I'm not a reporter, but I am snooty when being chased down the road by a massive Ram with a pristine cargo bed. In the each according to their needs world of common sense such vehicles would be used only by people whose livelihood involves hauling building supplies. I've given up bicycling on public roads and will stick to restricted trails because of those who don't need trucks who are clogging the roads, though it would be nice if I could ride a bike to the grocery in 15 minutes or less. Which we will need to start doing to get a handle on carbon output, mass obesity, and much more. Or I could put my bike in the bed of my FRamHevvy to haul to the trails to take my rides, and let the rest of the world burn
Guy just up the street from me is a doctor. His office is just about three miles from his little home on a 1/2-acre lot. But he has one of the biggest pick-ups I've ever seen. He uses the biggest John Deere to mow his little plot. All I can think is "Why?"
I was just reading about the Tree of Ténéré, an acacia tree in the Sahara, famous for being the only tree in a hundred mile radius. Scientists think it grew in a period when the desert was wetter, then was able to survive because it put roots down more than a hundred feet to reach water. It was a famous landmark, all the desert caravans navigated by it, so when they put highways across the desert they followed the traditional caravan routes, which put the tree right next to a highway. You can guess what happened next, a truck driver (some say he was drunk) ran into the tree and killed it. I can imagine him stumbling out of the cab of his truck, saying, "Who the fuck put a tree there?"
In the Guiness Book of World Records, listed as World's Remotest Tree. With a footnote as you mentioned. Only thing I remember from the sainted book, which I read cover to cover when I was eleven or so...
I checked, the title is now held by a spruce on an island off the coast of Antarctica, but it was planted by some Brit visiting the island so THAT'S CHEATING.
Yeah, the Giant Hotwheels Pickup That's Never Hauled Anything Except Groceries That Follows You On The Highway At A Distance Of One Foot is a regular pest here as well.
Look, the cities are full of ni . . . um, people who are not like you, William T. Whitebread. And the liberals will do anything ANYTHING!!!! to force your daughter to marry one of those. And that includes forcing you to move to Manhattan when your house in Manhasset gets burned down--probably by MS-13, know what I mean? And then what are you gonna do? You'll be forced FORCED!!! to walk to one of those bodegas! Why, there will probably even be laws mandating you eat delicious foods that Cracker Barrel and Applebees don't serve!
Those bodegas, being located conveniently on every street corner, will be so close to your place that it will force you to get fat because you don't get enough exercise walking to them! Shoot, I burn more calories just parallel parking my Mondo Glorioso!
The horrifying convenience of being able to walk a block to buy beer minutes before 2am (CA sales cutoff - more liberal technocrat social engineering) and shoot the shit with a clerk who knows your name (and will occasionally run some short credit if you’re light) and whose name you know as well. It really is quite Lovecraftian!
(There must be a difference between bodegas and corner stores because I never saw a kitty in any of the places in my old neighborhood, much to my disappointment.)
Beyond the abject stupidity of these arguments, they are silly as well. “If cars and trucks are banished from the pedestrian village, how are medics in ambulances to get to victims of heart attacks?” You know what happens when a person has a heart attack and they’re in a pedestrian zone? The fucking ambulance drives in the pedestrian zone. And because there’s no traffic jams to contend with, and people will willingly and quickly scatter out of the way if an ambulance is coming to address a medical emergency, it’s better than forcing the ambulance to deal with a street full of cars that can’t get out of the way because everybody is forced to drive a car to get anywhere.
You KNOW that's one of those brainfarts they always write with a little chuckle and a smile, real BUTWHATABOUT bullshit that they have no interest in checking how it works in The Real World because they think it's too great a dunk on those stupid libturds.
Like my brother-in-law was going on about solar panels and EV batteries, and how HORRIBLE for the environment disposing of them was, like they're made with 2-4-5 Trioxin or something. Thirty seconds with Google and I find people bein' entrepreneurial and working on these issues because "find a need and fill it". WHY DOES MY B-I-L HATE CAPITALISM
We can extract cobalt from a rock in the Congo when the cobalt is only 0.1% of the rock, but somehow we won't be able to extract cobalt from a used battery when it's 3% of the battery.
It's true. Solar panels developed by the military in 1968 *were* made of 2-4-5 Trioxin. It got hushed up and they were supposed to dispose of the panels in some special facility, but no one knows where they actually got shipped. Typical army fuckup. You wanna see em? They're in my basement.
Hey, I'm _not_ saying that Dan O'Bannon ripped-off an exceptionally cheap zombie movie starring a porn actor, but their version of zombies are pretty close, much closer to each other than to Romero's.
The enemy of mine enemy is not always my friend, but note that the less careerist 'libert'arians hate Trump's rejection of Free Market principles, a natural extension of his rejection of all principles beyond Please Donald Trump. (He likes CronyCapitalism, but would be even happier without the 'Capital'.)
You can take the steering wheel of my Prius with the bike rack on the back outta my not-particularly-cold-'cause-they're-stuffed-into-fleece-lined-calfskin-gloved hands.
I think I mentioned before being stuck in traffic behind a big pickup with a "Stomp My Flag I'll Stomp Your Ass" sign in the back window, but I didn't finish the story, because an ambulance came up behind us, all lights-n-sirens, and everybody edged out of the way as much as they could, clearing just enough space on a packed 3-lane road for the ambulance to pass. All except for Mr. Stomp Your Ass, who was thrown into a state of total confusion, first turning right, then left, then coming to a full stop in the middle of the lane, paralyzed by indecision, with a goddamn ambulance whoop-whooping right on his enormous rear bumper. It took a while for the dim bulb to grow a little brighter, and eventually the ambulance was able to get around him. It was all quite satisfying to watch, except for the horrifying possibility that someone was dying somewhere, waiting for an ambulance.
Hospitals are theft! Only hyper-individual solutions are acceptable! Learn medicine on your own and do your own EMTing! I'm sure there's a group on Facebook ready to help you!
I have a sticker I am SO tempted to put on the car: the I.W.W. Sabo-tabby eating the Gadsden flag snake on a red & black background with the text "WELL I DIDN'T TREAD", but I fear it isn't weatherproof.
I drive nearly 2 hours a day to my job in the green industries. My wife drives a full size pick-up.She needs it to tow the horse trailer. About that RV- Don't ask .
I'm the last person that should be talking to people about reducing a carbon footprint.
I bet you could sell the Olds on a 15 minute lifestyle. You'd have to allow golf carts.(Old people fucking love golf carts.)
Plus give them exclusive communities. Over 55. Nobody else really wants to live around them anyway.
What the actual fuck did I wander into here? I'm 65 and in addition to every other goddamned thing going on I have to worry about having Old People Smell? Just shoot me.
Well, youngster, I Googled 2-Nonenal when it was mentioned in an earlier comment (and Putrescine, for fuck's sake) so I've already read this horrifying article! Seems I'd better develop a taste for green tea and...
Until the last few years, I've only known the U.S. Growing up the suburbs, that was my initial paradigm of "normal," until I hit adolescence and began to feel increasingly alienated from it. And urban life meant NYC, so I've been happy living out in the country surrounded by greenery and silence.
