Peloton

Great photos of this year's Tour de France in The Boston Globe.

E.D. Kain's "Liberal Party" is close to what my ideal party would be if you applied some practical considerations to my ideology. I'd even bother to register!

My hastily sketched out platform:

• Limited government, but not anti-government. Trust in good governance and transparency rather than demonizing all things ‘statist’.
• Support for a simplified, but still progressive tax code.
• Non-interventionist militarily; globalist economically.
• Free trade with strong safety nets (like health care and unemployment assistance) to help people aversely effected by inherently chaotic (and thus functioning) markets.
• Support for more legal immigration of both low-skilled and high-skilled workers.
• A strong focus on civil liberties and social equality: end DADT, support for gay marriage, no more government authorized torture or assassination.
• A push toward more competitive federalism where possible to make government more responsive to people and less bureaucratic.
• A focus on ending subsidies in agriculture, fossil fuels, and other industries which distort trade, hurt the environment, and benefit big business.
• Strong, but fair, environmental protections.
• Support for workers rights, but not for too-big-to-fail government unions.

Of course in the platform of any party that I'd put my name on would be a retooling of the overall national transportation strategy. If government is to be in the business of designing and paying for transportation networks it shouldn't be actively building highways and enforcing zoning laws that encourage insubstantial(sprawly) municipalities, cities, whathaveyou. Great, dense, thriving cities are natural, efficient, beautiful, and are the engines of culture, innovation, and ideas. What great people and ideas never mingled or coalesced over the nasty stretches of highways and throwaway storefronts that pass for a towns or citys nowadays. It's just sad.

"The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream.”

Real

Failure

Frm J. K. Rowling's 2008 Harvard Commencement Speech:

"On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination."

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive... And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

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From David Byrne on cities:

The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable—it's how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt. Every time I visit San Francisco I ask out loud "Why don't I live here? Why do I choose to live in a place that is harder, tougher and, well, not as beautiful?" The locals often reply, "You don't want to live here. It looks like a city, but it's really a small village. Everyone knows what you're doing"

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