Sidewalks

The sidewalks along Frank Street across from Conn Elementary don’t reach to Brookside Drive. Being the civic geek that I am, I thought I would petition the City of Raleigh to put one in.

It looked like a slam dunk to me: the city will install sidewalks and pay for them provided the affected property owners agree. There’s been a well-worn “goat trail” from the Brookside crosswalk to the corner of Frank and Norris from years of kids coming and going to school. The city owns 75% of the affected property, with only one private property owner to deal with.

Therein lies my problem. The city may own most of the property affected but it doesn’t take a position on these projects. Thus it doesn’t count towards the petition. That means instead of getting the normal 75% of property owners to agree, I have to get 100% of one property owner to agree.
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“Public Treasury” quote is bogus

The other day one of my conservative friends, grousing about the presidential election, repeated a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville about democracy:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

The problem is that de Tocqueville never said it. Others have also attributed it to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish lawyer and writer, but Tytler never said it, either.

The statement has been traced only as far back as December 9, 1951. According to the excellent research by Loren Collins, it was seen in the Daily Oklahoman, quoted by a nobody named Elmer T. Peterson:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”

Like the Einstein Bees quote, the Jefferson Inflation quote and many others, this seems to be another case of someone attributing a quote to a famous person in order to give it added weight.

Some people think that if something gets repeated often enough it becomes true.

Veterans Day parade

Kelly and Hallie had haircut appointments Saturday morning, so Travis and I had a little free time on our hands. After a few attempts prying him from his video game, T and I went downtown to see the Veterans Day parade.

We arrived there about 10:15 but saw no parade. Fayetteville Street was deserted, with no cars and no people. We heard drumming coming from the State Capitol area so we walked over to see what was going on.

There was a crowd milling around the armed forces memorial on the north side of the Capitol but it wasn’t a parade-worthy crowd. Instead, it was kind of small. Based on the crowd after the parade, I’d be willing to bet that there were more people who marched in the parade than watched it.
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Introducing two friends from across the country

I got an unusual message on my Facebook wall this afternoon from Jacob Chitsaz, a friend who is the brother of my close friend, Mandy Reid. At first I thought it must be a joke:

In a car with Matthew Feath in Palm Springs… Small world 🙂 he says hi.

Matt and I served together in the same division on the USS Elliot back in the early 90s. We trade messages almost every day. Jacob had taken a limo in Palm Springs that just happened to be driven by Matt. Upon learning Jacob was from Raleigh, Matt probably asked the one-in-a-million question, “do you know a guy named Mark Turner?” Boom, instant connection.

Raleigh’s population is approaching half a million residents. Any one of those residents could’ve been Matt’s passenger. Instead, Jacob was and both of them figured out they knew me in common.

What’s amusing is that I know both of these gentlemen well enough to have attended each of their weddings. That puts them in a very small circle of friends. Small world, indeed!

Stepping away from CACs

This morning I let my fellow RCAC members know that I would not be running for a second term as chair of the RCAC when my term is up in January. It was a difficult decision for me as it’s been an honor to serve as the leader of leaders. I’ve really seen folks working together to a degree I hadn’t seen in a long while. That seems like a good time to step aside, though, doesn’t it? When things are going well?

I have had a few chairs ask if I would consider staying on but I was noncommittal until today. Part of my job as leader is to help create other leaders. People tend to step up when there’s a leadership opportunity. I have confidence that the RCAC will have a great leader to follow me and that the RCAC will continue to grow and prosper.
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Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness

Here’s an interesting look at John McAfee, the eccentric founder of the McAfee antivirus company.

It’s not too unusual for eccentric gringos to wind up in Central America and slowly turn stranger—”Rich white men who come to Belize and act strangely are kind of a type,” one local journalist told me. But this one’s story is more peculiar than most. John McAfee is a founding father of the anti-virus software industry, an inveterate self-promoter who built an improbable web security empire on the principles of trust and reliability, then poured his start-up fortune into a series of sprawling commune-like retreats, presenting himself in the public eye as a paragon of engaged, passionate living: “Success, for me,” he has said, “is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.” But down in Belize, McAfee the enlightened Peter Pan seems to have refashioned himself into a kind of final-reel Scarface.

via Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee's Heart of Darkness.

More ‘fewer angry white guys’

Tim Funk at the News and Observer also points out the value of the non-white vote.

Tuesday’s voting results held some good news for North Carolina Democrats hoping to keep the state competitive in future election years.

Black voters, who make up 22 percent of the state’s population, cast 23 percent of the vote and went for Obama 96 percent to 4 percent, according to exit polls.

And Latinos went for Obama 68 percent to 31 percent. “You’re talking 2-1 in a group that’s getting to be a bigger part of this state,” said Bitzer.

But exit polls also said this: White voters, who now represent 70 percent of the state’s electorate, were even less supportive of the president than in 2008.

That year, 35 percent of white voters in North Carolina cast their ballots for Obama.

In 2012, he got 31 percent.

via 5 reasons why Obama didn’t carry North Carolina – Elections – NewsObserver.com.

Monopoly Is Theft | Harper’s Magazine

I enjoyed reading about the history of the Monopoly board game, a history that turns out to be quite different than I had imagined.

The official history of Monopoly, as told by Hasbro, which owns the brand, states that the board game was invented in 1933 by an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow.

The game’s true origins, however, go unmentioned in the official literature. Three decades before Darrow’s patent, in 1903, a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie created a proto-Monopoly as a tool for teaching the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to “own” land.

via Monopoly Is Theft | Harper's Magazine.