Before anything else: Anyone know when that fundraising carwash is starting in north Minneapolis on Friday? I have it in my calendar without a time. ************ The single danger I can see in posting video cameras downtown is convincing camera that harm CAN'T come from video surveillance. Consider: The traffic management center monitors traffic all over the metro. It has been using cameras for years and years. As a result of that, people have learned to expect BENEFIT from the government watching them. But now we have a secret agency called "Homeland Security". It wants to do all kinds of things that are Big Brother-ish. Right now, I think there's serious resistance. But all it has to do is let the populace be seasoned to certain methods and the resistance might soften. People might lose all sense of normal resistance, might come to look at security agencies as benign (which in most of the world they certainly are not).
Were that to happen, this process of gaining footholds with pilot campaigns like this would be responsible in an important way. I guess the final question is whether the dangers of being in downtown really warrant the growth of the government's security function. I'm not against all government growth, but I think one is justified in being wary of the growth of the government's police power. You can't be perfectly secure and free at the same time. You can be both free and SECURE ENOUGH by the use of your intelligence to make sound decisions about what you do. And that's all that a free person really needs: to be SECURE ENOUGH. A person only remains free by mastering their fears to the degree that they aren't forced into decisions by uncontrollable fears. ********* Ms. Heller's post about realtime fingerprints made me wonder something. If lasers can take off tatoos, that go well into the skin, why can't they modify fingerprints? When that technology finally exists, will fingerprints be that valuable? They are already compromised by the use of plastic gloves at crime scenes. ********* I just read someone's good point about Cub. WHY, when the chief competition of Cub is on the ropes, should Minneapolis, already so tight on funds that it laid off firefighters and police, spend a CENT on building a new Cub? Someone should get Ostrow to answer that question. Is it "jobs for northeasters"? Has anyone told Ostrow what Cub jobs pay? And the other question that seldom gets answered is: How many jobs DISAPPEAR when a discounter moves in somewhere? Because, frankly, total business doesn't grow that much. It does increase, but seldom right after a new business opens. The first result is simply the transfer of business from one company to another. Outside the bright lights that always highlight a new business is the economic misery of dying competitors. So how come the advocates of subsidizing new business care so little for constituents who go belly up? Most of America's retailers have had THIS experience with Wal-Mart, though I don't think Wal-Mart demands subsidies to open a new branch of its empire. When it wants to go in somewhere, you can barely STOP it. Anyway, employment is not the top issue in Minneapolis right now. We have always had a degree of difficulty in that area, so new jobs aren't a bad thing. But we shouldn't be offering up our public safety function as a sacrifice for economic development. We need crime fighters and fire fighters slightly more than we need more jobs. ******** Several people have raised the issue of Target supplying the surveillance system. Just by way of logic I think Target realizes that in this fiscal environment, if the city had to BUY the system, it just would never happen. Some people MIGHT say "Heck put a camera at every corner and we can lay off even more cops". But I'm pretty sure the majority of residents would gag and say "no way". Maybe the gated communities would cheer for such a proposal, but I think we like to hire humans (and then hope they don't beat up people like the bad apples do). Jim Mork Cooper Neighborhood Longfellow Community In The Great and Wonderful City I Call Home, Minneapolis TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
