Tsarnaev should die

     When I heard that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been sentenced to death for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, my immediate, unfiltered reaction was "good." I don't think that puts me too far out of the mainstream of American thought.
    That "good" comes despite my opposition to the death penalty
    Generally.
    But not in this case.
    Why? 
    What's the difference?
    If killing is wrong—that's why Tasrnaev's being punished, for murdering three innocent bystanders with the pressure cooker bomb he and his brother built—then isn't it wrong to turn around and kill a killer, even through a deliberative legal process? 
    Good question.
    On one level, the criminal justice system is broken, men are sentenced to death wrongly, as a matter of routine by overzealous prosecutors and colluding cops. It's  skewed against minorities and the poor. If killing is wrong, then the great United States of American should not kill people, for any reason, as an official act. It's bad enough that cops and soldiers kill in the name of society, and how often does that turn out to be error when the smoke clears?
     Let's call that Logic Loop A.
    Logic Loop B goes like this: I'm glad Timothy McVeigh is dead. The Oklahoma City Bomber should not be wondering if there's vanilla cake for dinner, and issuing his occasional manifestos, through his lawyer, explaining why he's glad he blew up the Murrah Federal Building and buried those toddlers alive in the day care center. Society needs a way to express its utter disgust, and jamming him full of poison and letting him die strapped to a gurney just feels right. 
     It's emotional.
     When you look at society's that don't kill such people—Norway sentenced Anders Behring Breivik, the fascist asshat who murdered 77 people, mostly teens, to 21 years in prison—that seems wrong. Justice calls for something more than two decades in a Scandinavian prison. Then again, Norway is Eden compared to the United States, crime-wise, so maybe we should pay more attention to how they do things, and ask ourselves whether killing Tsarnaev feels right because we're a murderous nation of gun nuts who've barely knocked the dust off our Wild West spurs, at least intellectually. Maybe we should worry about this feeling like the right thing. 
     It's a tough judgment call. I can see those who are against capital punishment in any form, far more than I could buy the Texas, kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out approach to criminal justice. 
      Bottom line, for me, is that executing terrorists is good for society. I can't pretend it has deterrent value. These are not long-range thinkers and, besides, half the time they intend on killing themselves anyway. At some point we have to re-establish that we're a culture with limits, and the need to not randomly kill others for your psycho nihilistic cause is a fairly low bar to set. 
    Regular life is so precious, and sweet, someone who would shatter in on a clear spring day, at a joyous civic event, how should that person be dealt with? You could argue that an application of the mercy and humanity that is at the core of our Western culture, or should be. I could see that. But emotionally it jars for me. I don't want to see Timothy McVeigh, out after 20 years, as dictated by our Norwegian stands of justice, in downtown Northbrook, licking an ice cream cone. Better that McVeigh is in hell, and good news that Tsarnaev will be joining him. Not every decision should be made by cool reason. Sometimes you have to go with your gut.   
  

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I think I take so many pictures of street scenes and inanimate objects because I'm shy about asking people if I can take their photograph. It's awkward for me, makes them self-conscious, and shatters the moment, causing them to stiffen up. Usually I try to photograph people on the sly, while their attention is elsewhere, but something that isn't an option, as with this man enjoying his cigarette in solitude. But I couldn't just pass him by, given his singular outfit. The deep orange jacket is what first caught my attention, and his pork pie hat, rolled jeans, expanse of ankle and dapper mustache. It looks like a costume a child would wear in 1910. I asked if I could shoot his photo, and he said yes, but then his body language was directed at me, and he didn't have the sense of solitude he had when I first saw him. He wouldn't give me his name or other details, beyond the fact that he wasn't visiting, but on a break from his office ... where?
     Where exactly did I notice this young, or youngish man, having his nicotine fix? Guess the correction location—I'm looking for a specific street—and win one of my coveted 2015 blog posters. Any insight into the fashion would be appreciated as well. I can't say I've seen anything like it, other than on gondoliers in Venice. Good luck, and please remember to post your entries below. 

