Motto: Sacrifice your body for the team!
The dad belly is the engine room for this amazing machine!!!
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The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
"Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them." If the squib is accurate, Kotkin misunderstands what has been happening. The liberal progressive epoch of wealth and opportunity ended by the mid 1960s. What followed was pure illiberal progressivism which was the return to the more feudal system through a greater concentration of wealth and property, and frequent economic stagnation. The idea that there was reduced upward mobility is wrong even during the illiberal progressive epoch. The new hierarchical society is what the Trump revolution is pushing back against. It is in places like illiberal progressive California, New York, and Illinois that we see the crushing of the Yeomanry and the rise of the neo-serf class. It is the rest of America which is pushing back against the neo-feudal progressivism. Remember, socialism/fascism/progressivism are heresies of feudalism, they have nothing to do with free markets. The solution is moar Trump and less progressivism, just ask the Blacks and Hispanics who have participated in the least racist economic boom in US history, or the Common Man who participated in the same boom while the elites have failed to keep up. The reason the elites are bellyaching so loudly is they fear the Common Man will be resurgent and the elites will be cut free from their sinecures. Keep cutting Mr. President! Mining Company Withdraws From $20B Oil Sands Project — Citing Trudeau’s Environmental Policies
Especially for US citizens studying in Canada and paying Canadian tuition. My daughter and I are pleased with Trudeau's incredible incompetence and willingness to destroy the Canadian economy to keep daughter's tuition rates low. How cool is that?! 44. Fighting Obsolete Transit
The rules of rail transit are simple. It is shockingly costly. It will carry no significant number of riders. It will kill more people than the worst urban autos. It services the middle and upper-middle classes. It cannibalizes bus transit that services the poor. It will kill all transit through funding starvation. It is highly addictive to transit bureaucrats and politicians. It creates political lawlessness since the addicted politicians will do anything to get more rail transit, including lying to get their fix. The Antiplanner's thoughts on the subject: "In 1991, Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. It should have been called the Obsolete Transportation Inefficiency Act, as among other things it created a multi-billion-dollar annual slush fund to give to cities to build new rail transit projects. This fund, informally called New Starts and more formally called Transit Capital Investment Grants, had no limit on the amount of money any city could take out of it, which gave cities incentives to propose the most expensive projects they could so they could get the most “free” federal money. This law was actually a continuation of a 1973 law that allowed cities to cancel planned interstate freeways within their borders and spend the federal dollars that would have gone towards building those freeways on transit capital improvements instead. The 1973 was instigated by then-Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent, who wanted to cancel some freeways in Boston but didn’t want to be accused of “losing” federal transportation dollars. Boston, of course, has lots of rail transit and could easily absorb the federal dollars from a cancelled freeway by buying new railcars, installing new signals, replacing track, and so forth. Sargent’s law gave hope to Portland Mayor (and infamous pedo) Neil Goldschmidt, who wanted to cancel an interstate freeway in east Portland. But Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, only operated buses, and if it used all of the freeway funds to buy new buses, it wouldn’t have enough money to operate all of those buses. Goldschmidt came up with the idea of building light rail, which cost about the same to operate as buses and thus wouldn’t impose a huge operating cost on TriMet, but which cost much more to start up. In other words, he chose light rail because it was expensive, not because it was efficient. For that brilliant decision, President Carter made Goldschmidt his Secretary of Transportation. By 1991, all the urban interstate freeways that could be cancelled had been cancelled, but by this time a huge rail construction industry had grown up and turned to lobbying to keep the money flowing. Thus, Congress created the New Starts fund. Light rail was essentially streetcars with a fancier name. It differed from streetcars mainly in that multiple light-rail cars could be coupled together and run by one operator and it sometimes ran on its own right of way, while most streetcars ran almost exclusively in streets. As such, the first light-rail line was probably the Key System, which ran long rail cars that it sometimes coupled together over the then-new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Thus, light-rail technology effectively dates to 1939. Automobile technology is older than that, of course, but automobiles today are much different from those of 100 or even 50 years ago. They are faster, safer, cleaner, and more energy efficient by far than their counterparts from 1939. Light rail, however, is none of these, as most light-rail trains average about 20 miles per hour, they kill far more people per billion passenger miles than urban automobiles, and they require enormous amounts of energy to run, not to mention to build. The real reason light rail was obsolete was not automobiles but buses. In 1927, William Fageol had designed the first bus that was both cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate than streetcars. He called this the Twin Coach bus, and within a few years hundreds of transit companies replaced their streetcar lines (which were wearing out, being 30 years old or more) with buses. The transit industry quickly understood that buses were not only less expensive, they were faster and more nimble than streetcars. But few people realized that buses also had higher capacities than streetcars. A standard streetcar was about 60 feet long and could hold about 100 people, and a light-rail train might couple up to four 100-foot cars together, thus carrying up to 600 people at a time. A standard bus was 40 feet long and could hold only about 60 people, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that buses had a higher capacity than rails. But they did because, for safety reasons, railcars had to be separated by several minutes. Light-rail trains, for example, were generally no longer than the shortest city block in their cities, and thus two trains couldn’t occupy the same station at the same