AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK! ‘Harvard Dialogues’ taps power of respectful debate.

#JOURNALISM: This Washington Post Opinion Piece is Rewriting the Recent History of Border Control.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Year the Future Disappeared.

JOEL KOTKIN: Let America Sprawl: Planners’ preference for urban density should not supersede Americans’ preferences for suburban or exurban living. “America today is overwhelmingly a post-urban nation heavily concentrated in suburbs, exurbs, and even small towns. Across the entire nation, 92 percent of the population lives in counties with typical suburban population densities. In contrast, the urban cores, with population densities of at least 7,500 per square mile, accounted for barely 4 percent of the population, mostly located in and around New York City. These trends reflect deep-seated preferences. . . . These trends horrify many academics, city planners, big-city developers, and environmentalists. Opposition to car-oriented suburban development, notes historian Robert Bruegmann, reminded him of the Duke of Wellington’s complaint that trains would ‘only encourage the common people to move around needlessly.'”

Urban planners have not shown any particular skills at, you know, urban planning, as the squalid state of our cities today indicates.

Flashback: Learning to Love Sprawl. A column based on William Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History. “Rich people have always wanted to sprawl. . . . Sprawl didn’t become a problem until the wealthy and powerful were joined by the hoi polloi. Thanks to greater wealth and improvements in transportation, they were able to move from teeming tenements to less-urban settings. Once this started to happen — before the automobile hit the scene, and beginning outside the United States — social critics began to complain that sprawl was ruining pristine landscapes, and destroying the charm of urban life.”

It’s always been this way.

Related:

But that’s been the history of environmental activism from the beginning: rich white people doing well at the expense of the lower classes. In a 1977 Harper’s article, William Tucker explored the history of what’s regarded as the first big environmental movement in America: the opposition to Con Edison’s Storm King pumped-storage project. The project was designed to save energy costs and make it easier for Con Ed to handle summertime peak demand. It would also have provided a lot of jobs in a depressed area.

The catch is, it would have spoiled the views from rich people’s estates in the nearby mountains. As Tucker reports at length, those affluent landowners constructed an entire edifice of opposition to Storm King, for the most selfish of reasons. He quotes a local mayor, who was told by one of the landowners, “We’ve got it nice and peaceful up here, why do you want to spoil it?” The mayor reported, “I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything, but what I wanted to say was ‘What about all the little people down there in the village who need this plant? Did you ever think about them?’” No.

Hiring big law firms and elite PR firms, along with enlisting celebrities like Pete Seeger, who wrote a song about the mountain, the landowners managed to turn a selfish desire not to have to look at electric power lines that would benefit millions into a quasi-religious crusade on behalf of Nature. The plant was stopped, property values were protected and only the little people suffered.

It’s always the same. “Green Jim Crow,” as some call it.

FANI WILLIS UPDATE: Fulton DA accuses special prosecutor’s wife of ‘interfering’ with Trump probe. An Atlanta lawyer friend writes: “I just wonder if a male DA could get away with saying ‘my girlfriend’s husband is conspiring against me for screwing his wife.'”

Heh. Nope, but I don’t think Fani will get away with this, either.

OPEN THREAD: Hang on baby, Friday’s coming.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: With access to space on the line, the U.S. is eating its seed corn. “Sometimes, success has unforeseen consequences. The United States Space Force and Air Force (and NASA) have, in essence, decided they will simply procure space launch as a service from SpaceX. This isn’t an actual decision but is nevertheless true enough, as it has become the default situation. Cost and availability — the comparative ease of getting a launch slot — have resulted in tremendous business success for SpaceX.”

Well, I love SpaceX but I wish Blue Origin, ULA, etc. were better competitors. They’re not. Ideally, NASA should still be doing the bleeding-edge research, but are they even up to that? I mean, given the realities, reliance on SpaceX makes sense. But of course, like all institutions SpaceX will eventually ossify and become less creative, especially without significant competition.

INCONCEIVABLE! Perjury in a J6 Trial?

Usually everything’s on the up-and-up in your Stalinist show trials.

MICROBIOME NEWS: Gut Bacteria Surprisingly Resilient to Antibiotics, Long-Term Study Shows.

WELL, GOOD: Revolutionary “LEGO-Like” Photonic Chip Paves Way for Semiconductor Breakthroughs.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Shortage of ADHD drugs continues as patients scramble to find medication.

HMM: Study reveals a universal pattern of brain wave frequencies across mammalian species.

THE 1911 ISN’T DEAD: First Shots: New TRP Models From Springfield Armory: The line of professional-grade 1911s grows and adds new features.

EV NEWS: We Have Bad Afeela’ns about the Sony-Honda Electric Car. “No additional stats or details resulted from this recent look, but with it did come some new and rather worrying revelations about what the Afeela car—and other upcoming cars like it—portend.”

WELL, GOOD: Worldwide, we are living longer and the male-female longevity gap is shrinking, study finds.

I REMEMBER WHEN SUGGESTING OFF-LABEL USES FOR MEDICINES WAS ANTI-SCIENCE AND AWFUL: Researchers find that anti-HIV drugs may prevent complications from bacterial sepsis.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Adding impact to exercise can keep aging bones strong, research indicates.

IN DEEP DECLINE: Jeffrey Carter: American Cities Are Squalid. “Any clue which political party and what kind of people have run big American cities for more than five decades?”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: San Francisco Doom Loop Quickly Spiraling: Major Business Pulls Out of Its Downtown Office Tower.

Related: Doom Loop: San Francisco’s Budget Deficit Could Top $1.4 billion by 2027.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX delays Axiom-3 launch of all-European private crew to ISS.

D.C. PUNDITS SELDOM PAY FOR THEIR OWN LUNCHES: It’s the groceries, stupid: Why the pundits are puzzled by Biden’s putrid polls.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: ‘Zombie’ retracted papers continue to infect future research, scholars warn.

BACKLASH WORKS: Johns Hopkins Chief Diversity Officer creates list of ‘privileged’ groups, retracts following backlash.

COMMANDER SALAMANDER: The Costs of War at Sea: Understanding Scale.

Politically and institutionally – not to mention industrially – the institutions of our nation and those of our allies are sleepwalking in to a systemic shock I am afraid they are not ready for.

Make no mistake, at some point another large war at sea will come. They always do. For every “long peace” there is a “large war.” . . . We will have to fight with what we have, and try to force victory in the face of attrition without relief.

Nobody is really prepared for how expensive a major U.S./China conflict would be. They think they are, but they’re not.

RIP: Prof. Peter Schickele.