Showing posts with label Drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Drugs. Show all posts

Friday, February 23, 2024

Saturday, February 23, 1924. Electric Trucks.

The Saturday magazines hit the stands, including this issue of Colliers:
The issue had some good articles on it, including one that would still be considered timely.

Politics and oil were a topic.

On oil, the issue had an Autocar Truck advertisement advertising gas and electric trucks. . . the latter being something that locals now insist just can't happen.


And Colt had an advertisement on handguns in a national magazine, something that wouldn't happen now.  While the government is referenced, it's really home protection, a theme we still see, that is being suggested.

The Royal Navy intervened in the ongoing dockworkers strike to move 4,500 bags of mail from the United States.

Albanian Prime Minister Ahmet Zogu was shot twice by an anarchist would be assassin, but survived.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XL. Panem et circenses.

Yes, the "Big 4-0".

Roman numeral wise, that is.

Because we're not stoned enough already.

Poppies.  Poppy seeds were added to Italian bread in the middle ages by the poor, specifically to keep themsleves stoned most of the time.  This was because their lives were bad.  The German army passed out booze, and sometimes drugs, late in World War Two to "motivate" troops, or in other words stone them before they went into horrors.  Somehow, we're headed back into the Italian situation.

Headline from The Denver Post:

Gov. Polis tells Bill Maher he’s “excited” about medical ‘shrooms after voters pass psilocybin legalization

And also:

Colorado voters decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms

Colorado becomes the second state after Oregon to establish a regulated system for substances like psilocybin and psilocin.

Because Americans aren't stupid enough already, and Denver isn't enough of a giant doped up smelly dump.

Seriously, the march of intoxicants in this society ought to be an alarm bell going off. Something is really screwed up and the only thing a lot of people, and governments, can think to do is to keep people stoned.

A walk thought Denver's capitol city should show anyone, including Governor Polis, how messed up Colorado is as an example of this.  Truly, and I'm not a teetotaler, if there's one thing that could have been done to help keep the country from getting where it now is, that we could go back and do, not repealing prohibition would be it.

Panem et circenses?

It seems so.

Bias?

Colorado Springs shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich is a registered member of the Mormon church, spokesman confirms

So what?

I note this as this does seem to be the sort of headline that imports next to no useful information but which reporters, because of a bias, believe it does. It's impossible not to read this and think that the suggestion is that Anderson Aldrich shot up a gay club because he's a Mormon.

I'm rather obviously not a Mormon, but I'm confident that the LDS church does not advocate this sort of thing in any sense.

This is, I'd note, just a stone's throw from suggesting that all members of any conservative religion that generally holds conservative social views is a menace to society, a suggestion I've seen in news articles more than once.

Bias confirmation

Most folks here no doubt don't follow it, but there's a thing called "Catholic Twitter", which is made up of Catholics, on Twitter.

The main thing about Twitter is the gross exaggeration of any one topic until it's at the screaming level.  Most of the people on Twitter don't take Twitter all that seriously to start with, and they shouldn't, and any one topic that's on it is not likely to be all that important or reflective of what is going on in the real world.

Anyhow, below is a part of a conservation that got rolling and rapidly morphed into "blind my eyes to the evidence".  How it got started I'm not sure, as it involves the now actually relatively old story of Catholic cleric's abusing some sexually.

It's worth noting that this story is horrific in general. But at the same time it was a minority of clerics, and most of this story is now really old. To the extent that it remains a real present story it is is because the Church has a lot of older leaders, much like American society in general, who haven't done a good job of confronting this, in part because they seem to have ignored it and don't quite get the story.

Anyhow, one Priest noted.

Fr Matthew P. Schneider, LC
@FrMatthewLC
The majority of victims of clerical sex abuse were post-pubescent males who were still minors. Allowing men who were sexually attracted to post-pubescent male teens become priests likely had a part to do with the abuse (whatever name you give that).
Quote Tweet
Joshua McElwee
@joshjmac
Asked about prior comments that gay clergy were responsible for the Catholic clergy abuse crisis, new US Catholic bishop president Archbishop Broglio claims: "It's certainly an aspect of the sexual crisis that can't be denied." Academic studies have found no such relationship.
Twitter for Android

Fr. Schneider is correct.  Most of the abuse that occurred was male on male, and most of that was on post pubescent males who were legally minors.

Let's take a diversion here for a moment.

Just recently a French Cardinal publically confessed and condemned himself for what was translated as "an affair" with a 14-year-old female back many years ago when he was a priest, not a bishop.

