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Gulangyu Islet
Xiamen
China day 4
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notes from China
The Church of Planningology
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“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion[.]” 1st Am. U.S. Constitution
The Planning Tax
by Randal O’Toole
Conclusion
As it is usually practiced, regional growth management planning imposes huge costs on home buyers, renters, and businesses. Yet it provides negligible benefits: it does little to reduce sprawl (if that can even be considered a benefit), and its greatest social effect is to sort urban areas into central cities largely composed of young singles and childless couples and suburbs with high percentages of families with children.
The key to affordable housing is the availability of relatively unregulated vacant land for housing and other urban purposes. The effects of denying homebuilders access to such developable land appears to be an almost relentless upward push of housing prices. In 1979, price-to-income ratios in coastal California cities were greater than 4. By 1989, they exceeded 5.0. Thanks to a major recession in the early 1990s, they were still between 5 and 6 by 1999, but today they are mostly greater than 8. Prices may be declining now, but—unless changes are made—states such as Arizona, Florida, and Oregon whose price-to-income ratios were 4 or more in 2006 can expect to have California’s price-to-income ratios in a decade or two.
Remedies for unaffordable housing will require actions at the federal, state, and local levels.
• The federal government should revoke requirements that all urban areas must be represented by metropolitan planning organizations. Congress should also repeal the comprehensive, long-range planning requirements found in federal transportation and housing legislation.
• States with growth-management laws should repeal those laws and other states should avoid passing similar ones.
• Other state laws that give cities power to control the rate of development of rural areas, such as the California law creating local agency formation commissions, should also be repealed. Instead, states should insure that plenty of vacant land is available to meet each region’s need for housing and other land uses.
• Local governments should resist efforts by MPOs and other regional agencies to impose region-wide planning on their urban areas.
• As far as possible, infrastructure should be paid for by developers or property owners through annual user fees and special service districts rather than through up-front impact fees or general taxation.
Urban planners, of course, may oppose these actions. Instead, they aspire to pass growth-management laws in every state and impose growth-management plans on every urban area. The predictable result will be increasingly unaffordable housing, declining homeownership rates, and a growing disparity between the elite who own their own homes and a significant number of families who will never become homeowners.
Read the entire essay: The Planning Tax, The Case Against Regional Growth Management Planning
joint investigation protocols
DSS & Law Enforcement Joint Investigation Protocols
We are a nation and culture of laws. Laws provide the means that protect us from each other and from the state. When it comes to protection from other people, when our personal safety is threatened, we can act in self defense. For lesser degrees of protection not rising to the level of personal safety, we have civil legal remedies available to us through the courts. Any citizen can freely use these mechanisms for protection when necessary.
The state, however, is not a citizen with the same rights as everyone else. Citizens cannot protect themselves from the state in the same way they protect themselves from other citizens. To be clear, when I say the “state,” I mean all government entities – law enforcement agencies, ministerial and executive bodies, legislative bodies, regulatory agencies, public health, public schools, etc., i.e. any group funded directly or indirectly through taxation or public assessments.
American citizens protect themselves from the state with the set of laws that originate in the Constitution. Short of revolution, respect for the Constitution is all we citizens have to protect us from excessive state intervention in our lives. That is why our public servants swear an oath to defend and protect the Constitution when they take office. That is why all of our legislation and regulation is tested to see if it’s “constitutional.” We don’t care about official promises to protect us directly. We want a promise to protect the law that protects us. Law is far less fickle than personal promises. [Read more…]
Weld County protocol
Weld County Child Abuse Protocol
(4 megs)
child protection and law enforcement
http://www.futureofchildren.org/information2827/information_show.htm?doc_id=74221
“Given the evolving research about children’s suggestibility, caution is in order. Exaggerated claims that children, including preschool children, can never accurately report or always accurately report are not supported by the literature. In addition, because there is growing knowledge about factors contributing to suggestibility, as well as practical ways to lower it, it is important that those who do interview children are properly trained and that professional groups develop model protocols or guidelines for interviewing children. Some efforts in this regard are under way. For example, in a recent three-year study of multidisciplinary interview centers in Sacramento and Orange counties in California, child interview specialists received a specialized 40-hour course on interviewing children. The research and evaluation panel for this project concluded that trained child interview specialists were critical to the success of the centers and recommended that such specialists receive extensive start-up and ongoing training in child development, forensically defensible interviewing, and the informational needs of investigative agencies. The panel further recommended that California certify professionals who complete requirements established by the state for child interview specialists.36 We believe that this is a promising approach and that all states should explore the merits of certifying specially trained child interviewers.”
Reporting, Investigation and Adjudication
geekipedia
Meatspace
“This bit of net-jockey jargon denotes the real world of physical space, where your pasty, withered frame languishes in a drab cubicle — as opposed to cyberspace, where your Second Life avatar rests its buff, rippling bod on a beach while sipping a mojito in virtual Cabo San Lucas.”
i.e. This blog will go static while we travel to Far East meatspace for a few weeks at the end of the year.
