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"Just the facts M'am, Just the facts." -- Sgt. Joe Friday
By Brooks
By Brooks
We stopped for a night in Vancouver to break up the trip before heading on to Shanghai.
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These candid shots were taken in the Yuyuan market as people walked by while Henry and I waited for Melanie to complete a few purchases in a nearby store. The market is a wonderful place to just watch people.
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Other Shanghai shots from the weekend.
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By Brooks
July 12, 2008 Shanghai
Burney Zhang from Grayline guided us for the day. 28 years old, single, lives with his parents, born and raised in Shanghai, a young man of the city. Pictures will have to wait. We left the cable at home that connects the camera to the laptop, and we don’t have an adapter for the memory card to plug into the laptop, so verbal description will suffice for now.
We started at Yuyuan Gardens, also called Yu Gardens. They are a short walk from our hotel. Our hotel, The Renaissance Shanghai Yuyuan Hotel is pretty new and is located in an area of Shanghai with many blocks of homes and streets preserved with original buildings. It’s a tourist business area with lots of high pressure street hawkers constantly hitting on you. Maybe it was always this way.
Yu means “parents” and yuan means “to honor”. Yu Gardens were built by a wealthy Persian 400 years ago to honor his parents who died before they got a chance to live there. The gardens are now operated by the government. They contain many old buildings, walls, walkways, ponds and of course plants. This garden has a 400 year old ginko tree, a male. There used to be a female ginko next to it but it died and was replaced by a magnolia tree, the city tree of Shanghai. The object of a Chinese garden is to create many vistas for repose, contemplation, family occasions and meetings, within a small space. The garden is designed so that from one step to the next, new scenes and ways of looking at things emerge.
We learned about dragons. A dragon has the antlers of a deer, the head of an ox, the eyes of a shrimp, the talons of an eagle, the scales of a fish, and the body of a snake. The dragon holds an egg in its mouth, it’s life source. If the dragon loses its egg it dies. A toad below the dragon head helps protect the dragon egg. The toad lives off the dragons’ drool. The weak and the powerful work together to preserve the life force. Several of the walls in Yu Garden are crowned with dragons. Walls make a good base for dragons because they are long, like dragons.
And we learned about lions. Lions are found at entryways. The male is always on the right, the female on the left. The female will have a cub with eyes cast toward it, and the male will have his paw on a globe, the power of the world. Other male/female differences mentioned are that In China, women retire from work at age 55 and men retire at age 60. In Shanghai, 32 is a reasonable age for men to marry. Men are expected to have a house, a car, and a good job in order to attract a woman. Women focus on looking good and, according to Burney, they have a live-for-today attitude. I’m not sure how representative of Shanghai sex roles this last bit is. Just reporting here.
Yu Garden exits on to a matrix of shops and streets in an open mall, Yuyuan market, built from refurbished classic business buildings. These are several stories tall with curved and peaked eves, pretty massive buildings made of stout wood timbers painted in traditional dark red lacquer. The streets were packed with weekend tourists. On one side of an alley, cooks were mass producing by hand great piles of pork buns, and 10 feet across the alley was a Starbucks. Pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Fidel Castro (separate visits) were in the window in front of one of the top ten restaurants in Shanghai in the market.
We moved on to Old Shanghai Street from the Yuyuan market. This goes for several blocks and as you walk along sales agents hit on you one after another. Though many understand “no thank you” they will generally persist until you say “bu yao,” which apparently means the same thing. It’s all very non-threatening, however they do take something away from the peaceful experience of strolling casual observation. I found out what the stores are with all of the red paper goods – see pic from Xiamen. Lantern stores. The red paper lanterns hold candles, very festive and traditional.
Next we took a short cab ride to The Confucius School. Students visit the school to make wishes at graduation that they will do well in tests and find success. They put their wish on a board and if their wish comes true they come back and hang it with a red ribbon in a tree near the statute of Confucius. In the past, students would spend as long as a year in finishing studies at the Confucius School. During the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, Confucianism was discouraged. The school has been constructed, or reconstructed, to modern preservation standards, and Confucianism is again a respected philosophy. It was not clear what became of the school during the Cultural Revolution. Now it is a government park with a nice museum store containing antiques. We purchased a porcelain statue of the most powerful Buddha riding a dragon. I forget his name. I think there are 18 Buddhas. The statue is from Fujian province. We also bought a white jade carving of a cabbage. These things come with government certificates of authenticity, descriptions of their history, UPS shipping and insurance. We shall see. Burney rested while a young girl who had a degree in elementary education guided us around the school.
