The Human Factor
The Sacramento Bee has a series of time series photographs will chronicle the changes to areas devastated by the Japanese tsunami six months ago. Three views are provided; one immediately after the disaster, the second three months later and the third at six months. One reduced size photo is after the Read More.
Man Vs Entropy
The Urbanophile has another set of time series photos, this time taken in America. It shows an aerial photograph of a Detroit neighborhood in 1949 and again in 2003. The leftmost photo is 1949. The 2003 photo shows that much of the neighborhood has reverted to prairie.
Trees growing inside buildings
Taken together the photos pose two questions. What drove the change? And is the direction of change good? Time Magazine in a special titled “The Tragedy of Detroit” has a ready answer for the second set of photographs. The change was bad and racism, “hubris” and the lack of an industrial policy were allegedly responsible for the decline of a once great city. The obvious solution now is for the Federal Government to invest billions and transform these ruins “into the Arsenal of the Renewable Energy Future”.
Back in the ’50s, the Federal Government began investing what would eventually reach half a trillion dollars in what became the interstate highway system. You could have considered that an incredible subsidy for the auto industry — which it was — but it was also an investment in the nation’s future.
It’s an adaptable model. The fuel-cell technology that dazzled me at the GM Tech Center is less about autos than it is about energy — energy, as hydrogen, that exists in every molecule of water. What’s to stop us now from turning Detroit — its highly trained engineering talent, its skilled and unskilled workforce desperate for employment, its underutilized production facilities — into the Arsenal of the Renewable Energy Future?
If we did, Detroit could go back to building something America needs. As a nation, we could prove that we can still make things. And while we’re at it, we could regenerate not just a city but our sense of who we are.
But not everyone is convinced. The Urbanophile on the other hand takes the view that many of Detroit’s previous problems disappeared when the city killed itself. Because the parasites who feasted on the city have gone away from what they believe to be a carcass picked clean, re-building is happening all over the place, but in the shadows. Now if Time Magazine would only leave Detroit alone and keep the Federal Government from imposing Green Energy Arsenal scheme, Detroit might actually develop into something worthwhile, but organically and not necessarily according to some planning mandate.
In Detroit, the incapacity of the government is actually an advantage in many cases. There’s not much chance a strong city government could really turn the place around, but it could stop the grass roots revival in its tracks.
Can you imagine a two-story beehive in Chicago? In many cities where strong city government still functions effectively, citizens are tied down by an array of regulations and permits that are actually enforced in most cases. Much of the South Side of Chicago has Detroit like characteristics, but the techniques of renewal in Detroit won’t work because they are likely against code and would be shut down the minute someone complained. Just as one quick example, my corner ice cream stand dared to put out a few chairs for patrons to sit on while enjoying a frozen treat on a hot day. The city cited them for not having a license. So they took them away and put up a “bring your own chair” sign. The city then cited them for that too. You can’t do anything in Chicago without a Byzantine array of licenses, permits, and inspections.
In central Indianapolis, which is in desperate need of investment, where the city can’t fill the potholes in the street, etc., the minute a few yuppies buy houses in an area and fix them up, they immediately petition for a historic district, a request that has never been refused, ensuring that anyone who ever wants to do anything will be forced to run a costly and grueling gauntlet of variances, permits, hearings, etc. Only the most determined are willing to put up with that.
In most cities, municipal government can’t stop drug dealing and violence, but it can keep people with creative ideas out. Not in Detroit. In Detroit, if you want to do something, you just go do it. Maybe someone will eventually get around to shutting you down, or maybe not.
Viewed in this perspective, the time series photographs are really a portrait not of the physical landscape, but of the human factor: the society that creates the landscape. In Japan the physical tsunami has rebounded against the resilient people. In Detroit, the political tidal wave proved too strong, too devastating; but now that it has receded the survivors are picking up in its wake.
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $3.99, print $9.99
Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5
Last year the sheriff in Orange County FL raided nine barbershops for barbering without a license. There was one cocaine arrest and minor amounts of marijuana were recovered.
Perhaps demonstration “awareness raids” by the FBI would have dissuaded these criminal coiffeurs in the first place… No risk necessary, and the agents still get to be heroes.
If Detroit is the wave of the future, it will be a pretty grim future.
In Japan Recovery will be when the stranded ship is turned into a shopping mall. In Detroit Recovery will be when the stranded rail station is turned into a hundred small businesses serving each other. In other words, a ship.
