dallascityhall.org

Might make a good graphic for a billboard that says, "Remember, only you can prevent shrimp boat accidents."

A little over two years ago The Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit support group for Battery Park at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers on the southern tip of Manhattan, decided that it needed a new chair. The conservancy wanted a new park chair that would be light enough to tote around, heavy enough not to blow away in heavy weather and beautifully wonderfully distinctively designed.

So The Battery Conservancy announced an international competition for best Battery chair design. From 15 nations 679 designers submitted sketches, which a panel of judges whittled to 50 finalists, then five, then one. The winner, Andrew Jones of Toronto, drew a chair described by The New York Times as, "a pale blue flower, its curving petals forming the outlines of the seat, back and arms. Its smooth surface is perforated with tiny, seemingly random holes that will allow the seat to dry quickly after it rains."

A chair.

Here in Dallas decades of botched flood control, official neglect and simple happenstance have endowed us with an opportunity to create the largest urban park in the nation, vast enough to include huge recreational areas, a sprawling natural forest and a serious river. In short, this could be a park that truly redefines the destiny of a city, transforming Dallas from a jerry-built outback outpost to an American 21st century Mecca, a place where urban life and nature itself meld seamlessly at the city's heart.

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Wdstckdr via hitchikers.wikia.com

Hoping it's not bad luck to say this so soon, knocking on wood, rubbing my figurative rabbit's foot (my wife won't let me carry a real one), but I think this city and maybe even the nation deserve praise for overwhelming equanimity in the face of the first American Ebola cases. What the response so far shows is that we handle the truth a lot better than we do lies, and we tend to have real respect for real doctors as opposed to spin doctors.

Sure, there has been some flat-out goofiness, as in the school district in Maine that sent a teacher into quarantine because she had attended a conference in Dallas. But people in Maine are famously xenophobic anyway. Just like Texans.

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Wikipedia

Turf. Its dirty. But people fight for it.

Talk about mixed feelings this morning. On the one hand thanks to a youthful experience I would rather not recount here in colorful detail, I know exactly how Dallas school board member Bernadette Nutall feels about getting rousted by the cops earlier this week in a Dallas school building. My heart goes out.

See also: Mike Miles and Bernadette Nuttall Slap Leather

On the other hand, the same experience leads me to believe she's entirely in the wrong for thinking somebody owes her an apology. If anything, she owes an apology to school Superintendent Mike Miles, who had to sic the gendarmes on her, but even more than that she owes a big mea culpa to the board on which she sits, for violating their basic charter and, frankly, making them all look a bit like fools.

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This is the official dogma from The Dallas Morning News. It's wrong.

News media continue to present a picture of Ebola transmission that is significantly inaccurate by omission. They assert much more certainty than the science justifies. The version repeated like a mantra in most accounts -- only direct physical contact with an infectious person -- is wrong on its face and may be contributing to reduced vigilance.

What the science does say: direct physical contact with body fluids is the most common way and the most extensively documented way for the disease to travel. But science does not know that direct physical contact is the only way the disease can infect human beings. Scientists know the virus survives for significant periods of time outside the body, even dried on surfaces such as doorknobs and table tops. It is not known if a viable virus outside the body can infect a human being, because that research has not been done. But public health policy on decontamination assumes some risk, even if only at low levels, from so-called "environmental" (outside the body) Ebola virus.

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Taylor Callery

Maybe now is when we turn this into less of a food fight and something more like an actual system.

Big teachable moment right now in the Dallas school system -- huge! -- and the school board and superintendent should rush to take advantage of it. I'm talking about the deal I reported here yesterday in which the superintendent called school district cops to physically evict a school board member from a campus.

See also: Mike Miles and Bernadette Nutall Slap Leather

Of course we mediatoids love a story like this because it involves cops and outrageous behavior, our favorite things. But the thing not to miss here is that the showdown yesterday between Superintendent Mike Miles and school board member Bernadette Nutall is really about the entire history of the district. It's about a crucial decision the board needs to make right now to determine the future of the school system.