Next we took a short cab ride to the Shanghai Duty Free Pearl Shop. Shanghai is known for its fresh water pearls. Judy, not her Chinese name, began the shopping experience by opening an oyster for us and removing the pearls. There were 15 or so pearls “cultured” in this oyster. She gave us each a pearl from this oyster. That set the hook and pretty much determined that pearls would be bought today. And they were. Burney stood in a downpour for us for an eternity to get us a cab to go eat.
Burney then took us for a great dim sum lunch with many dishes at the Changshou Shunfeng Restaurant at 1068 Xikang Road. The 4 of us ate like kings for about $30, in contrast to the one dimensional poor dinner 3 of us had at our hotel for $100 the night before. On the other hand, the club level food and beverage offerings and very kind staff at the hotel are all excellent.
After lunch we walked a few blocks over to the Jade Buddha Temple. During the Cultural Revolution the monks hung pictures of Mao on the walls of the temple and in front of the Buddha statutes so that the army would have to destroy pictures of Mao in order to destroy the temple and it’s belongings. This saved the temple. The Buddhas are big, 15 feet tall. Some have supernatural features like multiple arms and animal parts. Two groups of monks walked around, chanting, making various percussion sounds with small symbols, drums and blocks. Burney said it was probably a funeral rite. He also said that young people don’t practice much Buddhism, it’s mostly preserved in the older generations. The Jade Buddha, the most revered Buddha in the temple has it’s own air-conditioned room and no photography is allowed in there. There were photos on the wall outside of Nancy Reagan and Bill Clinton, separate visits of course. Downstairs in another building, a calligraphy artist made a paper scroll of our names in Chinese. From the discussion between Burney and the artist I got the impression that the characters chosen to represent our names were selected partly according to the similarity of their sound to the English sound of our names, and partly according to how what they actually represent in Chinese resembled how we looked and acted. It seemed to make perfect sense to them though I would be surprised if the next Chinese reader, upon reading that calligraphy out loud, would say something we might recognize as our names. It was all good fun though.
We were getting exhausted at this point so our next two stops, the French Concession and the Bund areas were mostly walking and taking in street sights and sounds, without much explanation. These areas are well covered in the travel lit and they were busy with weekend walkers. The French Concession is very upscale with lots of beautiful Europeans patronizing the bistros and sidewalk cafes in various photogenic states of repose and frivolity. The Bund waterfront across the river from the new Pudong financial district was jammed with Chinese hanging out, seeing and being seen.
We were all in, took a cab back to the hotel, made our goodbyes to Burney who I would recommend to everyone as an ideal English speaking guide, and crashed for the night.
Some closing impressions: Shanghai is a modern cosmopolitan city with lots of the old still evident, lots of new construction and public works, many beautiful people, many poor city dwellers, basically a lot of everything. Hong Kong has much more of a British feel than Shanghai. There is a strong consciousness of the earthquake here and only recently have entertainment programs, banned since the quake, returned to television. They’ve recently enacted a surcharge for disposable plastic bags and take-away food containers. The English language Shanghai Daily Newspaper has a lot of local, regional and international coverage, and most stories have a not-so-subtle moral message embedded in them. This parallels the heavy symbolic element that seems to be a part of just about everything here.
By Brooks
Void for vagueness is a legal concept in American constitutional law, whereby a civil statute or, more commonly, a criminal statute is adjudged unconstitutional when it is so vague that persons “of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application,” as the United States Supreme Court articulated in Connally v General Construction Co., 269 US 385, 391 (1926). A statute is void for vagueness when: 1) it is unclear what persons fall within its scope, 2) what conduct is forbidden, and/or 3) what punishment may be imposed. Due process requires that a law be reasonably definite as to what persons and conduct are covered as well as the punishment for any violation. In determining whether a law is void for vagueness, courts have imposed the following tests: 1) does the law give fair notice to those persons subject to it? 2) does the law guard against arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement? and 3) can the law be enforced with sufficient “breathing room” for First Amendment rights?
It is difficult to see how a planning document that did not pass this test, could be constitutional and enforceable. Regarding the Transportation Master Plan:
Remove all intangible, vague, uncertain, subjective, ambiguous, duplicitous, parse-able expressions that can be twisted into subjective meanings, value-laden, and emotional language from the plan. If it’s not definite, or if it can create grounds for future disputes, or if it is arguable, or if it is based on contested science, it shouldn’t be in there.
The document is supposed to be about transportation. Make it ONLY about transportation. Cut all the lip service and happy language out. That stuff will only foster divisions that will tie people up and detract from the transportation mission.
