Margaret Thatcher 'Milk Snatcher' Finally Dead

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/margaret-thatcher-dead-iron-lady-1522947

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-death-etiquette?CMP=twt_gu

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead.

For those of us working class Britons who had to endure years of class warfare, Thatcher was no hero. I was 9 years old when I got my first taste of Thatcherism, when free school milk for the over sevens was removed in 1971. Edward Short, Labour education spokesman said it was ‘the meanest and most unworthy thing’ he had seen in 20 years.

It got worse from there. Thatcher sold off public businesses, destroyed trade unions and eroded workers' rights, slashed public services and tried to destroy the National Health Service, increased the gap between rich and poor and installed the basis for today's right wing political philosophy of "I, me, mine".

In my view, her policies destroyed Britain. I left in 1984, partially because Thatcher's England was no longer the England of my dreams.

Britain finally had enough when, in 1990, Thatcher instituted the Community Charge or 'poll tax': a tax which took no account of ability to pay. The resulting unrest forced Thatcher to resign as Prime Minister in November, defending a tax which an opinion poll had found only 12% favored.

Apparently, even in death she's still sticking it to the working class - she's getting a ceremonial funeral with military honors paid for with working folks' taxes.

No tears will be shed on this site over her demise. I just wish her policies would have died with her, but Britain is stuck with them.

Still, I should be thankful for small mercies. So party tonight at my house. Everyone's invited. The (English) Beat, Elvis Costello, Chumbawamba, Morrissey, The Exploited, Billy Bragg, and many, many more are on the jukebox and I aim to get legless.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/thatcherites-lyrics-billy-bragg.html

http://www.metrolyrics.com/stand-down-margaret-lyrics-english-beat.html

http://www.metrolyrics.com/tramp-the-dirt-down-lyrics-elvis-costello.html

http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858588780/

http://louderthanwar.com/top-13-anti-margaret-thatcher-songs/

'Thatcher is Dead' street parties are apparently happening in Brixton, Glasgow, Cardiff, Central London, Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester, Bolton, Leeds, Bristol. Portsmouth, Belfast.

Brixton, where poll tax riots took place.

Glasgow: Scots suffered the poll tax for a year
before it came to the rest of the UK.

My family comes from the area around Aughton, Treeton and Orgreave, villages outside of Sheffield.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-death-orgreave-coal-miners

When the Guardian stopped to ask a local man if this was Orgreave, he said simply: "It's supposed to be." It's not just the pits which have gone, said Mansell, who worked underground at the Treeton colliery for 22 years. But with it the "camaraderie, the community spirit – the sense that we were all looking out for each other." He believes Thatcher didn't just destroy his village and many others like it, but also paved the way for the political climate of today.

"It was class war," he said. "The people above didn't want us to win. The people with money didn't want us to win. If we had won, they wouldn't be able to get away with what they are doing now, cutting benefits for disabled people and things like that. The unions would have stopped them. But we lost."

Hell has now frozen over, because by now, Thatcher will have closed down the furnaces.

11 April Update: Russell Brand puts it nicely in an article in The Guardian today:

When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him...

All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship – it's just not British.

Fear and Loathing on the Bike Path

I've seen it argued many times on many blogs that people feel excluded from cycling. That if only we could have a vast network of segregated facilities, people would turn up in droves to cycle on them.

The thing is, as far as I can see, it just ain't so. The real problem is that the vast majority of people simply do not want to cycle. Sure, people often say "If it was safe, I'd cycle", but the fact is, it is safe (at least as safe as driving and possibly up to twice as safe, according to stats I've seen) and people still don't cycle.

The fact is, motorized transport is too convenient and people are too lazy.

But even if they weren't too lazy, the fundamental problem with populist infrastructure advocacy (segregation) is that its devotees promote infrastructure by supporting the very fear of traffic that the non-cyclists use as an excuse. It would be all well and good to say "We need infrastructure because roads are scary" IF a complete network of good quality fully segregated cycling infrastructure already existed, but the harsh truth is that it DOESN'T exist, nor will it ever exist. Whether the segregationists like it or not, most cycling has to be done on the road with traffic, and while that's the case, supporting fear can only result in more people being unwilling to cycle.

So I think that if segregationists truly want to see a significant rise in cycling mode share anytime soon, they need to get beyond using fear as a tool to get their way, so that the lazy masses have no more excuses.

But even if we got beyond the fearmongering, there's another big problem, and that is that populist cycling advocacy has no problem with poor facilities. The general attitude is "Yeah, it's not great, but it's better than nothing". But no, it isn't. Facilities like this dangerously narrow two-way bike lane:

...or this incorrectly striped bike lane:

...or this bike track which Streetsblog says "attracts 2.5 times as many cyclists as comparable streets with no bike lane" but which encourages wrong-way cycling and keeps cyclists dangerously removed from motorists' sight until they reach an intersection:

...or even this door zone bike lane, which Streetsblog.org lauded as an example of "Baltimore Getting Serious About Bikes":

...these are not better than nothing. The fact is, they end up injuring and killing cyclists with greater frequency than roads that are not 'bicycle friendly', as a recent study of bicycle facilities in Washington DC found, but glossed over.

The segregationists need to have at least some standards so they can draw some line between good and bad facilities. But right now, I don't see any criticism of anything - the general attitude is that if it's laid down for the exclusive use of cyclists, it's good, no matter how dangerous or useless it is, and God help anyone who criticizes it. This is play advocacy, because anything goes and there are no controls to make sure that what's being supported has real merit. The play-advocate gets to go to meetings, petition government, yell at and generally express loathing for opponents who do have standards, and declare victory for anything that gets done. The difference between play advocacy and real advocacy is standards, and in practice, populist bicycle advocacy has none.

