"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan How can you ask for what you want, much less get it, if you don't know the words?
shades of Toynbee. from the wiki on “A study of history”:
“Toynbee does not see the breakdown of civilizations as caused by loss of control over the physical environment, by loss of control over the human environment, or by attacks from outside. Rather, it comes from the deterioration of the “Creative Minority”, which eventually ceases to be creative and degenerates into merely a “Dominant Minority”.
He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their “former self,” by which they become prideful and fail adequately to address the next challenge they face. Results of the breakdown
The final breakdown results in “positive acts of creation;” the dominant minority seeks to create a Universal state to preserve its power and influence, and the internal proletariat seeks to create a Universal church to preserve its spiritual values and cultural norms.”
"Your enemy is not China. Your enemy is not Russia. Your enemy is the Military Industrial Complex."
This is why they got rid of Tucker Carlson, btw. He was allowing people like Jimmy Dore to come on his show and say the uncomfortable truth.pic.twitter.com/17fcLXBL7C
A woman caught a home run ball hit by Japanese baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani during the World Baseball Classic. Someone next to her wanted to see the ball, and it eventually got passed around the stadium to whoever wanted to see it. The baseball was returned to her after… pic.twitter.com/o4WjeUOcWD
Residences, commerce and offices coexist with pedestrians in traditional neighborhoods
(c) by Mark Dempsey
It's often hard to imagine local connections to global issues, but returning to a traditional way of building cities could cut vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in half, make transit viable, make a neighborhood's inhabitants healthier, and its infrastructure would be half as expensive to maintain. Lower VMT means less global warming. Healthier communities mean less expensive healthcare.
Home buyers favor this kind of development, too, paying premiums to live in such neighborhoods, yet few local jurisdictions in California default to such neighborhood design. Traditional neighborhoods mix uses, scattering commerce, offices and even light industry through residential neighborhoods of a variety of densities. The state of California already mandates new development build "complete streets" that accommodate pedestrians and cyclists as well as autos.
One Southern California Association of Governments study demonstrated that pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use is also the only way to significantly cut traffic congestion. Mixed-income neighborhoods would scatter apartments among the mansions, and mixed-use makes owning a car optional, since walking to the store or transit stop is a possibility. The covert "tax" of sprawl--the alternative to traditional neighborhoods--is that every driving-age adult must own a car.
Widening streets--even double-decking freeways does not cut congestion. Wider streets encourage more traffic in a phenomenon called "induced demand." Often as little as six months and millions of dollars after widening streets the congestion returns to the previous level. And no, even if you keep your receipt, you don't get a refund for the millions spent widening streets. Sprawl streets discourage walking.
Sprawl Street Design Discourages Walking
The sprawl twelve-foot travel lanes are identical to freeway lanes designed for 70 m.p.h. traffic. Because of their width, these wide sprawl streets are such an invitation to speeding that standard when they were built required them to bend every 1,000 lineal feet. Otherwise speeding cars on tertiary residential streets would be mowing down the neighborhood kids. Wide sprawl neighborhood streets bend to slow speeding traffic their width otherwise invites—spaghetti streets are a safety measure. Wouldn't it be cheaper and more sensible just to build streets narrower in the first place?
Still, the default for far too much new development is "sprawl"--a pattern of building that separates uses--commerce, residences, offices--and connects them exclusively with single-occupant-auto commutes.
Sprawl separates residences, offices, and commerce, connecting them only with commutes
Odd, meandering sidewalks do exist in sprawl, but they discourage pedestrians. On busy streets, the sidewalks are right next to fast-flowing traffic, if they exist at all. One report noted the Sacramento region would have to spend $50 million just to connect all the disconnected sidewalks.
Traditional neighborhoods also allow elders to age in place if they cannot drive. The over-85 demographic is one of the fastest growing, too.
All-in-all, traditional, low-impact building locally can contribute to reducing global warming, making healthier neighborhoods, and even providing a partial remedy for the banana-republic level of income inequality that afflicts the U.S. now.
