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Guest Post: (Un)Paving Our Way To The Future
Submitted by James H. Kunstler via Peak Prosperity blog,
You can’t overstate the baleful effects for Americans of living in the tortured landscapes and townscapes we created for ourselves in the past century. This fiasco of cartoon suburbia, overgrown metroplexes, trashed small cities and abandoned small towns, and the gruesome connective tissue of roadways, commercial smarm, and free parking is the toxic medium of everyday life in this country. Its corrosive omnipresence induces a general failure of conscious awareness that it works implacably at every moment to diminish our lives. It is both the expression of our collapsed values and a self-reinforcing malady collapsing our values further. The worse it gets, the worse we become.
The citizens who do recognize their own discomfort in this geography of nowhere generally articulate it as a response to “ugliness.” This is only part of the story. The effects actually run much deeper. The aggressive and immersive ugliness of the built landscape is entropy made visible. It is composed of elements that move us in the direction of death, and the apprehension of this dynamic is what really makes people uncomfortable. It spreads a vacuum of lost meaning and purpose wherever it reaches. It is worse than nothing, worse than if it had never existed. As such, it qualifies under St. Augustine’s conception of “evil” in the sense that it represents antagonism to the forces of life.
We find ourselves now in a strange slough of history. Circumstances gathering in the home economics of mankind ought to inform us that we can’t keep living this way and need to make plans for living differently. But our sunk costs in this infrastructure for daily life with no future prevent us from making better choices. At least for the moment. In large part this is because the “development” of all this ghastly crap — the vinyl-and-strandboard housing subdivisions, the highway strips, malls, and “lifestyle centers,” the “Darth Vader” office parks, the infinity of asphalt pavements — became, for a while, our replacement for an economy of ecological sanity. The housing bubble was all about building more stuff with no future, and that is why the attempt to re-start it is evil.
Sooner rather than later we’ll have to make better choices. We’ll have to redesign the human habitat in America because our current environs will become uninhabitable. The means and modes for doing this are already understood. They do not require heroic “innovation” or great leaps of “new technology.” Mostly they require a decent respect for easily referenced history and a readjustment of our values in the general direction of promoting life over death. This means for accomplishing this will be the subject of Part II of this essay, but it is necessary to review a pathology report of the damage done.
Launching Nirvana
I have a new theory of history: things happen in human affairs because they seem like a good idea at the time. This helps explain events that otherwise defy understanding, for example the causes of the First World War. England, France, Russia, Germany, and Italy joined that war because it seemed like a good idea at the time, namely August of 1914. There hadn’t been a real good dust-up on the continent since Waterloo in 1814. Old grievances were stewing. Empires were both rising and falling, contracting and reaching out. The “players” seemed to go into the war thinking it would be a short, redemptive, and rather glorious adventure, complete with cavalry charges and evenings in ballrooms. The “deciders” failed to take into account the effects of newly mechanized warfare. The result was the staggering industrial slaughter of the trenches. Poison gas attacks did not inspire picturesque heroism. And what started the whole thing? Ostensibly the assassination of an unpopular Hapsburg prince in Serbia. Was Franz Ferdinand an important figure? Not really. Was Austria a threat to France and England? It was in steep decline, a sclerotic empire held together with whipped cream and waltz music. Did Russia really care about little Serbia? Was Germany insane to attack on two fronts? Starting the fight seemed like a good idea at the time — and then, of course, the unintended consequences bit back like a mad dog from hell.
Likewise America’s war against its own landscape, which got underway in earnest just as the First World War ended (1918). The preceding years had seen Henry Ford perfect, first, the Model T (1908), and then the assembly line method of production (1915), and when WW I was out of the way, America embarked on its romance with democratic motoring. First, the cities were retrofitted for cars. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but the streets were soon overwhelmed by them. By the mid-1920s the temptation to motorize the countryside beyond the cities was irresistible, as were the potential profits to be reaped. What’s more, automobilizing the cities made them more unpleasant places to live, and reinforced the established American animus against city life in general, while supporting and enabling the fantasy that everyone ought to live in some approximation to a country squire, preferably in some kind of frontier.