We need mature advocacy, not play advocacy, so that people can't use the tired old excuses to avoid cycling. If we can get real advocacy, we can remove the barriers between people and bikes. Maybe then, people will start cycling in droves. Heck, maybe then, the facilities that the segregationists support will no longer be a joke, and even someone like me will be able to support them.

Wishing for Spring - another weather rant. This time with more groundhog!

I'm officially done with winter. All these low-30s mornings are now beginning to piss me right off. I mean, this is suburban DC - shouldn't it be warmer already? Six weeks ago, that lying rat Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring, yet here we are with a couple of days of winter to go, and I have yet to see a day where I haven't needed to bike in layers of wool.

Of course, Phil has a record that is spotty at best. According to Stormfax.com, Punxsutawney Phil has only been correct approximately 39% of the time. So I say we take him out of whatever hole he's crawled into, put him up against a wall, and shoot him South American revolution style.

Weather Forecasts Suck!

Last Tuesday, the weather forecast for Silver Spring on Wednesday was for up to 10 inches of snow. Yet I looked on Weather.com and while they were confidently predicting this childishly-named 'snowquester' or the more serious-sounding (though still somewhat inane) 'Winter Storm Saturn', I looked at the forecast temperatures, all of which were well above freezing, and concluded that it would never get cold enough for the snow to settle. So, at least in my brain, something didn't add up.

But Wednesday morning rolls around and my daughter's school is closed and NPR (where my wife works) told non-essential personnel to stay home. The weather services were still telling us to prepare for a 'snowmageddon'.

In the end, it snowed like crazy, but only enough to deposit about a half inch of very wet snow that melted almost immediately. The roads remained snow-free throughout with no need for salt or sand. It was a non-event. I guess I can't really complain, because although I missed my daily 7 mile cycle commute, the family got a day off. I just wish the weather services would use a bit of common sense. If it's not cold enough for snow to settle, it's probably not going to dump 10 inches of snow. One would think the weather services' computers would have been programmed to figure this out. It's not rocket science.

Motorist Anger

This morning, on our ride to school, my daughter says, out of the blue, "I think motorists hate cyclists".

I asked her why she thought so. I asked her if she was talking about the motorist behind us who had revved his engine as we stopped at a stop sign. She said no. She explained that a few minutes earlier, the driver of an oncoming car who had to wait for us to go by (because of parked cars on either side of the road) gave us a really angry look. I hadn't noticed.

We must have held him up for all of 5 seconds.

Yesterday, we were overtaken (with no delay) by two cars who then had to pull over to the side of the road because of a garbage truck that was coming in the opposite direction collecting trash. On our bikes, we could get through, so we overtook the cars and passed the garbage truck. So what does my daughter hear from one of her classmates when she gets to school? According to the kid, his mom spent the rest of his journey to school complaining about how 'those cyclists' might make her late for work - apparently it was our fault. In the kid's mom's mind, the garbage truck had nothing to do with it.

Fricken idiots.

Great Movie Cycling Scenes: The Wicker Man

Nicolas Cage steals a bike at gunpoint in The Wicker Man.

A classic of truly awful cinema, the Wicker Man was written and directed by noted misogynist Neil LaBute. It is a train wreck of a film, with a script that makes absolutely no sense, but well worth watching for its unintentionally funny scenes - especially if you have a fridge full of beer. The movie launched the internet meme 'Not the Bees'.

I saw it when it first came out because I'd always been a fan of the original 1973 version (not the greatest film - interesting idea but poorly paced) and I wanted to see if the update could do better. It couldn't. Sadly, the people who made this stinker have gone on to make more bad movies, though none quite so bad as this. LaBute still has his fingers in the Hollywood pie, though we should perhaps be thankful that, since The Wicker Man, he hasn't been allowed to direct or script a full-length movie.

After the bike theft, Nicolas Cage's character gets into a pretty sticky situation involving lashings of honey, a bear suit, woad-painted women, broken legs, bees and human sacrifice involving barbequed bike thief. If only real life cyclists got to enjoy similar vengeance on their persecutors.

False Courtesy and Rules of Priority

Today, another rant. Sorry.

This morning, while my daughter and I were turning left from the main road at a T-junction, an oncoming car at the same junction was turning right. We stopped, but the oncoming driver, rather than taking her turn, motioned for us to go.

We, of course, refused to go. I waved at the car with the standard 'get out of the way' gesture and apparently I used some choice words concerning the 'right of way', because the crossing guard (it was near the school entrance) heard me and laughed in agreement.

The rules of priority are not just a decision that any road user can simply change on a whim. I cannot turn left while an oncoming vehicle is turning right - I am required to wait. If I don't, and I am hit, it is my fault because I failed to respect the rules governing priority or 'right of way'.

The Maryland Driver's Manual states:

Right-of-Way

Right-of-way rules provide drivers with guidance
for situations when other drivers or pedestrians are
present. These rules determine which driver should
yield the right-of-way and the sequence for entering
and driving through an intersection or other driving
scenarios...

You should yield the right-of-way to:

• the driver who is at or arrives before you at
the intersection;

• drivers in the opposing traffic lane, when you
are making a left turn;

• the driver on your right, if both of you arrive at
the intersection at the same time;...

These three situations - the first three listed under the rule - are the most common situations in which drivers urge me to go despite the fact that they have priority.

When motorists urge me to go when they have priority, it shows that they have no idea of the rules of the road. Not only that, but this false courtesy endangers other road users because it arbitrarily replaces tried and tested rules with chaos. I really wish people would stop doing this. Is learning the rules of priority and putting them into practice really so difficult?