time. Most light-rail lines can handle no more than 20 trains per hour, while some heavy-rail lines could move as many as 30 trains an hour. As I’ve often said, the terms light and heavy rail refer to capacity, not weight; light-rail cars actually weigh more than heavy-rail cars, but heavy-rail lines have a higher (or heavier) capacity because the trains are longer and they can move more trains per hour. Before it ever built light rail, Portland built a busway that used one parking strip and one dedicated bus lane each on north and southbound streets through downtown. Each city block had room for four buses to stop and each bus stopped every other block. Blocks were divided into two bus stops, each capable of serving two buses at a time. By actual measure, each bus stop could serve more than 40 buses an hour, which meant the busways could move more than 160 buses an hour in each direction. At 60 people per bus, that’s almost 10,000 people per hour in each direction, while Portland’s light-rail lines could only move about 6,000 people per hour. Busway capacities can be increased still further by using bigger buses or expanding the number of buses that could use each stop. Istanbul’s busway runs more than 250 buses per hour, all of them stopping at every station along the route. Some of its buses hold as many as 200 people and the estimated capacity of the busway is about 30,000 people per hour in each direction. Bogota has a busway with extra lanes that allow express buses to bypass some stations; its estimated capacity is about 50,000 people per hour. The highest-capacity light-rail lines in America can only move about 12,000 people per hour. By 1975, only six American cities still had streetcars, and these either had an exclusive right of way (Cleveland and New Orleans) or went through tunnels (Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco) that would be smoked out by Diesel buses, thus justifying the continued cost of maintaining the rails. By 1991, several cities, including Baltimore, Buffalo, Sacramento, and San Jose, had followed Portland’s example of building light rail, usually with cancelled freeway funds. (San Diego had built one before Portland but used only local funds to do it.) The New Starts fund inspired several other urban areas, including Dallas, Denver, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City, to join the obsolete transportation club. Baltimore and Miami also built heavy-rail lines, which proved such a flop that most cities focused on light rail instead. Some of these cities were in states that required voter approval for the taxes that would pay the local share of rail costs. In most cases, rail proponents required multiple elections before they so wore down opponents that the measures passed. I’ve already told the story of my involvement in Denver’s light-rail debate in 2004. But before that, I participated in the debate over the Twin Cities’ first light-rail line, which was planned to parallel Hiawatha Avenue from Minneapolis to Bloomington, where the Mall of America is located. This light-rail proposal had been debated for several years when Jesse Ventura decided to run for governor on a third-party ticket. Among other things, he said he would kill the rail project. Instead, he appointed pro-rail Ted Mondale to be chair of the Metropolitan Council, which was planning the project (and which didn’t require voter approval). I was asked by a local group to debate Mondale. Only it wasn’t really a debate; first Mondale spoke, then he left, then I spoke. On one hand, this gave me an advantage because I could respond to his arguments. On the other hand, by leaving early he effectively dismissed me and my arguments. He said that the region had to build rail because it would cost billions of dollars to build enough new highways to relieve congestion. Unlike most people, I actually read the environmental impact statements for this and other projects, and I knew that planners calculated that the Hiawatha line would take only a few thousand cars off the road each day. Based on this, I quickly calculated that building enough light-rail lines to make a dent in the region’s traffic congestion would cost well over a trillion dollars. Although Ventura had been pretty much talked into light rail, he decided to have a public forum debate the issue. Wendell Cox and I were invited to speak in opposition, while California New Urban architect Peter Calthorpe and right-wing activist Paul Weyrich spoke in favor. Held in February, 2000, the debate was moderated by Ted Mondale, and Ventura loomed over everyone like a wrestler waiting for his partner to tag him into the ring. Weyrich was a founder or co-founder of several conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation. He also was a rail nut, especially electric railways, and published a quarterly called the New Electric Railway Journal. The American Public Transit Association loved to trot him out showing that even conservatives could love transit, but Weyrich’s conservatism and mine had nothing in common. I’m a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, where Weyrich was a social conservative (anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, anti-marijuana legalization, anti-free trade, etc.) and yet was enough of a fiscal liberal that he believed other Americans should subsidize his favorite forms of obsolete transportation. While Calthorpe proved to be an effective debater, Weyrich was an embarrassment, spending most of his time calling Wendell and me names and cursing under his breath. At the end of the debate, Mondale said that he would change his mind about light rail if any of three statements proved to be true: that Portland’s light rail had reduced ridership; that Portland’s light rail failed to stimulate neighborhood redevelopment; or that Portland’s light rail cost more to operate than buses. Since I was the one who made all three statements, I submitted documentation and wrote op-eds verifying that they were true, but not surprisingly Mondale didn’t change his mind. The line got built and I have to admit it is one of the few cases where light rail actually did increase transit ridership. Twin Cities’ ridership had been on a downward slide for many years, but after the Hiawatha line opened, rail ridership quickly grew and bus ridership grew as well. That may have been partly due to the fact that many transit riders who could previously take a one-seat trip from their residence to downtown Minneapolis now had their buses rerouted to be rail feeder buses, forcing them to change modes en route. But passenger miles grew as well, showing that the transit system picked up some new riders. As far as congestion relief, however, the Hiawatha line proved to be a disaster. Light-rail trains were given priority over other traffic at all traffic lights. While the rail line never crossed Hiawatha Avenue, also