Then last month I spent a week each in Paris and Amsterdam. With a metro card, you can go anywhere, quickly and cheaply. Instead of gray canyons of high-rises trapping dirt, noise, and caged people, buildings were human-scaled and aesthetically interesting, parks were frequent, and my rooms were actually quiet. (And no enormous pick-up trucks!)
Frankly, I don't see how we can reverse engineer the U.S. to achieve European-style liveability. The obstacles, physical and social, are just too great.
At least you saw! As I've been saying for years, the primary reason conservatives spread city-hate is to keep us from ever even venturing to see what the alternatives to our current way of life might be.
The bicyclization of Amsterdam, as depicted in the film Together We Cycle, was not some ride in the park. It was just as hard, infuriating and dangerous a thing to accomplish as it is here. I saw the film at a special screening at the Dutch Embassy, with a panel discussion afterward (adding "Dutch" to planning policy wonkism – not for the faint-hearted). That place went thru the same stuff we are going thru, just a generation earlier.
I don't know if it's that film or another one I saw, kids shutting down a street by declaring an all-day play festival, no cars allowed, we're playing here! I believe the word "spielstrasse" was used?
"Die Spielstrasse ist das tolle Internet-Portal für Kinder! Neben einem sehr übersichtlichem Verzeichnis für Kinderseiten mit einer kinderleichten Suche gibt es außerdem noch ein Soundstudio für Kinder, ein Mal- und Downloadstudio, Buchvorstellungen von empfehlenswerten Kinder- und Jugendbüchern, einen kleinen Tierpark sowie das tolle Bananenspiel mit Bono."
Before I went to Amsterdam I listened to an absolutely first-rate history of the city by Russell Shorto*, an American ex-pat. This gave me some understanding of the peculiarly Dutch temperament, a near-perfect balance of individualism and communitarianism — which reinforces my skepticism about this country.
(I especially liked the bicycles designed for hauling stuff, including up to four little kids crammed together — but I had a couple of near-death experiences with the faster ones. Do *not* step off the curb without looking both ways!)
*I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It was as engaging and entertaining as a novel.
Thank-you for that reference—his "The Island at the Center[sic] of the World" is a treat fro any Manhattanphile (and dependent on older Dutch documents,as I'll guess would be the Amsterdam book, which I'll hazard without evidence grew out of the New York book).
If you worked at a company and the CEO said, "We must NEVER closely examine what our competition is doing so we can improve our own operations and stay competitive" you probably wouldn't think they were up for a prize for CEO of the year. But conservatives, who are always full of homespun "Run government like a bizness!" thinking never think of this analogy.
'In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.'
Of course the real history of suburb v. city is exclusionary zoning which took over from red-lining when that racist scheme was weakened (but not eliminated). Yes, some people want a big yard and no sidewalks and the need to drive to everything and also lower taxes. Then the suburb grows up, has to add services, traffic into town gets ugly and taxes go up. Suddenly there’s interest in “partnering” with the city to provide fire, public transportation, police, water and sewage. But no way they’ll let themselves be annexed and be subjected to multi family housing, integrated schools, etc. It all starts with zoning.
Data points, not necessarily correlative nor even cogent (tho I s'pose there's potentially a limerick in there somewhere):
Portland is the city I know a little bit about that officially adopted a greenbelt development boundary. What I know of River City is it has a tall downtown on the left bank, with expensive housing upslope, extremely walkable city center and decent mass transit. Its right bank has a more suburban feel, but it is built out with single family homes on relatively small lots, with many modest-but-interesting commercial strips. Overall, aside from the derelict people of various sorts, the place is easily traversed by any mode, and green as hell.
Omaha, another city I've spent time in, suffers from flatitude. That is, on a relatively smooth level landscape, to a city father with an affinity for an infinitely expanding tax base it looks easy to spread out in (almost) all directions (the river is keeps the city from flopping into Iowa). So spread it did, consuming many little communities north, west and south over the decades. This led to circumstances such as the neighborhoods built a few decades ago in what was then unincorporated areas coming to the end of their infrastructure lives (roads, sewers, etc) and being denied maintenance services by the city because they had been built by the private developers. So some paved roads are reverting to dirt because the city won't repave them and the residents can't afford it. Should not need to add "walkable" it ain't. The apartment the missus lived in on the waterfront (easy walk to work) was 110 blocks from the nearest good grocery store.
Most of my urbanism self-education comes from decades in the Bay Area. It sprawled early enough into the hills that the nimbys managed to preserve their status for generations, and the flatlands filled in eventually. But the preservationist gene pool was pretty large there way back. Thus (against great odds, not to mention some lunatic opposition) the Bay was cleaned up a bit, and over 1.5 million acres(!) of open space in the region have been preserved from development. I was involved in a delightful regional planning effort to ID all the most important remaining lands (and waters) to protect, that effectively (in theory) promote infill development by creating incentives for developers in 2 ways:
• allowing infill up-zoning near existing mass transit locations, with (again theoretically) lowered permitting red tape
• transmitting development 'credits' from newly-protected lands to infill projects, reducing the tax load on the unbuilt lands and increasing density on the infill
Years later it is still early days in the process, and Stuff Happens (eg the building up of downtown San Francisco just as covid hit – No one could possibly have predicted!®).
This is my thank-you note to you. I live in a tiny apartment in San Rafael, but within minutes I can get to some spectacular hiking trails, lakes, beaches and wildlife that have been preserved from development. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the Marin Municipal Water District lands (the MMWD manages our reservoirs and water supply), and the various county and city open space areas are an amazing gift.
Of course, we are dealing with infill measures too, and we are going to have to adjust. There are mandatory goals in place, but damn, I just want to assure people that it's possible to live a rewarding, pleasant life in an apartment, especially when you have the fabulous good fortune of access to the natural world.
I'll speak for the many far more influential* and politically savvy folk and say 'You're Welcome'.
The histories of founding the GGNRA and the Marin Headlands addition, for instance, are well worth researching. The Headlands story is endearing land-advocacy literature. That deal was sealed high in a New York skyscraper by a personal check for $100. The story includes this exchange, between the CEO of a huge development company and the lead preservation advocate:
Huge developer dude: "My company employs many highly skilled attorneys and I pay them lots of money."
Scruffy land advocate: "We have lots of skilled attorneys too, and they work for free!"
*Holy Crap! I just realized "influential" and "influenza" are...well, I'm not sure exactly what they are, but it can't be good!
Adding here I lived in San Anselmo for awhile when I was a kid, and Terra Linda when I was a slightly older kid, and those were among the best years of my life to that point.
I really like San Anselmo. I've had a few dog-walking/house-sitting clients there. Also in Ross and Kent Woodlands. And Belvedere and Tiburon. I'm like an undercover spy in a whole other world. But I take good care of my critter-friends. (Right now I'm off to visit an elderdog on the Greenbrae Boardwalk - smallish houses on pylons in the salt marsh with big views of marsh, hills, and San Quentin. It is truly a land of contrasts. 😉)
John Hodgman claimed in "The Areas of My Expertise" that you can orient yourself in Omaha by setting a quarter on-edge, at which point it will roll toward Warren Buffett's house, beside the obvious joke about his money-making ability also, I'd say, a joke about the city's flatness.
Thing is, it's really a bunch of little flat-topped rollers. It just seems flat compared to much of the rest of the nation. But not in the same league as, say, the Central Valley of California. Flattest, levelest place on earth according to John McPhee.
