Archive for 2025

YEAH, IT’S A LOT OF BULLSHIT.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Grizzly bear attack in British Columbia seriously injures 3 schoolchildren.

The group of about 20 fourth- and fifth-graders had stopped along a wooded river trail in remote Bella Coola at midday on Thursday when the bear emerged from the trees and attacked, Canadian authorities said.

“Multiple teachers physically intervened,” the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service said, using bear spray and a noisemaking bear banger to drive the grizzly away.

The animal remained loose on Friday, the conservation officers said. They were setting up traps and motion-activated cameras. . . .

Parent Veronica Schooner told the Associated Press that several people tried to stop the attack, but one male teacher “got the whole brunt of it.” The bear ran so close to her 10-year son, Alvarez, that he “even felt its fur,” she said, “but it was going after somebody else.”

Bear spray is nice. A .458 Winchester is nicer.

REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES:

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: CBS Saturday Morning Concludes With German Author Comparing US To East Germany.

Before CBS Saturday Morning officially headed off into its uncertain future, co-host Michelle Miller used her final episode to interview German author Daniel Kehlmann about his recent novel about G.W. Pabst, the silent film director who originally fled the Nazis only to return and make propaganda movies. Naturally, much of the conversation was about life in a dictatorship, but unnaturally, towards the end of their conversation, Kehlmann would compare the current United States to the East Germany his wife grew up in, and Miller offered up little resistance to the crazy idea.

I’m so old, I can remember as far back as February, when CBS News hosts exclaimed that East German-levels of censorship were the knees of the bee. Europeans Don’t Get Free Speech, and Neither Does CBS News, Apparently.

No wonder the Germans were weeping by the end of it all. Vance had called everybody in the audience on their bluff. “You’re not afraid of your own people, are you?” Of course they are. (And also, let’s not kid ourselves, either: They have their reasons, especially if they’re Germans.)

You know who also is terrified of the people? CBS News. Yes, CBS had a true banner Sunday for itself this weekend by tagging along with Vance to Munich. And they made it clear they were on the side of the Europeans weeping about having to listen to the angry voices of their constituents. Margaret Brennan made headlines pontificating about the origins of the Holocaust from too much “free speech” — a topic for tomorrow’s Carnival of Fools because few in the media have more willingly donned clown makeup in recent weeks — but really it was 60 Minutes’ remarkable praise of Germany’s anti-free-speech laws that took the cake for me.

Including this incredible quote:

 

50-YEAR MORTGAGE DOA AMONG HILL AIDES: Their average age is 27, so many of the 12,000+ congressional aides working on Capitol Hill would in other years been among those buying their first home with a mortgage. But the proposal floated recently by President Donald Trump is going nowhere with Hill aides, according to the latest survey of opinion among this tremendously influential but almost invisible group.

SMART CITIES WILL KILL FREEDOM:

This same urge might explain the impatience of the smart city urbanist, née venture capitalist, who told The New York Times that “human beings currently live in cities that are the equivalent of flip-phones”. There’s a keen sense of waste; our sheer lack of optimisation offends. Another investor-urbanist, a Mr Huh, complains: “We have not affected the fundamental building blocks of infrastructure and society.” The Times reporter writes that Mr Huh gestured to his laptop and said: “We’ve made this better. We’ve made the new things better. We haven’t made the old things better.” In a helpful gloss, the reporter points out that in thinking about how to make the old things better, “people in tech prize ‘first principles’, a concept that suggests that historical awareness and traditional expertise can get in the way of breakthrough ideas”.

Here we see the old drama of modernism playing out one more time. The urban blank slater reminds us of Thomas Hobbes’ disgust with the customary or common law, that body of precedents and practices that ordered English life, but which appeared to his impatient mind as a sediment of inherited mindlessness. For him, life needed to be governed by laws that would be excogitated from scratch (by him), according to clear principles, not by the haphazard accumulation of informal usages and understandings. Rather than seeking the reasons latent in our unthought practices, and from them trying to reverse-engineer the logic of a city, the smart city epigones of Hobbes place their trust in their own powers of a priori reason.

But governing by syllogism doesn’t work very well. For one thing, the sovereign forfeits that easy, habitual law-abidingness that custom secures. As Thomas Schrock said in his critique of Hobbes: “We follow customary laws, not out of fear, but because they are here with us, our own, part of us.”

Governing by syllogism, on the other hand, requires heavy police work. Call Security!

It sure does, particularly when the smart cities’ residents’ lifeclocks start blinking red:

The 15-minute city idea trades freedom for a life of routine drudgery, mating high-tech with urban density:

But as we saw in 2020, at quite a cost:

As Glenn wrote in 2020: Coronavirus lessons on density, mass transit, bureaucracy and censorship: They kill.

AND IT’S ALL JUST A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY REPEATING:

That’s more fun with Shirley Bassey.

THE INTERNET CAN LOCATION-CHECK YOUR ASS:

More:

More to come?

IT’S ALWAYS EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THINK:

Even if you’ve written a book on the subject.