Culture matters. Detroit was destroyed by overpaid proletarians and uneducated corrupt politicians supported by semi-educated academics who believed that the “surplus value” generated by Capitalism is a bad thing. The surplus wealth generated by Capital, finance industrial land or labor, is a good thing. In Japan it is rebuilding Fukushima. In Detroit the unused land is a form of Capital that is being reallocated. Bankruptcy is a good thing because it allows capital assets to be reallocated. What happened to Detroit and Gary and in Eastern Europe can happen anywhere but recovery will happen as soon as the boot of a corrupt government is lifted. That does not mean that all government is corrupt.
How to deal with those who actively impede the generation and saving of wealth, as the parasites of Detroit did, is a larger political problem. Solving that problem while remaining a Democracy is difficult. In America it becomes linked to issues of race culture and politics. In other places, such as in Israel, it becomes tied to even more existential threats.
Did you create more wealth than you consumed this week?
Looks like one could have a mini-estate in Detroit; your own park land. Probably be a good idea to market the lots like that to attract homeowners/builders.
I am a life-long resident of the Detroit area, a point of both pride and pain. The socialist government that killed Detroit is finally dying now, the city has wasted away from 1.5 million residents to a hugely (upwardly)fudged population of 600K. The Golden Goose of tax-paying corporations have fled to the surrounding communities (or more often to the southern business-friendly states).
The state of Michigan poured billions into Detroit in a hopeless effort to keep the city alive but the rampant corruption and welfare-statism were relentless in their assault on civic life. This effort has bankrupted and impoverished the state. With the collapse of state funding the vultures are finally leaving the sorry corpse of Detroit. This leaves space for new growth, the most obvious is nature.
Old Mother Nature will not be denied, tress and shrubs grow everywhere in the city now, one of my favorites is a tree growing in the crumbling remains of an old hotel on the northwest corner of Woodward and the Davison Freeway. For the past six years it has reached skyward, even thought the floors beneath have collapsed and it is now three floors down into the structure. I now understand how the Mayan became a “lost” civilzation so quickly. Nature is unstoppable.
One has little to fear from code-enforcement officers in the city if you are a resident; it is a different matter if you are a “gentrifying cracker” from the suburbs, this will gaurantee that you are subject to the full focus of every rule, regulation and code. This is the biggest obstacle to progress in the city. Unless you are a multi-millionaire like Mike Illich (owner of the Red Wings, Fox Theatre and lots of othet high-ticket entertainment franchises) you can’t fight your way past the the wall of regulations the city has built to defend its failures.
The very last thing the state of Michigan (or Detroit) needs is the Feds coming in and throwing around a ton of money. It will prolong the agony, not end it. Like an alcoholic, Detroit needs to hit rock-bottom before it can start to recover, it needs to admit that it has a problem and that problem’s name is Socialism.
Sorry about the long-winded rant.
Then of course, the entire City paradigm could be revisited. Cities were originally met the need to concentrate labor and other resources at the point of production.
Hitler’s Speer changed all that. Personal transportation, Detroit’s creation, has helped reduce the density required.
There are inherent conflicts. Less urban density should impress the Greens on one hand and drive them crazy, based on energy consumption, on the other. Then there is the concept of Cottage Industries, an idyllic dream for the romanticist.
Interestinger and interestinger.
When I worked in the DC area in the early 90′s I recall reading where a Virginia farmer had been sent to prison.
He owned some property that was considered to be a wetlands by the Federal Government. He wanted to provide a safe habitat for injured waterfowl to recover and made some mods to his property for that purpose. He was sent to prison for converting part of a natural wetlands into an …. improved wetlands more suitable for waterfowl. The bastard! Why didn’t they give him the chair?
Also around that same time we had the LA riots. Pres Bush went to LA to tour the riot areas, and a young black woman was heard complaining that she could not talk to him. Asked by reporters what she would say she to the POTUS took them on a tour of places where “the government” should do this and that. Build playgrounds and fix things up and so forth. The fact that she lived in an area with lots of people that had nothing to do and that proposing self-help projects would make even the LA government deliriously happy never occurred to her. “The government” should come in and do all this neat stuff she thought up. The people who lived there apparently were so unselfish they won’t even do things for themselves.
In Detroit racism supposedly caused it to fall apart. Okay, so there was less racism in 1949 than there is today? Yes, that is the case, because the govt in its various forms imposes racism in ways and to an overall extent that was unthinkable in 1949. In 1949 we had just defeated a philosophy that calculated the percentage of a given ethnic group’s blood in a person’s veins and treated them on that basis. Today that same philosophy is exalted – and official government policy.
4. Jane Mee
“Looks like one could have a mini-estate in Detroit; your own park land. Probably be a good idea to market the lots like that to attract homeowners/builders.”
