us not to register our very strong concerns,” said Rev. Larry Kleiman, senior pastor of St. Peter’s United Church of Christ, Carmel , and a signatory on the letter. “To impose an opinion in the state constitution which denies constitutional rights to any minority group is an injustice. We simply refuse to stand by and let a very small group of Hoosiers create a very large second class citizenry here in our state.”
ICON is a membership organization concerned about the consequences of intolerance against sexual and gender minorities. It is particularly concerned about religious intolerance and lack of acceptance of God’s diversity. Its purpose is to create positive change through education and social action, so that gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersexed, and transgender people will be able to live in peace and equality.
ICON’s work is directed by 20 congregations and religious organizations, including: Affinity (Indianapolis); Bloomington Friends Meeting (Quaker); Broadway Untied Methodist Church (Indianapolis); Central Christian Church (Indianapolis); Circle Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (Indianapolis); Congregation Beth-El Zedeck (Indianapolis); Eastside Peace & Justice Forum of Cumberland First Baptist Church (Indianapolis); First Congregational Church (Indianapolis); Holy Eucharist Orthodox Catholic Church (Indianapolis); Jesus Metropolitan Community Church (Indianapolis); Lutherans Concerned Central Indiana; North United Methodist Church (Indianapolis); Northeast United Church of Christ (Indianapolis); Plymouth Congregational Church (Fort Wayne); St. Luke’s United Methodist Church (Indianapolis); St. Peter’s United Church of Christ (Carmel); The Church Within (Indianapolis); Unitarian Universalist Church (Bloomington); Unitarian Universalist Church (Lafayette); and Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Fort Wayne)
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Religious based bigotry only undermines the religious.
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Many ideas will need to be tested to find a political process that works. Here's one concept: The Baghdad conference participants could call on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to propose a process leading to a political settlement that foreign ministers could endorse. Iraqis would be at the center of the process under U.N. mediation. Regional actors would enforce the mandate to get peace (and stay out of the conflict themselves). A "contact group" would engage international parties but keep them out of legalistic nuances
The presentation will include routing, pickup and drop-off locations, fares, hours and potential start dates.
A $4.5 million federal grant that provides for express service in Hamilton County over three years will fund the service.
A major failing of current leadership models is the lack of knowledge, awareness, or even interest in life beyond our country's borders, a limitation of growing importance as the global economy expands. This is evident everywhere; our boards of directors have, on average, very few executives from other countries. Our presidential candidates have little or no international experience going into the job, a huge handicap that leads to poor foreign policy. Our leaders assume that the U.S. model of business and governance is ideal, with some small adjustments, for all countries and that our job is to go forth and remake the world in our image. This approach is naive and self-defeating.
...The answer that is not entertained by the president's most severe GOP critics, even when not speaking for quotation, is that this is just the governing style of George W. Bush and will not change while he is in the Oval Office.I found Novak an annoying character 20 some years ago when I watched Washington Week in Review regularly. I would say that "style" is a tepid term, but I sit here thinking that George W. has hit rock bottom when Robert Novak expresses his displeasure with a Republican. Bush's governing style mixes arrogance, pugnaciousness, and laziness with ineptitude.
But there's a deeper difference that is not only enabled by the technology, but sits right at the border between old school and new school. It's what Zinnemann (and possibly film fans of my generation) would find and do find so annoying about "300." For Zinnemann, the point of the movie was to pretend it wasn't a movie -- it was real, it was happening, it was there. You were looking at the actual through a magic pane of glass, a window in the side of the universe. This is even true of his most stylized work, the musical "Oklahoma!," where he effortlessly segues between the stylized dance numbers and the real-world setting.Mr. Hunter unleashes his whimsy in the article but I think he illustrates a problem with some modern movies. Or is it just adapting Frank Miller stories? The same cannot be said of Batman Begins (the flaws in that movie belong to a different problem of modern movies - the "let's blow something up because we just ran short of ideas" problem.). I disagree with only one item - as much as I think Burt Lancaster was great (and Hunter does mention one of my favorite Lancaster movies - The Professionals), Butler does seem to me a Spartan.