A pocket guide to financial disaster

     Personal experience is overrated. People fancy their closeness to a situation gives them the last word: "Look buddy, it happened to me, I know." When it can just as easily blind them. "I hate Mexicans because I went to Mexico in 1967 and got food poisoning . . ."
     Okay, thank you for your valuable insight.
     So let me start by sharing my bias, and you can decide whether it provides clarity or confusion. In 2009 when Jim Tyree wanted to buy the Sun-Times, the deal offered was the union would surrender seniority, take a 15 percent pay cut and lose our pensions. The choice was that or the newspaper would fold.
     We didn't snap at the deal. In fact, the union rejected it on the first vote. I was the only one, in my recollection, to speak in favor of the deal, and here is what I remember saying, "I'm a Jew and we survive. The purpose of the union is to protect our jobs at the newspaper, but if there's no paper and no jobs, then it really doesn't matter if the union is sound or not." We took the deal, and while I'm sorry to have to work like a hamster on a wheel until the day I die, I've never for a moment regretted taking it. Six extra years at a big-city paper is something.
     So now the come-to-Jesus moment for Chicago's pension fiasco looms. The Supreme Court spiked the fix that our political geniuses spent a year cobbling together because it's illegal. Moody's immediately downgraded Chicago's bond rating to junk status. Which means that massive borrowing, the only thing keeping the city afloat, just got even more expensive. And it's going to cost even more to borrow money, assuming Chicago can find folks reckless enough to lend to it to us.
     What to do? I heard one expert say that digging out of the pension hole will take a 40 percent property tax hike. No, said another, make that 49 percent.
     Let's review, for those who haven't been paying attention. (This problem is not only a tribute to the short-sighted cowardice of politicians, but to the electorate's genius for ignoring gathering disaster.) Politicians gave out pensions — I won't debate whether they're "fat" pensions, let's just call them "pensions" — to government workers, basically promising money the city didn't have and — whoops! — was never going to have. Knowing their own tendency to filch stuff, our leaders built into the law that the pensions, once established, could not be reduced. And the retired folks who receive them, former teachers and electricians and such, worked their various jobs for years, expecting those pensions. It was a promise.
     But you can't give money you don't have. Since it's against the law to cut pensions, Chicago has been cutting everything else. The constitution doesn't demand it provide mental health services or give aid to people with disabilities. No need to pay traffic aides — I didn't see a one downtown at 5 p.m. Wednesday and many Loop intersections were gridlocked, a metaphor for our times.
     These cuts degrade life in the city. That's going to grow worse, as everything gets tossed over the side in order to keep ballooning pensions from capsizing the ship. At some point Chicago will hollow out and become an enormous pension plan that also puts out fires.
     There is no facile solution, just a series of bad choices. A clear-cut sacrifice, like the Chicago Newspaper Guild made, isn't even possible. Retirees can't vote to cut their pensions to save the city and wouldn't if they could. Taxes could be raised, though the common wisdom is that jacking up property taxes or increasing taxes on corporations would cause Chicago residents and companies to flee faster than they already are, leaving those who remain clawing at an ever smaller pie.
     I believe this is referred to as the "death spiral."
     There is no easy solution that doesn't involve going back in time, and the necessary time-travel technology is not in place. Me, I think the city declares bankruptcy and puts the pensioners in line for their dimes on the dollar with all its other creditors. That's bleak. So here, let's end on a light note:
     Anybody wish that Chuy Garcia was on the fifth floor of City Hall? Busily forming his exploratory committee and trying to figure out which wire to cut before this problem sends Chicago up in a mushroom cloud of insolvency? I didn't think so.

And no, there are no actual coins....