“Transportation” is a solvable problem. There is a least-cost, maximally efficient, solution for any transportation network. A transportation plan should be so targeted. It should not be loaded up with non-transportation objectives. It should not be a vehicle to advance a subset of politics.
By Brooks
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. [Read more…]
By Brooks
“The truth is that forest “health” is a political term used by the timber industry for the same reasons environmentalists use the word “sustainability.” These words are practically devoid of any measurable content, yet they are used to bludgeon political opponents who dare to question the subsidies that each side wants for their activities.” From:The Antiplanner
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Another example:
Note the disconnects between some of the Elbert County Transportation Master Plan’s Objectives, and the list of “qualitative and quantitative” inputs used to achieve those objectives.
-Community Values and preservation of the quality of life.
-Good land use and planning policies.
-Sensitive to the environment.
No inputs are identified to resolve these goals. This is probably because they cannot be objectively resolved. As a result, the plan will mean different things to different people at different times. It will be a moving target, devoid of accountability, subject to corruption and exigencies of the moment, basically, a make-work device for lawyers and planners.
By Brooks
Because finding the liberal answer is more important than finding the right answer. Of course, if the correct liberal answer is already known (as the author implies) why even bother with the Supreme Court?
By Brooks
By Brooks
By Brooks
“There is no secret about ACWWA being desirous of Elbert County’s water.”
Kiowa Cabal 1 & 2
“I saved the best for last. ACWWA does not want Elbert County’s water.”
Kiowa Cabal 3
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, The actual malice standard requires that the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case prove that the publisher of the statement in question knew that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity.
By Brooks
By Brooks
When liberals are in the majority:
“The Court follows the approach of cases in which objective indicia of consensus demonstrated an opinion. . .” KENNEDY v. LOUISIANA
When conservatives are in the majority:
“In interpreting this text, we are guided by the principle that “[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.” United States v. Sprague, 282 U. S. 716, 731 (1931); see also Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 188 (1824). Normal meaning may of course include an idiomatic meaning, but it excludes secret or technical meanings that would not have been known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation.” DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA ET AL. v. HELLER
Two Supreme Court rulings issued one day apart, the first creating law out of thin air, the second, interpreting law from the Constitution. Do you feel more secure when the law of the land can be manufactured at will? Or do you feel more secure when the law must be derived from the Constitution chosen by our ancestors, and sworn to be upheld and defended by public officials ever since? Can the liberal method even qualify as a “rule of law?” Isn’t it really a “rule of perceived consensus?”
By Brooks
By Brooks
6/25/08 BOCC Meeting at Fairgrounds to decide Scouts temporary use permit 43 meg audio file. (Please download large audio files to your computer for listening.)
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment letter to BSA of June 18, 2008
Mr. Herman indicated the Scouts have spent a half million dollars thus far in litigation with 4 of the 300 neighbors who live within 2 miles of the Peaceful Valley Scout Ranch.
By Brooks
Opening remarks of Scalia’s dissent
“What the Court apparently means is that the political branches can debate, afterwhich the Third Branch will decide.”
By Brooks
“I think we need to appreciate what we have and protect it.”
Nature vs. Greed, What Legacy Are You Teaching Your Children? from: Abe21.net 6/22/08
“A world without children will be a poorer world — grayer, lonelier, less creative, less confident. Children have always been a great blessing, but it may take their disappearance for the world to remember why.”
A World Without Children – Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe
The tension is between those who don’t have kids yet who are, ostensibly, trying to save the world for the kids of tomorrow, and those who are trying to figure out a way to live with their kids in the world of today. But those most active in preserving nature don’t appear too interested in having messy little kids muck around in their pristine wilderness.
So who really are the greedy ones in this paradigm? The folks who want to lock up vast tracks of mostly other people’s land because they like the way it looks, or the folks who want to mortgage their lives away for a small piece of property on the fringe of the metro area in the hope of securing a small piece of the American dream to raise a family?
By Brooks
Overview of the anti-alcohol industry
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By Brooks
This image is a merge of the “existing level of service” and “new connections” graphs from the transportation master plan, plus two diagonal connections that would improve inter-county transit times.
(click to enlarge)
1) The great majority of new connections are East-West routes within the county.
2) North-South routes don’t change much.
3) There are no new connections to points outside Elbert County.
It appears fair to conclude that the plan would facilitate intra-county transportation, but not inter-county transportation with our neighbors. Therefore;
1) The plan is not designed to bring this portion of Elbert County into a more integrated regional transportation network and appears to violate the purpose of creating a component of a larger regional transportation plan construct.