That's horrific.

The headlines, however, rapidly went from "an affair" to "rape", or at least the Twitter ones did.

Here's the thing.  Under the applicable French law, she was over the age of consent and could do just that.  So the act was icky, gross, immoral, inexcusable, but not illegal.  It wasn't rape as the law of that land, at the time, defined it.

FWIW, as that surprised me, I looked it up. The age of consent in France is now 15.

I always think of the age of consent being 18, but by and large in most of Europe, Ireland I think aside, the age of consent is lower than 18, with ages in the mid-teens not uncommon.  I'm not going to post them all, but that's interesting in part because Europeans like to criticize the US for having legal pathways to "child marriage" while they have legal pathways to what we'd regard here as rape.

Anyhow, this is an example of following the evidence.

And the evidence generally is that most priest abusers were engaging in homosexual abuse, as legal line or not, "post pubescent" is a legal, not a physical, line.

Occam's Razor holds that the simplest answer is generally the best, because it's generally correct.  The simplest explanation here is that most of the abusers were homosexuals.

Indeed, they pretty clearly were.

No, that doesn't make all homosexual men abusers, but if you put anyone in a situation in which they have no legitimate means for an outlet, problems arise. The real question, therefore, is how did enough homosexual men end up in the priesthood (and in Boy Scout leadership positions) for this to be statistically observable.

I've posted on it before, but my view is, on the priesthood, that this occurred as it gave homosexual Catholic men a place to professionally hide.  That seems to be where the evidence leads. They weren't there because they were homosexuals per se, but because it gave them a socially acceptable excuse for not being married and, even more than that, not exhibiting any interest in women.

Well, of course, the Twitterverse couldn't accept that. The competing explanation, violating the principal of pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, was that the abuse was male on male only males were around, and therefore they were the only targets of opportunity.

That explanation leaves a lot lacking.  For one thing, males aren't the only humans around. The French example, which has become two examples, demonstrates that, and an example in our own diocese of many years ago demonstrates that as well.

And while all male environments do give rise to this, it's not quite in the same fashion.  Those examples tend to be instances in which not only are only males around, but their virtually cloistered for long periods of time.  Groups of straight conscripts, for example, don't start engaging in male on male sexual contact as there aren't women around.  Indeed, studies have shown that in areas where there are only males for long periods of time, what tends to happen is that their testosterone levels plummet on their own, and they're simply less interested.

But because we must maintain this fiction socially now, we can't entertain the possibility that the abusers were homosexuals.  We can't even really engage in the possibility that a small number of homosexuals are abusers.

The Zeitgeist.

What about the Boy Scouts?

I haven't researched it, but I'd guess that those abusers were attracted to those leadership roles specifically for the target of opportunity situation.  So that situation was different yet.  The difference, therefore, is that in the priest example I suspect homosexual men put themselves into that situation to avoid suspicion as to their inclinations, and then yielded in crossing a line which they should not have, and which in the US is illegal, but in the same country, at a time when pornification of child models was common, isn't surprising.  In the Boy Scout example, that was probably a group of men who were abusers in the first instance, but with homosexual inclinations.

And no, that doesn't mean all homosexuals are abusers.

Less government?

The State gave out $6,600,000 in rent relief, funded by the Federal Government, last month.

This program has stopped now, but its interesting in that there's been so much howling in the state about Federal money.  As other examples have shown, people can howl about the dangers of Federal money and take it at the same time.

Credit Cart Sales and Firearms

A recent headline read:

Guns bought through credit cards in the US will now be trackable

So what?

In the United States, you have a right to keep and bear arms. We all know this. But that really doesn't mean that private companies can't track it.

They're already tracking everything else.

If we really don't like this, what we ought to do is simply ban credit cars, which are inherently inflationary to start with.

Misplaced Complaints

A lot of people are complaining about Elon Musk buying Twitter and treating it like a toy.

Well, he's super rich and for him, it probably is a toy.  He's probably loving seeing people complain as they dance to his tune.  And that probably explains why he let Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene back on Twitters.

Just ignore it.

Twitter really doesn't matter.  I noted this all the other day here:

Much ado about Twitter.

Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is busy making changes to it internally. This, in turn, has resulted in a lots of righteous anger about his behavior.

Here's the real question.

Who cares?

We have a Twitter Feed.  You can see it on the bottom right-hand corner of this page. That doesn't stop the fact that Twitter is basically stupid.