     We are in an era when, if you are not careful, technology will race away from you, and you'll end up a befuddled person confronting a puzzling world of alien systems and incomprehensible institutions. Thus while I don't believe in giddily embracing every new development, in case it becomes popular, you shouldn't ignore the arrival of significant developments either, just because it takes effort to comprehend them.
     Thus the installation of this "Bitcoin" machine recently between the Jamba Juice and the FedEx on the second floor of the Merchandise Mart seemed the moment to pause, bite the bullet, and try to understand what Bitcoin is, and the best way to do that is by trying to explain it to you, assuming that, like me, up to this point you've kept the whole issue on the periphery of your perception. 
    Assuming I'm not that last person who hasn't yet grasped it. If you're buying your pizza and paying your mortgage in Bitcoin, well, laugh away. I haven't joined Uber yet either.
    It isn't as if I have no idea. Bitcoin is some kind of online currency. Though that is the limit of my knowledge, along with the recollection that the whole thing collapsed a while back, which can't be true, as testified by the arrival of this machine.
    So...let's poke around. 
   CNN Money describes Bitcoin this way: "Bitcoin is a new currency that was created in 2009 by an unknown person using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. Transactions are made with no middle men – meaning, no banks! There are no transaction fees and no need to give your real name. More merchants are beginning to accept them: You can buy webhosting services, pizza or even manicures."

    Well, that is interesting. Its creator being unknown puts it in an elite group of technology—along with fire and the wheel, I suppose.
     So it's like cash, only online. You store it in a wallet in your device or in the cloud, and people have hacked them and stolen them. That said, what good is it? 
    The downside of the CNN Money description is that it doesn't seem to be accurate. Vox published an interesting account in December (only half a year ago, so I'm not lagging behind the curve that badly). Timothy Lee points out that while Bitcoin fluctuates like any currency, sometimes losing alarming portions of its worth against the dollar, despite CNN Money's claim, it actually is not quite a currency, but more of a new, unregulated open financial system, and so has enormous potential. Lee compares Bitcoin to the Internet:

     Because no one owns or controls the network, there are no limits on how people can use it. Some people have used that freedom to do illegal things like buying drugs or gambling online. But it also means there's a low barrier to entry for building new Bitcoin-based financial services.  There's an obvious parallel to the internet. Before the internet became mainstream, the leading online services were commercial networks like Compuserve and Prodigy. The companies that ran the network decided what services would be available on them.

    So what good is it besides buying drugs? Lee says they can do international currency transactions, that while Western Union charges 8 percent, that Bitcoin ATMs charge only 3 percent per transaction (on each end, meaning sending funds would cost 6 percent, and also painting CNN Money's "no transaction fees" as wrong—it isn't as if Malaysia Airlines is their only embarrassment ) an improvement, though hardly worth braving the uncertainties of the Bitcoin world, at least right now. (He also mentions the ATM's were launched in late 2013, and by 2015 there were some 329 of them).
     I explored the glowing orange machine screen, but it seemed to only work if you already had an account, and given that it accepts only $20s and $100s, I didn't quite see the point of pumping big bucks into it just to then try to find a vendor who would take the Bitcoins my money would become. Where's the benefit in that?
     I don't want to merely echo Lee's analysis, you should give it a read. The takeaway is that Bitcoin is to financial networks what Uber is to taxi services: an unregulated, technology-driven twist that might work spectacularly—as Uber has so far—or might crash and burn. The question is whether all that regulation is necessary. My hunch is, given how screwed up our own economy has been—thank you banking industry—that people going into Bitcoin in a big way are going to miss those legal protections.
     Right now, it seems only really useful to those who want to buy drugs online—that wouldn't be me. As for its other uses, I'm not exactly an early adopter. Maybe some of you have some Bitcoin experiences you'd like to share. I think I'll wait, then maybe find a place that accepts them that has something I wish to buy.  Investors have poured some $500 million into it, so somebody thinks it has potential. 