I love these histrionics about 'the tyranny of the pedestrian' over car owners, and unquantifiable hyperbole (as you ably point out) like 'most people in Western democracies' suits the Reactionary Sprawler Set down to the core. 'Most people' as in, scared white people like ME. Maybe I sound unsophisticated but they can s*ck my b*lls with that garbage.
It's a small step from "Bills", as in "Buffalo", a kinda popular football team around here. I suppose if they're losing it could be "sack my Bills" but I get the impression most of the Bills fans are REALAMURRICANS™ and thus ignorant of that use of "sack".
If the people of Portland or San Francisco or Berkeley don't want to live under the tyranny of 15- minute cities, they've got an easy remedy: Vote in a mayor and city council that won't do this stuff. And if the people of Omaha or Dallas want to sprawl to their heart's content, I assume they'll vote accordingly.
Once again, "They're forcing ____ down our throats" really means "Somewhere, people are using the democratic process to make choices we disagree with."
OMG for sprawl in Omaha—you should see Dodge Street, now elevated over a section of (previously) West O, and continuing as a multi lane artery all the way out to Elkhorn (previously a distant little town; long since annexed). Downtown Omaha is redeveloping, but suburbia is a hell of a drug.
That looks like fun. I've ridden some of the eastern gravel roads. Mixed bag of straight line boredom and windy rollers. Mostly what I remember is the wind, direction of which is roughly impossible to predict, except of course when you are on a bike it's always a headwind. Along about mile 75 that gets a little irritating.
Reminds me of a woman I saw interviewed at a Trump rally back in 2016: "Well, OF COURSE he's gonna make America great again! It says so right there on his hat!"
I've been too much watching "Ugly Americans", which features the "Manbirds", a flying species whose only utterance sounds like 'Suck my balls!' but who have a wide vocabulary based on how that's said.
It's only liberals who come up with ideas, so if we're going to have a debate about ideas, they're going to have to be liberal ones and the debate will have to be about how they're awful. Sorry, conservatives just don't do the "ideas" thing any more.
Yeah I'm sure all those people currently working from home in the Bay Area suburbs so they can walk their kids to school and hang out in the backyard while they do their zoom calls are just waiting for an opportunity to waste 2 hours a day on the freeway.
If you don't get back into the car and curse the traffic, then to paraphrase an old conservative truism, the flu has won.
Exactly. Irrespective of the likelihood that people choose never to return to cubicle hellscape (and/or bosses therefrom), the living, breathing (well, gasping) inferno of auto-commuting (and parking!) has scarred many people beyond recognition and they Will. Not. Come. Back.
Sadly but predictably, the remaining auto-jockeys are finding it easier to get into and out of town (if not to park), which makes them less likely to consider mass transit alternatives.*
*This is really important for every facet of enlightened urbanism, because mass transit focuses development in (often, anyway) rational ways, helps granny get to market and the kids to school, and gets the doped-up ravers home after the thrashmetal concert.
NUH-HUH, The Pigman explained thirty years ago that mass transit was an evil Liberaldemocrat plan to CONTROL WHERE YOU CAN GO! And thus we see the seed of the mind-numbingly stupid "move to the cities, own nothing, eat bugs" argle-bargle at present.
You can take my 6.7 liter Ford Super Duty® pickup with high-output Power Stroke V8 Turbo Diesel engine from me when you extract it from the 120 car pileup in the middle of a 10-mile section of freeway with bumper-to-bumper traffic at a dead standstill.
Re Kurtz (likewise his cohort of course): X, what an asshole.
Much too big a rabbit hole to even look at the rabbit hole, but exactly how do builders get encouraged to build urban housing? And if there’s sufficient state pressures to get builders to quit the burbs, clearly there’s no interest there in becoming urban landlords in addition, of course, to building the housing in the first place.
It’s one of these fantasies the comrades, too, lock onto: vision and no discussion of how to make it manifest.
Similarly, that 15 minute city is a great vision with no possibility of happening in the US anytime soon.
"15 minute city" is really just a shorthand for something that already exists, all over the world and all over the US too. It's looking at where the affluent live and how they live and asking why others can't have the same options.
Uhhh… I wouldn’t say that’s at all common in Manhattan or even the outer burroughs— and to the extent they do, gentrification and business locating are reducing such 15 minute areas.
I don't know Manhattan, but if I was living where the rich folks live, would I be able to find a Whole Foods, a Starbucks and many, many restaurants within walking distance? It's not an unattainable ideal, it's just unattainable right now for people who aren't rich.
Funny though how conservatives deride projects like 15 Minute Cities as "SOCIAL ENGINEERING!!!" yet want to massively restructure American society to suit their stupidity. And seem to be doing it - back in 2005 Stanley could lament that abortion wasn't going away, and yet here we are.
Didn't I used to like Michael Lind in the NY Review of Books? As Art Buchwald entitled his book about Watergate, I Think I Don't Remember. That bit about ambulances not being able to get through is also a good argument against speed limits, BTW.
I got to search out more Art Buchwald books; I really liked them back when I was a sprout. Paid no attention to politics then but thought they were funny regardless. It'd be interesting to go back to those with my knowledge now and see if they still resonate.
Since seldom is any "driver" punished for killing people on the road (unless the victims are OTHER DRIVERS), the best argument against speed limits is consequence-free unlimited murder opportunities.
"I did not see them" is a rock solid defense for any driver anywhere in this-here homeland.
"Michael Lind is the author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite."
Sounds like something I would have liked back when I was getting tear-gassed at anti-WTO protests. Now, if this article is any indication, not so much.
Funny how people are always looking for shortcuts to avoid the work of evaluating ideas on their merits. The fact that an idea comes from "managerial elites" doesn't tell us much about whether it's a good idea or a bad idea, for that we'd have to look into the details, weighing the available facts and evidence, but that's like, effort, and who wants to do that?
I hope you are incorrect about this line of nonsense finding a place in the political debates. It reminds me of the peasants in the Russian Revolution who opposed "collectivism" because they were told they would lose their little vegetable plots.
Home ownership is one of the oddest scams of the US economy. The concept is so engrained in our concept of ourselves, of our identity, that most people do not even question its efficacy or practicality.
It is a weird divide, those who believe owning a shack on a plot makes one a better class of person versus those who see owing money and taxes on something is hardly freedom. And you have to maintain the thing! I guess if you think that's the best use of time and attention...replacing a roof, pruning plants, commuting, etc.
And these days, for many people the house is the anchor they can't weigh, 'cause they're in a region dying from economic decay, so they can't sell because they won't get anything for it and they can't move because housing in functioning regions is too expensive...
That lack of income because of 40+ years of class warfare going the way of the wealthy is an expected outcome of the entire scheme called the American Dream. Color it rust.
In the nonwalkable world, suburban Maryland has become a hellscape of developments all built in the past 30 years, strung together by highways all built in the last 20 years. No town centers have been built. Instead there are shopping complexes with huge parking lots. Even so, by luck, my mother actually lives within walking distance of two of these. Twenty minutes of sidewalk, even going slooow, 0.8 miles, gets you to a supermarket, suburban chinese food, Dunkin Donuts, a poke bowl, pizza -- now ask me, in almost 30 years living there, has she ever walked to any of these places? Friends, not even once. When I visit she always says it is "great" that I walk to them, by which she means "surprising." It is always surprising.