Something similar has been done in several areas, they are rather like feudal estates (complete with surrounding walls and armed guards) There are(were) many magnificant homes in Detroit, some survive, others are rotting away. Do a Google Earth street-veiw of the homes west of Woodward and south of Eight Mile Road, they are very fine. Then shift your focus a mile or two south, or west, or east. It quickly becomes areas that police are leery about entering.
The biggest problem that Detroit faces in attracting outsiders is that the city has no services to speak of, the schools are a terrifying cross between a prison and an insane asylum, and all of the retail establishments normally found in a major metro area are located in the surrounding suburbs.
There have been efforts to “sterlize” entire square mile areas,(to remove the residents and eliminate streets, sewers and electrical services) so that farming can be re-established INSIDE the city. I suppose you could do the same with a housing development but the staggering surplus of houses in the area would probably make it unprofitable.
Burn, crush, and bury all vestiges of government.
Anton – your story resonates. Im originally from Michigan, but left for California 30 years ago where I made a small pile of cash. I began buying foreclosed homes in the cities outside of Detroit (Redford and Livonia) which have traditionally been well run blue collar mixed race neighborhoods with solid houses and solid communities. Some of the renters I found were black working refugees from Detroit, whom I naively thought would be thrilled to rent houses in these better neighborhoods. Keep in mind, these are older established neighborhoods where the renters and owners get along pretty well, so there can’t be any credible claims of racism as to why the black detroiters can’t make a go of it.
That was about 18 months ago. Now I have evictions under way for every one of the human scum which came from Detroit due to non-payment. They all still have jobs, but act like absolute babies with never-ending excuses as to why the rent check is late or bounced this month. This, on top of never-ending demands to buy them things like central air, and new carpets. These houses all had $5-10k invested to make them cozy and habitable. I’d live in any one of them. And by comparison, my other renters of all colors are doing just fine. Yet the poisonous filth from Detroit have proven that their Black racist entitelment culture has corrupted them fatally.
Detroit appears to be located in the U.S. Ecoregion 212 – the Laurentian Mixed Forest. Give it 120 years or so and natural succession will produce an attractive valuable forest. The old Detroit has gone. Why not let a new urban Detroit develop all by itself amidst a long term improvement in the surrounding vegetation? Just a a bunch of independent people developing new industries and a few basic bye-laws required.
I live in a place similar to Detroit. It is actually not all that bad or depressing, in fact very nice. There are vast tracts of crumblng old buildings, vacant lots and failed attempts at rehab projects, but one drives right past them between the outer rings of suburbs and the few remaining hubs of activity in the central regions.
Traffic problems are few, land and housing is cheap. Instead of the grand factories and institutions of the past, smaller enterprises have sprung up. It is a big city but does not feel like one. More like a collection of communites, most of which are fairly prosperous.
I am always reminded of Asimov’s Foundation series when I think about cities like Detroit. History never quite turns out the way we think it will. It will be all right despite the planners:
“And Mallow laughed joyously. “You’ve missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You’ve missed everything, and understood nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They’ve calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion.
“But we,—we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources,—have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods,—techniques and methods the Empire can’t follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any vital scientific advance.
“With all their nuclear shields, large enough to protect a ship, a city, an entire world; hey could never build one to protect a single man. To supply light and heat to a city, they have motors six stories high,—I saw them—where ours could fit into this room. And when I told one of their nuclear specialists that a lead container the size of a walnut contained a nuclear generator, he almost choked with indignation on the spot.
“Why, they don’t even understand their own colossi any longer. The machines work from generation to generation automatically and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burnt out.
“The whole war is a battle between these two systems; between the Empire and the Foundation; between the big and the little. To seize control of a world, they bribe with immense ships that can make war, but lack all economic significance. We, on the other hand, bribe with little things, useless in war, but vital to prosperity and profits.
“A king, or a Commdor, will take the ships and even make war. Arbitrary rulers throughout history have bartered their subjects’ welfare for what they consider honor, and glory, and conquest. But it’s still the little things in life that count—and Asper Argo won’t stand up against the economic depression that will sweep all Korell in two or three years.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Microcosms of what’s now underway in Europe. R.R. Reno over at First Things has a nice little article about the death of social democracy.
The irony is exquisite: the moment for the bust-out move by the left is neck and neck with the crashing and burning of all its products.
It’s not funny, really, but almost.
12. spin, I believe Asimov was one of several science fiction authors who disseminated warnings that were told to them – not from this world!
This area of Detroit is even worse now. Here a google map of the area:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=st+cyril+detroit&hl=en&ll=42.393663,-83.028692&spn=0.006981,0.010353&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=60.288153,84.814453&vpsrc=6&hnear=St+Cyril,+Detroit,+Michigan&t=h&z=17
The Church is gone, a school is gone and almost all the houses are gone.