2) The plan does not promote economic integration between this portion of Elbert County and its’ three neighboring counties.
3) By not improving linkages to surrounding counties the plan preserves the economic isolation of Elbert County from neighboring counties. This indicates that the “socioeconomic trend” in this section of Elbert County is to remain a bedroom community. The plan’s intent to spend $1.5 billion dollars to build out and pave road infrastructure seems inconsistent with economic isolation.
By Brooks
“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short [and colorful].”
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.
The no-growth crowd may love their mythological state of nature, but all that proves is they’ve never lived in it.
By Brooks
Here is an opportunity to stand up against the inflammatory hyperbole and emotional scare tactics directed at the Boy Scouts at Peaceful Valley last year. Please help saner minds prevail in this situation and add your voice in support of the Scouts.
By Brooks
By Brooks
See: Conservation Easements_ The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.pdf
See: Rule Against Perpetuities
See: The Nature Conservancy Consolidated Financial Statements for 2007 and 2006
In their last fiscal year, the Nature Conservancy sold over $260 Million worth of conservation land and easements to governments. Government officials like this method for gaining control of private land because they can do it without the public notices involved with planning and zoning land use changes.
See: Colorado Land Trusts
Also See:
February 21, 2008
Conservation Easements in Perpetuity are for a Long, Long Time
By Clarice Ryan [Read more…]
By Brooks
By Brooks
“What America needs is a bill with a Manhattan Project for nuclear power plants, a plan to develop the two trillion barrels of North American shale oil, and a map of where the rigs in ANWR and offshore will go.”
By Brooks
By Brooks
By Brooks
West Elbert County Transportation Master Plan May 8th Draft
West Elbert County Transportation Master Plan May 8th Appendices
These documents are available on the county web site. I saved them here in case they get removed from the county site.
On the whole, it looks like the plan creates more beneficiaries than those negatively impacted. A good deal of property stands to be reallocated to transportation, however, and the plan would gain considerable authority if it were put before the voters for adoption. Whichever way the vote went, many fights would be avoided.
I’m a little surprised the plan did not propose any major diagonal arterials into the Springs and Denver to facilitate commuting. A great way to “foster the rural quality of life so important to Elbert County citizens” (Community Vision Statement, pg. 3-5.) would be to have those citizens spend less time on zig-zag roads commuting to and from town.
By Brooks
Daily Article | Posted on 5/29/2008 by Gary Galles
We get a lot of abuse, those of us who publicly defend private property rights and voluntary arrangements against the varied depredations of government. Having to constantly face such attacks is a substantial part of the cost of speaking out, and probably explains why more people don’t take the risk.
For those who might be considering publicly taking up the cause of “life, liberty, and property,” I offer the following example to give you a taste of what you can expect. [Read more…]
By Brooks
By Brooks
An Abe21 unsigned opinion, collected 5/21/08, since taken down.
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“The Will of the People[?]”
“What the Citizens want[?]”
“The Collective Persona of the county[?]”
Balderdash! Buncombe! BS!
There is no such thing, entity, common idea, or consensus. The Master Plan is advisory to the Commission precisely because no fictional collective consciousness, however loudly proclaimed by a vocal minority, should ever be binding upon citizens. I don’t care how many consultants and government planners put their expensive hours into writing it, the county Master Plan is not the product of a representative legislature or representative deliberative body. The county Master Plan is the work product of a minority of non-representative, special-interest, squeaky-wheels, who cloak their totalitarian methods in social engineering platitudes, and who use the courts to accomplish what they cannot obtain at the ballot box.
Any judge who upholds their minority plan as binding upon the majority should be run out of town on a rail. No quantity of speculative judicial reasoning can disguise the injustice of holding the majority hostage to the utopian dreams of a special interest minority.
Mr. Thomasson and Democrats of like mind in this, as much as I think the county commission needs diversity, it is issues like this involving the usurpation of fundamental liberties that will lead to the election of a Republican ticket in November.
I encourage the Democrats to propose their utopian visions for voluntary democratic approval at the ballot box, however, forceful impositions of social engineering upon the citizens of Elbert County should be resisted with equal force. Citizens can and will protect their own interests far more effectively than planners ever have or will, and that is the “no-brainer.”
Brooks Imperial
By Brooks
The top 2 income classes making $100,000 and up, comprise 15.4% of income tax payers, and pay 83.3% of federal income taxes.
Remember this next time the progressives talk about raising taxes on the rich. The rich already pay way more than their fair share, and that’s probably enough progress.
Source: U.S. Congress
By Brooks
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." Thomas Jefferson