...Barry Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 voting rights bill was not incidental to his run for the White House but an integral element of conscious departure from Republican tradition that contributed to his disastrous performance.I wondered when the Republicans began their departure from the party of Lincoln to the party of the South, and I guess Goldwater and 1964 is a place to start. It appears to be the start, actually.
Douglass outlived Lincoln by thirty years. In the latter half of that period the nation receded from its Reconstruction promise of racial justice, and Southern blacks were forced into second-class citizenship. As this trajectory spiraled downward, the Civil War president looked better and better in retrospect. If Lincoln were alive today, Douglass said in 1893, "did his firm hand now hold the helm of state;...did his wisdom now shape and control the destiny of this otherwise great republic," the national government would not be making the "weak and helpless" claim that "there is no power under the United States Constitution to protect the lives and liberties" of Southern blacks "from barbarous, inhuman and lawless violence."
Organized labor's press to pass the Employee Free Choice Act is understandable. Union representation has fallen from 20 percent of the workforce in 1980 to 12 percent today; just over 7 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions. The ability of employees to organize -- indeed, even the prospect that they could do so -- is a critical component of achieving fairness in the workplace, and it is a core democratic right. Labor and its legislative allies would do better to concentrate on finding practical ways to protect it, rather than seeking a politically unachievable, and substantively unwise, result.
But now the Chinese are producing a PC that uses a Chinese-designed microprocessor and operating system. It's early days yet but the development is significant. It shows that China has developed the capability of designing and producing its own microprocessors. If I were AMD or Intel, I would see this as a significant long-term challenge.The world grows more competitive, we must not accept complacency. We did with our manufacturing base. Read this post about a Muncie Star-Press article and see the effect our earlier complacency.
If all the estimated 3.8 billion pounds of U.S. restaurant grease produced annually was used, it would make 495 million gallons of biodiesel or heating fuel, equivalent to just 1 percent of the country's diesel consumption, Bantz said, quoting figures from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
While vegetable oil and restaurant grease may never make a big dent in overall energy needs, the existence of such enterprises underlines the urgency of the search for alternatives to fossil fuels, said Bantz.
"We have to look under every rock and down every drain for alternative energy sources," he said.
Someone send the Governor a rock. Put a message that ethanol is not the only alternative fuel.
While this may not make a big dent in overall energy needs, using restaurant grease as fuel offers the additional benefit of not having to store it in a garbage dump. That will help decrease the growth of landfills. Benefits, benefits.
Prohibition was one of the longest, dumbest chapters in the history of 20th-century American folly, and the impulses behind it are still alive today. The architects of this bizarre experiment were as varied as the country in which they lived: faith-based Christian zealots, idealistic social reformers, flat-out bigots, a few solemn feminists and more than a few cynical businessmen who simply wanted their blue-collar workers to show up sober and on time. The movement even included a genuine terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. The generals in this culture war believed, in Michael A. Lerner’s words, that “the prohibition of alcohol and the elimination of the saloon would morally uplift the people of the United States, ultimately creating a healthier citizenry, safer cities and workplaces, and a more efficient society.”Hmm, one of those supporting Prohibition was my mother's mother's mother who was a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. I heard of her through my mother (my great-grandmother lived with my grandmother and my mother and my aunt and helped raised the granddaughters), my grandmother, my aunt, and even my father. Her name was Prudence Livingston Day and I heard nothing to make think her a zealot and certainly not a Klanner. She was a good Democrat and back then Democrats were in opposition to the Klan. Pretty sure she was not a bigot; even if I have been told she did not care much for my grandmother's Irish mother-in-law, but then her own family came from Scotland and so it might have been something tribal. She was a good, rock-ribbed Baptist, though. Baptists have nothing to do with booze. (Well, not supposed to.)