Another human factor
Dozens of U.S. spies captured in Lebanon and Iran
Current and former U.S. officials concede that CIA suffered difficult blow; sources say Lebanon informants were compromised by meeting CIA agents at a Beirut Pizza Hut.
Hizballah, together with the Lebanese government, has rolled up what is believed to be the vast majority of the assets of the Central Intelligence Agency in Lebanon.
http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2011/11/what-you-need-know-about-cia-getting-rolled-lebanon-and-larry-munson.html
It sounds like some sloppy trade craft–like the disaster in Khost in 2009
So culture triumphs over technology given equal levels of technology?
Maybe the US should pick up a lot of Hezbollah agents, including those in Latin America and tell the Nasrallah that if he can find a branch of Domino’s in Beirut he can his agents back if America can get its agents back.
The History Channel had a series Life After People on the subject of what urban environments would evolve/devolve to in the absence of man -
http://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people
Of course there are innumerable ghost towns west of the Mississippi dating from the various 19th Century ‘booms and rushes’ and even today a depopulation of the Great Plains is on going -
http://www.economist.com/node/10534077
These are not centers of former political power and thus hardly garner the attention and ‘solutions’ being sought.
Reminds me of a story from a couple years back about hunting racoon in Detroit. The tag line “the best sauce for coon is hunger”
http://detnews.com/article/20090402/METRO08/904020395/To-urban-hunter–next-meal-is-scampering-by
16. Victor, did you read what people are saying about it: CIA Spies Caught, Fear Execution in Middle East
I’ve never seen so many disbelieving posts on a populist news site – over 7,200 comments and the skeptics are modded way up. Usually the “loons” are mocked and berated.
People aren’t buying the story.
Detroit was built on the government-union-corporate model of US socialism that “worked” well through the 1960s, until we were challenged from the outside, by Japan. Whatever de facto racism existed in Michigan through the 1960s was certainly broken by the early 1970s – but unfortunately just as the region was doomed to go into steep decline anyway. Seriously bad timing. Like Minas Tirith begin polluted down to Minas Morgul, the place now seems damned. Maybe the best thing that can happen is bulldoze the whole region, let it lie fallow for a century, let the deer and wolves have it, until the evil is washed away. Unfortunately, the robots have taken over 80% of the jobs that used to be there, and those jobs will never come back. So, let it grow buffalo or acorns or winter wheat.
In Long Beach, California (go south from LA, past Compton, towards the port where the coast curves around), two major boulevards from downtown north go through the local ghetto (original home of Snoop Dogg and others, but really not nearly as grim as that might suggest). Anyway, when the suburban model of commerce changed in the 1980s, the two boulevards started to lose all their major businesses. City finally adopted the regulations and practice of bulldozing any commercial properties that were vacant more than X long (there may be more to the regulation than that, but that’s the basic idea). But it hasn’t stayed vacant. Over twenty years a fair amount has been converted to public/private housing, and by all appearances quite successfully. The old ghetto area, such as it ever was, is under far more assault by Hispanic/illegal neighborhoods, also Little Cambodia on one side, than by poverty as such.
City still has reasonably upscale neighborhoods both on the coast and on the knoll north of the ghetto, in one stretch they are (modestly) successfully developing new street traffic and commerce, and that’s even in the recent weak economy. It’s only a shadow of what it looked like in the 1950s and 1960s, but for Obamaville, it’s OK.
(speaking of which, BAC stock down to $5.49 again today …)
(oh, also, Obambus just Spoke again, blaming the supercommittee failure on Republicans, he is our first black schlemiel)
For those who haven’t heard of The Curley Effect here’s this:
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/curley_effect.pdf
It contains an analysis of the disaster that befell Detroit under Coleman Young, one from which it has yet to recover.
18. wretchard, why would we want them back? HumInt is expensive and mostly more trouble then it’s worth. The CIA doesn’t (or maybe I should say didn’t) recruit in the Islamic crescent. They try to hire 2nd generation Americans. Most Islamic walk-ins are plants. Wanna-be double agents. Most of the intelligence services in the Islamic crescent have been staffed by families for the last few thousand years. Positions are passed down from Father to son. That makes them difficult to infiltrate and very professional.
They took their money along with their chances. SigInt is more reliable in that part of the world. The CIA is a babe in the woods compared to the GDSSI (Egyptian Intelligence Service) or the SAVAMA, in Iran. The CIA has a bigger budget but it takes tons of money to compete with generations of operational experience.
Here is Wiki’s list of intelligence services;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies
It is not easy to keep track of the various names, since a name change is never a bad thing so far as a spy is concerned.