And this from a friend, “Sometimes the gleam in their eyes comes from the light bouncing off the back of their skull.”
request for summary judgment
Thanksgiving weekend
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in racing, just as in life
(click to enlarge) 
Gus Dur
The Last King of Java
Indonesia ‘s former president offers a model of Muslim tolerance
BY BRET STEPHENS
JAKARTA, Indonesia–Suppose for a moment that the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world openly says “I am for Israel.” Suppose he believes not only in democracy but in the liberalism of America’s founding fathers. Suppose that, unlike so many self-described moderate Muslims who say one thing in English and another in their native language, his message never alters. Suppose this, and you might feel as if you’ve descended into Neocon Neverland.
In fact, you have arrived in Jakarta and are sitting in the small office of an almost totally blind man of 66 named Abdurrahman Wahid. A former president of Indonesia, he is the spiritual leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Islamic organization of some 40 million members. Indonesians know him universally as Gus Dur, a title of affection and respect for this descendant of Javanese kings. In the U.S. and Europe he is barely spoken of at all–which is both odd and unfortunate, seeing as he is easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism.
Conversation begins with some old memories. In the early 1960s, Mr. Wahid, whose paternal grandfather founded the NU in 1926 and whose father was Indonesia’s first minister of religious affairs, won a scholarship to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which for 1,000 years had been Sunni Islam’s premier institution of higher learning. Mr. Wahid hated it. [Read more…]
morning today
How to counter Islamic extremism
By Abdurrahman Wahid ( Gus Dur )
The Age, Wednesday, April 10 2002
There are two great challenges for reform of education that have to be addressed if Muslim society is to respond meaningfully to the threat of terrorism. Most Muslims are strongly opposed to acts of violence, in any form, undertaken in the name of religion. Consequently, it hurts us to constantly see the name of Islam, “the religion of peace”, linked with international terrorism. Nevertheless, as Muslims we must face the reality that if we fail to address the challenges before us we will find ourselves constantly confronted with accusations of harboring terrorists – regardless of how fair those generalised accusations might be. If, however, we are prepared seriously to address these two challenges, people such as Osama Bin Laden will find increasingly little solace or support in Muslim society. Sadly, at the moment within the Muslim world we do have groups that justify violence on the grounds that they are defending Islam against the tyranny of the uncivilised West. We need to undercut the kind of thinking that justifies such simplistic assertions, in order that those who advocate terrorism will find no refuge in our communities. [Read more…]
notice of 1B hearing
11/24 update: Charles Groesbeek of the ECDC asked for and received a continuance from the court. The hearing will be rescheduled.
A hearing on the 1B complaint has been set for Monday, November 26th at 10:00 a.m. at the Office of Administrative Courts, 633 17th Street, 14th Floor, Denver, CO 80203.
Anyone with evidence relevant to this complaint is hereby invited to contact Brooks Imperial at (303) 725-9662.
responsive v prescriptive planning
Modern Memorials
Monuments to Wimpdom
What do these modern memorials to heroism and sacrifice have in common?
* The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. Designed by college student Maya Lin, it was unveiled in Washington, D.C. on Veterans’ Day 25 years ago. It’s a black granite thingy-a long, plain wall that lines a big hole dug 10 feet into the ground. It lists the names of the war’s 58,000 fallen Americans and . . . nothing else.
In her first proposal to build the memorial, Miss Lin explained its purpose: “We, the living, are brought to a concrete realization of these deaths.” That’s it. Not to honor what they did. Just a reminder that they’re dead. Thanks.
* The Flight 93 National Memorial. The National Park Service has decided to erect the “Bowl of Embrace,” in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed to earth on September 11, 2001. Here’s the plan: For their heroism in overpowering four Islamic hijackers and foiling their attempt to destroy the White House or the Capitol, the passengers are to be honored with . . . an empty field. It’s little comfort that the field is surrounded by a stand of red maple trees planted in an arc that eerily resembles the crescent of Islam. The design’s original name: “The Crescent of Embrace.”
Like the Vietnam memorial, the monument itself has no inscription honoring anyone’s actions-just 1970s-style wind chimes and the names of dead people inscribed on glass cubes.
* The National September 11 Memorial. On the spot where New York’s mighty World Trade Center stood, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.’s anointed designer, Michael Arad, decrees that there be . . . an American eagle? How about a statue of the three firemen raising the American flag over the rubble? Heck no. Just two huge, square, “reflecting” pools. Maybe you can gaze at your navel through them. In a complex slated to cost $1 billion, this urban swamp is called “Reflecting Absence.”
Absence, indeed. What these modern war memorials have in common with each other is nothing. They portray nothingness. They have no people in them, never mind men carrying guns or swords, statues of Winged Victory, or even doves of peace. Just death and names — grief without glory. [Read more…]