A person can't say anything worth saying in as few of words as Twitter restricts you to.  All Twitter really is for us is redirection to this blog. Does it work? Who knows.  But as far as weighty conversation, not happening.

Indeed, the fact that people seem to think its weighty shows how dim the American intellect has become, as if there wasn't plenty of proof for that otherwise.

Now, I have some feeds that I follow I really like. Some do nothing other than what this one does, direct you to other things Some are basically photo feeds, much like Instagram.

But as far as news or anything worth reading, not going to happen.

Some people seem to think that Musk shouldn't be allowed to own Twitter or, if he does, he shouldn't be allowed to wreck it. Well, why not?  He owns it.  If you are uncomfortable with that, as many are, the real argument is that a person shouldn't be allowed to amass the size of fortune that Musk has.  Musk was born into a wealthy South African family, and he's made more money, showing I suppose that being born to a wealthy family is a good way to get richer. 

It also shows how screwed up American immigration laws are, as Musk apparently lives in Texas. Why was he allowed to immigrate here?  No good reason at all, and in a society whose immigration laws made sense he'd be back in South Africa, or perhaps someplace in what's left of the British Commonwealth.

His personal life also shows how Western morality has declined.  Musk has ten children by three women, the first six by his former wife Justine Musk, then two by Claire Elise Boucher, the Canadian singer who goes by the absurd stage name Grimes, and finally twins via Shivon Zilis.  If nothing else, this proves that vast amounts of money will get the male holder of the same money and sex, but it's not admirable and that this sort of conduct is no longer the type that is regarded as scandalous, although it should be.

None of which is a reason to get all in a twitter about Twitter.  If he wrecks it, well, he bought it.  

Who cares?

A bigger topic regarding Must, really, is should a just society allow one person to have so much of the planet's resources.

I risk sounding like Huey Long on this, but I really don't think so.  There shouldn't be billionaires at all.  Before you reach a billion in assets, indeed, before you reach $500,000,000, you simply ought to be taxed down to size.  And no, I don't believe that disincentivises a person from "developing the economy".  And if it does, well, I don't care.

We're now past the election, but speaking of that and I guess twitter, it's really time for John Barasso to stop coming on Twitter and complaining about the price of gasoline.

Here's how the price of gasoline works.

It's made from petroleum oil.

Petroleum oil is produced in certain spots of the globe and sold all over the planet before it's refined.

Most of the world, the United States included, uses more oil than it produces. This is true of the US even though its a major petroleum producer.

US petroleum is expensive to produce.  Normally, Mexican, Venezuelan, Arabian and Russian oil, are not.

If the price per gallon is low (West Texas is $79.19/bbl as I write this. . . low), a lot of North American oil becomes uneconomic to produce.  Just about $60.00/bbl is that point for the US.

If the price per gallon is high, it means that a lot of North American oil is economic to produce.

Wyoming only makes money on petroleum when the price is relatively high.

An unstable price doesn't benefit anyone.

Russia invaded Ukraine, and for a variety of reasons this has driven up the price of oil.  OPEC+, which includes Russia, has operated to try to keep the price high.

Want lower prices?

Lower demand or increase cheap supplies.

We have no cheap supplies in North America.

Joe Biden doesn't set the price of gasoline.

Scary

North Korean is rapidly becoming a frightening menace.

The question is what, if anything, can be done about this short of military action, and will we reach a point where this seems necessary to any administration other than a Trump administration, which probably wouldn't.

Last Prior Edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XXXIX. Pretending


Prior Related Threads:


Thursday, July 7, 2022

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXXV. Griner and Russian Law, Senseless Destruction, No. 10 Cat to get new Roommate, Russia threats on Alaska, Where's the followup?

Don't be stupid out there


Russia is not the United States.

Brittney Griner is accused of bringing CBD oil into Russia, supposedly in vape pens.

Did she do it?  I don't know.

But what I do know is that Russia isn't the US, where a celebrated athlete would likely get a slap on the hands for a drug violation, and where this isn't one.

Americans seem to believe for some reason that if they fall afoul of the law in a foreign nation, the US should rescue them.  The US has no obligation to do that.

And like it or not, other nations have much stricter laws on a host of things than the US does.  The US in contrast has lots and lots of laws, which isn't necessarily a good thing either.  In part, that leaves Americans with a sort of combined quite contempt and ignorance for the law. We don't know what all the laws are, so we don't tend to worry about them overly much.  And people can do some pretty bad stuff and not get punished all that much.