How far should trustees poke their noses into the day-to-day management of the school system? As it is now, trustees are all over the district every day, in and out of offices in the administration building, in and out of schools, often on very strategic missions, sometimes in direct contravention of the superintendent's own orders to the staff.

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Wikipedia

Proposed venue for next Miles/Nuttall meeting.

Yesterday morning Dallas school district cops forcibly removed school board member Bernadette Nuttall from Billy Earl Dade middle school on Grand Avenue in South Dallas after Nuttall told them, "Go ahead and arrest me."

They didn't. They just put her out of the building. But both Nuttall and a school district spokesperson said it was a hands-on removal by three officers.

See also: No, WrestleMania Is Not Coming to Cowboys Stadium (At Least, Not In the Next Two Years)

Nuttall's eviction followed a schoolhouse showdown between her and Dallas Superintendent Mike Miles. Miles wanted to hold his own closed meeting with staff at the school. Nuttall, who said she had been asked to attend by some staff, wanted in on it.

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Thomas Frieden, CDC Director

Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, speaking on 7/31/2014:

"It is not a potential of Ebola spreading widely in the U.S. That is not in the cards."

"We have quarantine stations at all the major ports of entry. People cannot transmit Ebola to others unless they are sick, and Ebola makes you so sick that it's pretty obvious pretty quickly. A traveler will be flagged by the flight crew and if someone gets sick after arrival in the U.S. they will almost certainly seek medical care."

"Ebola poses little risk to the U.S. general population."

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Is Clay Jenkins the real deal or just another two-bit soap-boxer?

Before I get on my high horse, I usually check back upstream to see what sort of feet of clay I may have myself on an issue. Great thing and terrible thing about the Internet. It's all still there. So this morning before leaping to the saddle to whack people for calling Dallas County Clay Jenkins bad names, I took a moment to see what I may have called him in the past that I have conveniently forgotten, now that I am a Jenkins fan.

Well, let's see here in this first item that comes up. "Dormouse," I called him. Not even sure what that is. Could be a kind of pet maybe. "Footman." Possibly not flattering. "Fool."

See also: All Hail John Wiley Price, the King of Dallas County.

Fool? I called him a fool? That was three years ago. Listen, I have grown up a lot since then. In fact I grow up every day. All over again.

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Wikipedia

Pretty much always, Americans have found ways to get the scoop on what's really going on.

One great service Dallas could render to the rest of the country, should the dust ever settle on the local Ebola story, would be a thorough, no-holds-barred post mortem on information sharing. I am already hearing from people behind the scenes, speaking off the record, that there has been significant tension between officials on the question of what to tell people, when and how.

And it didn't start here. From the moment the Thomas Eric Duncan story first lit up, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has preached that risks to the public in this country are minimal, our healthcare system will beat Ebola with a first round knock-out and the most important thing to avoid is public fear. There are some good reasons for preaching that line, but there may also be some unanticipated bad consequences to carrying it too far, illuminated by the Dallas experience.

See also: Even the CDC Isn't Totally Sold on its Own Proclamations on How Ebola Is Transmitted

The first things to acknowledge are the good reasons for not publicly reporting every single twist in the story. If and when the full story can be told, for example, we will learn that there have been numerous incidences of people self-reporting that they have Ebola. In fact people have told authorities in Dallas County in the last week not only that they have Ebola but that they have had contact with Duncan, when neither claim turned out to be true upon subsequent investigation.

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Wikipedia

THE COG! is coming for you. You are powerless to escape. THE COG! never stops cogging.

The weird shadow government nobody knows about but that runs everything, called "THE COG!," headquartered near Six Flags amusement park in Arlington, is cooking up a plan to ram a new highway down the city's throat even if the city votes against it.

Well, that would be my interpretation of a story in The Dallas Morning News this morning by Brandon Formby. You're welcome to call me alarmist, paranoid and whatever. Just don't come crying when you have a 10-lane truck route down the Trinity River instead of the park citizens voted for 16 years ago.

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