The thrifty Scottish on the Obama pork pie

The British may be feeling depressed, defeated, powerless, and at the mercy of a political class that can't contain its eagerness to re-brand their country as Britannistan. But now and again, flashes of the Brits' old gift for language and invective pop up in the newspapers -- although it probably helps if the target is the folly of Americans.

A piece by Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday is an instant classic. There's no point paraphrasing it because the original couldn't be bettered. Here are a few quotes, but for your full measure of satisfaction, read the whole thing:

Barack Obama's "stimulus" plan will be long remembered as the occasion when political euphemism triggered economic disaster. There is no terminology available to express adequately the appalling irresponsibility of this naked political banditry. To have squandered a fraction of the near-$1 trillion cost of Obama's pork barrel in days of prosperity would have been more than reprehensible; to do so at a time of financial crisis is unforgivable. Obama likes to pose as the heir of Abraham Lincoln: as this shameless bribery demonstrates, he is heir only to the Chicago Democrat political machine that spawned him.

Even the temporary boost that such ploys as spending $5.5bn on the "greening" of federal buildings may give the construction industry have been blunted, at least in the Senate bill, by omitting the E-Verify mandate that was in the House bill. This would allow an estimated 300,000 illegal aliens to parasite on construction jobs; they are even awarded tax breaks in another part of the package.

To call this spendthrifts' wish list a "stimulus" is an insult to America's intelligence. Instead, it is a hotch-potch of politically correct liberal obsessions: $75m to promote "smoking cessation" (that will stimulate retailers); a $246m tax break for Hollywood trash merchants; and even an extra $300m medical appropriation to treat Casanovas who, in the coy euphemism, have been kissing girls with runny noses.

The most blatantly sinister item is the allocation of $4.2bn to "neighbourhood stabilisation", the programme that will enrich the far-left organisation ACORN which played so controversial a role in voter registration during the recent presidential election. In tandem with that goes $1bn to forward Obama's ambition to control the 2010 census, rich in electoral opportunity for the promoters of the one-party state.

For do not forget that Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary who displays a boyish unfamiliarity with tax returns, is standing by to throw a further $2.25 trillion at banks. If you add up the US government's commitments, the sums are: Federal Reserve, $5.5 trillion; Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, $1.5 trillion; Treasury, $947bn; Federal Housing Administration , $300bn – total $8.34 trillion. There is, however, one key component missing: the costs of nationalising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which adds $5 trillion, producing the grand total of $13.3 trillion.

No wonder Barack Obama, bereft of his auto-cue, was uncharacteristically hesitant at his press conference last week. The messiah has to borrow $3.5 trillion over the next two years. This could prove a burden that even the legendarily resourceful and productive citizens of the United States cannot shoulder.

If only our leftist-captured, tamed, leashed mainstream media could tell it like this. But then they wouldn't be the mainstream media we know.

Imbecile of the year — no, century — well, make that all time

Nadya Suleman, champion welfare mom

You've read about this slag, no doubt. (Previous posting here.) She is the California head case who used in vitro fertilization to add another eight babies to her collection, already numbering six. She's not paying to birth and raise them, of course. That's what employed (unlike her), taxpaying citizens are for.

The very notion of eugenics — selective breeding to improve the gene stock of the population — is enough to send all good liberals, and not a few of other persuasions, into hysterics. (A word, incidentally, which comes from the Greek for womb. If our campus feminist loons had any classical learning, they'd no doubt add hysteria to the proscription list of politically incorrect terms.)

But our society does intervene in breeding. Only, it's in the opposite direction, dysgenics. We literally pay women to produce babies that they can't support. We encourage the stupidest and most unsocialized to outbreed the responsible, and bill the responsible for it.

California has a reported $40 billion budget deficit. Not even Nadya Suleman is accountable for all of it, but subsidizing the illegals and many legal immigrants, and other programs that operate under the principle "the less you earn, the more you get," are big reasons the IOU State is looking to soak its businesses and citizens to make up the gaping hole in the budget.

Oh, wait, I forgot. There's a stimulus package coming up. States will be held off from bankruptcy through money borrowed by the federal government. I'll bet Nadya is already planning her next baby binge.

UPDATE 2/14

Mickey Kaus writes in his Slate blog:

"Robert Rector and Katherine Bradley note that the anti-welfare-reform provisions in the stimulus bill aren't as bad as I'd feared. They're worse. They attempt replicate the fiscal mechanics of the old welfare (AFDC) "entitlement," but with a bigger incentive to welfare expansion:

"For the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseloads. Indeed, the new welfare system created by the stimulus bills is actually worse than the old AFDC program because it rewards the states more heavily to increase their caseloads. Under the stimulus bills, the federal government will pay 80 percent of cost for each new family that a state enrolls in welfare; this matching rate is far higher than it was under AFDC."

Tell me that bit again about how President-Messiah Obama would be "moving to the center" once he was elected?