The urban hinterlands presented just such a simulacrum of a frontier. It wasn’t a true frontier anymore in the sense of civilization meeting wilderness, but it was a real estate frontier and that was good enough for the moment. Developing it with houses seemed like a good idea. Indeed, it proved to be an excellent way to make money. The first iteration of 1920s car suburbs bloomed in the rural ring around every city in the land. An expanding middle class could “move to the country” but still have easy access to the city, with all its business and cultural amenities. What a wonderful thing! And so suburban real estate development became embedded in the national economic psychology as a pillar of “progress” and “growth.”
This activity contributed hugely to the fabled boom of the 1920s. Alas, the financial shenanigans arising out of all this new wealth, along with other disorders of capital, such as the saturation of markets, blew up the banking system and the Great Depression was on. The construction industry was hardest it. Very little private real estate development happened in the 1930s. And as that decade segued right into the Second World War, the dearth continued.
When the soldiers came home, the economic climate had shifted. America was the only industrial economy left standing, with all the advantages implied by that, plus military control over the loser lands. We already possessed the world’s biggest oil industry. But after two decades of depression, war, and neglect, American cities were less appealing than ever. The dominant image of city life in 1952 was Ralph Kramden’s apartment in The Honeymooners TV show. Yccchhh. America was a large nation, with a lot of agricultural land just beyond the city limits. Hence, the mushrooming middle class, including now well-paid factory workers, could easily be sold on “country living.” The suburban project, languishing since 1930, resumed with a vengeance. The interstate highway program accelerated it.
The Broken Promises of Suburbia
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Country life for everybody in the world’s savior democracy! Fresh air! Light! Play space for the little ones! Nothing in world history had been easier to sell. Interestingly, in a nation newly-addicted to television viewing, the suburban expansion of the 1950s took on a cartoon flavor. It was soon apparent that the emergent “product” was not “country living” but rather a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country. Yet it still sold. Americans were quite satisfied to live in a cartoon environment. It was uncomplicated. It could be purchased on installment loans. We had plenty of cheap energy to run it.
It took decades of accreting suburbia for its more insidious deficiencies to become apparent. Most noticeable was the disappearance of the rural edge as the subdivisions quickly fanned outward, dissolving the adjacent pastures, cornfields, and forests that served as reminder of the original promise of “country living.” Next was the parallel problem of accreting car traffic. Soon, that negated the promise of spacious country living in other ways. The hated urban “congestion” of living among too many people became an even more obnoxious congestion of cars. That problem was aggravated by the idiocies of single-use zoning, which mandated the strictest possible separation of activities and forced every denizen of the suburbs into driving for every little task. Under those codes (no mixed use!), the corner store was outlawed, as well as the café, the bistro, indeed any sort of gathering place within a short walk that is normal in one form or another in virtually every other culture.
This lack of public amenity drove the movement to make every household a self-contained, hermetically-sealed social unit. Instead of mixing with other people outside the family on a regular basis, Americans had TV and developed more meaningful relations with the characters on it than with the real people around them. Television was also the perfect medium for selling redundant “consumer” products: every house had to have its own lawnmower, washing machine, and pretty soon a separate TV for each family member. The result of all that was the corrosion of civic life (a.k.a “community”) until just about every civic association except for school oversight (the fabled PTA) dwindled and faded. And the net effect of all that was the stupendous loneliness, monotony, atomization, superficiality, and boredom of suburbia’s social vacuum. It was especially hard on the supposed greatest beneficiaries, children, who, having outgrown the play space of the yard by age eight, could not easily navigate the matrix of freeways and highways outside the subdivision without the aid of the “family chauffeur,” (i.e. Mom).
