Progressives wanted a universal health care bill in 2009. But polling shows that most people like the health care they have. Consequently, instead of doing the straightforward thing and producing a plan in which everyone swaps out what they have now in exchange for something better, we’ve got something rather more complicated. The political thinking here is pretty clear and hard to question, but as Jonathan Cohn lays out at length it makes the resulting policy quite a bit worse.

Meanwhile, even with Obama being extremely incrementalist in his proposals, it’s still very hard to get anything through congress. And, indeed, the main lesson of the past 25 years worth of American politics is that big change is hard to make under any circumstances.

Interesting map from Gallup which takes a look at the geographical incidence of healthy behavior:

The midyear results from the AHIP State and Congressional District Resource for Well-Being, a product of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, find the nation as a whole dropping substantively on the Healthy Behavior Sub-Index, from 63.7 in 2008 to 62.6 in the first half of 2009. The Healthy Behavior Sub-Index is one of six sub-indexes that make up the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, and asks Americans four questions: do you smoke; did you eat healthy all day yesterday; in the last seven days, on how many days did you exercise for 30 minutes or more; and in the last seven days, on how many days did you have five or more servings of fruits and vegetables. The Healthy Behavior Sub-Index scores for the nation and for each state are calculated based on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 would be a perfect score.

At this point, I mostly just find it interesting any time you see a map that doesn’t just reduce the red/blue map of presidential politics. Instead we see that both the liberal coastal west and the conservative interior west are pretty similar, while the Great Lakes look indistinguishable from the Deep South. Of course it’s not clear to me that the methodology of this survey is so great.

Dave Alpert has an effective rebuttal to commentators whose view of urban bicycling is dominated by the fact that cyclists sometimes violate the rules of the road. As he points out this is true for all modes of transportation, but nobody ever calls for getting all cars off our streets on the grounds that motorists frequently encroach into sidewalks or drive in the bus lane on 7th Street.

That said, I continue to think that the main culprit for the endless fighting over this point is actually an excess of rules. Here’s a photo of a street in Geneva that, like many streets in Geneva, just kind of sits there without a lot of lane striping and signs and rules. That’s not to say that it’s a locus of lawless anarchy—the main point, obviously, is just that you’re not supposed to run over anyone with your car or slam into them with your bike. And guess what? Nobody does. Just like in a park or a public plaza you don’t need to cordon the pedestrians off from one another with different yellow and white lines and yield signs and so forth. Human beings are actually perfectly capable of negotiating the “am I about to collide with someone?” issue without relying on explicit signage.

What those road markings are good for is creating a situation in which automobiles can go fast. Obviously, there’s a time and a place for that. Grade-separated highways exist in order to facilitate the fast driving of automobiles. A wide boulevard in a city can serve a similar purpose in a way that’s appropriate to an urban context. Here you’re going to need striped lanes, a median to separate the different directions of traffic, lights to indicate when to stop and when to go, etc. And the best way to accommodate cyclists in that context would be with separated bike lanes. But a typical side street in a residential area isn’t an appropriate venue for just trying to make cars go as fast as possible. These kind of streets would be more functional—and safer—as uncontrolled open streets shared between modes and with people expected to conduct themselves in a decent manner.

On a related note, check out this video:

That may be taking things too far in terms of a lack of explicit controls. But it shows that this sort of thing works better than people raised in a “traffic lights everywhere” environment tend to recognize.

French air craft carrier Charles de Gaulle (wikimedia)

France acknowledges that nuclear weapons on the Charles de Gaulle are a thing of the past. Robert Farley observes:

Nevertheless, comparing the number of deployed nuclear weapons in the world today to the number in the 1980s shows a drastic reduction in nuclear arsenals, at least on the part of France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia. The shift hasn’t been universal, as China has modestly increased its nuclear arsenal, and North Korea, India, and Pakistan have become acknowledged proliferants. The exact number of Israeli weapons remains unknown. Still, reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons was a dearly held goal of arms reductionists in and out of government in the 1970s and 1980s, and we’ve seen progress towards that goal under just about any conceivable metric.

And the odds are good for further reductions. Steep bilateral reductions between the United States and Russia appear to be on the table and should go forward. When that’s done, we should attempt to bring China into the picture and get them to agree to stop growing their arsenal and just let the United States and Russia progressively move to smaller and smaller arsenals. Of course substantial challenges remain with the so-called “rogue” states, but even here a diplomatic resolution of the situation with Iran still seems to be potentially on the table, and the DPRK isn’t going to be around forever. I think people tend toward postures of undue pessimism on global governance issues. The fact of the matter is that even though there are a lot of challenges, tremendous progress has been made over the years and the odds of further progress are quite good if people don’t simply give up.