In contrast, there can be real penalties for things in foreign countries.  In one Southeast Asian country, for example, people get beat with canes for spitting gum on the street.  When I went to South Korea with the National Guard in the 1980s I recall us all being warned that you could be jailed for possessing a Playboy magazine, which didn't bother me as I wasn't going to be running around the Korean Peninsula with one, but that's a much different approach to pornography that the US has.

You get the point.

On Griner, my present understanding is that she plays basketball in Russia as women basketball players make less than male ones in the U.S.  So she goes there on the off season, where apparently they are then running their leagues.  I get that, and that's not just, but that's not a reason to be careless, if she was.  Her minority status, her numerous tattoos, her homosexual status, and her American citizenship all made her a target in a nation where all of those are either very unusual or not at all tolerated.  On top of that, there's a war going on.

There's not much the US can do to spring her.  The Russians will let her go when holding her no longer serves a purpose.

Senseless Destruction.

Somebody blew up the Georgia Guidestones.

For those who are not familiar with them, there's a really good episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World about them, identifying the builder and why he did it.  For a really brief synopsis, based on memory, a physician who lived in another state built them out of concern that things were going down the tubes and giving his own personal guidance and thoughts on how to avoid going down the tubes in the future.

Frankly, they were very 1970ish.

Why would somebody blow them up?

Apparently, some people believed they were evil, which is silly.  

Regarding guidestones, with all the crap going on in the US right now, the builders thoughts probably wouldn't be altered if he were around right now.

Boris Johnson falls.

Americans tend to be so self focused on their own politics, which are distressingly weird right now, that they miss the politics of other nations.  On top of it, the American press is phenomenally bad on reporting political events in other nations.  Added to that, the press of the subject nations tends to be no better, so you are only left with the suggestion that he did something horrible, with nobody ever telling you what it was.  An article in the Guardian, for example, calls him the worst leader the Tories every had, but won't say why.

Canadian changes of power, by the way, are completely that way.  It's like the entire topic of the election is a big secret.

Anyhow, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has resigned.  He will briefly remain Prime Minister until his replacement is chosen.

Usually this happens following an election with the party in control loses.  This, however, was due to an internal revolt in the Conservative Party.

Apparently a lot of this has to do with "Partygate", a scandal in which parties were held at No. 10 Downing Street (as if they were going to be able to keep that secret) which violated COVID restrictions in the UK.

I guess it says something in favor of the British that this would bring a Prime Minister down, whereas in the United States a sitting President would attempt to illegally retain power and nothing happen to him.

Russia threatens Alaska.

One of the Russian strategies to deal with its pathetic performance in Ukraine is to threaten everyone else.  Now it is threatening the United States, stating it might fight us to take Alaska back.

Seriously?

Usually, bullies have to win to be credible.

And now. . . ?

I'm not going to bother to name names, but there is a politician in Congress who came on Twitter nearly daily to blame Biden for rising gasoline prices.

Now gas prices have fallen for eight days straight.  So is he going on and giving credit?

Yeah. . . right.

Friday, June 3, 2022

The Mental Health Crisis. Okay. . . but why?

In the current debate, discussion, etc., or whatever it is on violence in the United States, we continually hear that the country has a "mental health crisis".

Vagrant sleeping on the street in Denver, a common sight.

Nobody seems to doubt this, and indeed it seems true.

We hear a lot of other common things stated by Americans about the United States, including that it's the "greatest nation on Earth". But does a great nation have a massive mental health crisis.

What's going on?

Well, it should be apparent that the crisis is an existential one.  If we have a massive crisis, it's because there's something massively wrong in the culture itself.  Other nations have lots of firearms in circulation without having what we're experiencing, and that alone tells us something.

And we also know that, contrary to what we often hear, our society is getting less and less violent, but at the same time our mental health is getting worse.  But mental health getting worse isn't a good thing by any measure.

And here's another fact of this crisis. From at least an external view, nobody whatsoever is going to do anything about this, really.

And here's why.

What is going on is that we've erased a set of standards that governed our society that were nearly wholly based on a Christian world view, on everything.  In their place we've erected nothing at all, other than a concept that whatever pleases you, you should do, even though every indicator is that this in fact doesn't make for a happy society at all.  Most recently we've even tried to erase biological lines written into our DNA, and simultaneously flooded our society with new intoxicants of all types, as the old ones apparently were sufficient.  Lines that at one time, if they were crossed, resulted in some sort of institutional intervention, no longer do.  Those in society crying for help aren't going to get it, as our new libertine society simply holds that their crying is simply an expression of their soul, rather than a desperate cry for help.