Cutting Our Losses & Moving On
A couple of points about the current situation in suburbia ought to be self-evident. One is that our predicament vis-à-vis oil, along with cratering middle class incomes, suggests that we won’t be able to run this arrangement of things on the landscape a whole lot longer. The circulatory system of suburbia depends on cars which run on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Despite the current propaganda (“drill, baby drill”), we have poor prospects of continuing an affordable supply of those things, and poorer prospects of running the US motor vehicle fleet by other means, despite the share price of Tesla, Inc. The second point is how poorly all suburbia’s components are aging — the vinyl-clad houses, the tilt-up strip malls, the countless chicken shacks, burger stands, and muffler shops, all the generic accessories and furnishings that litter the terrain from sea to shining sea. There are a lot of reasons these things now look bad (and lose value) but the chief one is that most of them are things nobody really cares about.
In Part II: A Better Human Habitat for the Next Economy, we explore the necessary behaviors we'll need to adopt if we hope to have any prosperity in the years ahead. What seemed like a good idea at the time — through the 20th century and a little beyond — is looking more like an experiment that failed. Our sunk costs in it promote a tendency to agonize over it. I propose that we just give up the hand-wringing and prepare to cut our losses and move on. The reality of the situation is that the response to all this will arise emergently as circumstances compel us to change our behavior and make different (and we should hope) better choices. That is to say, don’t expect programmatic political action to change this, especially from remote authorities like federal or state governments. We will reorganize life on the ground because we will have to.
Click here to read Part II of this report (free executive summary; enrollment required for full access).
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The author completely neglects the effects of the Federal Reserve Bank on these events. The real estate boom and bust of the mid 20s, was a symptom of easy credit policies of the FED, along with the, later, Stock Market boom and bust. Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank loaned England $50 billion dollars to prop up the Pound Sterling. This loan was about the same amount of money creation as financed WWI. Liquidating that expansion caused the crash of 1921.
See Murray Rothbard's book, "The Great Depression" for the details.
I have no idea what the future will bring, because our economy has been distorted by the FED since 1913. Technological advances in communications, transportation and logistics seem to alleviate the need for big cities. Biotech and 3-D manufacturing could be developed anywhere; why not in a low tax and regulation state?
Middle class and working families with children are being squeezed out the cities due to high taxes, restrictive regulations and a lack of jobs. Moreover, the big cities are where the Liberal political machines rule. The Liberals will try to maintain their power, but this retards any solution. All these cities will follow Detroit into ruin.
Rather seeing small town America vanish, I suspect that our government's financial debacle will hit the big cities very hard. The big cities might go up in flames if the welfare checks don't arrive or those checks won't buy anything because of an inflated dollar.
I don't know which direction events will follow: either into a deflation or a hyperinflation. A hyperinflation requires the active participation of the FED during a credit crisis. It would be very stupid of the FED to expand credit just as the dollar is being trashed around the world, but the FED leadership's long term inclination has been to do anything to prevent a deflation, because that would wipe put the assets of the central banks.
The FED and the Primary bankers are holding almost all of the outstanding US govt. bonds. Those bonds would become worthless if no one will accept a dollar in payment for goods or services.
You don't have to like or agree with Kunstler to understand why automobile-oriented urbanism is bad.
Instead, why not visit Nathan Lewis' site (newworldeconomics.com)? He's a proponent of a gold standard and flat-tax. No doomsterism, and certainly no socialism.
But even a flat-taxer goldbug has no problem kicking the crap out of our suburban sprawl because it's wasteful of other people's money, time and resources, and especially because it can't survive without constant massive government-directed subsidy and malvestment.
I think ZH should try to get Lewis to guest post.
I'm not so sure what is so unsustainable about suburban living when virtually all people initially lived outside of cities. For me as a "burber" the most unsustainable part is a tax system that forces me to pay for the city's infrastructure to support its massive agendas. Admittedly, if our economic system continues to unwind, we may all be living in portable stacked buildings in a FEMA camp somewhere as that will be determined by our leaders as the only sustainable lifestyle.
you're high, dude. the car is the greatest invention ever. when you get one, you will understand. i highly recomend the 2008 corvette. can be had with less than 20,000 miles on the clock for about 25k. fast, fun, comfortable and gets 30 mpg on the highway.