known as state highway 55, it did cross many streets that cross Hiawatha, and the signals on those streets were coordinated with the signals on Hiawatha. Thus, each train forced the Hiawatha signals to change even though the trains didn’t cross Hiawatha itself. Traffic engineers estimated that this added 20 to 40 minutes to the average trip between Minneapolis and Bloomington. “This is not a sinister plot to make traffic as miserable as possible and move everybody onto the train,” one transportation official vowed. But it turned out that it was: state representative Phil Krinkie dug up documents showing that a consultant had predicted that the light-rail line would jam up traffic on Hiawatha, and state officials dismissed the problem, saying “we need to give the advantage to transit.” After fiddling with the signals for several months, the state gave up and admitted that “light rail always will slow the flow” on Hiawatha. Tax activist groups had a better chance of stopping light rail when it required a ballot measure, but, as mentioned above, in too many cities proponents just kept coming back until the opponents were worn down and the measures passed. Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Seattle were among the areas that first voted rail down then passed it. Opponents did better in Austin, Kansas City, Milwaukee, San Antonio, St. Petersburg, and Virginia Beach. Light rail has been on the ballot in Kansas City nine times; it passed the eighth time, but that plan proved impossible to implement so they put a supposedly doable plan on the ballot and it lost. I didn’t play a role in Kansas City but I did in other cities, serving as a policy analyst for local groups. For example, I wrote a review of a light-rail plan for Austin and another review of the proposed light-rail line in St. Petersburg. I also wrote a review of a proposed streetcar system for San Antonio. In Milwaukee, Virginia Beach, and other cities, I wrote op-eds and did some public speaking. Light rail was on the ballot twice in Austin and lost both times; it may go on the ballot again this year. San Antonio has voted down various light-rail and streetcar proposals. Virginia Beach’s neighbor, Norfolk, built a light-rail line that is one of the worst-patronized lines in the country. Nevertheless, proponents put a measure on the ballot to extend the line into Virginia Beach, and (with a little help from me) it lost. Rail proponents responded to my reports with ad hominem attacks, usually having something to do with the fact that Cato gets some of its money from the Koch brothers. According to the New York Times, I am a “weapon in the Koch arsenal” that is trying to kill transit. While I’ve never met either of the Koch brothers, I suspect they don’t give a damn about light rail or any kind of transit except that they may see it as a waste of money. Ironically, the issues they seem to care about most — personal and economic freedom and peace — are issues that the left agrees with more than not. But the left has decided to demonize them because they won’t support big-government solutions to every problem and because it is easier to hate a person than to actually debate his or her ideas. The problem with winning in Austin, Milwaukee, and other cities that this was like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole: even if we could kill a light-rail project in one city, another one would spring up in another city. This is because federal New Starts funds were always out there tempting cities to build their own obsolete rail projects. To be honest, the reason why skeptics were able to defeat rail in these cities was not because they asked for my help. Instead, the fact that they had the resources to ask me to help (usually paying travel expenses but not a fee) indicated they had the resources to defeat rail. Before 2000, I estimate that any opposition group had a good chance of defeating rail if they could raise more than 2 percent as much as proponents spent. After 2000, when Utah Transit showed the industry how the agencies themselves could “educate” the public with pro-rail propaganda, opponents required at least 5 to 10 percent as much money as proponents to defeat rail. One city where I can take a lot of the credit was not in the United States but in Winnipeg, Canada. The Frontier Centre asked me to review of light-rail plan proposed by Winnipeg’s mayor. Based on my review, I wrote some op-eds and spoke to a few forums on Winnipeg. One evening while I was there, the transit agency held an open house to tell people more about rail. One of the participants who worked for one of the companies that hoped to sell their goods or services to Winnipeg approached me. Though he spoke with a thick French accent, as near as I could tell he was trying to bribe me into shutting up about light rail. He said the company he worked for owned a small tourist railroad in Alaska that didn’t make much money. He would try to talk his employers into giving it to me provided I stopped campaigning against light rail. I may have misunderstood him, but if not this was the only time someone ever tried to bribe me. They say everyone has their price and he came pretty close to mine as the White Pass & Yukon Route was my favorite tourist railroad in the world. Unfortunately, I had done my job too well: after my op-ed was printed and I talked to some reporters, the mayor dropped his support for light rail. Thus, Winnipeg remains rail-free and I didn’t get to move to Skagway, Alaska. Voters in my own former hometown of Portland approved light rail just once. After that, voters rejected it every time it was on the ballot (often with help from my op-eds and public speaking). Voters even rejected a measure to raise taxes to buy new buses, since everybody knew that the real goal was to free up money to build more light rail. Despite voter opposition, Portland continued building light rail, partly by getting the federal government to pay a higher percentage of the cost and partly by using tax-increment financing (the only taxes the city could raise without voter approval) as matching funds. Portland also invented the claim that light rail led to economic development. It initially made this claim by listing all new construction that took place near the light-rail line and stating that the light rail generated the construction. For example, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen purchased the Portland Trailblazer basketball team and decided to build a new arena with more seats for his team. The new arena was next to the old arena which was near the light-rail line, but Portland and TriMet claimed that it wouldn’t have been built at all without the light rail. Similarly, President Clinton and Oregon’s Governor Barbara Roberts issued executive orders requiring all federal and state agencies that were located in cities to move to the downtowns of those