I think it is a waste of Federal money into Detroit. The city should be left to return to nature. If you want to stay in Detroit pay for the services you need or do without. Maybe hunt Yacks or Muskox for a living.
“Time Magazine in a special titled “The Tragedy of Detroit” has a ready answer for the second set of photographs. The change was bad and racism, “hubris” and the lack of an industrial policy . . .”
Or maybe the cause was the surroundings: the sewer plant on the North, the Detroit City Airport a few blocks to the Northeast, a 30-track-wide railroad yard to the West, and an impressively sized GM factory to the Southwest (apparently with it’s own sewer plant).
A quick zoom out on TM’s helpful Google link (#15 above) shows all of these. I don’t know Detroit, but Photo #2 is apparently the “I-94 Industrial Park Renaissance Zone”, a gem of a real estate parcel that would be cleared for heavy industry in most cities hungry for jobs.
Interestingly, the City of Hamtramck, across the tracks to the West, was voted “Most Walkable City in Michigan 2011″ by walkscore.com, and was ranked the “Most Densely Populated City in Michigan” in the 2000 Census.
The real comparison is Detroit vs Silicon Valley.
Americans have always moved on and left towns behind them. I don’t know any other country that celebrates its Ghost Towns. The vein runs out, land everywhere is cheap, and everybody moves on. From the cold winters of Detroit to the orchards of San Jose.
This is Creative Destruction in Action. All the productive people have left the city, built South Center, Grosse Pointe, Farmington Hills, and Ann Arbor. All those are part of the Detroit Suburbs. Others have left for Texas, California, and others Lands of Promise.
Why reinforce failure in Detroit? Go West Young Man!
No other country will cut its losses like this.
23. Cowboy
The Curley Effect is a great link. I’ve always assumed that redistribution policies affected the giving and taking populations via a mechanism similar to the classical malaria equations that Robert Ross presented, or later extensions like Lotka’s equations. Two simultaneous differential equations describing rate of change, one each for host/parasite or predator/prey populations. Each equation included the population size of the other. The host equation included the parasite population and vice versa. Integrate both equations and you can define equilibrium conditions where host and parasite populations remain stable or fluctuate in a stable manner. You can also find conditions necessary for the crash of host and/or parasite.
But the Curley Effect paper is much better because it is designed specifically to describe a scheming politician who just wants to be boss, even if he has to create a manure heap in the process. In his mind it’s better to be King of a manure heap than to be no King at all.
RT – #OccupyDetroit happened 50 years before #OccupyWallStreet – and you see the results. The theme was the same, demand State intervention to address nurtured grievances, demand free housing, free food, and all manner of redistribution and “Social Justice” for the victims of white paternalism and capitalism. BTW, the Detroit infrastructure/ layout worked like a dream for the first 60 years – it allowed Detroit to lead the world in manufacturing and productivity during it’s golden age. But when the Great Society hit like a tsunami, the pols took the black community and turned them into an angry mob of occupiers – they nurtured them on hatred of white society – “social Justice” – and how much America owed them. They viciously guilt tripped whites and demanded so much and threatened so much, that whites virtually stampeded out of Detroit into the suburbs as fast as they could flee… As whites removed themselves, Detroit inevitably and rapidly began to crumble, and in less than a decade, Detroit went from a functioning productive metropolis into a sewer filled mostly with black angry people….
By the end of the sixties, there were murderous race riots. I remember vividly as a child the cynical attempts to wreak havoc on the whites by “busing” the ghetto kids into the functioning schools located in the white suburbs, and the reverse for the white kids into the ghetto. This was ostensibly proposed to rectify the “Social Injustice” of failing Detroit schools, blaming the whole fiasco on white racism and unfair distribution of wealth.. Of course everyone understood that the real motive was to punish whites, and to terrorize them into shelling out billions of tax dollars to bring black schools up to white standards. This was only reversed when it became clear that it would have resulted in a blood bath. But the cynical, vengeful, divisive actions were emblematic of the period, and illustrated how incompetent, ruthless, vicious, and vengeful the radical Left could be.
The reckoning for the fiasco of #OccupyDetroit is only hinted at in those Google images. On the ground, the nuclear bombed streets and endless idle black pissed off hoodlums is devastating to behold. The Leftist criminals who caused it have never been brought to account. The human waste is mind boggling. And I’ll bet you a bag of donuts that blacks in Detroit voted for Obama 100% and support the #Occupy_______ movement 100% as well. On some level they deserve everything that has happened to them.
@ 18. wretchard
I like your solution– a more civilized sort of the Russian solution–you take our agent–we send you the body parts of your agents
Apparently the tri border region of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay is where the
Hezbollah agents operate from.