But Lerner’s book is a serious work, suggesting that there are still lessons to be learned from the 13 years, 10 months and 18 days of a utopian American delusion. There remain a number of Americans today who are filled with similar angry visions, longing to make them into law.
Officials had been trying to emphasize in recent years that the local economy was going to become less dependent on manufacturing whether it was ready or not.
Dan Allen, president of the Muncie-Delaware County Chamber of Commerce, noted in mid-2006 that local economic development efforts were sometimes only able to keep pace with job losses in manufacturing.
"As fast as we're pedaling, the deterioration of manufacturing is pedaling faster," Allen said.
Ball State University economist Patrick Barkey agreed.
"We're familiar with manufacturing," Barkey said. "Unfortunately we're more familiar with them when they shut down."
The problem is, ethanol really isn't ready for prime time. The only economical way to make ethanol right now is with corn, which means the burgeoning industry is literally eating America's lunch, not to mention its breakfast and dinner. And though ethanol from corn may have some minor benefits with regard to energy independence, most analysts conclude its environmental benefits are questionable at best.
Proponents acknowledge the drawbacks of corn-based ethanol, but they believe it can help wean America off imported oil the way methadone helps a junkie kick heroin. It may not be ideal, but ethanol could help the country make the necessary and difficult transition to an environmentally and economically sustainable future.
State Rep. Ron Herrell isn’t looking forward to advancing his clocks this weekend, though he admits there is little he can do to avoid it, for now.
His concern is due to daylight-saving time springing forward, which happens this Sunday at 2 a.m.
“I really don’t care for [DST] personally,” Herrell said.
Neither do his constituents in the 30th House district, he said.
“The majority oppose changing to daylight-saving time. They do not to want to change their clocks,” he said.
Indiana lawmakers voted in 2005 to begin observing statewide daylight-saving time for the first time in 30 years.
Earlier this year, Herrell championed his constituents’ views when he proposed a bill asking for a referendum on the time change. Herrell said it didn’t make it past his own party members. He said the chairman didn’t want to get into another battle about the time change when they had more important issues to discuss during a budget year.
He’s not going to drop the issue.
The company is also developing its windcrofting initiative that aims to see mini-windfarms built across the country.
The idea is for Proven to place a small number of turbines on farms. Farmers would receive rent in return and cheap electricity.
I really do not know why some drugs fall into the different schedules used by our laws but my recollection is that it relates to supposed harm. I say harm because marijuana is considered very harmful and thus its position in our drug laws. I recall an Atlantic Monthly article about marijuana and that the drug had no lethal amount. So much for physical harm.At best, drug policy is problematic. Anyone criticizing current policy should expect the label of immoralist. Well, that was pretty much true till the police started telling the public how much of a failure was the War on Drugs. From my experiences as a public defender many years ago, I have to agree about the failure. In addition to fear of appearing immoral, too many have a vested interest in the current system to allow a rational change. Seems to be the same in Britain:A new report by the Royal Society of Arts criticises the "moral panic" which has supposedly guided a generation of drug laws in the UK. Such laws, it says, are no longer "fit for their purpose", and may never have been fit in the first place. It argues that the current Misuse of Drugs Act - and its punitive ABC classification system - should be replaced with "an index of harm", determined by the respective health risks of any given drug.
Implicit in the findings is a criticism of the practice of treating drug-taking as a crime, rather than a health problem; as the business of the Home Office rather than the Department of Health. Even then, it argues, evidence suggests that the "majority of people who use drugs are able to use them without harming themselves or others", rendering the "harmless use of illegal drugs" not only possible but "commonplace". The Home Office has already said it doesn't accept all the report's recommendations, but hasn't yet elaborated further.
And yet the panic remains unabated, peddled by tabloids, politicians and clerics. The irony of a society in which more people die from peanut consumption than ecstasy, say campaigners, has been airbrushed from modern history. But there is no reverse gear, according to politicians, no way of revisiting the topic."Politicians have bought a lot of their own propaganda and they have their own fears about the way reform would be met by the great unwashed," says Danny Kushlick, director of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation. "They've pumped out an enormous amount of propaganda for a ridiculous policy, and effectively painted themselves into a corner."
