Let's contemplate a Fourth Turning catalyst. "Perhaps there’s no better example of [generalized suckitude from People in Authority] than watching the man who scoffed during a presidential debate at the notion of America engaging in global “nation-building” suddenly declare that it was America’s mission to spread democracy to the ends of the earth with the 'ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.'" It's not as if I haven't been documenting a lot of tyranny in Illinois and in the United States, is it?
The tyranny is coming from an order of people who have lost their minds. "Looking at this generation of leftist leadership that seems absolutely convinced America is 'systemically' racist, sexist and phobic, and that only a complete deconstruction of our way of life will help – one wonders if it must be allowed to discover by painful experience how idiotic that philosophy really is. Alas, sane Americans will have to suffer the consequences of their foolish experiment, too." Brace yourself to your duties, dear reader, reality will bat last.
Nation building is a foolish idea. So let it be with urban planning. "Victor Gruen found work conceiving and developing what became America’s earliest shopping malls, which he optimistically envisioned as the best of what city shopping districts had to offer (strolling from store to store, places to socialize), but now easily accessible by car from the new suburban communities spreading across the landscape. As shopping activity shifted from the old downtowns to suburban malls, downtown leaders sought to transform them again to win the shoppers back." Downtowns: undone by the Fatal Conceit. "Gruen’s generation of builders and architects were so influential precisely because their vision came at a moment when American communities were still malleable enough, and confident in the ability to physically change themselves, that they could transform rapidly into something that responded to an emergent need."
The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.
1. Blunt and graphic. "It’s Perfectly Normal is harder to shrug away."
2. Losing the classical allusions. "We are rapidly losing this ability and it will greatly impoverish our understanding of who we are."
3. The wounds are wide-spread. "Democratic cities are delivering lasting self-inflicted wounds to gun control efforts with poorly conceived and poorly drafted measures."
5. Reality begs to differ. "They'll get it together at some point."
6. Governing less secures the blessings of liberty? "You can close the doors of every small business in America, but don't you dare shut down the Department of Education or Interior or National Public Radio for one day or there will be blood in the streets, senior citizens won't get their meals on wheels and disabled children won't have access to social services."
7. In China, or the 'hood, or in higher education, THIS MEANS YOU. "Disaffected young men are the ones who tend to do very bad things, for example."
8. Knit Jennifer Granholm's name into the tapestry. "A family with a baby in the sweltering Georgia heat were victims of White House privilege."
9. The making of September 12 Americans. "That’s when we all knew we were under attack. And that’s also when I became a Republican."
10. There is no unity in diversity. "The strain on Democrat mayors trying to placate black voters while eagerly seeking to administer and curry favor with vote-rich Latino immigrants is obvious."
11. Quasi-religious mania. "'In the 1500s, they used to drown witches in Europe because they blamed them for bad weather. You had the pagan people trying to appease the gods with sacrifices,' [climatologist Judith] Curry said. 'What we’re doing now is like a pseudoscientific version of that, and it’s no more effective than those other strategies.’" Yup.
12. Indeed. "Can we just stop with the, 'If you don't do what I want, I'll kill myself,' mentality? This rush to manipulation does nobody any good, least of all those who are suffering from a very real mental illness."
13. The Stalinist Terror comes for the hippie love coach. "Oberlin — like many higher-level institutions these days — only seems to support the First Amendment if your values align with theirs."
14. There's plenty of error to confess in Springfield. "Just don’t expect Illinois leadership to admit it."
15. The grim strategy equilibrium applies to frivolous impeachments. “This is supposed to be the most extreme sanction in American politics, and if you reach for it every time you think it'll help you in the polls, I fear it will become degraded.”
16. So I voted for Goldwater and ... Democrats warned me that if we voted GOP, we’d have fascism in the US.
17. It's life's illusions they recall. "The idea that a country might develop a peaceful road to an alternative economy not based on rapacious greed, war mongering, profiteering, and the myth of the meritocracy was inspiring."
18. Wrong. “If it saves one life, then it’s worth doing.”
19. Push back against technocracy more generally. "We need to push back on the idea that more controls make crossings safer, and think more holistically about the environment."
20. Your weekly reminder. "The Democratic Party is not altogether comfortable with democracy."
21. Freedom is tax slavery. "Communists saw 'freedom' in the same way a herd of anthropomorphic livestock might." Or a herd of Walworth County Democrats.
23. Frequency and connectivity. “You can’t compete with the automobile if you only have one or two trains a day.”
24. I'll drink to that! "The only thing that changed this year was the ownership of the Chicago Bears."
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