The Torture Question

A few days ago I watched a recent Frontline called The Torture Question. It was another Frontline documentary that I think all Americans should watch. Please, go over to that website right now and either watch it or bookmark it for viewing later. It's important for us to understand what these people who are in charge of the executive branch are doing in our name.

This isn't a Democrats vs. Republicans thing. This is American Values vs. Sadam Hussain's Values, and Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld are on Saddam's side. How did we let this happen? How did we elect people who are just like Saddam into office?

It's probably going to take decades for our country to regain its reputation on the world stage. This is going to effect everything. People aren't going to listen to us when we want them to change their ways. People aren't going to give us the benefit of the doubt when something else happens. I hate to side with the Loony Far Left who thinks everything this country does is bad, but we really are a Rogue Nation in this case.

Mini Buses

Pattern 20 in A Pattern Language is "Mini Buses". I thought I knew what he was going to talk about because there are mini buses in Bolivia called micros that are just like our buses but they have a lot more of them and the come more often than regular buses.

But the author explains that they could be somewhat in between a taxi and a bus. You call them up and they pick up other riders as they go along. A central dispatcher tells them where to pick up the next customer. He suggested putting phone booths on each of the stops, but nowadays everyone has a cell phone so you don't need that expense. And computers are so cheap and easy to program that you could have it do all of the routing.

I bet that if you linked the core neighborhoods of Seattle with a system like this it could easily work. I would definitely use it for at least two use cases: 1. going downtown to shop, eat, or watch a movie and 2. going to parties.

If you placed the stops every couple blocks then people wouldn't have to walk to far and the mini buses wouldn't have to drive in too much of a zig-zag route. Then you would just need to put up a sign with the telephone number.

I don't think that lots of people would start using it right away, but if it's an option for people just out of college who have just moved to town then they might start using it and eventually it seeps into the consciousness of everyone in the city and a certain percentage of people will decide to use the system and eventually some might decide to give up their car when the cost of insurance isn't justified by its usage.