cities. The Bureau of Land Management and the Oregon Highway Division both were required to abandon offices in suburban areas to move to downtown. This led to a downtown construction boom that had nothing to do with light rail, but of course TriMet took credit for it. Scrutinizing TriMet’s list of buildings supposedly generated by light rail, I found a chain store that had been remodeled. I looked up the web site of the chain store, and it proudly stated that the company had remodeled all of its chain stores in the previous two years. Ironically, the chain store on the rail line soon closed saying that the rail line had brought in so much crime that it wasn’t worth being there. It was the only time in that chain store’s history that it had ever closed a store without opening a newer, bigger one nearby. Frustratingly for Portland planners, none of the developments that had been built near the rail line were “transit oriented” in the sense of including high-density housing in walkable, mixed-use developments. This was especially peculiar as Portland had rezoned all of the areas near light-rail stations for such developments. A decade later, the Portland city council held a hearing asking what happened. “We have not seen any of the kind of development–of a mid-rise, higher-density, mixed-use, mixed-income type–that we would have liked to have seen” along the rail line, a Portland planner admitted to the city council. “We are in the hottest real estate market in the country,” exclaimed city commissioner Charles Hales, yet maps of potential infill developments showed that most of the areas around light-rail stations were still vacant. Developers testified that the problem was that there was no market demand for high-density housing. People wanted to live in single-family homes, not mid-rise condos or apartments. Although Portland housing prices had been growing for a decade, single-family homes were still pretty affordable in 1996, when this hearing took place. Urban planners liked to tell themselves that there was a pent-up demand for high-density housing of the kind they favored but zoning laws prevented it. This was far from true in Portland, whose first zoning codes zoned wide swaths of single-family neighborhoods for apartments. Mayor Goldschmidt bemoaned the fact that the suburbs were growing much faster than the city even though Portland, whose population was about 375,000 people when he was mayor, was zoned for a million people. Since zoning wasn’t enough to attract transit-oriented development, Commissioner Hales proposed to subsidize it. First, he persuaded the city council to waive ten years’ of property taxes for high-density residential developments on the light-rail line. Second, the city urban renewal agency, which under state law was allowed to put a fixed percentage of the city’s area into urban renewal districts, drew such districts around all of the existing and planned light-rail lines. That would allow the city to use tax-increment financing to subsidize both the new light-rail lines and the development along the existing line. Next, Hales convinced the city council to build a streetcar line connecting a new urban renewal district north of downtown with another new urban renewal district south of downtown, passing through two existing urban renewal districts in downtown. The city spent hundreds of millions of dollars attracting new mid-rise and high-rise development in the new urban renewal districts, then claimed that all of the new development took place solely in response to the streetcar. When Portland State University, which was on the streetcar line, built a new classroom building, the city credited it to the streetcar, as if students were choosing Portland State over the much more prestigious Oregon State or University of Oregon solely because of the streetcar. Among the new developments were numerous parking garages including at least 10,000 new parking spaces, wom3 or. Yet Portland crowed to the media that all of its rail transit was reducing driving and greenhouse gas emissions. I reviewed its claims and discovered that all of the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions took place because of the closure of an aluminum refinery east of Portland. Transportation greenhouse gas emissions hadn’t declined at all. In the next election, Hales was challenged by a radio talk show host who objected to the streetcars and all the tax-increment financing. But Hales was able to pull in some big donations from light-rail contractors and railcar manufacturers and won the election. Then he surprised many by quitting his seat on the city council in mid-term so he could take a much higher-paying job with HDR, a consulting firm that helped cities plan rail transit. The revelation that Neil Goldschmidt had statutorily raped a 13-year-old girl when he was mayor led to his downfall and for the first time Portland newspapers openly discussed the notion that the city was run by a “light-rail mafia.” Although he hadn’t held political office since 1991, Goldschmidt was the godfather, using his connections to hand out no-bid rail construction contracts, got his allies placed into key jobs such as the general manager of TriMet, and blocking legislation that might have democratized the regional planning process. U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer quickly stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Goldschmidt’s disgrace. He persuaded Congress to create a new program called Small Starts that would fund streetcar lines and other smaller rail projects. On behalf of HDR, Hales traveled around the country telling officials in other cities that a streetcar line would generate billions of dollars’ worth of economic development. The Bush administration threw a monkey-wrench into the works when it passed a rule requiring cities to show that streetcars would be more cost-effective than buses. That rule was thrown out by the Obama administration, which obviously didn’t care how much money was wasted especially it was wasted in Democratic districts, leading Atlanta, Cincinnati, Tucson, and other cities to get federal grants for streetcars. I documented Portland’s problems in one of the first reports I wrote after being hired by the Cato Institute. When streetcars became an issue, I wrote another report for Cato. I’ll discuss these and other Cato publications in the next chapter." CDC Refused to Test First Possible Community-Transmitted Coronavirus Case for Days
The CDC is apparently still useing the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic playbook. Dude? It's past 2018, get a grip, modernize your thinking. And we need to stop listening to authority, it is wrong, always. Defining Sanders, and by accident the entire Democratic Party, in a single shot to the heart!2/28/2020 Why did Sanders cling to failing communist regimes decades longer than other leftists?