Pity– because Iguassu Falls is one of the wonders of the world.
Apparently Michael Yon is going to dispatch from South of the Border and the tri border will be a good place to start.
Michael Yon has the Special Forces background and guts to do such reporting
–he does not do travelogues
Great to see he has joined PJM
This reminds me of Rudyard Kipling’s story of “Letting In the Jungle”:
–Mowgli fulfilled his vow to kill the tiger Shere Khan and to lay his hide upon the wolfpack’s Council Rock, but was cast out of the human village after its chief hunter, Buldeo, learned of his friendship with wolves and accused him of sorcery.
Mowgli returned to the jungle and tried to forget humanity, but Akela [wolf] told him that Buldeo was still searching for him. Grey [wolf] Brother suggested killing Buldeo, but Mowgli angrily forbade him.
Mowgli and the wolves stalked Buldeo and eavesdropped on his conversation with some charcoal-burners. Mowgli was shocked to discover that the villagers had imprisoned his adoptive human parents, Messua and her husband, and were planning to execute them for fostering Mowgli.
Ordering the wolves to harry Buldeo and prevent him from returning to the village, Mowgli returned there to rescue his parents. He discovered that his adopted wolf mother, Raksha, had also arrived, and warned her to keep out of sight while he freed Messua and her husband.
Messua was thankful that her son returned to save them, but her husband was resentful at losing most of his money and possessions and showed no paternal warmth toward Mowgli.
The next day Mowgli told Bagheera he had a plan to take revenge on the villagers, a plan that involved Hathi the Elephant and his sons. Bagheera was sceptical that Hathi would answer Mowgli’s summons, but was surprised when he did so. Mowgli wanted Hathi to destroy Buldeo’s village as well, but to take more time doing so.
Over the course of several weeks, the village fields were invaded by herds of pigs, deer, and Wild Asian Water buffalo; the livestock was harried by wolves; and the elephants destroyed the grain storage bins. While all this was happening, Mowgli kept well out of sight so that the villagers would not suspect his involvement.
Finally, as the rainy season set in, the elephants tore down the village huts, and any villagers who had not already left, fled for their lives.
Six months afterward the wreckage had been completely swallowed by wild jungle, and Mowgli’s revenge was complete.
26. RT
I thought the same thing; a quick zoom-out shows other neighborhoods in much better shape. Whole blocks being depopulated and cleared does suggest that someone has other plans. Though I don’t want to minimize the evocative images either – I did go elsewhere and saw posts and videos, made by residents, touring areas of blight and showing examples of looming and near majestic decay. And hardly any people.
Not knowing exactly what I am seeing, and noting the ideas of others and the descriptions of Detroit as cynical, divisive, and opportunistic, it’s not hard for me to believe that the grand plan is to wait until most of the population dies, kills each other, or moves out, and then it’s on to revitalizing a more manageable city with more manageable people in it. A leftist’s dream.
And Mr. Doodslag is spot-on, as usual. This husk of a city filled with teeming indolent, indoctrinated haters is the dirty work of the Left.
#29 & #10 Morton Doodslag,
I still live in the Detroit metro area, alas.
I know people with children in the local public schools. Based upon what I’m told it seems every possible problem that could be expected in the worst urban school district imaginable- i.e. Detroit- has appeared in the suburbs. Blame vouchers or the out-migration from Detroit, but be thankful you left. Again, I mean.
Worse, the collapse of the housing bubble and/or the local economy has made housing in the suburbs cheap enough that the worst of the worst from you-know-where can afford to buy a house, especially with the near-zero down loans still available.
In other words, the cancer that killed Detroit is spreading. You already know this I’m sure.
26. RT
Ham-Town (nicknamed for the Polish hams that were a speciality in days gone by) was preserved by the close-knit Polish population. They resolutely refused to budge whem crime and riot became the norm. Thisd has faded over the years, the Poles have been replaced by Albanians and other inward-looking ethnic populations that take pride in their twon and feircely defend it against the sewer that they are surrounded by. Conversely the city of Highland Park (which houses Ford’s first significant factory) was once the jewel of the Mid-West with masions built by the like of Frank Lloyd Wright. It fell to chaos when the wealthy businessmen discovered the joys of living in the “country” and moved to the suburbs.
29. Morton Doodslag
You hit the nail on the head
32. Tee
Be careful about the borders, there are some very nice towns that directly abut Detroit. Use the Street View function on Google Earth to get the full effect of the sorry state of affairs in Detroit. Google Earth drove through the city snapping pictures as they went, no agenda, no political/racial/economic axe to grind simply photo-journalism in it’s purist form; I came, I saw,I took pictures. An informal, unscripted, anonymous recording of a day in the city; literally a “fly on the wall”.