To add to it, we've wiped out meaningful and productive labor for an entire class of individual, which was often all that kept them tethered to something.  For many more, we've erased the change that tehir employment and daily endeavors are their own, rather than some board of directors living far away who care little about them. And the dream of working on the land, the most elemental dream of all, is just about dead in the United States.

And, added to that, the erasing of the natural bonds of family in an aggressive way means that entire generations of children are essentially raised in conditions that no human being has been since some prior variant of our genus started to become really intelligent.

Mental health crisis?

Yes, indeed.

Are we going to do something about it?

Probably not more than doping up as many people as we can and sending many more to bogus therapy.

Monday, March 25, 2019

The inevitable cycle of substance

How can it be harmful, people have used it for generations (even if they really didn't, or if in earlier eras, in some examples, scarcity of resources meant they used it rarely)?

It can't be harmful. .. . I'm using it (even if a confirmation of that type means nothing).

It won't hurt me.

Science demonstrates it has risks.

Science demonstrates its really risky.

Society does nothing.

The lawsuits begin. . . .

Friday, March 22, 2019

Friday Farming. Wherein the New York Times shows itself to be economically thick.



I'm not a huge fan of the New York Times.  Indeed, over time, I've come to see its adopted editorial policy, in which its headlines tend to reflect a political view and its editorials speak of an imagined self importance that the paper and the city that it is located in hasn't had for years and years, as nearly emblematic of the dense way that some large city elites view the entire rest of the country.  When newspapers like the Times cry about a fellow New Yorker they detest as President, they ought to realize that it was views like theirs that helped put him there.

Among the NYT columnist I generally am not impressed with is Paul Krugman.

Krugman was published in the NYT the other day with this editorial:


Oh BS.

And among the BS is this concluding statement.
Nor, realistically, can we expect aid to produce a political turnaround. Despite all that aid, in 2017 more than a quarter of East German men cast their ballots for the extreme-right, white nationalist Alternative for Germany. 
I’m sure that some rural readers will be angered by everything I’ve just said, seeing it as typical big-city condescension. But that’s neither my intention nor the point. I’m simply trying to get real. We can’t help rural America without understanding that the role it used to play in our nation is being undermined by powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to stop.
All of this really symbolizes the thick nature of urban analysis combined with the thick nature of American economic thought in general.

Lets start with the second to last paragraph.  Eastern Germany, that part of Germany that used to be the German Democratic Republic (the DDR), the Communist satellite state set up by the Soviet Union shortly after World War Two, isn't generally rural and therefore doesn't provide any sort of useful analogy at all.  Communism itself never figured out how to deal with rural populations and rural people at all, which is why is general approach to rural topics was to industrialize and wipe them out, or simply wipe them out if that approach wasn't successful.

East Germany was an economic backwater, to be sure, but that was due to Communism itself, which did a pretty good job of making almost every region it held sway in, after an initial outburst of forced industrialization, an economic backwater.  Communism, it might be noted, was hostile to rural life.  Indeed, Marx, who thought up his nifty ideas while taking up seating space in British libraries rather than going out and actually working, grew so frustrated with rural people that he declared rural life "idiocy", which probably nicely reflects that in most rural communities some guy who showed up in the library every day and showed no sign of working would probably be asked to go do something else.

Indeed, the rural hallmark of the introduction of Communism in rural Russia was to halt an evolving transfer of the land to the rural residents and terrorize the most successful individual farmers with famine being the predictable result.  Farming in Germany in general was doing well enough throughout the 20th Century prior to 1945 to the extent that the Nazis didn't really touch it that much during their horrific reign as they were somewhat afraid of doing so and rural Germans never embraced the Nazis, unlike their urban fellows.  While Nazi economic policies would have created long term disaster for German farming and real horrors for rural areas, including farmers, for the rest of Europe, had the Allied victory not ended them, the introduction of Communism in the East certainly didn't' create economic bliss of any type.

Not that the approach in the Western world has been a lot better, but analysis like by Krugman are so dense to the economy that they can't be expected to grasp that.

Indeed, that's long been the case with American economic pundits and economists in general.  The United States has long had, and all of the Western World now has, a Corporate Capitalist economy.

That's not a free market economy, even though we think it is.  As a Corporate Capitalist economy we have long had state intervention in favor of business consolation which favors large entities in central locations over small ones that are decentralized.  We don't have to have that sort of economy, we simply do as long ago we determined that this is the economy we wanted as it very much favors the increase and consolidation of wealth and that's what our leadership has always viewed as a desirable thing, irrespective of whether it is or not.