Don't bet on Chicago casino

     There is something garish about plaid suit jackets — a certain Nathan Detroit vibe, particularly if the pattern is on the loud side.
     I have a few such jackets. Though more tasteful than the "Guys and Dolls" wardrobe, I hope, they hardly ever get worn. But my eye recently fell upon a subdued blue and black job, with — geez — an orange thread.
     "Where did I get this?" I asked my wife, holding up the hanger, checking the label. A store in Cannes — and was transported to the South of France, where we intended to go to Monte Carlo. Men visiting the Casino, the guidebooks instructed, must wear jackets and I, with a Slavic peasant's obedience built into my DNA, went out and bought this one.
     A purchase that led me to feel extra stupid the next day, leaning against the vingt-et-un table at the sparsely populated Casino, along with a handful of Eastern European tourists in their motley Members Only plastic windbreakers—"jackets" in the loose sense of the term. I played for half an hour, realized I had the same pathetic pile of franc chips I had started with, cashed out and left
     This is a long way of saying that the casino reality is far from the James Bond fantasy. For both individuals and for cities. If I see one more politician or lobbyist rub his palms together, chortling over the millions untold that Chicago will pull in from its casino, any moment now, I'm going to scream. (Exactly what I'll scream, I'm not sure, maybe: "And George has a piece of land, and we're going to be farmers!")
     First, it might never happen. A Chicago casino has been a political will-o'-the-wisp for decades. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Politicians giving away the ranch, spending money they don't have, telling themselves (and us) that good old Uncle Casino will show up any moment and settle the bill.
     Second, if through some miracle, Chicago finally snags a casino, it might not work, or not work like we hope. When Harrah's opened New Orleans' first casino, its location and construction were so badly botched that revenues were 60 percent below projections, and the whole project, rather than bailing out anybody, went bankrupt. When Cleveland's first casino opened in 2012, Ohio officials estimated it would bring in revenues of $1.2 billion. In 2014, it took in a quarter of that, and state tax revenues have been disappointing. Casino taxes "hardly made a dent" in budget deficits, according to Wendy Patton, senior project director of the State Fiscal Project of Policy Matters Ohio, calling casinos "another blow to local government finances."
     So don't count your eggs before they're in the pudding.
     Which goes for more than casinos. Such as the Obama Library. Well, I guess Chicago is going to get it — all together now, fling your rough wool caps in the air and shout, "Hurrah!" — but is the decision really whether it goes into Jackson Park or Washington Park?
     The whole point of libraries is to turn to the past for instruction and understanding. So let's do that. I pick the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, because one of my strongest memories of using it is the long, long cab ride to get there, stuck on some lonely promontory, jutting into the harbor, leaning forward in the cab seat, watching the meter click, thinking, "Where IS this place?" Kind of odd to have put it here. Wouldn't you think a Kennedy Library would be at Harvard?
     The short answer is, that was the plan. Kennedy himself, a month before his death, visited the future site in Cambridge. So what happened? It took about 10 seconds of sleuthing to find this nugget on the library website:

     In 1975, the Kennedy Library Corporation abandoned plans to build the library on the site at Harvard University originally selected by President Kennedy due to prolonged delays in freeing the site for construction and opposition by some Cambridge residents who feared urban congestion caused by visitors and tourists.

     Well, that would explain it. Note the date. A dozen years of site battle hell. If I would have to bet — and I try not to — I'd say we'll have an Obama Library open, in 2027, due to delays we can't imagine, yet. Still, that'll be long before Chicago sees its first casino.

So THAT'S why we shake with the right hand...

     My wife does the shopping, God bless her. Not out of a love of stores, but simply because she knows if she sends me, I'll both buy the wrong stuff and spend too much doing it.
     But sometimes I tag along, to keep her company, though my interest isn't really held by the snagging of items on the list, and I tend to wander, like a child, and set off on impromptu anthropological expeditions, either intrigued by the DaVinci sketchbook diversity of my fellow shoppers, or studying trends in marketing.
     For instance, I recently found myself detained in the toilet paper aisle, first by this package of Cottonelle, with its "clean ripple texture" which is the sort of unexceptional euphemistic pap you'd expect, perhaps distinguished by "ripple"—good word—but leading to that  surprising "removes more."
     Oooh, I thought closing in like a lepidopterist spotting a rare butterfly, tip-toeing right up to it, aren't we? That dangling transitive verb, "removes," qualified by "more" and then just ... left there, dangling. Removes ...  more ... what?"

