Leftism

“Walkability” is Moot…

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…if people can’t afford to live there.

Some group has declared that San Francisco rates highest for ease of getting around on foot. Of course they are considering only the people who are already there, not those who have been priced out of SF by its sky-high real-estate valuations, the result of land-use restrictions imposed by the Bay Area’s notoriously anti-growth political culture.

One of the comments on the site where the walkability story appears puts the issue well:

The problem has never simply been walkability. It’s always been affordability. Take New York City. Rent for a studio apartment is $2000. In the burbs? $1000 for a one-bedroom. The $1000 difference pays for an awful lot of gasoline. Oh – and I should mention the 4% income tax New York City levies on its residents.
 
The effect of higher gasoline prices won’t be people moving en masse into marginal inner city areas. Instead, it will be the progressive reduction of property prices in the suburbs to compensate for higher gasoline costs, coupled with the gradual move of businesses to the suburbs to accommodate their employees, and save on real estate costs.

To paraphrase a statement one often hears from the Left, the rich and the poor are equally free to walk on the streets of San Francisco.

Anti-Quote of the Day

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Thomas PM Barnett:

“Bottom line: mature democracies trust populists more, while authoritarian states like fellow rightists.”

I like Barnett, and many of his ideas.    However,  quotes like this that make me think that he belongs in a cloistered think tank deep in the beltway, where his thoughts would probably have less impact than they currently do.

Sustainability of Progressive Politics

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What is sustainability? It seems to be a term that has been loaded with additional baggage since the Progressives have reappropriated the term for their own use. It seems to be a word used to describe the longevity of a given system, usually in an ecological context. Yet, as with many ideological terms of the left, it manages to translate itself into virtually every facet of human life. For example, sustainability encompasses what kind of house you live in, the food you eat, the types of vacations you go on, the politicians you elect, your choice to have children (or not), the types of investments you make, and many other aspects. But what is sustainability with regard to politics? (I am not speaking of sustainability policy–I’m speaking of the longevity associated with political constituencies.)

Victor Hanson wrote at his Works and Days blog about the sustainability of San Fransisco–no, not the ecological sustainability, but rather the sustainability of the (strongly-Democratic) human population:

I spent some time speaking in San Francisco recently… There are smartly dressed yuppies, wealthy gays, and chic business people everywhere downtown, along with affluent tourists, all juxtaposed with hordes of street people and a legion of young service workers at Starbucks, restaurants, etc. What is missing are school children, middle class couples with strollers, and any sense the city has a vibrant foundation of working-class, successful families of all races and backgrounds. For all its veneer of liberalism, it seems a static city of winners and losers, victory defined perhaps by getting into a spruced up Victorian versus renting in a bad district, getting paid a lot to manage something, versus very little to serve something. All in all, I got a strange creepy feeling that whatever was going on, it was unsustainablesort of like an encapsulated Europe within an American city. The city seems to exist on tourism, and people who daily come into the city to provide a service, get paidand leave….
 
I remember SF in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a kid visiting with his parents. A much different place altogether of affordable homes, vibrant docks, lots of construction—and children everywhere.

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Live by the Study, Die by the Study

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According to a NY Times story:

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented. The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

I can only say one thing: ROFLe3!

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Wile E. Is Getting Too Bold

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I’m licensed to carry concealed firearms, and it is a given that I always go armed if it is legal for me to do so. There certainly is no question that I am packing when I take my dogs on their evening walk every night.

Last year the pack and I came across a coyote that was gorging on trash, a fairly sizable wild predator in the heart of a modern city that was miles from any wilderness area. Although I was certainly ready to put it down if it was rabid and attacked, I let it go without hindrance when it turned tail and ran. Besides the fact that I’m not about to fire a gun unless I need to protect myself, coyotes aren’t enough of a threat to merit hunting them down in the city.

That might just change.

Click on that last link and see how coyotes in southern California have attacked small children in three separate incidents in a five day period. It was only because of the timely intervention of adults that none of the children were killed. Killed and eaten.

And it isn’t as if the children in question were mere babies, either. It seems that the coyotes are trying to snatch toddlers from playgrounds and front yards. Think of a 2-year-old with their face in the sharp grip of a coyote’s jaws.

This news article discusses how the experts are puzzled by how predation on humans on SoCal is on the rise, even though it mentions how one of the coyotes which attacked a little girl was limping as it approached the child. Seems to me that you don’t need to be an expert to realize that humans are easy meals for animals unless they are properly equipped to resist something with natural weaponry.

Added to that is the hippy-drippy “Nature is our cuddly friend!” attitude that dominates in that area of the country. If you have people who actually delight in having wild predators live in close proximity to human children, then there is going to be tragedy some time down the road. Where is the big mystery?

There is no real chance that a predator will be able to prevail over me, or that one will harm a child in my care. But that is because no one in their right mind would ever be able to describe me as a hippy.

My esteemed colleague Dan From Madison wrote a well received series of posts concerning how cougars are losing their fear of humans. It is no surprise that the big cats generate more concern because they are certainly more dangerous, and they have easily killed adult humans. I think that, unless attitudes change, there is going to be an incident where a child is killed by a coyote some time in the not-so-distant future.

And then the hunt will be on, hippies be damned.