Now see! That is exactly what they were talking about. They are pushing for rickshaws on single lane metro pathways and you want a corvette! You obviously don't care about the planet and only about having fun.
Have you ever noticed that almost all human endeavors are ultimately destructive to something or someone and government collective activities are the only ones that will save us...from ourselves. Tell me how this is not the same as religion saving our souls.
And forget that corvette thing, go for the viper.
priced as they are, with so many super low milage ones out there, the advantage to the vette is you can burn them up as daily drivers. there are no cheap vipers, and they're sort of a beast to drive anyway. other than insurance and tires, the running costs on vettes are about the same as a new nissan altima. i've always liked porsches, but i'll probably never get another one, they are really good cars but super expensive compared to chevy. almost all cars are bulletproof these days, you can get 200,000 miles out of almost anything.
@Trampy: provide another route to contact yourself, other than PGP, which I don't use. ZH offers to be the initial link, but you won't answer that. You want a pen pal? Write me a letter, send it to Occupant, 4311 Kuykendall Road, Charlotte, NC 28270, with the return address only on the inside. Near as I can tell, the USPS does not (yet) open first class mail. btw, you seem to have a pretty good grip on things, which definitely increases loneliness when you realize almost no one else does, as in, 'OMG, am I the only one who sees this?' and I agree, ZH does not meet the collegiality test, but then most of the commenters are not deep thinkers.
Fishhawk
Time to hit the WayBack Machine: When Henry Ford started the River Rouge plant, he never envisioned the mess that would become Detoilet in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s due to massive urbanization. Henry Ford was convinced that Southeastern Michigan farmers would work at his automotive plants during non-planting and harvest seasons. Ford's name for this was CHEMURGY---google it, The first Model T's hardware was a black plastic made from soybeans.
The old coot's heart was in the right place. If interested, suss out all the deliberatley decentralized medium-small auto plants at Nankin Mills, Novi, etc. that followed the ring of the Huronn River as it circles SE Michigan. But the ideal never stays static. JHK has some internal ideal of the rural good life that never really existed. That's okay.
I enjoy JHKs rants, but he is stuck in a brief boomer period called "...the back to the Land Movement" of the 1970s in USA. The era known as "Mother Earth News Era." In short, everyone began doing what is called "prepping" today: buy land, grow veggies, build a root cellar and prepare for the second coming. This all takes an astonishing amount of effort and until the minimum wage disappears, it will not be happening on a broad scale. We will all be grateful for a full stomach in future years.
This is all very nice, but the future---if we get there at all, will be a combo of Road Warrior, Blade Runner with errant EBT cards and Christmas muzak playing in the background. Game Over.
I'm kind of confused here, even more so than usual, after reading the article and then reading the comments. Having not read Part 2, where he may be proposing all sorts of evil solutions, I find it hard to disagree with much of what he says about urban and suburban ugliness and dysfunction here, yet so many negative comments has me confused. I must be missing something?
He seems to be indicating too much 'central planning' has brought about many of the issues, no?
I'm not sure where you live but the suburban areas near me are substantially nicer than the urban ones unless you go into the really big bucks. As having wotked in and around the construction industry my whole life I can tell you the quality has gone down on many levels and there is no doubt that most homes will not be intact in a hundred years, but that is as true in the city as out.
dexter, i can help. the idea of the globalists is to herd the population into as small of an area as possible so it's as cheap as possible to sell them services. places like haiti are proving grounds for all kinds of efficiency experiments to figure out how to keep large populations in densly packed spaces. why do you think the idea of the electric car never dies? if your roundtrip range is 50 miles, you just got pwned. when oprah says a generation of racists needs to die, she means a generation of people who believe in hard work and self sufficiency and economic freedom. let's hope she bails and heads back to her ancestral home in the mountains of rwanda. a life with a single family home on a big lot with a car is pretty sweet. they want to convince us we'll be happier with an apartment and a bicycle.
Hear, hear the cries of merkens, as they start to realize that their most sacred values are a bunch of horsehit
All values are horseshit until there yours.
