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I had a man with dementia wonder into my garage. He said he was lost. All he remembered was he lived somewhere with a parking lot and grass. I couldn't be sure he wasn't faking, but he seemed honest. I called 911 and asked for an ambulance. They said they had to send police too. I told them he was harmless and I'd rather they sent an ambulance. The police officer was very kind and understanding. He opened the door to his squad car and offered the old man the chance to sit down and told him it was optional and he was not detained and free to go if he did not want police help. The man accepted and the officer started making calls to locate his home. Eventually someone responsible for caring for the man came and picked him up. Madison police are really good, but we shouldn't be dependent on individual officers or even cities respecting citizens' rights.
I'm sure you seen Portlandia: http://youtu.be/AVmq9dq6Nsg
I think of this on this as being on the rightwing side of the spectrum, if we had to put it on the spectrum.
" The same number of lanes for cars, and added light rail and bike lanes!"
I've heard we're second only to Portland for being bike friendly. They wanted to add some kind of electric street cars here, but it was unpopular because it would have shared the roads with buses. It's cheaper just to add more buses. I love the bikepaths here, and it's hard to imagine it being any better anywhere else.
Be bike friendly all you want, but when you do it at the expense of the means of transportation that 99.9 percent of the population in this area rely on, then something is broken. One additional Portland'ism... the city of Portland was running out of transportation monies (wonder why?) and had this brilliant idea that they didn't need to perform routine road maintenance such as filling potholes, etc. which would allow them to continue their light rail expansion. Now the city is faced with an almost exponential bill for road repair since simple problems that could have been repaired fairly inexpensively have not metastasized into much more serious and expensive problems to repair.
Ah, the wisdom of our "leaders".
Crazy Eddie.
""Yes. You appeared precisely in the..." Renner's Motie seemed to search for a word. Visibly, she gave up "Renner, I must tell you of a creature of legend."
"Say on." Renner's image dialed for coffee. Coffee and stories, they went together.
"We will call him Crazy Eddie, if you like. He is a... he is like me, sometimes, and he is a Brown, an idiot savant tinker, sometimes. Always he does the wrong things for excellent reasons. He does the same things over and over, and they always bring disaster, and he never learns."
There were small sounds of whispering in MacArthur's wardroom. Renner's image said, "For instance?"
Renner's Motie's image paused to think. It said, "When a city has grown so overlarge and crowded that it is in immediate danger of collapse... when food and clean water flow into the city at a rate just sufficient to feed every mouth, and every hand must work constantly to keep it that way... when all transportation is involved in moving vital supplies, and none is left over to move people out of the city should the need arise... then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions." "
- The Mote in God's Eye