I also added a poetry page page to archive some stuff I’ve written over the past decade. Find it under “Other Writing” in the sidebar or click here.

• Good times don’t last forever
• Why a federal Balanced Budget Amendment will never happen, and why that’s a good thing
• Three reforms to modernize Oklahoma’s income tax
• Will Oklahoma continue to lead the way in early childhood education?
• Why Oklahoma needs an income tax
• New report shows tax flight is a myth
• FAA shutdown proves business taxes aren’t always passed on to consumers
• How the Rainy Day formula requires us to make mistakes
• An interview with Dr. Thomas Benediktson about TU’s new focus on urban education
• Visualizing where the money goes
• An interview with Amina Benalioulhaj, director of “Women Behind Bars” documentary
• What’s been done and what still needs doing on corrections reform

Between us
Air is rarefied
And matter delineates
Cleanly and brightly
Its bodily bonds,
As solid as we are amorphous,
As I am blind,
And you are invisible.

II.

Worlds flow by oblivious
For we are streamlined
And gathering speed.
Relative to each other
We do not move.

III.

You blow through me
Like ether,
Both chemical and celestial.
I am exalted and exhausted.

• Sally Kern could be on to something (but it’s not what she thinks)
• How the tax incentives war puts states in a terrible bargaining position
• Bill would raise taxes for 1 million low-income Oklahomans
• New OK Policy report lays out options for protecting Oklahoma public services
• More states push to end the Amazon tax loophole. Will Oklahoma join them?
• When a job is not enough: New measure looks at what’s needed for economic security
• A tale of two closing funds, the Chinese Communist Party, and genetically modified mice
• What’s at stake: the toll of budget cuts
• Politics for architects, or how fewer elections can be good for democracy
• The three part test for tax credits – and the fourth part we should be asking
• Cutting the top income tax rate: Who benefits?
• Unfair, inefficient, and bad for business: Why Oklahoma needs sales tax reform
• OK Policy Roundtable: Should the state of Oklahoma be promoting marriage?
• When “business-friendly” regulations are bad for the rest of us
• Why education reform is not like musical chairs

Anyway, I might as well post here “What OKC Central Doesn’t Want You To See.”  Lackmeyer complains about a Forbes list that ranked OKC as the 9th most dangerous city because they included transportation deaths, which put a “skew to the data.”  But why should people killed by cars be out of bounds?  They are just as dead, and I would say just as murdered, as someone who fell victim to a mugger.

As illustration, here’s a side project that I have been doing for a little while: http://carskill.tumblr.com/

Yes, it’s morbid.  But it has to be, because otherwise we would never notice these deaths.  The constant trickle becomes ordinary background noise.  You have to see them all at once to realize the scale.  If we had an average of 2 people every day dying from violent crime in Oklahoma, it would be a huge deal.

It’s indicative of a very widespread misconception that the negative effects of car culture are somehow a part of nature and therefore don’t count.  We say people died in a “car accident,” which is a nice way of holding no one responsible.  It’s the same logic as when people argue that mass transit doesn’t work because it is subsidized, even though roads receive many times the amount of taxpayer subsidies every year.

But we are responsible, as individuals and as a society.  We make the choice when expanding highways every year instead of investing in mass transit and walkability.  We make the choice to condone wreckless driving, often blaming pedestrians for being on the road when an inattentive driver runs them down.  We don’t take seriously our responsibility when behind the wheel, and we show it by texting, eating, or talking on the phone instead of paying attention to not kill someone.

That doesn’t describe all drivers, of course, but it describes enough of them that it is a legitimate problem.

Update: Some time after this was posted, my comment reappeared on OKC Central.

What’s Republican Senate Leader Glenn Coffee’s response?

“It’s not a dollars and cents issue with me.”

Facebook chat is now down as the social network races to close a security hole that let people see their friends’ live chats. The security bug was exploited, ironically enough, by fiddling one’s privacy settings, as this TechCrunch video demonstrates.

Exhibit B: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

What I really dislike about Facebook is that you can’t export your own posts to your hard drive or another site. Facebook doesn’t respect our rights to our own content, so we get the worst of both worlds: neither privacy nor ownership. I’m still there because that is where friends are, but if there was a popular open alternative I would jump ship in a second.