Why is it so hard for people such as Kunstler and also many in political life that they can't understand the simple concept that people LIKE the suburbs and LIKE their cars. Always anti-freedom for some "better" agenda. Oh yes, and of course the people that like their houses and cars are stupid, ill-informed, and just plain evil.
Let us repeat it for the do-gooders. We LIKE our cars and we LIKE our backyards. We don't mind driving around. We like to go where we want when we want.
Why isn't every new development Seaside, Florida? So much better for us the do-gooders say. But much to their chagrin, the biggest sellers are still typical suburban housing. Because we like them and want them.
Whilst growing up everyone I knew liked Kraft Parmesan Cheese that came in the green foil thing can.
That was until they had the real thing. They simply did not know any better. Yes this sounds elitist but you cannot ignore the socialization that takes place in any society as to it's effect on choices and preferences.
I do not have any "agenda". I wish I could afford a car. Shit if government was out of the way we'd have all been in Bucky personal helicopters by now. But don't just sit there and get all pointlessly defensive when someone with a diffrent point of view and perhaps a different insight critically analyzes social phenomena.
Do you really want to be left just drinking "California Chablis" and thinking that is what wine is all about or do you want to experience the real thing at the hands of unhindered free markets void of central planning that allows for any and all options?
Oh Dear God THAT sounded reallt elitist. But maybe you get it.
The area of the country that is still most lovely and undeveloped and "built by hand" by people who have lived there for generations, who are often self-sufficient, who know their neighbors, is the rural South. The region has avoided the suburbanization that Kunstler so loathes.
But (if you have read any Kunstler), there is no-one whom he hates, detests and despises more than a rural Southerner. His bigotry re rural Southerners is actually sick and shocking.
I'm not a rural Southerner, and the few I've met have found me annoying, but I can at least see how ironic this jerk Kunstler's set of views is.
As chief 'Eagle who sees far ahead' said: hey, welcome to my world. We didn't need you drunken, thieving, raping, fat-asses around here either.
Maybe if chief Eagle wasn't battling Chief Manygoats, they'd have sat down and discussed border security. (and every other indigenous tribe in developed nations).
All I know is our little community by the sea, part rural, part suburbia, has a shot. Freshwater and saltwater fishing, land to grow on and a quirky local population that seems to "get it."
Oh may I add,
A place of great early American history and innovation, but also darker sides of slavery trade earlier and other nefarious deeds.
Flash forward today:
.gov is blue with all the unsustainable slime. but the "right" up here thinks thats fine,
(where the "Privileged" left and right truly meet) - not regular folks.
- Sucks, but the people are good and we have an independent mindset historically in other words, we could make it just fine w/o them...I would dare say better.
http://sos.ri.gov/kidszone/history/independentman.php
Come visit sometime.
Eye Candy
http://www.visitrhodeisland.com/videos/
http://www.visitri.com/newport.html
http://www.visitrhodeisland.com/gallery/
http://www.visitrhodeisland.com/
"The worse it gets, the worse we become."
the rest is BS
James H. Kunstler wrote: ".. Americans of living in the tortured landscapes and townscapes we created for ourselves.”
Tortured landscapes? Tortured townscapes? According to WHO?
Some of my colleagues live in Boston; some live in the surrounding suburbs. I chose to live some distance to the nothwest in a rural setting, with large forests and a nearby mountain for skiing. We, as individuals, freely CHOSE where we wanted to live. Why are some people so determined to remove personal CHOICE? Why do they seek to FORCE others to live in their concept of the "proper habitat"?
The basic tenet of English and American law under the Common Law is government exists SOLELY to protect a man's liberty and property. All other functions of government exist only by contract and/or indivisual consent (for example, legislated statutes require the "consent of the governed"). John Locke wrote of the very limited powers of government, "the legislative being only a FIDUCIARY power to act" for certain limted ends - that the people retain the "supreme power."
John Stuart Mill said it most eloquently, "The ONLY purpose for which a power can be rightfully over any member of a civilized society, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is NOT a sufficient warrant." On Liberty (1859)
It appears that any society will always contain sociopaths such as James Kunstler who, with their "good intentions", wish to dominate the lives of others.