Kids these days come up with the craziest ideas! I hear they're doing this "walking" thing now, which sounds suspiciously like "twerking", parents check on your kids, they may be "walking" in their bedroom when you're not watching!
Back in my day, we didn't have your fancy "legs" and all these "arms"! If we wanted a head of lettuce and four double-A batteries, we had to DRIVE to the store -- even if it was only fifty yards away! We had to get a disposable bag, every time, and on the way home we had to put that in the trunk of the car! Aw hell, I'm wasting my time, you don't even know what a trunk is.
Ohhhh boy, I could only read a third of the way down before I had to look away to preserve my sanity. It was like the Necronomicon -- read too much and you become a gibbering madman. Thanks!
See here, gromet! I'll have you know that when we went to Lebanon to look up the relatives we stopped at the mayor's office and he said "Sure, I'll take you there myself! Hop in the car!" Which we did, mentally bracing ourselves for (another) exciting excursion on the Roads of Terror, which did not in fact develop, as their house was across the street.
Yes, we drove across the 2-lane street and parked in the driveway.
Back in the 50s and 60s when I was just a wee lass, the "15-minute city" was where we all lived. Many people still didn't have cars. There was a main street with shopping, doctors' and dentists' offices, bars & restaurants, Woolworth's and Grant's, etc., all accessible to pedestrians. Then they built the highways out to the suburbs. Destroyed large swaths of neighborhoods, especially minority ones, and cut the city up in ways that made no sense to the existing neighborhoods. Easy access to the burbs fueled white flight, encouraged by fear of encroaching minorities and block busting by greedy realtors. If I moved back to the old home town, I would have to have a car and live virtually a suburban lifestlye since there is no grocery or other shopping within walking distance.
In my current urban hellhole, I have indeed a 15-minute walk to groceries and other shopping, the public transportation is adequate to get downtown or to a suburban mall if I want. Sad to say, the creeping gentrification is eating the amenities that make urban living pleasant. The suburbs' refusal to build any housing denser than single-family on large lots is forcing the city to make up the difference by building large, monotonous glass boxes of apartments on any buildable surface. Who is forcing tiny, expensive apartments on whom, Mr Kurtz?
I'm not a reporter, but I am snooty when being chased down the road by a massive Ram with a pristine cargo bed. In the each according to their needs world of common sense such vehicles would be used only by people whose livelihood involves hauling building supplies. I've given up bicycling on public roads and will stick to restricted trails because of those who don't need trucks who are clogging the roads, though it would be nice if I could ride a bike to the grocery in 15 minutes or less. Which we will need to start doing to get a handle on carbon output, mass obesity, and much more. Or I could put my bike in the bed of my FRamHevvy to haul to the trails to take my rides, and let the rest of the world burn
Guy just up the street from me is a doctor. His office is just about three miles from his little home on a 1/2-acre lot. But he has one of the biggest pick-ups I've ever seen. He uses the biggest John Deere to mow his little plot. All I can think is "Why?"
Some men just really, really want to see the ice caps melt.
'When the last tree falls, He shall return' - somewhere in the Bible
I was just reading about the Tree of Ténéré, an acacia tree in the Sahara, famous for being the only tree in a hundred mile radius. Scientists think it grew in a period when the desert was wetter, then was able to survive because it put roots down more than a hundred feet to reach water. It was a famous landmark, all the desert caravans navigated by it, so when they put highways across the desert they followed the traditional caravan routes, which put the tree right next to a highway. You can guess what happened next, a truck driver (some say he was drunk) ran into the tree and killed it. I can imagine him stumbling out of the cab of his truck, saying, "Who the fuck put a tree there?"
In the Guiness Book of World Records, listed as World's Remotest Tree. With a footnote as you mentioned. Only thing I remember from the sainted book, which I read cover to cover when I was eleven or so...
I checked, the title is now held by a spruce on an island off the coast of Antarctica, but it was planted by some Brit visiting the island so THAT'S CHEATING.
Yeah, the Giant Hotwheels Pickup That's Never Hauled Anything Except Groceries That Follows You On The Highway At A Distance Of One Foot is a regular pest here as well.
Apologies: I've got a right-wing nut process running sometimes:
> Which we will need to start doing to get a handle on carbon output,
FAKE PROBLEM, JUST A STALKING-HORSE FOR COMMUFASCISOCIALISMS,PROBABLY ISLAMO- TOO
> mass obesity,
NOW YER FAT-SHAMING—INCONSISTENT LIBRUL MUCH?
> and much more.
IS THERE NO END TO YOUR LUST FOR POWER? WHAT NEW 'PROBLEMS' WILL YOUR KIND INVENT TO COMMUNIZE US? INVENTING 'RACISM' WASN'T ENOUGH!?
Look, the cities are full of ni . . . um, people who are not like you, William T. Whitebread. And the liberals will do anything ANYTHING!!!! to force your daughter to marry one of those. And that includes forcing you to move to Manhattan when your house in Manhasset gets burned down--probably by MS-13, know what I mean? And then what are you gonna do? You'll be forced FORCED!!! to walk to one of those bodegas! Why, there will probably even be laws mandating you eat delicious foods that Cracker Barrel and Applebees don't serve!
MS13?
Ha! -- you can't even buy MS9 with MS13 these days....
Still better than MST3K—those robots can be _vicious_.
Those bodegas, being located conveniently on every street corner, will be so close to your place that it will force you to get fat because you don't get enough exercise walking to them! Shoot, I burn more calories just parallel parking my Mondo Glorioso!
The horror of *you* having to *go to* the taco truck.
The horrifying convenience of being able to walk a block to buy beer minutes before 2am (CA sales cutoff - more liberal technocrat social engineering) and shoot the shit with a clerk who knows your name (and will occasionally run some short credit if you’re light) and whose name you know as well. It really is quite Lovecraftian!
Eldritch, even...
Especially their cleavers.
But are they chthonic and/or squamous and/or rugose?
Dunno 'bout them; I myself often feel squamous and/or rugose, tho almost never chthonic...
Do California bodegas have cats?
In LA, yeah. Cool cats.
Let's not even get into the horrors of BODEGA CAT.
Who named them bodega cats and not bodegatos
Ya got me there, amigo.
Aw, jeezus, it was RIGHT THERE
I know what I'm calling them from now on
(There must be a difference between bodegas and corner stores because I never saw a kitty in any of the places in my old neighborhood, much to my disappointment.)
Named before we knew we could make words like Brangelina.
I long for those innocent times, because to me pop culture compound words are annoying AF.
Step away from the Germans.
I'm gonna sell my house in town
Bodegato
I'm gonna sell my house in town
Well played.
You might have to say as many as thirty-five good-byes before you leave.
The BODEGA CAT who shall not be Named lest it be summoned!
Eldritch scritches.
I mean, if they don't serve it at Barrel O'Crackers, is it even FOOD to begin with?
(as I prepare to go off to work where a very good lamb saag and a piece of garlic naan await for dinner)
(Barrel O' Crackers, best known for canned veg and racism, and not necessarily in that order.)