Save for a minority of Millennials who think they have suddenly embraced the rotting stinking corpse of Socialism, there's hardly anyone who will consider anything else or even recognize that anything else exists.  The entire economic world boils down to Capitalism and Socialism, in our narrow minded view, and even economic pundits and economist themselves see it that way. And they all also assume that Capitalism equates with a free market, when in fact an economic system that requires state intervention in order to simply exist must also by implication favor some businesses over others and not really feature a free market.

Simply put, if there's a rural crisis, it's because we planned it that way.

Indeed, an honest look at Krugman's topic would, first of all, ask if there's an actual rural decline, or, rather, a decline in general.  

The better evidence is the latter, and distinctly.

The decaying American rust belt, which isn't rural, and an American urban economic environment so bleak that the darling of the new American left in Congress declares herself to be a Socialist and maintains that Capitalism must be destroyed would suggest that the problem isn't rural at all, but rather simply economic.  Something in the American economy isn't working.

For that matter, yellow vests protests in Europe, which are rural centered, would suggest that something in the Capitalist system everywhere isn't working very well, as we've addressed here before.


And if that something has featured a long running population depletion from some, but only some rural areas, it's also featured an economic decline from manufacturing areas and an economic backwater in some of the United State's oldest cities.

While that's gone on, the decay of the intellect and sense in reality in those more benighted classes in cities has lead to a very real and ongoing decay in American and western society in general.  In the 1970s this expressed itself with a desperate effort of those in those cities and in that economic class to stone themselves into numbness, something previously really only a feature of the lives of the desperately poor in urban areas. This has never really abated and now its gone so far that marijuana, the drug of the pre World War Two ethnic and urban underclass has evolved to legality so that the monied middle class may more easily stone itself and escape reality.  In other areas, people who previously were concerned with making do in life have reduced their identity to their sexual appetites and want to be known by them so that they define their existence.  All over in the same class personal standards have declined to where features of former working class life that actually conveyed a message, such as tattoos, have become standard in a desperate effort for identity and people change their appearance in all sorts of ways nearly weekly.

Things are so bleak that the USA Today recently ran this headline:

U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began


And the niftiness of our present economic direction was looked at by the Atlantic in an article published under this headline:

Workism Is Making Americans Miserable


Things don't look good, alright, but Paul, where you live is the epicenter of that.


Fascism, which Paul alludes to, and its identical cousin Communism, don't come out of rural areas either.  Rater, politics in rural areas tends to be defined by a distinct "leave me alone" attitude that the current "validate me and my beliefs" ethos of the urban white middle class simply can't stand.  

About the only thing that Paul got right in his missive is that there has indeed been a long term, indeed very long term, shift of the rural population to urban areas and its technology based.  

And its based in that alone.  Nothing about large cities is otherwise enviable or really a long term draw to anything.  The reason that it happens is economic and political.  It's not, as people like Paul would seem to assume, simply natural.

This has everything to do with a system that encourages consolidation over everything else.  Even while we fret over this, lawmakers do everything to make it easier and easier.  

Legal roadblocks in the form of licensing that at one time partially arrested such things have been removed, thereby shifting the provision of all sorts of services, both professional and otherwise, to city centers and large entities.  Consolidation of retail through the use of the corporate business form, combined with the total decay of local statutory forms on such things as land use and zoning, has operated to wipe out local retail through state fiat.  Funding of transportation systems, which are always taxed based in some fashion, has encouraged and then practically required the movement of everything into the dense city center.  Statutory provisions that would address some of this have failed to pass, as in the example of the the Big Box tax that failed in the Legislature recently, or have gone unused, as in the case of the seemingly dormant Sherman Anti Trust Act.  

It's happened not because we tried so many things and they failed, it's happened as we value money over everything else on earth and believe that buys us happiness, even though the long record has shown this isn't the case.

Indeed, that's been shown to so much be the case, that people who really succeed, and acquire wealth, use that to move to rural areas, albeit often sanitized ones where the realities of rural life, or just reality in general, have been removed.

So, Paul, it's not that we looked for solutions and they failed.  We just didn't look. And now the long existing problems associated with the big cities are being ignored as well.  So soon, indeed now, you'll be able to look much closer to home.

From Chesterton.

So, Paul, I agree.  People, including yourself, should get real about rural America. But that would require getting real about economics in a really large sense itself, which few are willing to do, and which I don't expect the New York Times to do anytime soon.