Hatred of America and all she stands for is strong in the current progressive. This is mostly through failed education, although frequently it is through true belief in the progressive mass movement. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements The Perverse Panic over Plastic
Progressives want to take actions that make them feel good; they do not care if the actions are either dangerous or useful. This is a shockingly cynical, and selfish worldview. Here is the view from John Tierney's back yard. "Why do our political leaders want to take away our plastic bags and straws? This question is even more puzzling than a related one that I’ve been studying for decades: Why do they want us to recycle our garbage? The two obsessions have some common roots, but the moral panic over plastic is especially perverse. The recycling movement had a superficial logic, at least at the outset. Municipal officials expected to save money by recycling trash instead of burying or burning it. Now that recycling has turned out to be ruinously expensive while achieving little or no environmental benefit, some local officials—the pragmatic ones, anyway—are once again sending trash straight to landfills and incinerators. The plastic panic has never made any sense, and it’s intensifying even as evidence mounts that it’s not only a waste of money but also harmful to the environment, not to mention humans. It’s been a movement in search of a rationale for half a century. During the 1970s, environmentalists like Barry Commoner wanted the government to restrict the use of plastic because it was made from petroleum, which we needed to hoard because we would soon run out of it. When the “energy crisis” proved a false alarm, environmentalists looked for new reasons to panic. They denounced plastic for not being biodegradable in landfills. They blamed it for littering the landscape, clogging sewer drains, and contributing to global warming. Plastic from our “throwaway society” was killing vast numbers of sea creatures, according to Blue Planet II, a 2017 BBC documentary series that became an international hit. Its depictions of sea turtles, dolphins, and whales in jeopardy prompted Queen Elizabeth II to ban plastic straws and bottles from the royal estates, and the documentary has galvanized so many other leaders that greens celebrate the “Blue Planet Effect.” More than 100 countries now restrict single-use plastic bags, and Pope Francis has called for the global regulation of plastic. The European Union parliament has voted to ban single-use plastic straws, plates, and cutlery across the continent next year. In the United States, hundreds of municipalities and eight states have outlawed or regulated single-use plastic bags. New York and other cities have banned plastic-foam food containers, and more sweeping edicts are in the works. Greens in California are pushing a referendum to require all plastic packaging and single-use foodware in the state to be recyclable, and the EU has unveiled a similar plan. Celebrities and politicians photographed with the wrong beverage container or straw now endure online “plastic-shaming.” Some reformers are well-intentioned, but they’re hurting their own cause. If you want to protect dolphins and sea turtles, you should take special care to place your plastic in the trash, not the recycling bin. And if you’re worried about climate change, you’ll cherish those gossamer grocery bags once you learn the facts about plastic. Like the recycling movement, the plastic panic has been sustained by popular misconceptions. Environmentalists and their champions in the media have ignored, skewed, and fabricated facts to create several pervasive myths. Your plastic straws and grocery bags are polluting the planet and killing marine animals. The growing amount of plastic debris in the seas is a genuine problem, but it’s not caused by our “throwaway society.” Environmental groups cite a statistic that 80 percent of the plastic debris in the oceans comes from land-based sources, but good evidence has never supported that estimate, and recent research paints a different picture. After painstakingly analyzing debris in the north central Pacific Ocean, where converging currents create the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a team of scientists from four continents reported in 2018 that more than half the plastic came from fishing boats—mostly discarded nets and other gear. These discards are also the greatest threat to marine animals, who die not from plastic bags but from getting entangled in the nets. Another study, published last year by Canadian and South African researchers, traced the origins of plastic bottles that had washed up on the shore of the aptly named Inaccessible Island, an uninhabited landmass in the middle of the southern Atlantic Ocean. More than 80 percent of the bottles came from China and must have been tossed off boats from Asia traversing the Atlantic. Some plastic discarded on land does end up in the ocean, but very little of it comes from consumers in the United States or Europe. Most of the labels on the plastic packaging analyzed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch came from Asia, the greatest source of what researchers call “mismanaged waste.” Of the plastic carried into oceans by rivers, a 2017 study in Nature Communications estimated, 86 percent comes from Asia and virtually all the rest from Africa and South America. Developing countries don’t yet have good systems for collecting and processing waste, so some of it is simply dumped into or near rivers, and these countries’ primitive processing facilities let plastic leak into waterways. It’s true that some plastic in America is littered on beaches and streets, and some of it winds up in sewer drains. But researchers have found that laws restricting plastic bags (which account for less than 2 percent of litter) and food containers do not reduce litter (a majority of which consists of cigarette butts and paper products). The resources wasted on these anti-plastic campaigns would be better spent on more programs to discourage littering and to pick up everything that’s discarded—a direct approach that has proved effective. When you recycle plastic, you prevent it from polluting the oceans. This myth is based on the enduring delusion that plastic from curbside bins can be efficiently turned into other products. But sorting the stuff is so onerous and labor-intensive—and the resulting materials of so little value—that recycling plastic is hopelessly unprofitable in the United States and Europe. Municipalities expected to make money selling their plastic waste to local recyclers, but instead they’ve had to pay to get rid of it, mostly by shipping it to Asian countries with low labor costs. The chief destination for many years was China; but two years ago, China banned most imports, so the plastic waste has been diverted to countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. That means that some of the plastic from your recycling bin has probably ended up in the ocean because it has gone to a country with a high rate of “mismanaged waste.” At the rudimentary recycling plants in Asia, some of the plastic waste leaks out into the environment, and much of the imported waste doesn’t even reach a legitimate recycling plant. Journalists and environmentalists have been collecting horror stories in Malaysia and Indonesia of Western plastics piling up at illegal dumps and spewing toxins when they’re burned in backyard kitchens. The people living near the dumps and recycling operations complain that foreign plastics are fouling their air and polluting their rivers. The good news is that these countries are starting to share China’s reluctance to accept the stuff from our recycling bins. Waste