Oh I got a barrel o' crackers
And crackers're plenty for me
A calypso about Indian food:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF9ziPJoWPk
> the cities are full of ni . . .
Lucky for you those church bells rang-out at that point, I hear the Jewish Space Lasers get anyone who says the whole word* too loudly.
*'It is one of our worship-words!'
"one of"? Buddy, it's THE worship-word.
Which word? I didn't quite catch that. Can you repeat clearly and distinctly? Thanks in advance.
Beyond the abject stupidity of these arguments, they are silly as well. “If cars and trucks are banished from the pedestrian village, how are medics in ambulances to get to victims of heart attacks?” You know what happens when a person has a heart attack and they’re in a pedestrian zone? The fucking ambulance drives in the pedestrian zone. And because there’s no traffic jams to contend with, and people will willingly and quickly scatter out of the way if an ambulance is coming to address a medical emergency, it’s better than forcing the ambulance to deal with a street full of cars that can’t get out of the way because everybody is forced to drive a car to get anywhere.
At the big festivals, where (Horrors!) many thousands of people gather festively, the EMTs on bicycles always get to the patients first.
"if cars and trucks are banished yadda yadda"
You KNOW that's one of those brainfarts they always write with a little chuckle and a smile, real BUTWHATABOUT bullshit that they have no interest in checking how it works in The Real World because they think it's too great a dunk on those stupid libturds.
Like my brother-in-law was going on about solar panels and EV batteries, and how HORRIBLE for the environment disposing of them was, like they're made with 2-4-5 Trioxin or something. Thirty seconds with Google and I find people bein' entrepreneurial and working on these issues because "find a need and fill it". WHY DOES MY B-I-L HATE CAPITALISM
We can extract cobalt from a rock in the Congo when the cobalt is only 0.1% of the rock, but somehow we won't be able to extract cobalt from a used battery when it's 3% of the battery.
Well, y'see, we KNOW how to extract that cobalt from the battery, but it's *cheaper* to ship cobalt from the Congo than to do that.
I know, we ship the used batteries back to the Congo, paint the word "Ore" on the side and let the children find them. Problem solved!
You, sir, need to be careful, 'cause you are on a serious roll, and the hill's gettin' steeper...
It's true. Solar panels developed by the military in 1968 *were* made of 2-4-5 Trioxin. It got hushed up and they were supposed to dispose of the panels in some special facility, but no one knows where they actually got shipped. Typical army fuckup. You wanna see em? They're in my basement.
They're in some boxes I've been meaning to go through, with my golf clothes and a bunch of papers.
Store them in the bathroom; I hear it's the most secure place in the house.
Next to the barrel labeled “ZOMBIE EXPERIMENT RESULTS *DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES* TOP SECRET NEED TO KNOW ONLY
It's totally safe! This is solid engineering! [smacks barrel with hand a little too hard]
Too late, the Rage Virus is already loose in the population.
Wasn't the "Beware of the Leopard" sign still posted?
I'm cutting you off: no more paramedics for you.
'Fun' 'fact': 2-4-5 Trioxin was developed as an improved form of Gamma 693.
This must be some new meaning of the term 'Fun' with which I was previously unfamiliar.
Hey, I'm _not_ saying that Dan O'Bannon ripped-off an exceptionally cheap zombie movie starring a porn actor, but their version of zombies are pretty close, much closer to each other than to Romero's.
The enemy of mine enemy is not always my friend, but note that the less careerist 'libert'arians hate Trump's rejection of Free Market principles, a natural extension of his rejection of all principles beyond Please Donald Trump. (He likes CronyCapitalism, but would be even happier without the 'Capital'.)
And yet he wanted his minions to seize the capitol for him...
His version of English has only one possessive pronoun in it, and it's not 'yours'.
Cars and trucks are pseudo-ethnic (for the pseudo-ethnos 'White Americans') cultural vehicles, the way AR-15s are their cultural weapons.
You can take the steering wheel of my Prius with the bike rack on the back outta my not-particularly-cold-'cause-they're-stuffed-into-fleece-lined-calfskin-gloved hands.
I think I mentioned before being stuck in traffic behind a big pickup with a "Stomp My Flag I'll Stomp Your Ass" sign in the back window, but I didn't finish the story, because an ambulance came up behind us, all lights-n-sirens, and everybody edged out of the way as much as they could, clearing just enough space on a packed 3-lane road for the ambulance to pass. All except for Mr. Stomp Your Ass, who was thrown into a state of total confusion, first turning right, then left, then coming to a full stop in the middle of the lane, paralyzed by indecision, with a goddamn ambulance whoop-whooping right on his enormous rear bumper. It took a while for the dim bulb to grow a little brighter, and eventually the ambulance was able to get around him. It was all quite satisfying to watch, except for the horrifying possibility that someone was dying somewhere, waiting for an ambulance.
I assume he told his wife later, "Well, this is the last time I come into The Big City!"
Damn sick people!
And their Socialist ambulance services! Throw meemaw in the bed of the F-350 and drive her to the hospital yerself!
Hospitals are theft! Only hyper-individual solutions are acceptable! Learn medicine on your own and do your own EMTing! I'm sure there's a group on Facebook ready to help you!
Surely one of the million or so newly minted virologists can figure out what to do about Memaw's stroke.
I have a sticker I am SO tempted to put on the car: the I.W.W. Sabo-tabby eating the Gadsden flag snake on a red & black background with the text "WELL I DIDN'T TREAD", but I fear it isn't weatherproof.
Or bulletproof. . .
(Those people get upset when you laugh at their flag.)
Oh, I was laughing, all right, just not at the flag.
Didja all see the headline in the goog feed today about the cops arresting some guy because he "left a bullethole in their car"?
"What the hell? I had that bullethole just a minute ago..."
New D20 Modern magic item: Portable Bullethole
https://media.tenor.com/h8mUprv8MYIAAAAd/acme-portable-hole-roadrunner.gif
I drive nearly 2 hours a day to my job in the green industries. My wife drives a full size pick-up.She needs it to tow the horse trailer. About that RV- Don't ask .
I'm the last person that should be talking to people about reducing a carbon footprint.
I bet you could sell the Olds on a 15 minute lifestyle. You'd have to allow golf carts.(Old people fucking love golf carts.)
Plus give them exclusive communities. Over 55. Nobody else really wants to live around them anyway.
The lack of interest young people have in old people has turned out to be one of the blessings of old age.
That funny old people smell is a defensive mechanism.
I dunno, I always kinda liked the funny ones, even when I was a kid...
I smoke weed because I heard it masked the Old People Smell.
FunFact: old person smell is 2-Nonenal. For a not-so-fun fact, look up Putrescine.
Thanks. I'll take 2.
We sell Corpse flowers under the tamer misnomer " Voodoo Lily"
They foolishly planted one in one of our test plots and were amazed at the stench.
And yet it is the single most popular attraction at the Botanical Gardens.
I stood in (a fairly short) line for our local one. It was worth it.
…where one of its attractions is that you can start going far away from it at any time.
Japanese: 'kareishu'=='essence of aging'
What the actual fuck did I wander into here? I'm 65 and in addition to every other goddamned thing going on I have to worry about having Old People Smell? Just shoot me.