     Well, they can't say, of course, this being America, and we being among the most prudish, inhibited people who ever walked the earth. We can't say, we can barely bring ourselves to think about it. Which also explains all these cute animals, blubbery bears and playful puppies, trying to dance around what people do with their TP.  I haven't done a study of all toilet paper packaging ever, but I would bet cash money there are very few adults on those ever-increasing packages of toilet paper, enormous blocks that you could build homes with. Paper towels can be Brawny, can feature a lumberjack. But toilet paper isn't going to feature, oh, a smiling chef holding a big cake that will only end up ... well, you know.. 
     The only human I noticed in the toilet paper aisle was this infant, the AngelSoft baby, and I suppose if we take them at their word, that's not a human either, but an wraith, an incorporeal spirit. 
    Admire the irony in that. They can't mention what toilet paper cleans up, or show an actual person who might dab at their nether regions with it, but they are comfortable  flogging their product with dead babies, with enlisting as mascots babies who have died and are now angels.
    I don't really blame them. I don't want to write a post about the details of wiping shit either. We all know. 
    Or do we? For instance, what did people use to remove more before toilet paper? The Greeks used stones. There are books on the subject, "Wiped: The Curious History of Toilet Paper," by Ronald H. Blumer, a well-researched study. He begins slowly, as one must, surveying the various euphemisms for "go to the toilet." My favorite being, during the Constitutional Convention of 1789, the Founding Fathers were familiar with an East Coast showman exhibiting a camel, an exotic wonder, and Thomas Jefferson et al would excuse themselves from their deliberations by saying, "I think I'll go out and take a peep at the camel."
   Or the aptly-named "What Did We Use Before Toilet Paper? 200 Curious Questions & Intriguing Answers" by Andrew Thompson. The short answer: lots of stuff, from the Romans' sponge on a stick to coconut husks in Hawaii.
    "Wealthy people around the world used hemp and wool, with lace being used by the French royalty. British lords used pages from books," Thompson writes. "Poorer people used their hands, [their left hands, usually, which is why we shake with our right] grass, stones, moss, seashells or wood shavings, while the use of water was also common around the world. ... In the U.S., newspapers and telephone directories were common used, as were other books. The Old Farmer's Almanac was actually printed with a hole punched through the corner of each page so that it could be hung in outhouses, and the Sears catalogue was widely used..."
    Coyness in selling the stuff is as old as bathroom tissue itself. When the first toilet paper was mass produced in the United States in 1857 by Joseph Cayetty, it was also marketed with extreme delicacy, labeled as "Therapeutic Paper" (bold, considering that when Kimberly-Clark first started marketing Kotex, in 1920, it was sold in plain white boxes with its first name, "Cellunap" and nothing else, no description of its intended use whatsoever. But even that proved too much for both customers and drug store owners, who insisted the boxes be wrapped in plain brown paper. Kimberly-Clark changed the product's name to "Kotex" trying to lose the customer-alienating "nap," short for "napkin," and spent years coaxing the boxes out from behind counters). 
     But enough of this. I'm trying to attract readers, not repel them. Certain topics evoke memory of the voice of Nigel Wade, my long ago New Zealand press lord editor. "Steinberg!" he would bellow. "I was eating my poached egg when I read that!" So apologies all around. Something more appetizing tomorrow. 

"Wow, it's just so huge"

      When Brad Sutter was growing up nearby, of course he saw the Thornton Quarry. You can hardly miss it.
     "I've driven past here hundreds and hundred of times," said Sutter, of the series of vast limestone pits flanking I-80/94 just south of Chicago. "As a child, you're 'Wow, it's just so huge.' In my mind it's comparable to the Grand Canyon, though I've never seen it."

