Yesterday, when you opened Twitter and Facebook up, it seemed like one post or another was calling for people to “do something” about the “menace of guns” in our country, or improve the accessibility of mental health in our county.
I don’t oppose some of the those suggestions. Indeed, certainly we could probably do more ensure affordable and stigma free counseling was available to all. The President’s health law that passed in 2009, with Mental Health parity and a requirement for all to subscribe to a basic health care plan.
We could also consider some gun control restrictions — but the restrictions have to be reasonable in effort, and need to provide a very high standard against someone owning or possessing a firearm. It would have to require a judge, a jury, and a beyond reasonable doubt standard — as does any restriction of a constitutional right. We can’t just have government officials, on a whim, restricting people’s rights, because they don’t like their politics.
We also can’t just start stigmatizing or persecuting individuals just because we don’t like their views. We saw too much of that after September 11th. Rather then embracing conformity, we should embrace diversity, and encourage people of diverse backgrounds to be active and engaged members of our society. We have to stand up against political persecution. They may not be coming after you today, but your in line next.
What I fear, and already see is the worst coming out of people. People want to do something — regardless of what it means for our civil liberties. They want to stop violence, even if they really can not do anything. Even if it means hurting regular folks, they feel they must do something. This is plain scary.
Day is Done – Peter, Paul and Mary.
I think it’s time to step back, and put an end to this madness — the madness of saying we must do something now.
After the wake of many close elections, one has to wonder if we need more restrictions on voting, to ensure that dangerous people, who don’t fully understand the consequences of voting don’t vote. It’s quite possible that George Bush won in 2000, not because of his abilities to lead our country, but because voters were just plain stupid.
Some have proposed to give local police forces the unilateral authority to decide who gets to vote and not vote on election day. It could be a very simple and straightforward procedure — the chief of police in every town could sign a sheet of paper to make it unlawful for anyone to vote whose name appears on the list.
Why have tough evidence based standards to keep people from voting? Why bother to get a court order, showing a person is mentally unfit to vote? Or if we insist on requiring court involvement, shouldn’t courts be able to keep anyone they want to from voting?
Certainly requiring evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt of a crime committed or about too be committed is too high of a standard. That could allow a lot of people who are of questionable mind to vote in elections. Indeed, even one voter, throwing an election could lead to a totalitarian regime to take over our country. We certainly don’t need any more tragedies like George Bush getting elected.
People make similiar arguments about gun control, so why not voting? Doesn’t this sound very democratic and fair to give government lots of arbitrary control over who can vote?
One thing that concerns me is the lack of transparency for all not-for-profit organizations that are involved in influencing government polic or representing themselves in front of government agencies.
While all not-for-profit organizations must disclose how they spend their money, at least on an yearly bases on publically avaliable IRS Form 901, they do not have to disclose individual donors, or the amount each donor gives. In many cases, through the advocacy and other works of not-for-profits, substantial government lobbying and political influence is given by the organization, yet few actually know who is funding the organization, or what the true rational for the organization’s actions.
If persons are afraid to give to not-for-profit organizations, for fear of disclosure, then they should not give. Not all not-for-profit organizations serve the public interest, as many spend a substantial amount of their funds advocate for policies that are highly detrimental to the public interest. Likewise, there should be public pressure on not-for-profit organizations avoid taking donations from corrupting sources of funds.
A great deal of advocacy on behalf of major corporations takes on behalf of citizens groups. Many cases, grass roots efforts are amplified by large corporate donations, but nobody really knows where the money comes from, except that they report large donations as being a key to sustaining their organization. For sake of openess, all not-for-profit organizations should have to disclose all donations and where they came from.
Today is tax day. The day where we look back at how much of our income we paid in taxes, and how much additional we must pay by today to avoid even further taxes and penalities.
It would be one thing if taxes always served a purpose of benefiting the people. Yet, we know that increasingly is not true. Increasingly taxes buy deregulation of corporations, tax breaks on wealthy individuals, and increased regulation on working folks.
Take Obamacare. The Individual Mandate is just one example of the government supposedly helping the people, while it’s mostly just a way to drum up additional income for insurance companies by forcing everybody to buy landyacht healthcare policies.
We don’t really have much of a choice in paying income tax. But we as citizens have the ability to advocate that our government use such monies for our interest, and not just for corporate benefit. We can advocate against waste and corporate giveaways. We can fight back against such policies that force individuals to buy corporate products and those that are deregulation solely in favor of corporations.
That’s an interesting thought. The United States Senate has two senators for each state, while the US House is propotionally represented. While an urban state like New York State recieves 29 representives, we only get two senators, a rural state like Vermont recieves only 1 representive and 2 senators.
In theory, that would mean a rural state like Vermont, Wyoming, North Dakota, or even Iowa would have have a disproptionate impact on the legislation through the US Senate. While it’s true that such states have more of a voice in the US Senate, it’s not clear rural residents get more representation in the US Senate.
Why not? For one thing, US Senate districts are larger. Much larger, typically covering whole states. The problem is that by representing complete states, every senator represents both urban and rural areas, and in most states, urban populations outnumber rural portions of states.
If any thing, urban consituencies have more power in the US Senate then the US House. There are representives in US House Districts that are predominately rural, in contrast to even rural states, where population is dominated by urban centers — such as Burlington, Vermont.
Census Block Equivalency – A list of census blocks in each district, generated by the commerical GIS program (such as Mapitude) used for redistricting.