Locke, Mill...all good.
But do you actually believe that what we experience is anything even remotely close to that?
And yes I can logically expalin ALL human behavior as choice BUT discounting circumstance in the making of such "choices" leaves out a very large component of any situation.
I'm not so sure JHK is the dominate the lives of others type. If he was I think he'd take a different path, like say, politics? I disagree with him on many subjects. I think he looks to throw his critical analysis out there for consideration. Perhaps I am wrong 'bout JHK but I don't see him calling for coersion or force to achieve his ideas. And yet I would bet that 99% of the commentors here are just fine with doing just that they simply do not acknowledge it as such. They just hand it off to a third party to do their dirty work and then use bullshit like "social contract" and "consent of the governed" to essuage their guilt.
Well, I never signed any "contract" or gave any "consent". In fact I've never seen such a document. Mill's quote is just fine but it is often misappriated and used to endorse a coersive central authority that maintains a monopoly on violence.
How's that working for ya?
I'm afraid these collectivists just can't live unless they get to control every aspect of our lives. The only good choice is their choice.
Evidently I'm the only one who likes living in the suburbs. You agenda 21 guys are going to have to pry my truck and racecar from my cold dead hands.
Cass Sunstein says we need sidewalks on the Internet... plus he's a lawyer. Does that count? There's also default opt-in organ donations. You gotta think outside the box... the big box.
GEronimo's ghost must be laffing his head off upon reading this post.
...SO you sent me to rot in an extermination camp in Florida and took away my people's freedom, as of those of my fellow Amerindians; the true liberty children of this untarnished land; to build this shit dystopia of broken promises and hubris gone unchecked over one hundred and fifty years time line all dedicated to the glory of the Rockafellas and JP MOrgans, since my elimination?...
One nation of gas guzzlers now fracking west Texas beyond recognition to extract what's left of the earth's crust and damn the consequences; "our way of life is not negotiable," as said the head Neo Con. Indeed. Luckily some of us saw it when it was virgin territory and West of the Pecos was route 66 without the suburbian cobweb that Cali has become.
Not saying the rest of the world is not in similar state; given that every autocrat around the world wants to cut n paste LA and big Apple style of living in his home town!
Boris r you listening you incredible elitist shill?
I grew up in a real suburb. Most of what is called a suburb in the NE is just a small town. There is a difference. The planning side/zoning side of JHK's post is probably the most overlooked but most important.
On the surface where I grew up look great on paper and it does have some agavantages but like anything there are unintended consequences many of which cannot be objectively measured. The burbs are psychological and intellectual prisons.
JHK is a lot of doom and gloom and often holier than thou. He's a peak EVERYTHING kind of guy. But he does have several very accurate evaluations of the current shit show called 'Murica. Just because someone critically analyzes something that you might find to be beneficial or close to the heart does not mean they want to come with government thugs and take it from you. Lighten up folks. I personally think that TV-all of it-is a poison and responsible for much of the cultural rot in this society. But I won't take away your Breaking Bad or any other mindless bullshit even if I could.
You want your strip malls, McMansions, and suburban hell? Fine have at it. But do not think for a minute that the genesis of such things were spontaneous or organic. They were not. They were purposely planned by a central authority (douchebags like Robert Moses for all you NE types who need an example). The same type of central authority that gives us things like The Fed, all our wars, a 17 trillion dollar debt, a massive bureaucrat state, Soc Sec, Medicare, (both of which are complete abject failures) and now thanks to the "sounded like a good idea" mentaity that allows for all this crap, the crown jewel of Central Planning (Soviet Style) SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! Wooo Hooo.
Now we can suck just as much as Europe and every other shit mess except that we also have the societal disaster knowm as the burbs as well!
Come and get it everyone. The big Red, White and Blue cock that's been assraping you for decades and for which-and this is the real doozie- YOU VOTED!
USA! USA! USA!
.
Peak *everything* is ok,
because peak everything implies "peak people" too.