SnarkiNorski
Shared this with me and now I need heroin.
https://assistinghands.com/55/florida/sarasota/blog/prevent-senior-body-odor/#:~:text=Living%20a%20healthy%20lifestyle%20can,Exercise%20and%20eat%20nutritiously.
Well, youngster, I Googled 2-Nonenal when it was mentioned in an earlier comment (and Putrescine, for fuck's sake) so I've already read this horrifying article! Seems I'd better develop a taste for green tea and...
Well at least I’ve got something to look forward to in the next decade or two, so there’s that!
Yes, it's like a Cloak of Invisibility.
Or a Displacer Cloak. You know the odor is coming from somewhere, but you can’t pinpoint it.
Him what smelt it dealt it!
Until the last few years, I've only known the U.S. Growing up the suburbs, that was my initial paradigm of "normal," until I hit adolescence and began to feel increasingly alienated from it. And urban life meant NYC, so I've been happy living out in the country surrounded by greenery and silence.
Then last month I spent a week each in Paris and Amsterdam. With a metro card, you can go anywhere, quickly and cheaply. Instead of gray canyons of high-rises trapping dirt, noise, and caged people, buildings were human-scaled and aesthetically interesting, parks were frequent, and my rooms were actually quiet. (And no enormous pick-up trucks!)
Frankly, I don't see how we can reverse engineer the U.S. to achieve European-style liveability. The obstacles, physical and social, are just too great.
At least you saw! As I've been saying for years, the primary reason conservatives spread city-hate is to keep us from ever even venturing to see what the alternatives to our current way of life might be.
The bicyclization of Amsterdam, as depicted in the film Together We Cycle, was not some ride in the park. It was just as hard, infuriating and dangerous a thing to accomplish as it is here. I saw the film at a special screening at the Dutch Embassy, with a panel discussion afterward (adding "Dutch" to planning policy wonkism – not for the faint-hearted). That place went thru the same stuff we are going thru, just a generation earlier.
I don't know if it's that film or another one I saw, kids shutting down a street by declaring an all-day play festival, no cars allowed, we're playing here! I believe the word "spielstrasse" was used?
"Die Spielstrasse ist das tolle Internet-Portal für Kinder! Neben einem sehr übersichtlichem Verzeichnis für Kinderseiten mit einer kinderleichten Suche gibt es außerdem noch ein Soundstudio für Kinder, ein Mal- und Downloadstudio, Buchvorstellungen von empfehlenswerten Kinder- und Jugendbüchern, einen kleinen Tierpark sowie das tolle Bananenspiel mit Bono."
So there ya go – it's all about Sonny Bono!
All roads lead to Sonny.
And the Beat Goes On®
Get yer car outta my Internet-Portal! Danke!
Prod off, Bananenspiel!
Not unless you can prove I downloaded illegally.
Before I went to Amsterdam I listened to an absolutely first-rate history of the city by Russell Shorto*, an American ex-pat. This gave me some understanding of the peculiarly Dutch temperament, a near-perfect balance of individualism and communitarianism — which reinforces my skepticism about this country.
(I especially liked the bicycles designed for hauling stuff, including up to four little kids crammed together — but I had a couple of near-death experiences with the faster ones. Do *not* step off the curb without looking both ways!)
*I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It was as engaging and entertaining as a novel.
Thank-you for that reference—his "The Island at the Center[sic] of the World" is a treat fro any Manhattanphile (and dependent on older Dutch documents,as I'll guess would be the Amsterdam book, which I'll hazard without evidence grew out of the New York book).
Shut up, sit down, eyes forward, there are no alternatives
NEVER, under any circumstances, ask "How do other people do things?" That way lies SOCIALISM.
If you worked at a company and the CEO said, "We must NEVER closely examine what our competition is doing so we can improve our own operations and stay competitive" you probably wouldn't think they were up for a prize for CEO of the year. But conservatives, who are always full of homespun "Run government like a bizness!" thinking never think of this analogy.
'American exceptionalism' means that it's anything from foolish to
treasonous to try to apply anything learned in foreign parts here.
We're not alone in nationalism as an excuse for wilful ignorance:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/16/vladimir-putin-russia-politics-of-eternity-timothy-snyder
'In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.'
Of course the real history of suburb v. city is exclusionary zoning which took over from red-lining when that racist scheme was weakened (but not eliminated). Yes, some people want a big yard and no sidewalks and the need to drive to everything and also lower taxes. Then the suburb grows up, has to add services, traffic into town gets ugly and taxes go up. Suddenly there’s interest in “partnering” with the city to provide fire, public transportation, police, water and sewage. But no way they’ll let themselves be annexed and be subjected to multi family housing, integrated schools, etc. It all starts with zoning.
Data points, not necessarily correlative nor even cogent (tho I s'pose there's potentially a limerick in there somewhere):
Portland is the city I know a little bit about that officially adopted a greenbelt development boundary. What I know of River City is it has a tall downtown on the left bank, with expensive housing upslope, extremely walkable city center and decent mass transit. Its right bank has a more suburban feel, but it is built out with single family homes on relatively small lots, with many modest-but-interesting commercial strips. Overall, aside from the derelict people of various sorts, the place is easily traversed by any mode, and green as hell.
Omaha, another city I've spent time in, suffers from flatitude. That is, on a relatively smooth level landscape, to a city father with an affinity for an infinitely expanding tax base it looks easy to spread out in (almost) all directions (the river is keeps the city from flopping into Iowa). So spread it did, consuming many little communities north, west and south over the decades. This led to circumstances such as the neighborhoods built a few decades ago in what was then unincorporated areas coming to the end of their infrastructure lives (roads, sewers, etc) and being denied maintenance services by the city because they had been built by the private developers. So some paved roads are reverting to dirt because the city won't repave them and the residents can't afford it. Should not need to add "walkable" it ain't. The apartment the missus lived in on the waterfront (easy walk to work) was 110 blocks from the nearest good grocery store.
Most of my urbanism self-education comes from decades in the Bay Area. It sprawled early enough into the hills that the nimbys managed to preserve their status for generations, and the flatlands filled in eventually. But the preservationist gene pool was pretty large there way back. Thus (against great odds, not to mention some lunatic opposition) the Bay was cleaned up a bit, and over 1.5 million acres(!) of open space in the region have been preserved from development. I was involved in a delightful regional planning effort to ID all the most important remaining lands (and waters) to protect, that effectively (in theory) promote infill development by creating incentives for developers in 2 ways:
• allowing infill up-zoning near existing mass transit locations, with (again theoretically) lowered permitting red tape
• transmitting development 'credits' from newly-protected lands to infill projects, reducing the tax load on the unbuilt lands and increasing density on the infill
Years later it is still early days in the process, and Stuff Happens (eg the building up of downtown San Francisco just as covid hit – No one could possibly have predicted!®).
This is my thank-you note to you. I live in a tiny apartment in San Rafael, but within minutes I can get to some spectacular hiking trails, lakes, beaches and wildlife that have been preserved from development. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the Marin Municipal Water District lands (the MMWD manages our reservoirs and water supply), and the various county and city open space areas are an amazing gift.
Of course, we are dealing with infill measures too, and we are going to have to adjust. There are mandatory goals in place, but damn, I just want to assure people that it's possible to live a rewarding, pleasant life in an apartment, especially when you have the fabulous good fortune of access to the natural world.