Update: "Transportation is now the highest-emitting sector in the country, and critically, these emissions won’t be eliminated by electric vehicles alone. Even if the country electrified 70 percent of all cars by 2030, RMI has found that we would need a further 20 percent reduction in per-capita vehicle miles traveled to meet national climate goals. In other words, truly sustainable policies aim to reduce driving of all kinds, not just the driving of gas-powered cars. Housing reform is a critical means of doing so."
One more thing: you can sign a petition to encourage traditional development here. Feel free to share.
Ok guys, it’s time for me to tell you about something very enlightening that I read in a book recently:
75% of people would rather being knowingly wrong and blend in, than be right and stand out. And there’s a well known psychology experiment that proved it. 🧵
— Dr. Lisa Iannattone (@lisa_iannattone) April 3, 2023
Here's the best article about elite immunity. It documents a history of presidential crime, starting with Grover Cleveland, who apparently raped a woman and fathered a child...then got off scot free. Elite immunity is not anything new.
The overwhelming majority of union leaders are honest and democratically accountable to the membership. But when corruption sets in, the government doesn’t mess around. According to Labor Department records, in the past decade there were 2,505 criminal investigations of union officials and 821 convictions. Hundreds did prison time, mostly for embezzlement of union funds.
During the same period, not a single top Wall Street executive went to jail, despite the fact that Wall Street frauds cost the economy trillions while the typical union misappropriation was in the thousands or low millions.
Today's Sacramento Bee has a story with the headline "Social Security insolvency coming earlier than expected" (p.A10, by Tony Pugh, of Bloomberg). The story issues similar dire warnings about Medicare, too.
Apparently, the story's reporter believes dollars grow on billionaires--why the Federal government cannot produce dollars! Yet the U.S. has trillions for bank bailouts and trillions more for overseas wars, but grandparents will have to suck it up, because --Hey! we're out of money!
I wonder how many people resent this obvious scam. A similar mystery for the media: why people vote for a guy promising to sabotage the U.S. system of governance--Trump.
The Bloomberg story blandly states the grandparent-unfriendly solutions: "Congress has varied and assorted options -- like increasing taxes and reducing benefits -- that could reduce or eliminate both programs' long-term financing shortfalls."
But even Alan Greenspan ("The Maestro") debunks this myth:
After Paul Ryan, in a Congressional hearing, asks Greenspan about the "insecurity" of Social Security, touting private accounts as a remedy, Greenspan answers "I wouldn’t say that the pay-as-you-go benefits are insecure, in the sense that there’s nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The question is, how do you set up a system which assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase" [emphasis added]
One suggested solution to Greenspan's question: a real-asset-creating system would favor producing real, well-distributed goods and services over speculation in financial assets.
As "The Maestro" says, the genuine constraints on Social Security are not financial, they're related to the productivity of the whole economy. Nothing prevents the federal government from "creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody." Nothing prevents government from creating infrastructure that enhances productivity, either, but that's not been happening.
And let's not attribute this mythical thinking to Republicans only. In his book Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank says Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich proposed something similar to Ryan's agenda--privatizing Social Security. This was just before the subprime/derivatives meltdown would have decimated such private accounts, but Monica Lewinsky put a halt to that. We owe her!
There's no indication the Bloomberg reporter appreciates the absurdity of juxtaposing Social Security's "insolvency" next to the stories of bank scandals. Bloomberg is apparently irony deficient.
Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley Bank bailout is now estimated to be $25 billion. President Bush created a $700 billion bailout fund more than a decade ago, and the Federal Reserve--the Fed is our central bank--extended $16 - $29 trillion in credit to the financial sector in 2007-8. That last figure is from a congressionally-mandated audit that the Fed resisted. Where did that money come from? What a mystery!
Now everyone knows that the money creation without limit can magically appear for the bankers but not for grandma's pension and healthcare.What's next? A report that the Bureau of Weights and Measures is running out of inches?
Bloomberg would probably assert that government money for Social Security and Medicare will cause inflation. Inflation couldn't stem from COVID, supply chain difficulties, the sanctions on Russian energy production, or the recent OPEC oil production reductions. Nope. It's not a shortage of goods, it must be that darn government printing press that causes inflation! And please ignore the subsidies for the financial sector and military-industrial-prison-media complex! Those can't be inflationary! Just grandparents are inflationary. Yeah, that's the ticket!
