It’s a better road! Only drivers don’t like it

After spending loads of money to remove the roundabout five miles away in that other part of Binghamton, Binghamton has proudly installed a new roundabout that is safer and easier and gooder, if you would just follow the directions, for heaven’s sake, and drive over the sidewalk that’s not for walking on only if you are truck.

It makes Binghamton safer for everyone except for the people who don’t know how to use this new piece of road, or for people who might be nearby when those drivers misuse this special piece of safe road. We need a special re-education program to teach everyone who drives in Binghamton but has never driven in Europe how to drive on this special piece of everyday commonplace road that nobody has seen before. The re-education shouldn’t cost too much more than the quarter mil it took to make this special piece of safe, easy to use, commonplace road that nobody has seen before. Not counting the money they spent replacing signs that got hit by all the drivers who don’t know how to drive, because those signs are on the maintenance budget not the project budget.

It is definitely better looking, anyhow! No question about that!

Shattered mind

This is a good presentation of mental illness. The description resonates with my (second hand) experience and so does the manner of the speaker. Power, control, and death would seem to be common points of obsession. Mass murders, intrusions, plots, The Mission.

To say that schizophrenia is the condition of a shattered mind is evocative but not adequately specific. Alzheimer’s could be described as a shattered mind, too, perhaps. There is a malice in schizophrenia that clinicians are too quick to dismiss. I am not talking about the sometimes violence of the schizophrenic sufferer; I’d guess that everyone would respond in basically the same way to the same stimuli. But just as it makes we normal people feel better to think that madmen are at peace tied up, lobotomized, or sedated, so too we are much more comfortable believing the schizophrenic’s condition is impersonal chaos and not an irresistible evil.

We Americans, I think, are especially terrified by the thought of an unstoppable evil; our taboo extends to the grave we desperately ignore in our “celebrations of life.” Sufficient positive thinking will fix anything: the economy, cancer, warfare, and especially mental illness.

My friend: I may laugh at your defenses, but I will never laugh at your enemy.

A whole different gas

“[I]t took about six years for truck fleets to shift from gasoline to diesel fuel in the early to mid-1970s.” (DC Velocity, quoting T.B. Pickens.) Huh. I didn’t know that ever happened. I didn’t realize that diesel hadn’t developed as a motor fuel right along with gasoline the whole way.

Trucks run practically everywhere in this country. But there are some long cross-country routes that some companies run every single day. There are, in general, national, regional, and local carriers. If it made operating sense, you could develop your natural gas network from the national routes on down to the more localized routes. Either the cost of LNG needs to go down, or the cost of diesel needs to go up; or a combination of both. Yet gas extractors have significantly slowed their operations in the Marcellus shale because they’ve driven the prices lower than they’d like.

Well – the price of diesel is bound to go up one of these days.

Not that I really want to see the tree-covered hills around here spiked with rigs. But on the whole, I think it is better for people to deal with the consequences of their actions. It is ethically more healthy to get your energy out of your own backyard.