I'll speak for the many far more influential* and politically savvy folk and say 'You're Welcome'.
The histories of founding the GGNRA and the Marin Headlands addition, for instance, are well worth researching. The Headlands story is endearing land-advocacy literature. That deal was sealed high in a New York skyscraper by a personal check for $100. The story includes this exchange, between the CEO of a huge development company and the lead preservation advocate:
Huge developer dude: "My company employs many highly skilled attorneys and I pay them lots of money."
Scruffy land advocate: "We have lots of skilled attorneys too, and they work for free!"
*Holy Crap! I just realized "influential" and "influenza" are...well, I'm not sure exactly what they are, but it can't be good!
At one point the 'flu was blamed on the evil influence (`mal' influenzaʼ) of (I think) the planets.
This made my day whether it's true or not.
Adding here I lived in San Anselmo for awhile when I was a kid, and Terra Linda when I was a slightly older kid, and those were among the best years of my life to that point.
I really like San Anselmo. I've had a few dog-walking/house-sitting clients there. Also in Ross and Kent Woodlands. And Belvedere and Tiburon. I'm like an undercover spy in a whole other world. But I take good care of my critter-friends. (Right now I'm off to visit an elderdog on the Greenbrae Boardwalk - smallish houses on pylons in the salt marsh with big views of marsh, hills, and San Quentin. It is truly a land of contrasts. 😉)
I have enjoyed many a bike ride all over those places, including San Quentin...
Inside the walls or outside?
John Hodgman claimed in "The Areas of My Expertise" that you can orient yourself in Omaha by setting a quarter on-edge, at which point it will roll toward Warren Buffett's house, beside the obvious joke about his money-making ability also, I'd say, a joke about the city's flatness.
Thing is, it's really a bunch of little flat-topped rollers. It just seems flat compared to much of the rest of the nation. But not in the same league as, say, the Central Valley of California. Flattest, levelest place on earth according to John McPhee.
(and of course taxes in the suburbs go up partially because the idiots in control keep giving businesses tax breaks)
A (local) microcosm of the issue at hand, e.g., What Happens When White Suburbanites Hate Paying Taxes: https://www.wsav.com/crime-safety/officials-effingham-county-tornado-sirens-did-not-sound-during-confirmed-june-14-ef-1-tornado/
I love these histrionics about 'the tyranny of the pedestrian' over car owners, and unquantifiable hyperbole (as you ably point out) like 'most people in Western democracies' suits the Reactionary Sprawler Set down to the core. 'Most people' as in, scared white people like ME. Maybe I sound unsophisticated but they can s*ck my b*lls with that garbage.
Hear hear
SCARED WIPIPOS: “If you’re like me, and I know I am, . . .”
"sock my bills"?
Sick my Bulls! GO BULLS! < written as a person who follow NO sports and doesn't even know if that is a baseball or basketball team.
Toreadors wanna word.
It's a small step from "Bills", as in "Buffalo", a kinda popular football team around here. I suppose if they're losing it could be "sack my Bills" but I get the impression most of the Bills fans are REALAMURRICANS™ and thus ignorant of that use of "sack".
"Well, sock my bells!" said the Notre Dame Cathedral right before it burned down.
If the people of Portland or San Francisco or Berkeley don't want to live under the tyranny of 15- minute cities, they've got an easy remedy: Vote in a mayor and city council that won't do this stuff. And if the people of Omaha or Dallas want to sprawl to their heart's content, I assume they'll vote accordingly.
Once again, "They're forcing ____ down our throats" really means "Somewhere, people are using the democratic process to make choices we disagree with."
OMG for sprawl in Omaha—you should see Dodge Street, now elevated over a section of (previously) West O, and continuing as a multi lane artery all the way out to Elkhorn (previously a distant little town; long since annexed). Downtown Omaha is redeveloping, but suburbia is a hell of a drug.
As long as they leave the Ponca Hills alone.
This is on my bucket list:
https://bikepacking.com/routes/bikepacking-nebraska/
That looks like fun. I've ridden some of the eastern gravel roads. Mixed bag of straight line boredom and windy rollers. Mostly what I remember is the wind, direction of which is roughly impossible to predict, except of course when you are on a bike it's always a headwind. Along about mile 75 that gets a little irritating.
Ah, DEMOCRATic process, I see your BIAS there!
Sorry I forgot AmeRiCa iS a rEpuBLic nOt A dEMocRaCY.
I still maintain that they do that because OBVIOUSLY 🙄 if America is a republic, the GOP MUST be the correct American party.
God's people, god's will.
Reminds me of a woman I saw interviewed at a Trump rally back in 2016: "Well, OF COURSE he's gonna make America great again! It says so right there on his hat!"
How could they put it on a hat if it wasn't true?!
If they were _properly_ reactionary they'd favour pedestrians.
Ha! Also, they kinda do: whenever they haveta choose between hitting the semi or hitting the little old lady in tennis shoes, they favour granny.
'There are times when you don't want to be "Number One".'—George Carlin.
Get to the head of the line, champ!
I've been too much watching "Ugly Americans", which features the "Manbirds", a flying species whose only utterance sounds like 'Suck my balls!' but who have a wide vocabulary based on how that's said.
Indulge away! It's what we signed up for!
It's only liberals who come up with ideas, so if we're going to have a debate about ideas, they're going to have to be liberal ones and the debate will have to be about how they're awful. Sorry, conservatives just don't do the "ideas" thing any more.
This is good content
What does Roy write that isn't?
Yeah I'm sure all those people currently working from home in the Bay Area suburbs so they can walk their kids to school and hang out in the backyard while they do their zoom calls are just waiting for an opportunity to waste 2 hours a day on the freeway.
If you don't get back into the car and curse the traffic, then to paraphrase an old conservative truism, the flu has won.
Exactly. Irrespective of the likelihood that people choose never to return to cubicle hellscape (and/or bosses therefrom), the living, breathing (well, gasping) inferno of auto-commuting (and parking!) has scarred many people beyond recognition and they Will. Not. Come. Back.
Sadly but predictably, the remaining auto-jockeys are finding it easier to get into and out of town (if not to park), which makes them less likely to consider mass transit alternatives.*
*This is really important for every facet of enlightened urbanism, because mass transit focuses development in (often, anyway) rational ways, helps granny get to market and the kids to school, and gets the doped-up ravers home after the thrashmetal concert.
NUH-HUH, The Pigman explained thirty years ago that mass transit was an evil Liberaldemocrat plan to CONTROL WHERE YOU CAN GO! And thus we see the seed of the mind-numbingly stupid "move to the cities, own nothing, eat bugs" argle-bargle at present.
Them cons gonna be surprised when they try to outlaw edible insects and they find themselves in the sights of the most frightening cartel: Big Bug.
"In America, insects eat YOU!" says some Floridian version of Yakov Smirnoff.
"Grover Norquist awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find he'd been transformed into a lobbyist for Big Bug."
Not as much transformation required as you might think.
The lobby of the Big Bug Hotel in the Federal District (not the Willard, that's the place for rats and Romneys) is replete with Samsanite™ luggage.
"rats and Romneys" is the sort of redundancy which needs no ampersand.
You can take my 6.7 liter Ford Super Duty® pickup with high-output Power Stroke V8 Turbo Diesel engine from me when you extract it from the 120 car pileup in the middle of a 10-mile section of freeway with bumper-to-bumper traffic at a dead standstill.
