Former Houston Rockets center Yao Ming did a Reddit AMA to promote his new Animal Planet documentary about elephant poaching. I always liked Yao when he was a player, so was pleased to read his answer to the question, “Can you describe your vision of perfect basketball? If you are given free rein to build a basketball team, what would it be like?”
He replied, “My ideal team would be the Spurs. San Antonio Spurs.”
Given my post the other day about how much better voting in Iowa was than voting in Texas, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to this article from the ACLU, “I was arrested for voting.”
When I was convicted on a nonviolent drug charge in 2008, my defense attorney told me that once I served my probation, I would regain my right to vote automatically – correct information at the time. But Gov. Terry Branstad suddenly changed the rules in 2011, and now all citizens with a felony conviction lose their voting rights for life. Our Secretary of State Matt Schultz, in fact, has made this subversion of democracy a point of pride. He has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hunting down and prosecuting people with past convictions who unknowingly registered or cast a vote.
Considering how successful disenfranchisement tactics have been, I suppose it’s unsurprising that a state with a Republican Governor has been instituting some of them.
Pretend that it’s 4 a.m. and you’re channel surfing and you come across the opening to some old sitcom you must have seen before but don’t seem to quite remember. That’s how this was originally presented. Eleven minutes from now your life will be a stranger, more interesting thing than it was before.
On Election Day I posted the Facebook status,
For the record, voting in Iowa feels like a massively more civilized activity than voting in Texas does. The disenfranchisement efforts here are palpable.
To expand on that: Iowa had same-day voting registration, paper ballots that you sealed yourself, and incredibly helpful election officials that exuded concern for protecting everyone’s franchise. In contrast, when I moved back to Texas I rushed to register before the October 6 deadline. I assumed that since I had lived in Texas for all but the previous 3 years of my life and been a Texas voter before, this would be a straightforward process. It wasn’t. It took me two days of driving back and forth from Pflugerville, four forms of ID, and a document from the county tax assessor’s office to get my Texas ID and voter registration. It was important to do those at the same time, because if there are any discrepancies between the two–such as the presence of a middle name on one but not the other–you will not be allowed to vote normally on election day. You will be able to, should you be willing to take the time, fill out an affidavit and a provisional ballot, which may or may not end up being counted. And even if everything is in order, you will be voting electronically, with all the potential for abuse that brings.
I was able to get my Texas ID and register in only two days because I’m childless and self-employed and was able to take as much time jumping through bureaucratic hoops as was required. Also, I had four forms of identification. But what if my time was more limited, or I had a shorter history as a voter in this state? I might not have managed to register in time at all. And the presence of such irritating barriers might have stopped me from caring enough to try.
That effect is exactly the reason the barriers are there: to stop minorities, the poor, anyone who is demographically unlikely to support the Republican party from voting. And this year it was remarkably effective. Texas had a voter turnout rate of only 28.5%, the lowest in the entire country. Relatedly, the conservative candidates rolled to easy victories. Iowa’s a swing state and Texas isn’t. Voting in Iowa feels like a celebrated act of civic responsibility. Voting in Texas feels like being patted down by the TSA.
I drove down to San Antonio to attend the first game of the season with my Dad and watch the Spurs get their rings and unveil their fifth banner. I recorded the ceremony, and while I spent some time wrestling with the brightness settings on my phone, I managed to get some great moments (including a rare Gregg Popovich fist pump). Here’s what it looked like in the arena.
Nonfiction
Fiction
The fine folks over at Boxscore Geeks were kind enough to let me write what was probably the easiest team preview of the season. The short version: if you liked last year’s team that dominated the Finals and took home their fifth title, good news! They all came back!
One thing worth noting is that, while the text is mine, the table data comes from Arturo Galletti’s player model. He’s apparently calculating things somewhat differently than in years past, and says an explanation post is forthcoming. I look forward to reading it.
My new home page header image is Leaf Relief by Mark Englebrecht. My previous header image was one of his photographs as well. His Flickr page is full of wonderful, CC-licensed nature photography, and I’d encourage you to give it a look. As ever, all CC images used on this site are attributed on the About page.
I recently went with Meghan McCarron to a screening of the long, excellent video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, and since then have been reading some interviews with the director, Thom Andersen. In an interview with StopSmiling in 2007 he commented on changes in public transportation in Los Angeles.
Since I made the movie, the bus system and public transportation system in general has gotten better. But it’s on the verge of getting worse because, over the next couple years, they want to raise fares more than 100 percent. They’re losing money. It’s attributable to the investment in subways and so-called “light-rail” projects. The ridership on those systems has never been very high because the idea of those systems is not to serve the public that actually uses public transportation, but to attract another public to using public transportation.
I don’t know how these issues have developed in the seven years since he gave that interview, but his observation–that new public transport proposals were designed to appeal to wealthier people, and therefore not only didn’t address the needs of those who actually used pubic transport but exacerbated them–strikes me as profound. I suspect this is a common phenomenon, and one that I will strive to look for now that it’s been pointed out for me. It reminds me of something I once heard articulated by a Berkeley economist on the radio: the free market works on price signaling, so people too impoverished to contribute a meaningful signal are invisible, treated by the market as if they don’t exist. Thus, free market solutions are simply inapplicable to problems of poverty. Andersen’s observation is an example of how, even if the needs of impoverished communities is invisible to the free market, the rhetoric of those needs, or more specifically their value as a tool to justify profitable endeavor, is not.