Metes and Bounds – A legal description of each district, used in resolving court disputes over district boundaries, and assisting board of elections on where to put voters whose property might be crossed by a Census block
If you planning on making a map, Metes and Bounds won’t be particularly useful. Computers don’t understand english very well, they need numbers and lists. In contrast, the Census Block Equivalency is very useful for mapping things.
Every year, the Census Bureau puts out series of ERSI Shapefiles known as TIGER/Line. You can download TIGER/Line for any state and county in the United States from their website. They provide many different shapefiles and layers such as a Highway, Faces, Edges, and County Subdivision layers, however the one you will be most interested for making district maps is the Tabulation Block (tabblock) layer.
You can use these files in the free program known as Quantum GIS or QGIS. While this tutorial will not explain the ins and outs of QGIS, this should get you started on making redistricting maps.
The Tabulation Block Layer is the file containing all of the Census Blocks for a particular county. A Census Block is the smallest unit of population gathered by Census Block, and consists of all bordering features (bounds) — roads, rivers, shorelines, along with all imaginary lines (metes) — town lines, village lines, other lines drawn for statisitical purposes.
Each Census Block has a number, that is a subdivision of the Census Block, County ID, and State ID that it resides within. For example, the Governor’s Mansion in Albany is located in Census Block 2000 in Census Track 23.00 (zero padded to 002300) in Albany County (Federal Information Processing Standard — FIPS ID: 01) which is in NY State (FIPS ID: 36). County subdivisions are not applied to Census Tract Numbers, as they may in some cases cross county subdivisions, as is the case of smaller districts.
You put those numbers together to get the GEOID — which is the key used for redistricting block lists and most other block-level census data. The Governor’s Mansion is located at a block with a GEOID 360010023002000.
36
001
002300
2000
State ID
County ID
Zero Padded Census Tract Number
Census Block Number
The block list you get from a redistricting commission typically is in Database Exchange Format (.DBF) or Comma Deliminated Format (.CSV) which are both openable by common spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Spreadsheet and GIS programs like ArcGIS or Quantum GIS.
This is taken from the LATFOR State Senate Proposed Districts (January 2012) DBF file. It shows you that the Governor resides in Proposed Senate District 44. Across the river in Census Block 4010, Census Tract 524.03, in Rensselear County (FIPS ID 83), NY State (FIPS ID: 36) is located in Proposed Senate District 43.
360010023002000
SD44
360010021002008
SD44
360010021002004
SD44
360010021002001
SD44
360830524034017
SD43
360830524034010
SD43
Download the TIGER/line “Tabulation Block” Shpaefile file for the district you are interested in. You will want the 2010 version. You can download a state-wide tabulation block file, however that is not recommended as the next step will be impossibly slow on most computers. You may also want to open the .CSV or .DBF file in your spreadsheet program and cut out the county you want to speed things up.
You will then want to open up the file in Quantum GIS. You will get a nice map of the county you downloaded, showing all of the Census Blocks.
From there, go to the Vector -> Join Attributes submenu.
Make sure that the Target vector layer matches the Tabulation Block Shapefile you wish to join against, then set Target join field to GEOID10 .
Select click Join dbf table and select the DBF or CSV file you wish to join.
Change the Join field to BLOCK or whatever the GEOID is titled in your redistricting block file.
Enter in a location to save the Output Shapefile
Click okay.
Then wait. A typical county will take 10-40 minutes to join on my 5 year old laptop; your computer may be quicker. If you have a dual processor machine, go on to doing other work in other programs. You will end up with a map that looks like this (stylized for your enjoyment). Each block will be assigned a Senate District (in this example).
Halfway there. Now you need to “dissolve” each Census Block into it’s larger political district. Go to Vector -> Geoprocessing Tools -> Dissolve . Set the Input vector layer to the file you previously joined. Then set the Dissolve field to the field containing the district number — such as DISTRICTID or whatever it is named. Enter a name to safe the file. Click Dissolve.
Outputed will be a Shapefile containing all the political districts in the county you joined and dissolved. This will take 5-20 minutes on my laptop. Other data may exist in that file, such as Census Block number, however at this point that data will be invalid, as only the district number is accurately preserved in such a join. All other data will be picked at random, so delete those columns.
I hope this is helpful. If you just want the Proposed State Senate or State Assembly Districts you can download them from Center for Urban Research. These are the same data, joined using the above process by somebody with a much faster computer. I have also made up a Shapefile containing the Albany County Legislative Districts using this process.
One of the things I most exciting about the Occupy Movement is their emphasis on using Public Spaces for organizing, meetings, and demostrations. Too often public spaces are neglected as gathering spaces, relegated to spaces of the unthinking passerbys.
While one can legitimately object to a single group claiming “ownership” or “occupation” of a certain place of public lands for a long period of time, one can not object to people using public spaces, in a temporary fashion to organize, meet, and protest.
Locally the Occupy Albany Movement has met in …
Governor’s Chambers on the 2nd Floor of the Capitol
The North Concourse of the Empire State Plaza
City Hall Chambers
Academy Park
Townsend Park
Most of those places have people that walk through there, but much more rare is spontaneous meetings or group discussions of issues of the day. The reality is most of these places would be dead, if not for Occupy Albany going there, having their meetings, demostrating, and making it clear to the public, that public places belong to the public — and anybody can go there, spontaneously get together, discuss politics and demostrate.
Public spaces belong the public. We, the public, should be celebrating it, and using our public spaces. While we must not let any one permentantly dominate a space, sometimes obnoxious protests and meetings are essential in upholding the notion of the public space.