So...many, many cold dead hands then...?
Many. All in 10-12 position.
Brings back (un)fond memories of driving school...
Re Kurtz (likewise his cohort of course): X, what an asshole.
Much too big a rabbit hole to even look at the rabbit hole, but exactly how do builders get encouraged to build urban housing? And if there’s sufficient state pressures to get builders to quit the burbs, clearly there’s no interest there in becoming urban landlords in addition, of course, to building the housing in the first place.
It’s one of these fantasies the comrades, too, lock onto: vision and no discussion of how to make it manifest.
Similarly, that 15 minute city is a great vision with no possibility of happening in the US anytime soon.
"15 minute city" is really just a shorthand for something that already exists, all over the world and all over the US too. It's looking at where the affluent live and how they live and asking why others can't have the same options.
How come I hafta live in this 4th floor hovel when the folks up on the 12th floor hog all the sun and views, huh?!
Uhhh… I wouldn’t say that’s at all common in Manhattan or even the outer burroughs— and to the extent they do, gentrification and business locating are reducing such 15 minute areas.
I don't know Manhattan, but if I was living where the rich folks live, would I be able to find a Whole Foods, a Starbucks and many, many restaurants within walking distance? It's not an unattainable ideal, it's just unattainable right now for people who aren't rich.
Mistah Kurtz, he dumb.
Funny though how conservatives deride projects like 15 Minute Cities as "SOCIAL ENGINEERING!!!" yet want to massively restructure American society to suit their stupidity. And seem to be doing it - back in 2005 Stanley could lament that abortion wasn't going away, and yet here we are.
1. Hahaha!
2. Can’t play the hypocrisy card against people who don’t care about fact but just on what they want.
Didn't I used to like Michael Lind in the NY Review of Books? As Art Buchwald entitled his book about Watergate, I Think I Don't Remember. That bit about ambulances not being able to get through is also a good argument against speed limits, BTW.
I got to search out more Art Buchwald books; I really liked them back when I was a sprout. Paid no attention to politics then but thought they were funny regardless. It'd be interesting to go back to those with my knowledge now and see if they still resonate.
Since seldom is any "driver" punished for killing people on the road (unless the victims are OTHER DRIVERS), the best argument against speed limits is consequence-free unlimited murder opportunities.
"I did not see them" is a rock solid defense for any driver anywhere in this-here homeland.
"I saw them, but they were black and shouty" is under development as a defense.
"Michael Lind is the author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite."
Sounds like something I would have liked back when I was getting tear-gassed at anti-WTO protests. Now, if this article is any indication, not so much.
Funny how people are always looking for shortcuts to avoid the work of evaluating ideas on their merits. The fact that an idea comes from "managerial elites" doesn't tell us much about whether it's a good idea or a bad idea, for that we'd have to look into the details, weighing the available facts and evidence, but that's like, effort, and who wants to do that?
I hope you are incorrect about this line of nonsense finding a place in the political debates. It reminds me of the peasants in the Russian Revolution who opposed "collectivism" because they were told they would lose their little vegetable plots.
Home ownership is one of the oddest scams of the US economy. The concept is so engrained in our concept of ourselves, of our identity, that most people do not even question its efficacy or practicality.
It is a weird divide, those who believe owning a shack on a plot makes one a better class of person versus those who see owing money and taxes on something is hardly freedom. And you have to maintain the thing! I guess if you think that's the best use of time and attention...replacing a roof, pruning plants, commuting, etc.
And these days, for many people the house is the anchor they can't weigh, 'cause they're in a region dying from economic decay, so they can't sell because they won't get anything for it and they can't move because housing in functioning regions is too expensive...
That lack of income because of 40+ years of class warfare going the way of the wealthy is an expected outcome of the entire scheme called the American Dream. Color it rust.
In the nonwalkable world, suburban Maryland has become a hellscape of developments all built in the past 30 years, strung together by highways all built in the last 20 years. No town centers have been built. Instead there are shopping complexes with huge parking lots. Even so, by luck, my mother actually lives within walking distance of two of these. Twenty minutes of sidewalk, even going slooow, 0.8 miles, gets you to a supermarket, suburban chinese food, Dunkin Donuts, a poke bowl, pizza -- now ask me, in almost 30 years living there, has she ever walked to any of these places? Friends, not even once. When I visit she always says it is "great" that I walk to them, by which she means "surprising." It is always surprising.
Kids these days come up with the craziest ideas! I hear they're doing this "walking" thing now, which sounds suspiciously like "twerking", parents check on your kids, they may be "walking" in their bedroom when you're not watching!
Back in my day, we didn't have your fancy "legs" and all these "arms"! If we wanted a head of lettuce and four double-A batteries, we had to DRIVE to the store -- even if it was only fifty yards away! We had to get a disposable bag, every time, and on the way home we had to put that in the trunk of the car! Aw hell, I'm wasting my time, you don't even know what a trunk is.
Now all cars are trunkless! It's all part of that UN Agenda 21!
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jun/24/agenda-21-conspiracy-theory-sustainability
Ohhhh boy, I could only read a third of the way down before I had to look away to preserve my sanity. It was like the Necronomicon -- read too much and you become a gibbering madman. Thanks!
And people without arms or legs are just trunks! What I'm getting at, the whole world truncates its way towards Armageddon!
See here, gromet! I'll have you know that when we went to Lebanon to look up the relatives we stopped at the mayor's office and he said "Sure, I'll take you there myself! Hop in the car!" Which we did, mentally bracing ourselves for (another) exciting excursion on the Roads of Terror, which did not in fact develop, as their house was across the street.
Yes, we drove across the 2-lane street and parked in the driveway.
I got nuthin'.
A Lebanon—Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon,…—or The?
https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/middleeast/the-lebanons-in-america-fadi-boukaram/index.html
The Phoenician one, yeah.
Back in the 50s and 60s when I was just a wee lass, the "15-minute city" was where we all lived. Many people still didn't have cars. There was a main street with shopping, doctors' and dentists' offices, bars & restaurants, Woolworth's and Grant's, etc., all accessible to pedestrians. Then they built the highways out to the suburbs. Destroyed large swaths of neighborhoods, especially minority ones, and cut the city up in ways that made no sense to the existing neighborhoods. Easy access to the burbs fueled white flight, encouraged by fear of encroaching minorities and block busting by greedy realtors. If I moved back to the old home town, I would have to have a car and live virtually a suburban lifestlye since there is no grocery or other shopping within walking distance.
In my current urban hellhole, I have indeed a 15-minute walk to groceries and other shopping, the public transportation is adequate to get downtown or to a suburban mall if I want. Sad to say, the creeping gentrification is eating the amenities that make urban living pleasant. The suburbs' refusal to build any housing denser than single-family on large lots is forcing the city to make up the difference by building large, monotonous glass boxes of apartments on any buildable surface. Who is forcing tiny, expensive apartments on whom, Mr Kurtz?
Infill. (My joke about the official bird of Atlanta being the Construction Crane is particularly apt nowadays.)
Yeah. Back when SF was jumpin' and birders asked me If I'd ever seen the sandhill crane migration I'd respond "No need – I live in Crane City."