My (First) MARTA Column

Now that Sunday alcohol sales (see my "Will to Power" post) is done with, I've been in need of a new topic to write column after column about.

And so I found it--the transportation one-percent tax, or as I've always called it, the TSPLOST.

(For those of you who aren't from Georgia, a Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax or SPLOST is a one-percent sales tax implemented for a limited time to pay for certain projects, like a new government building or a land-purchase.)

Here's my first column:

http://www.northfulton.com/Articles-c-2011-06-28-188000.114126-sub-Expansion-of-rail-beneficial-for-the-state.html

When I was in Griffin, I did some state-level stories about the passage of the TSPLOST, which took multiple legislative sessions, as well as the Atlanta-Macon passenger rail line that was on the unconstrained project list and was a topic of political debate in Griffin and Spalding County's local government.

However, Matt Schafer pointed out in a Facebook discussion that expanding MARTA northward would be more effective than the Atlanta-Macon line in getting commuters off the roads and after some thinking, I've come to believe he's correct.  The Atlanta-Macon line would take care of people commuting from the southside, but I think there are more commuters coming from the north.  Plus expanding the MARTA Red Line north would be within one county (Fulton) and not be so difficult politically, unlike a multi-county Atlanta-Macon line.

I concede MARTA does have some issues that would make suburbanites leery of it coming to their county, but I think that would be more applicable to Cobb and Gwinnett, which historically rejected MARTA, than to North Fulton, whose residents already pay the MARTA tax but have to drive down to North Springs to actually use the train.  Plus MARTA's own leadership wants their agency merged into a wider Metro Atlanta transit entity--an entity including the other counties' transit systems (like Cobb's bus line) might be more effective and more palatable to voters and taxpayers.

I've written a second column about the first wave of cuts to the unconstrained project list.  I'll post it here when it goes live, probably this coming Tuesday.

The voters will approve the regional sales tax in 2012, but the final project list must be completed by August 15 of this year.  I think I'll be flacking for rail expansion all summer long.

An Alternate History Scenario I Liked (And Contributed To)

The members of my alternate-history forum whose handle is Eurofed likes larger and larger states, I believe on the grounds that internal stability over larger areas promotes economic development and human welfare.  To that end, he has devised various alternate timelines featuring this, some featuring this unification done by the good ("The United States of the Americas and Oceania"--the U.S. includes Canada from the get-go and grows from there) and the very bad ("The Long Night Falls," a victorious Third Reich uniting Europe and the Middle East).

This one, however, is my favorite

Europe of the Three Empires

Basically, the Roman Empire expands even more than in our history, incorporating Mesopotamia and reducing Persia proper to vassalage and expanding deeper into Europe, giving them a more defensible border (the Oder is shorter than the Rhine and can tie into the Danube as a barrier).  Eventually the enlarged Roman Empire splits apart due to religious and cultural-linguistic (Latin/Greek) differences and a third empire emerged in Russia and Scandinavia based on the Norse, the Goths, and various steppe influences.

There was a lot of discussion about just how big the Roman Empire could get and stay functional.  Geography is one problem, as is the slow speed of communications.  Eurofed is not a believer in geographic determinism--he said India remained disunited even though it doesn't have a lot of division-encouraging geographical features.

My handle on the board is MerryPrankster and I posted a lot of suggestions, including how the Norse and Western Romans would divide up territory (I favored the Norse taking Britain), how the East-West political split might happen, and the East-West religious split might develop.  In particular, if we're going with a Christian East that develops our history's religious-authoritarian Byzantine political culture and a pagan West that is comparatively freer, I figured there'd at least be some Christians who would believe a state church to be an abomination and oppose brutality and tyranny being done in the name of Jesus.

Our history, after all, saw one person of note in the early church (for some reason I'm thinking it was Arius of Alexandria, founder of the Arian heresy) who claimed Constantine did not scourge the back but tickled the belly and "damned the soul with gold."  Not to mention the Biblical justification for imposing Christianity and "Christian" political positions by force on society as a whole is somewhat lacking--when Paul told believers to pray for kings, it was so that they would become Christians and thusly not persecute Christians anymore, not to impose Christianity on everyone with the sword.

Maybe I'll try to write fiction set in something similar to this world, but that would require having an actual plot (for the fiction) and an actual timeline, starting with a divergence from our history.  I suggested some of the conquests be made during the Republican period, since the Republic was actually more aggressive than the Empire (the Emperors wanted to avoid war when possible to avoid having victorious generals threaten them) and more inclined to keep conquered territory.

Perhaps Caesar doesn't get assassinated and sets off for his war against Parthia?  He can get assassinated later, maybe if he goes on a power trip after beating the Parthians and makes himself king (or people think he will try to make himself king), and we can still have our world's Augustus.

Anybody Got Suggestions for Improvement?

I attended a meeting of the Atlanta bloggers meetup.com group the other day.  Unfortunately, due to getting out of the office late and taking the train to the wrong MARTA station*, I missed a substantial chunk of the meeting.

*I went to the North Avenue station and walked several blocks when it turns out the Midtown station is right next to the restaurant.  At least I saved gas and didn't need to worry about my car...

I pick up some interesting suggestions.  One of them is to set up a Twitter account to accumulate followers and, I assume, cross-pollinate with the blog (refer Twitter folk here and blog-followers to Twitter).  I'll be sure to do that, but not right now.

The most relevant suggestion to this post, however, is to ask your readers for feedback.  So....

1. What parts of my blog do you all like?

2. What parts do you all dislike?

3. What are some improvements you think I could make?

Any comment would be appreciated.

TSA Hassles Those With Prosthetics

Our least favorite federal agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), is behaving even more obnoxiously.  On top of groping people or using excessively intimate scanners, now we have people with prosthetics being harassed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40278427/ns/travel-news

And John Pistole, rather than acknowledging he may be going too far, is being an arrogant blowhard.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40234326/ns/travel-news

"I'm not going to change those policies," he said, according to MSNBC.  No couching the language or nuance at all--he simply refuses to compromise.

Well he darn well better, or he might find himself unemployed.  It's a lot easier to fire a department head who makes himself unpopular than abolish an entire government agency, even one as resented and relatively new as the TSA and with his attitude, he'd be remarkably easy to scapegoat.

Personally, I think it would be better to abolish the TSA and go back to the pre-9/11 way of doing things, only with more effort being put in to ensure procedures are actually followed.  If I remember correctly, if the procedures had been followed, at least some of the hijackers would not have been allowed onto the aircraft.  John Stossel backs me up on this. 

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/GiveMeABreak/story?id=123823&page=1

Methinks certain people found an opportunity in 9/11 to pull a power grab--after all, Tom Daschle said "you can't professionalize unless you federalize."  What an arrogant tool.  And it was George W. Bush who signed off on this--more proof the man had no backbone when domestic issues were concerned.

James Madison said if tyranny and oppression ever came to America, it would be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.  Let's not ignore the legitimate dangers of terrorism, but at the same time, let's not allow the terrorists to win by sacrificing our freedom to travel (literally) unmolested.

Here's a way to write your federal representatives and the president.  Those of you who don't like the current airport security regime, write your Congressmen (and Senators, and the President) and let them know.

http://www.congress.org/