34. Xennady
Another Metro Detroit denizen! Glad to see that I’m not the only Clubber in this area. I live in the NE corner of Warren and work in Ferndale, I hope you are surviving well in this most Depresseed part of the most Depressed State in the Union.
A former DPS employee (she quit because she couldn’t stand it any more) pointed out to me the other day that Detroit pays more per Grade Point Average than any school district in the state by several orders of magnitude. DPS delivers education at about 1/40th of the effiency of the average state-wide.
And you are right, the toxic culture spreads like ripples in a pond.
Morton #29:
Well said!
You know, 20 years ago I saw an interview with Michael Moore. He talked about how proud he was that his family participated in union strikes at the auto plants. And he was so very angry that the auto industry picked up and moved away. “They were making plenty of money!”
Indeed, and so they could just keep paying the UAW more and more for less and less work, ad infitum. In the 90’s the UAW was striking for less overtime and more permanent workers, not higher worker pay and benefits.
It was not just Japan that killed Detroit. The Big 3 could go to southern and western states and not have to worry about the Unions being prevalent. When GM went to Oklahoma in the late 70’s only the very top executives could apply for a transfer. Everyone else, even engineers and white collar workers, had to present themselves at the plant and apply. The companies were running from Detroit attitudes. In Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina they talk about not how proud they are that shut the plants down but how proud they are they started them.
The Curley Effect applies to the unions as well as their purchased politicians.
Climategate 2 now breaking. see Climate Audit, The Air Vent, Tallblokes
If you zoom down to “street view”, you can walk the empty streets of St. Syril. Cooper School is gone in the satellite view, but its ghost remains in the street view. It’s an empty husk, stripped of windows, doors and facade ornamentation. It’s as if no one has the money to board it up. Or the interest.
I think that every city mayor, councilman and planner should, as a part of their training, spend some time playing SimCity. Not because it provides an fully accurate model of how to make a city succeed, but because it provides a reasonably accurate model of how human folly on the part of government can kill a city. The natural tendency on the part of the player is to spend every penny coming in building roads, plumping up city services, and building parks, museums, universities, and passing the full menu of do-gooder ordinances like the clean air and the recycling programs, and all of which require continuous funding.. You can do this for quite a while, and if nothing bad happens, you can have a very pretty city. Then something happens and you run a momentary deficit. Your roads don’t get repaired, police and schools are defunded, and instantly all the “high wealth” areas turn vacant. Then tax receipts and population crash in an unstoppable death spiral and in minutes your city is Detroit.
I use a big old car as an analogy. You’re driving down the road in a big old car with a big V8. You’re the government and the V8 engine is the economic engine of the private sector. You’ve got the air conditioning running and the radio blasting. This puts a load on the engine, but the engine has enough power to move the car and do all those things. Now you ascend a steep hill. A recession. The engine starts to labor. You see the engine temperature gauge start to rise.
Anyone who’s ever owned a big old car knows what they have to do. Turn off the air conditioner and radio and shift into a lower gear. Reduce the load on the engine to get up the hill. Maybe even have the passengers get out and walk alongside the car for a bit. Even turn on the heater and open the windows to suck some of the heat off the engine block, and absorb some of the discomfort for the sake of protecting the engine.
But Government’s response seems to be the opposite. Leave the AC and radio on, refuse to accept any discomfort, any inconvenience, and cross your fingers that the engine won’t blow up. After all, it’s all the hill’s fault.
Then the engine throws a rod and you have Detroit.
Damn hill.
jms @ 38 said:
“I think that every city mayor, councilman and planner should, as a part of their training, spend some time playing SimCity. Not because it provides an fully accurate model of how to make a city succeed, but because it provides a reasonably accurate model of how human folly on the part of government can kill a city.”
I strongly agree. I would also argue that playing SimCity should be part of the high school curriculum teaching kids about government. It’s a fun game and kids learn about weakly coupled nonlinear systems and how dynamic processes tend to have significant lag times, e.g. you do something expensive/unpopular early in the game that offers no initial benefit and then later on the earlier action is all the difference in the world between the city living and dying. If you completely screw up with SimCity then you end up with a creeping blight such as seen in Detroit that eventually kills the city. Sadly, SimCity is now considered an obsolete game and kids tend to play Sim3 instead (my daughter is hooked on it). Sim3 is more about personal relationships and consumerism rather than civic planning. Sim3 is still beneficial as a teaching tool because it’s essentially a dumbed-down CAD package.