If "they" will be able to orchestrate a population decline
which drops faster than any decline in resource production,
then peak everything will be ok
for "them".
I'm a little late to the conversation because the article is such an eyeroll. I live in the burbs. It's not depressing. It's rather nice, actually. There's very little crime. The kids got to grow up with a lawn and a dog and bicycles and their own bedrooms. As I did.
These elites, always looking down their noses and lamenting our choices and saying oh so regrettably how democracy itself may need to be sacrificed to fulfill their agenda or whatever. Just keep pushing, fuckers.
The commies know what's best for you... all the things that made America great are bad.
If this dude is so upset about "suburbia" why doesn't he go live in some third world county and live in a mud hut and get "close to nature?"
Either that or commit suicide-he sounds really depressed!
Like Dexter_Morgan, I too am a bit confused by the comments. I didn't read part 2 and don't know what the author's solutions are or what he's selling. I respect the opinion of most fellow ZHers. And I don't agree with the notion of plight everywhere. We live in a great suburban town with low crime and have a nice home. However, I do think they way we all live is unsustainable in the long term. It always hits me the most when I fly and see what we've done to the land. I think we need to be spread out, form small local communities that are tight-knit and help each other, living in homes that use little energy, self-sustaining, independant communities that grow most of their own food. Here's one of my favorite movie clips from the "Matrix" that says it well. "Humans are a virus"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Na9-jV_OJI
Never forget the real problem is bankers and CEO's have enough money and power now to force the FED to print to infinity. TRILLIONS of dollars annually! Really, does anyone honestly believe there will not be severe repercussions from this? Ultimately you can say rocks sticking up from the bottom of the lake are the problem and call them "Peak Oil"or whatever. The real problem is that as you fill the reservoir of the wealthy with unlimited dollars to protect their investments, the water (dollars) available to the rest of us steadily diminishes showing the bottom of the lake that many will crash upon. Until the situation is corrected and the process of economic natural selection is allowed to take place (the opposite of To Big to Fail) things will not get better for the masses. If GM had been allowed to flop by now all of those assets would have been recycled into productive efficient auto lines. Add to that the government trying to control 1/6 (arguably more) of the economy through Obamacare which is nothing more than another tax for the masses further lowering the lake and soon desperaton will set in. How can anyone with a mind not see the problems our government is creating for us.
Great.
Another genius telling us how 'we need' to live 'collectively' to enhance our lives.
What? 10,000 years of building towns and villages, but now we're doing it wrong?
Funny.
Cities are different...they are supposed to be overcrowded poverty attracting shit-holes. They always have been. They also contain the industry that allow you to make enough money to eventually leave the city, or at least the crappiest parts of it.
Don't forget that the 'sociologists' brought you the compassionate highrise ghetto farms of public housing in the 50's.
How is that working out for you? Collective living at it's finest, purist expression.
An acquaintance a few years ago was involved in building storage places. What he found quite telling was that when he was in South East Asia on holiday, people had a problem with the concept of storage places especally as they knew about the size of western housing.
The truth is that man has degenerated into a collector of ugly clutter and much low quality architecture and buildings. Our technology might be brilliant but our built environment is often quite depressing.
We skype the world but might not see or talk to the neighbour across the street (other than wave when getting the mail) for weeeks if not months thanks to cars and remote controlled doors.
Much of this igliness is the fact that there is little agricultural food production within our cities and even parks are being shunned in favour of the computer and its add ons.
The biggest challenge is to figure out how to close down some suburbs or towns and shift the population to another half abandoned suburb or town in the hope of restoring life, finances and a sense of community.
Another social planner. Fuck you.
The Interstate system was built for military purposes. If you aren't on a military mission, stay off the interstate. How much reduction in use would that bring about?if your family is Republican and you want "small government," i want you off the interstate, and I want your tires shot out when you're on the interstate ramp. Small government starts with Republican families first.