managers in America and Europe lament that their warehouses are overflowing with bales of plastic recyclables that nobody will take off their hands, and they’ve been forced to send the bales to local landfills and incinerators. It would have been smarter to do that in the first place instead of running a costly recycling program, but at least they’re preventing that plastic from polluting the ocean. You can do your own bit for marine animals—and your town’s budget—by throwing your plastic straight into the trash. Single-use plastic bags are the worst environmental choice at the supermarket. Wrong: they’re the best choice. These high-density polyethylene bags are a marvel of economic, engineering, and environmental efficiency: cheap and convenient, waterproof, strong enough to hold groceries but so thin and light that they require scant energy, water, or other natural resources to manufacture and transport. Though they’re called single-use, surveys show that most people reuse them, typically as trash-can liners. Once discarded, these bags take up little room in the landfill, and the fact that they’re not biodegradable is a plus, not a minus, because they don’t release methane or any other greenhouse gas, as decomposing paper and cotton bags do. The bags’ tiny quantity of carbon, extracted from natural gas, goes back underground, where it can be safely sequestered from the atmosphere (and the ocean) in a modern landfill with a sturdy lining. Every other grocery bag has a bigger environmental impact, as repeatedly demonstrated by environmental life-cycle analyses of the bags and by surveys of consumer behavior. Paper bags and reusable tote bags require more water to manufacture and more energy to produce and transport, which means a bigger carbon footprint. To compensate for that bigger initial footprint of a paper bag, according to the United Kingdom’s environmental agency, you’d have to reuse it at least four times, which virtually no one does. The typical paper grocery bag is used just once (and takes up 12 times more landfill space than a plastic one). People do reuse tote bags, but not as often as they plan to. One survey found that consumers forget to bring the bags to the supermarket nearly half the time. To offset the initial carbon footprint of a cotton tote bag, you’d have to use it 173 times, but the typical tote is used just 15 times, so the net effect is about nine times more carbon emissions than a thin plastic bag. Environmentalists who have looked at these numbers advise greens to shun cotton bags (even their beloved organic ones) in favor of plastic tote bags, because a bag of nonwoven polypropylene needs to be used just 14 times to offset its initial carbon footprint. At first glance, that looks like a slight net plus for the atmosphere, given that the typical tote is used 15 times. But that benefit disappears once you consider another consequence observed in places that have banned single-use bags: when consumers are deprived of the bags they were using as bin liners, they start buying plastic substitutes that are thicker than the banned grocery bags—and thus have a bigger carbon footprint. So the net effect of banning plastic grocery bags is more global warming. Exactly how much more depends on which researchers’ life-cycle analysis you choose, but there’s definitely more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as Julian Morris and Brian Seasholes of the Reason Foundation concluded. Using the range of available analyses, they calculated that San Francisco’s plastic-bag ban had caused the greenhouse emissions related to grocery bags to rise by at least 9 percent, and possibly to more than double. Moreover, as the Reason researchers note, those calculations understate the greenhouse impact because they’re based on analyses that omitted an important factor: the need to wash tote bags to avoid contaminating food with bacteria that leaked from last week’s groceries. Most shoppers don’t bother to clean their bags—a study at supermarkets in California and Arizona found large numbers of bacteria in almost all the reusable bags—but health authorities advise washing them weekly in hot water to avoid food-borne illnesses. Whether people clean by hand or throw the bags into the washer and dryer, they’re consuming energy and adding still more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If our goals are to reduce carbon emissions and plastic pollution, we can take some obvious steps. Stop forcing consumers to use grocery bags and other products that increase emissions. Stop exporting plastic waste to countries that allow it to leak into the ocean. Help those countries establish modern systems for collecting and processing their own plastic waste. Send plastic waste straight to landfills and incinerators. Step up the enforcement of laws and treaties that restrict nations from polluting the ocean and that prohibit mariners from littering the seas. But politicians and environmentalists have other ideas. They’re doubling down on their mistakes by banning more plastic products and demanding alternatives that are more expensive, less convenient, and worse for the environment. Even experts familiar with the facts succumb to magical thinking. Yes, they acknowledge, we shouldn’t be exporting our plastic waste to Asia, but the solution is to recycle it at home. And yes, that’s impractical today, but everything will change after we create a “circular economy,” which merely requires a transformation of society. Guided by wise central planners, manufacturers will redesign their products and retool their factories so that everything can be reused or recycled, and consumers will painstakingly sort everything into just the right recycling bin, and we will all live happily ever after in a world with “zero waste.” This fantasy isn’t merely a waste of time and money. It is interfering with practical solutions to dealing with plastic pollution. Improving sanitation systems was traditionally a top priority for public-health officials and foreign-aid donors, but it has been neglected as they’ve redirected money and attention to “sustainable development” schemes for recycling and conserving water and energy. This shift in priorities has hampered the development of effective waste-management systems that would keep plastic out of the oceans, according to Mikko Paunio, an epidemiologist in Finland who has studied public-health programs in rich and poor countries around the world. “Ideologically motivated environmentalists in the 1980s and their dreams of recycling and a ‘circular economy’ are the ultimate cause of the marine waste problem,” he concludes, “because they have discouraged development of municipal waste schemes in Asia and Africa, and because they have encouraged developed nations to use management schemes that make it hard or expensive to deal with waste and therefore tend to ‘leak’ to the environment, sometimes catastrophically so.” Even if the dream of a circular economy were possible, it would accomplish remarkably little, at enormous expense. Suppose a miraculous revolution occurs in consumer behavior. Suppose you used the tote bags with the lowest carbon footprint (the ones of nonwoven polypropylene) every time you went to the supermarket, and you conscientiously washed the bags with water heated by solar panels on your roof. Over the course of a year, the Reason researchers calculate, you would reduce your carbon emissions by less than the amount spewed by the typical car in two trips to the supermarket. You could have done more for the planet by eliminating those car trips, and there’s a convenient way to do that a lot more often than twice a year: order your groceries online from a service like FreshDirect or Peapod. University of Washington engineers estimate