     So it was with great satisfaction that the 24-year-old's first job for the Walsh Group was Safety Engineer, making sure that everybody who descends into the Grand Canyon of the Southern Suburbs comes back out again.
     "Being able to go from seeing it my entire life, to work in it and make sure people go home to their families, it's extremely rewarding," he said.
     So you need a hard hat—rocks tumble—and an M20 oxygen rescue pack, since there are massive tunnels to venture into. And neon yellow vests, to help prevent being driven over by heavy equipment. And the right boots, which nobody had mentioned beforehand. It didn't matter that his guests included Mariyana T. Spyropoulos, president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago and Adel Awad, senior civil engineer for the MWRD, which for the past two years has been turning the north lobe of the Thornton Quarry into the Thornton Composite Reservoir. Sutter had us cool our heels until the proper footgear was sent down from the front office.
     "Just doing my job," he said.

     Not that I minded waiting at the bottom of this unimaginably huge man-made basin, 2,000 feet across, 1,000 feet wide and 300 feet deep, which Hanson Material Services created over the past several decades by removing 76 million tons of limestone. Soon this tableau will be at least partially hidden under billions of gallons of water that would otherwise wind up in the basements of homes or in the Little Calumet River.
     "This reservoir is going to protect 14 communities, about 500,000 people, hopefully, it can save about $40 million in damages to the communities, annually," said Spyropoulos.
     Just having a big pit is not enough, however. it isn't just a matter of hooking it up to the 109-mile Deep Tunnel network and turning a spigot. You have to prep: about $400 million worth of construction was needed to create the reservoir infrastructure. Limestone is porous, for instance, and the polluted storm and waste water would leach back into the water table if the reservoir weren't sealed like a shower stall.
     "The challenge here, you have to grout the four boundaries, to create a kind of wall, a curtain," said Awad.
     That was done by digging holes, hundreds of feet deep, every 20 feet or so around the perimeter and filling them with grout.
     How much grout?
     "A lot," said Awad. Think a tube six inches wide and 150 miles long. "That spreads and forms a barrier."        

     Controlling the force of the incoming water is another challenge. Inside the intake tunnel will be four enormous steel gates, two feet thick, costing $7 million each, moving on bearings the size of garbage can lids. The 30 foot wide intake tunnel is divided into two channels, to reduce the water's force, and outside there is what amounts to a blast plate, designed to deflect the force of the flow and keep it from chewing up the reservoir bottom.
     "During a storm, when the flow come through the tunnel, it's huge force," said Awad. "You need the structure to be stable. This concrete slab will be six feet thick; it will diffuse the energy."
     The water will only be held temporarily at the reservoir; it'll flow by gravity to the Calumet Treatment Plant. Last year the MWRD extracted 200,000 tons of what it tastefully calls "biosolids"—fertilizer that ends up on park district golf courses and athletic fields.
     Back at the office, since one doesn't often get the chance, I phoned Hanson Materials to ask about gravel.
     "Our biggest customers are concrete and asphalt producers," said Bob Sapp, quarry's plant superintendent, who has worked there 27 years. "We're continuing to mine it, and have many years of reserves left."
     I wondered what is the most interesting part of mining gravel.
     "What we're mining is 420 million years old," he said. "This used to be an old coral reef. We find fossils of sea life."
     You can see the layers of rock formed over the millennia. For now.
     "We're hoping that this summer that we're going to get water in her," said Spyropoulos
     Until the water starts flowing, however, the MWRD is taking groups to see the dry reservoir. Various delegations from neighboring communities have visited, and Sypropoolos said that if interested groups contact her office, it will arrange a tour. I carefully explained, several times, that if you put a thing like that in the paper, people will actually do it. But she insisted that is okay. So for next month or so, now's your chance. Because it'll be under water a long, long time. Though if you do go, a word of advice: bring sturdy boots. Because Brad Sutter won't let you in otherwise.
     To schedule a tour, contact the MWRD Office of Public Affairs at tours@mwrd.org, or phone 312-751-6633.

Everyone going into the tunnel takes a brass tag, to keep track of who's inside. 

This rectangular entrance, leading to the active part of the quarry, is being plugged with concrete. 

Your intrepid reporter, on the scene, within a tunnel connecting the reservoir to the TARP system.

They leveled the bottom because boulders would create turbulence.