Guerilla SK8 Park in Jersey City, Part 2

9 Aug

Part 1 here

Where were we? Ah, the SK8park has been destroyed as preparation for construction that never happened, presumably because of the 2008 financial melt down that’s still just oozing along and seems like it’s going to raise the cost of crossing the Hudson, but . . . back to the story.

The park’s patrons were not happy:

shoot-me

“Someone shoot me,” it says, “used to be the fucking coolest place.” Then, a few days later, another sign appeared:

city hall meeting.jpg

Could’a knocked me over with an aerosol blast. Who in City Hall, I asked myself, gives a crap about these kids and their illegal but hard-won park? I was curious, and went to the meeting. Four skaters, one councilman, Steve Fulop, and me, that was the meeting. Fulop asked the skaters if they could get more skaters to come to a rescheduled meeting. They said they could. Fulop scheduled another meeting for Monday 19 November. I told the councilman that I would donate photos of the site Jersey City’s library so that there would be a permanent record of the park, which I did a week or so later. Continue reading →

Anger in Japan Over Withheld Radiation Forecasts – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

Such is the way of governments, no? A protective lie here, another there, and pretty soon even the bureaucrats and politicians forget they are insulating themselves from the world through  lies.

“From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant. He and thousands from Namie now live in temporary housing in another town, Nihonmatsu. “We are extremely worried about internal exposure to radiation.”

The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”

In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry.

via Anger in Japan Over Withheld Radiation Forecasts – NYTimes.com.

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

And in those rare cases where rating agencies have downgraded countries that, like America now, still had the confidence of investors, they have consistently been wrong. Consider, in particular, the case of Japan, which S.& P. downgraded back in 2002. Well, nine years later Japan is still able to borrow freely and cheaply. As of Friday, in fact, the interest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.

So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems. …

No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

via Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com.

Guerilla SK8 Park in Jersey City, Part 1

8 Aug

Sometimes people just go ahead and create what they need without waiting for the government to act. That’s what a bunch of kids and young adults did in Jersey City a few years ago. At least, that’s what I surmise after the fact. I don’t actually know what they decided, when, and why. I just know what they did. I know, because I walked into it by chance. Here’s that story.

It was in November of 2006, about a month or so after I’d become interested in photographing local graffiti. I was walking in the neighborhood, or perhaps I was in the car on the way back from my Sunday AM grocery run. One of the other, it doesn’t much matter. Anyhow, I spotted some color:

sk8 park.jpg

That’s the stuff, says I, that’s the stuff. When I got closer, I noticed a ramp against a wall:

one old ramp now gone.jpg

And then this:

10 80.jpg

Someone was obviously using this site—the floor slab of an abandoned industrial building of some sort—as a park for skateboarding and BMX bike riding. See:

bikez3

I took this in July of 2007. Notice that the art on the walls has changed. It seems that some local, and not so local, graffiti writers used this site as something of an experimental gallery even as the skateboarders and BMXers used it to hone their athletic skills. Continue reading →

Under a Mound in Hiroshima: A City of Ashes the Size of Santa Fe

8 Aug

Behind twin curtains on either side of an altar, several dozen pine boxes, the size of caskets, were stacked, unceremoniously, from floor to ceiling. They hold the ashes of about 70,000 unidentified victims of the bomb. If, in an instant, all of the residents of Wilmington, Delaware, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, were reduced to ashes, and those ashes carried away to one repository, this is all the room the remains would require.

via Under a Mound in Hiroshima: A City of Ashes the Size of Santa Fe | The Nation.

What Happened to Obama’s Passion?

8 Aug

Obama fought the bullies, and the bullies won:

When Dr. King spoke of the great arc [of history]  bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.

IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.

via What Happened to Obama’s Passion? – NYTimes.com.

“You Start with Bike Lanes” « One Jersey City

7 Aug

This is the way to think. A relatively minor, but critical, change that has broad ramifications. Like bikes!

Take bicycles. The advent of bike lanes in some American cities may seem like a big step, but merely marking a strip of the road for recreational cycling spectacularly misses the point. In Amsterdam, nearly everyone cycles, and cars, bikes and trams coexist in a complex flow, with dedicated bicycle lanes, traffic lights and parking garages. But this is thanks to a different way of thinking about transportation.

To give a small but telling example, pointed out to me by my friend Ruth Oldenziel, an expert on the history of technology at Eindhoven University, Dutch drivers are taught that when you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind. Likewise, every Dutch child has to pass a bicycle safety exam at school. The coexistence of different modes of travel is hard-wired into the culture.

This in turn relates to lots of other things — such as bread. How? Cyclists can’t carry six bags of groceries; bulk buying is almost nonexistent. Instead of shopping for a week, people stop at the market daily. So the need for processed loaves that will last for days is gone. A result: good bread.

via “You Start with Bike Lanes” « One Jersey City.

The Rise of Tea Party Keynesianism – How the World Works – Salon.com

7 Aug

Cognitive dissonance, they name is America:

M.S., in response, writes that “the idea that a major tea-party figure can turn around and make a bog-standard argument for defense spending on Keynesian grounds testifies to a startling capacity for cognitive dissonance.”

via The Rise of Tea Party Keynesianism – How the World Works – Salon.com.

In Japan, A-Bomb Survivors Join Opposition to Nuclear Power – NYTimes.com

6 Aug

Aghast at the catastrophic failure of nuclear technology, and outraged by recent revelations that the government and power industry had planted nuclear proponents at town hall-style meetings, the elderly atomic bomb survivors, dwindling in numbers, have begun stepping forward for the first time to oppose nuclear power.

Now, as both Hiroshima and Nagasaki observe the 66th anniversary of the twin American atomic attacks at the end of World War II, the survivors are hoping that they can use their unique moral standing, as the only victims of nuclear bombings, to wean both Japan and the world from what they see as mankind’s tragedy-prone efforts to tap the atom.

via In Japan, A-Bomb Survivors Join Opposition to Nuclear Power – NYTimes.com.

Labour Leader Ed Miliband Rebounds Amid Turmoil – NYTimes.com

5 Aug

Is Britain about to move transition into a higher gear? One can only hope.

The uproar over The News of the World and its ramifications for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, as well as for rival newspapers that have been implicated in the phone hacking and other abuses, have changed much in Britain. The scandal has also raised difficult, career-threatening questions for Prime Minister David Cameron and has led to a stunning reversal in fortunes for the 41-year-old Mr. Miliband, who as recently as last spring appeared to be sinking fast as Labour’s new helmsman.

via Labour Leader Ed Miliband Rebounds Amid Turmoil – NYTimes.com.

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