Detroit is the best place to start understanding that Republican tax cuts do not create US jobs. I still say if you're underemployed, you should be in a Republican politician's office conducting your job search. If you never find a better job, you never leave the Republican politician's office. Instead of Rush running his mouth for 3 hours every day, why doesn't Rush devote a month's radio broadcasts to finding Republicans and Veterans jobs? Get the Republican BS exposed as BS. I stood in front of the Republican candidate in my home town and challenged him to take the Faux News cameras, the ACORN pimp and prostitute, and film the job search process--application, what happens to the applications, how many applications result in job interviews, and how many interviews result in offers for jobs with benefits. I called him a liar, to his face, with 80 voters standing in line waiting to vote. Needless to say, he had nothing to say, looked like a deer caught in the headligts, and lost his election. THAT"S the point we have to get to in the United States.
You're obviously a Kool-aid drinking idiot. Centrally planned govt has NEVER worked, and, despite the efforts of the collectivists, our system is built on sef-sufficiency. Charity is wonderful, so go do good things, but don't expect that you get to do good things with my money. Keep your damn hands out of our pockets and go make a life for yourself even if that means emigrating away from here like our grandparents did so long ago. Otherwise, shut the hell up.
Articles like this always make me shake my head. Urban planners tend to make the perfect the enemy of the good and declare the good to be Mordor itself.
Here we stand
Like an Adam and an Eve
Waterfalls
The Garden of Eden
Two fools in love
So beautiful and strong
The birds in the trees
Are smiling upon them
From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it's nothing but flowers
There was a factory
Now there are mountains and rivers
you got it, you got it
We caught a rattlesnake
Now we got something for dinner
we got it, we got it
There was a shopping mall
Now it's all covered with flowers
you've got it, you've got it
If this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
you've got it, you've got it
Years ago
I was an angry young man
I'd pretend
That I was a billboard
Standing tall
By the side of the road
I fell in love
With a beautiful highway
This used to be real estate
Now it's only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it's nothing but flowers
The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture
I thought that we'd start over
But I guess I was wrong
Once there were parking lots
Now it's a peaceful oasis
you got it, you got it
This was a Pizza Hut
Now it's all covered with daisies
you got it, you got it
I miss the honky tonks,
Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens
you got it, you got it
And as things fell apart
Nobody paid much attention
you got it, you got it
I dream of cherry pies,
Candy bars, and chocolate chip cookies
you got it, you got it
We used to microwave
Now we just eat nuts and berries
you got it, you got it
This was a discount store,
Now it's turned into a cornfield
you got it, you got it
Don't leave me stranded here
I can't get used to this lifestyle
I have a new theory of history: things happen in human affairs because they seem like a good idea at the time.
Wow ... just wow. What an utterly moronic statement. As if the Rothschilds, the Kuhn-Loebs, the Warburg banking families didn't exist. As if the taxicab companies buying up the trolley (basically "light rail") routes and then ripping them out of the roads so they could never be used again, didn't happen. Like, conspiracies don't exist, man!
So, Durden, what are you suggesting? That the solution will come from central planning? I think we've all had quite enough of that. How about this, when people are ready to change their lives, they'll do so. Or do you think that we should have the govt tell us where to live and how to make a living in order to fix the problems you've identified? Maybe when the people living in cities realize that there is no longer a purpose for cities, they'll begin to migrate to something they prefer. Maybe people will begin to farm again, maybe not. But I'll be damned if some bureaucrat is going to tell me that I have to change my life. Tell us what you mean?
P.J. O’Rourke answered this article better than I can:
But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.
Work this out --- when people are broke ---- and the price of energy is through the roof --- what do you think they will do?
Look no further than Greece --- to keep warm they start cutting down trees to keep warm in the winter.
Now multiple that phenomenon by a few billion ---- people will pillage the forests for fuel to keep warm and cook food
Have a look at Haiti ---- where virtually every tree has been cut
Now you have an idea of what the world is going to look like in the not too distance future.
We have raped this fucking planet - we have bred like fucking rats - and now we are going to pay the price. You are going to wish you were dead.
Oh ---- and we were warned of this outcome ---- but like the stupid greedy fuck faces that we are --- we dismissed these warnings and went shopping.