that online grocery shopping can reduce the related carbon emissions by at least half—clearly a more effective method than banning plastic grocery bags. Then why do environmentalists hector consumers about plastic bags instead of urging them to shop online? Why not focus on something that not only reduces greenhouse emissions but also makes people’s lives easier? The short answer: because the plastic panic isn’t really about saving the planet—and it’s certainly not about making people’s lives easier. “San Francisco’s plastic-bag ban caused greenhouse emissions from grocery bags to rise by at least 9 percent.” I have been trying to understand the green psyche since 1996, when I set a record for hate mail at the New York Times Magazine with a cover story titled “Recycling Is Garbage.” It was obvious then that the cheapest way to dispose of trash was to bury it in a landfill, and that there would never be a shortage of landfill space, yet people were clamoring to pay extra for the privilege of sorting their own waste. I concluded that recycling was a sacrament to expiate guilt, a rite of atonement for the sin of buying too much stuff. I subsequently found support for that theory from James B. Twitchell’s 2002 analysis of consumer passions, Lead Us into Temptation. “While we claim to be wedded to responsible consumption,” he wrote, “we spend a lot of our time philandering. Trash is lipstick on the collar, the telltale blond hair.” Recycling is our way of saying, “I’m sorry, honey.” The plastic panic involves consumer guilt, too, but that explains just a small part of it. While recycling programs have long enjoyed broad public support (even as the economics have worsened), similar enthusiasm doesn’t exist for restricting plastic. Market researchers have found that only 15 percent of consumers care enough about environmental issues to change their buying habits and that 50 percent will change only if it comes at no extra cost or hassle. Yet politicians eagerly go on banning plastic bags and looking for more ways to annoy voters, like California’s new law forbidding hotels from providing disposable plastic toiletries. Why would the California legislature and governor deprive their constituents of those handy little bottles of shampoo? It seemed bizarre to me until I discovered scholars’ analysis of just this sort of petty tyranny in the past. Today’s plastic bans represent a revival of sumptuary laws (from sumptus, Latin for “expense”), which fell out of favor during the Enlightenment after a long and inglorious history dating to ancient Greece, Rome, and China. These restrictions on what people could buy, sell, use, and wear proliferated around the world, particularly after international commerce increased in the late Middle Ages. Worried by the flood of new consumer goods and by the rising affluence of merchants and artisans, rulers across Europe enacted thousands of sumptuary laws from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These included exquisitely detailed rules governing dresses, breeches, hose, shoes, jewelry, purses, bags, walking sticks, household furnishings, food, and much more—sometimes covering the whole population, often specific social classes. Gold buttons were verboten in Scotland, and silk was forbidden in Portuguese curtains and tablecloths. In Padua, no man could wear velvet hose, and no one but a cavalier could adorn his horse with pearls. It was illegal at dinner parties in Milan to serve more than two meat courses or offer any kind of sweet confection. No Englishwoman under the rank of countess could wear satin striped with silver or gold, and a German burgher’s wife could wear only one golden ring (and then only if it didn’t have a precious stone). Religious authorities considered these laws essential to curb “the sin of luxury and of excessive pleasure,” in the words of Fray Hernando de Talavera, the personal confessor to Spain’s Queen Isabella. “Now there is hardly even a poor farmer or craftsman who does not dress in fine wool and even silk,” he wrote, echoing the common complaint that imported luxuries were upsetting the social order and causing everyone to spend beyond their means. In justifying her sumptuary edicts, England’s Queen Elizabeth I lamented that the consumption of imported goods had led to “the impoverishing of the Realme, by dayly bringing into the same of superfluitie of forreine and unnecessarie commodities.” But like the Americans who go on using plastic bags, the queen’s subjects refused to give up their “unnecessarie commodities.” The sumptuary laws failed to make much impact in England or anywhere else, despite the rulers’ best efforts. Their agents prowled the streets and inspected homes, confiscating taboo luxuries and punishing violators—usually with fines, sometimes with floggings or imprisonment. But the conspicuous consumption continued. If silk was banned, people would find another expensive fabric to flaunt. Rulers had to keep amending their edicts, but they remained one step behind, and often the laws were flouted so widely that the authorities gave up efforts to enforce them. For historians, the great puzzle of sumptuary laws is why rulers went on issuing them for so many centuries despite their ineffectiveness. The specific explanations vary from country to country, but there’s a common theme: the laws persisted because they benefited the right people. In a recent collection of scholarly essays, The Right to Dress, the laws’ appeal is summarized by Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, a medieval historian at the University of Bologna: “Whatever the lawmakers’ original or prevailing purpose might have been, sumptuary laws were useful instruments of rule.” The laws didn’t curb the public’s sinful appetite for luxury or contribute to national prosperity, but they comforted the social elite, protected special interests, enriched the coffers of church and state, and generally expanded the prestige and power of the ruling class. For nobles whose wealth was eclipsed by nouveau-riche merchants, the laws reinforced their social status. The restrictions on imported luxuries shielded local industries from competition. The fines collected for violations provided revenue for the government, which could be shared with religious leaders who supported the laws. Even when a law wasn’t widely enforced, it could be used selectively to punish a political enemy or a commoner who got too uppity. The laws persisted until the waning of royal sovereignty and church authority, starting in the eighteenth century. As intellectuals promoted new rights for commoners and extolled the economic benefits of free trade, sumptuary laws came to be seen as an embarrassing anachronism. Yet the urge to rule inferiors never goes away. Today’s plastic bans are even less rational than the old sumptuary laws, but they, too, benefit elites. Cheap plastic products have been a boon to the poor and the middle class, which just makes plastic seem even tackier to their social superiors. The old-money scions who used to join the clergy today do their preaching as green activists, and they’ve got the power to impose their preferences now that environmentalism is essentially the new state religion in progressive strongholds. They can lord it over the modern merchant class—the corporations desperately trying to curry social favor by touting their green credentials and making the proper financial obeisance. The plastic panic gives politicians and greens the leverage to extract contributions from companies afraid that they’ll be regulated out of business. It provides fund-raising pitches for greens and subsidies for environmentally correct companies and nonprofit groups. Most important, the plastic panic gives today’s political rulers and modern nobility a renewed sense of moral superiority. With her half-dozen regal residences, Queen Elizabeth II has one of the world’s largest carbon footprints, but now that she has banned plastic bottles and straws, she can share the first Queen Elizabeth’s dismay at her subjects’ “inordinate excess.” No matter how much fuel politicians and environmentalists burn on their flights to international climate conferences, they can still feel virtuous as they issue their edicts to grocery shoppers. For now, their power seems secure, but perhaps the public will eventually come to agree with Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, he dismissed sumptuary laws as not just terrible economics but also rank hypocrisy. “It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries,” Smith wrote. “They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs.” We could even be trusted with our plastic bags and straws." President Trump Has Created an Economic Boom for Blacks In America