The slippery slope theory falls back on an age-old mantra: that drugs lead to more drugs, and that we need to be saved from ourselves. The theory - based on the fact that heroin addicts invariably started out on softer drugs - is seen by its opponents as a fraud that ignores what seems obvious. Most people who take drugs, they say, will never graduate to heroin; most will never give it a second thought. Most, they will argue, whether in a loved-up state or otherwise, would see little cause for panic at all.
I suggest reading the whole article as it contains some very interesting history in a short space.
And why the article made me think about Richard Pryor?In moral terms, things didn't get serious until the crossover of drugs into the West's indigenous white community during the 1950s and 1960s. It was only then that Britain introduced drug laws, under the UN's guidance, which rewarded cannabis users with a lengthy jail term. Traversing the race divide like the rhythm in Elvis's hips, the "black problem" became a white problem, rendering the whites using those drugs problematic.Pryor made the same point about the U.S. over two decades ago.
The balance of powers set forth in the Constitution is starting to work again. By far the strongest message from the election is that Americans want a change in Iraq. It is a tremendous challenge to get any administration -- especially one as stubborn as this one -- to change course during wartime. But Congress is now performing its constitutional role as a check on the executive. The administration is being asked the hard questions and being held accountable for its answers.
Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, Robert Kagan writes on the "surge" and its success:Two-thirds of political independents -- the swing voters -- agree with the statements that Republicans are too quick to use military force instead of diplomacy and are too stubborn in refusing to negotiate with hostile countries. But by nearly as large a margin, those same independents agree that Democrats are not tough enough to do what is needed to protect America and that they are unwilling to use military force, even when it's necessary for national security.
Overall, independents have moved closer to Democratic positions on foreign policy, meaning that the Republicans' almost-automatic advantage on national security issues may be a thing of the past.
Those doubts leave Americans in a quandary -- and very worried about the future. Matt Bennett, a vice president of Third Way, told me, "Candidates need to recognize Americans have been shaken in their confidence."
The Sept. 11 attacks, more than five years old, remain a vivid threat. Large majorities -- including most Republicans -- reject Vice President Cheney's contention that the absence of a second attack means we are safer. Instead, they say that the threat of terrorism has increased since 2001, and they believe that the war in Iraq has made us less safe, not more.
Four months later, the once insurmountable political opposition has been surmounted. The nonexistent troops are flowing into Iraq. And though it is still early and horrible acts of violence continue, there is substantial evidence that the new counterinsurgency strategy, backed by the infusion of new forces, is having a significant effect.I sit here thinking that it does not really matter if the surge succeeds. Well, does not rally matter to us but it will matter to the Iraqis - if it does bring less death with it. I never really understood the Republican opposition to withdrawal. Bush himself made it clear that we came not as conquerors. If not as conquerors, then we had to leave some time. If the surge succeeds then it allows Bush to withdraw without acknowledging just how incompetent our political and civil leadership has been during this stupid episode.
Though figures are not yet available, Testa predicted in a new blog posting that manufacturing exports likely increased 11 percent last year,. That would be the third consecutive year of gains above 10 percent, both for the Midwest and the United States as a whole.
Orders for durable goods fell 8.7%, revised down from last week's 7.8% estimate. Last week's report on durable goods orders contributed to the large sell off in the stock market last Tuesday. Orders for nondurable goods fell 2%, the government said in the latest report.A weakened manufacturing sector has raised concerns about the durability of the expansion. With housing still falling sharply, many economists had counted on higher business investment spending to boost economic growth. But business spending has been weak, leaving it up to the consumer to hold up the economy.Many economists believe the slump in the factory sector is a temporary slowdown, caused by excessive inventories in a few sectors that should be worked off in a few months. Others, however, believe capital spending will not rebound to any significant degree.