There is a gotcha with games like SimCity in that the model can be tweeked to advance a particular political ideology. Case in point: churches pop up randomly in SimCity. You can waste effort bulldozing churches but the churches just pop up somewhere else. Generally speaking, SimCity is apolitical (technocratic) and represents an honest attempt to provide a simple simulation of a real city. I wish my daughter would play SimCity rather than Sim3.
Love him or hate him, The Two Moons:
Back in 1951, [a political analyst] came up with the theory that at any time in America there’s a Sun Party, which drives the agenda, and a minority Moon Party that shines by reflecting its rays. But these days, “we are living in the era of two moons and no sun,” writes David Brooks of the New York Times. “Neither party has been able to rally the country behind its vision of government.”
…
With the public divided or agnostic, “both parties have developed minority mentalities,” becoming insular and combative. “The Republicans feel oppressed by the cultural establishment, and Democrats feel oppressed by the corporate establishment.” They’re both too weak to push their agendas, but too stubborn to compromise. “Independent voters are trapped in a cycle of sour rejectionism—voting against whichever of the two options they dislike most at the moment.” So both sides occasionally win big elections, “which only re-enforce their worst habits.”
…
Grover Norquist’s tax pledge isn’t really about public policy; it’s a chastity belt Republican politicians wear to show that they haven’t been defiled by the Washington culture.
……….
Those who have an allergic response to the “both parties are at fault” analysis need to seriously consider the possibility of a permanently divided USA. That too is on the table.
YBR – “a permanently divided USA” has existed for a very long time. The only thing we have to quibble over is the qualifier “permanent”. Go back over a century and consider what sort of smugly git mind would choose the term “Progressive” as a banner round which to rally.
Yeah, Define yourself as the people who are modern; who have advanced beyond the OLD and TIRED ways; who are clearly smarter, more clever, more discerning, more insightful, et cetera.
It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” all over again, and all the people too dumb to grasp the wisdom of that story have latched onto the PROGRESSIVE agenda like ticks on a bison. They will either suck the blood till the beast collapses and dies, or until some hideous tick virus comes along and miraculously shrivels’em.
I’m quite sure there’s no Avenging God of the Oil-Soaked Q-tip to smite them all.
You’d need an Ocean of Mineral Oil…
I think things are going to get a lot worse before they start to get better.
Self Reliance, folks.
MF@41: “a permanently divided USA” has existed for a very long time.
“That” distinction is as old as politics, and arguably species-specific.
Competing visions of the future need to be reconciled, not denied (nor reduced to psychological profiles that transcend ideological belief systems.)
What’s different now is that, in the past, that tension was a key strength. Today it is a weakness of threatening proportions. One hopes that this country will not be brought to its knees by vocabulary alone.
I loved simcity but once you realize how anti-car it is and tear out all the roads and run single line rail EVERYWHERE it’s an easy game. Will Wright didn’t like cars I guess?
I find the disaster that is Detroit fascinating it’s like a train wreck. Below is a site that documents some of what was Detroit. Clicking the TOUR button is a good start.
http://www.detroityes.com/home.htm
tm @ 43 said:
“I loved simcity but once you realize how anti-car it is and tear out all the roads and run single line rail EVERYWHERE it’s an easy game.”
I’ll have to try that.
My earlier comment about SimCity caused me to do some research on it. Even though I enjoyed SimCity, I haven’t played it for years. It appears that “SimCity 3000 Unlimited” is the version to play. There are more recent versions but apparently they suffer from “bleeding edge” issues. Also “SimCity 3000 Unlimited” comes in a Linux version which appeals to me since I’m a Linux bigot. Apparently when the DotCom was going full bore, a small startup firm obtained access to Maxis’ source code and ported the software over to Linux. Like almost all DotComs, the small startup eventually went broke and the Linux version became orphaned but supposedly it’s not an issue because the software was already mature before it was ported to Linux. I’m hoping I can dangle SimCity 3000 in front of my daughter and lure her away from Sims3 (yes, I’m dreaming).
The progress in Japan is stunning. Be interesting to know how much of what is being done (and paid for and managed) by neighbors, the larger community and township, and their central government.
They give me hope.
While I despair as I think about our own enclaves of dependency either at or on the path to being a Detroit.
Seems a Swiss-Canton-like radical decentralization would fix this too. If Detroit were to become four nearly sovereign states of, say, 150,000 people each they would sort it out – or sell out – or quickly go bankrupt – and the problems would be self-correcting. Where a bankruptcy of a public entity might well be used to create a tax and regulation free (given personal residency that insures shared risk in every area deregulated) zone for the new owners.
I suspect that the stronger property rights are the less chance there is of this type of decay. Where the largest contributor to a lack of renewal because of diminished property rights are zoning regulations and growth controls (as seen in the absence of long-term decay in places without either).