No President in my lifetime has done more for Black Americans economically. So, do Blacks want more false Democrat promises, or do they want real change? We will know in November. The Real Reason for Racial Achievement Gaps "Progressive policies cause the racial achievement gaps that progressives spend so much time lamenting. That’s the conclusion of Minnesota lawyer and think-tank president John Hinderaker, based on recent educational research. He cites a report from Brightbeam, “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity For All.” The report is authored by Chris Stewart, a liberal activist from Minnesota. He studied why the progressive public schools in Minneapolis’s biggest cities have among the country’s worst achievement gaps between white and black students. Brightbeam describes itself as “a network of education activists demanding a better education and a brighter future for every child.” Stewart compared achievement by race in various cities classified as progressive or conservative. Conservative cities (as ranked by political scientists) consistently did a more effective job of shrinking student achievement gaps–occasionally, to zero–than progressive cities. The figure below summarizes the findings: Brightbeam looked at a number of variables that it thought might help to explain these findings. It concluded that “of all the factors we looked at, progressivism is the greatest predictor.”
The Brightbeam study did not attempt to explain which particular progressive policies caused these disparities. But it did call on progressive school districts to rethink their assumptions. At Bacon’s Rebellion, the longtime journalist James A. Bacon suggests some likely causes: * Agency. By blaming racism and discrimination for the woes afflicting minority communities, progressives deprive minority students of agency — the sense that they control their own destinies and that their efforts will make a difference. If minority students see themselves as victims of systemic racism, why bother working hard and “acting white”? * Discipline. Progressives have implemented “social justice” approaches to school and classroom discipline on the grounds that suspensions and other punishments disproportionately affect minorities. The resulting breakdown in classroom discipline has the perverse effect of disproportionately harming the minority students whose classes are being disrupted. * Lower standards. As an offshoot of the “self esteem” movement, progressive educators don’t want to damage the self-esteem of minority students. Accordingly, they have lower expectations and set lower standards for minorities to offset the advantages that white students have from “white privilege.” Research supports Bacon’s theory that breakdowns in classroom discipline resulting from progressive policies worsen the racial achievement gap. In New York City, suspensions were curbed by progressive school officials. The result? Minority students suffered most, as classroom disruption increased at the expense of their ability to learn. Manhattan Institute researcher Max Eden found that “schools where more than 90% of students were minorities experienced the worst” effects on school climate and safety due to restrictions on suspensions. It is predominantly-minority schools that are most often plagued by chronically disruptive students who make it difficult for their classmates to learn. Other studies have also found that progressive officials’ refusal to suspend chronically disruptive students increases the racial achievement gap. As Eden noted in the New York Post, a “study by a University of Georgia professor found that efforts to decrease the racial-suspension gap actually increase the racial achievement gap.” That research found that “in public schools with discipline problems, it hurts those innocent African American children academically to keep disruptive students in the classroom,” and “cutting out-of-school suspensions in those schools widens the black-white academic achievement gap.” In some places, progressives have curbed suspensions for violent or chronically defiant or disruptive students based on the assumption that suspensions must be racist, because it is disproportionately black students who are suspended. But racial differences in suspension rates don’t prove racism as appeals courts in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Richmond have noted. Instead, the differences in suspension rates reflect the fact that black kids are more likely to come from struggling single-parent households that fail to instill discipline. As the liberal Brookings Institution conceded in 2017, “Black students are also more likely to come from family backgrounds associated with school behavior problems.” Education reporters, who are a staunchly progressive lot, have mostly ignored the Brightbeam study. But a few newspapers have recognized its findings. One example is an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by liberal activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, titled “Research shows progressive places, like Minneapolis, have the worst achievement gaps.” Armstrong describes the findings of the Brightbeam study: The Brightbeam report shows that progressive cities like Minneapolis do worse — and, surprisingly, conservative cities do better — when it comes to educating students of color. According to the report, conservative cities have gaps in math and reading that are on average 15 and 13 percentage points smaller than those in progressive cities. *** Researchers also controlled for other factors that could potentially explain different educational outcomes, including poverty rates, population size, per-pupil spending and private school attendance rates. Surprisingly, none of these other variables made a difference in predicting the size of the opportunity gap. What mattered most was whether the city was conservative or progressive. In three of the most conservative cities — Anaheim, Fort Worth and Virginia Beach, researchers found that leaders have either closed or eliminated opportunity gaps in either reading, math or high school graduation rates. Meanwhile, in our own “progressive” city of Minneapolis, the report showed that the shameful gap in math achievement between black and white students in K-12 is 53 percentage points, while the gap in math between brown and white students is 45 points." If you want more outcomes like these vote progressive/Democrat. If you want fewer destructive outcomes don't. An election looms this fall, choose wisely. Amazon opens full-size, 'cashierless' grocery store in Seattle
Automation will revolutionize the government, which is just jonesing for a good dose of full-on automation. We could cut the federal workforce by more than half. |
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