A hero's welcome to the U.K.: handcuffs?

Geert Wilders has announced that he intends to fly to London tomorrow, despite a Home Office warning that he — a member of the Dutch parliament — will not be admitted.

In the world of diplomacy, such an act would be nearly equivalent to a declaration of war. But of course Britain's rulers — no milder word fits the case: U.K. citizens are virtually powerless against their own government and the E.U. — are at war against Wilders.

They have sided with the jihad preachers in their own population, against a brave man who refuses to accept the ever-advancing state of Eurabia. As Lawrence Auster writes, "If the exclusion from Britain of an elected member of the Dutch Parliament stands, that would be a definite sign that Britain has passed the threshold from a left-liberal regime to one that is simply and frankly leftist and anti-Western."

How are the British papers that matter playing the Wilders issue, which is almost impossible to exaggerate as symbolic of the Establishment's fawning over Muslims?

As of this writing, the supposedly conservative Telegraph has nothing about it on the home page, although it has room for a link to an article headlined "India makes cola from cow urine." Neither does the left-wing Guardian, although you can learn there about "Valentine's dates with a difference: Forget candlelit dinners. This year, try a scratch-and-sniff cinema or formaldehyde dodos."

The new tabloid, comic-book version of the once-respectable Times reports, "A far-right Dutch politician will attempt to defy a government ban on his entering the UK tomorrow, amid a diplomatic row over his right to visit." (Shouldn't that be "far-right to visit"? Someone who makes a film quoting the Koran and is intemperate enough to suggest that its hateful verses actually mean what they say can't be called "far-right" often enough.) The Times also describes Wilders as "an outspoken anti-Islamist."

The Home Office’s decision yesterday to refuse Mr Wilders entry on account of his extreme views provoked Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch Foreign Secretary to call David Miliband to protest at the decision.

So, we are to take it that in the Times writer's mind, being an outspoken anti-Islamist constitutes having "extreme views."

Not only are the British rulers cowardly in bowing to pressure from the the most intolerant among the Muslims they have so determinedly recruited for their country, but they have been handily outfoxed.

By accepting the dare, Wilders has already won. If the British government backs down, it will be a victory for free speech and for Britons who aren't ready to accept dhimmitude. If they actually are foolish enough to arrest him, it will be a cause célèbre generating far more publicity and sympathy for Wilders's cause than if they'd just let him in without a fuss — and, to boot, it will show the world how far the appeasement mentality has taken hold in Whitehall.

The market is even bigger than Obama

Obama may yet manage to stop climate change and lower sea levels, but his all-thumbs economic policy won't reverse the investment world's law of gravity, Karl Denninger says. He thinks ordinary Americans should get mad and get even.

Obama: The market is issuing you a warning

We are approaching yet another market implosion just like the one in September and October.

While it may come today or tomorrow, I wouldn't take that bet. In fact I expect that people will "rejoice" that you didn't wipe every common stockholder's equity stake in firms like Citibank, Bank America and Goldman Sachs - even though you should. Because I expected you to do the wrong thing, I actually bought some Citibank stock a short while ago. Were you to do the right thing my position would be worthless. It should be worthless. I'll bet its not - at least not immediately (and that I'll make a profit as a consequence of your idiocy.)

When and if this dislocation comes, however, it will destroy what is left of the American Banking System, it will expose that Bernanke has over one trillion dollars of garbage on The Fed's Balance Sheet, and that in turn will destroy the international market for United States Treasury Debt.

In the best case we wind up like Japan and have a bunch of zombies sucking up capital and doing nothing of value for our economy. In the worst case we get much higher yields in the bond market and the near-immediate bankruptcy of hundreds of midsize and larger firms, including virtually all financial firms in the S&P 500 and DOW, along with all major multinationals that have a captive financing function.

The Government cannot backstop it all. If you try the government fails outright. The market is bigger than you, it is bigger than The Fed, it is bigger than Treasury. You are subservient to The Market, not the other way around. Go ask Bill Clinton about The Bond Market when he tried to ramrod his Hillarycare plan through and what the reaction was. That's 1/100th of what you're about to experience.

I have no way to know whether this is wrong, 10 percent true, 50 percent true, or 100 percent true. It's always tempting for a pundit to call the game on account of cataclysm. But certain things are so unarguable that they fall into the realm of fact.

Fact: Other than Bear Stearns, all the big-time players (not excluding the U.S. government) who made a plague pit of our economy are standing, digesting the first helping of bail-out money and licking their chops in anticipation of the next, and possibly the one after that. Fact: Not one of the executives (including U.S. government regulators) who knowingly created financial bubbles that they knew were bound to pop is under indictment or hiding out in Honduras. Fact: The financial advisors of the Bush and Obama administrations — in some cases the same Mandarins — have been unable to stop the debacle, although they have assured us many times that their wise hands on the tiller would do so. The only thing that has changed is that they have migrated from reassuring us to threatening us with dire consequences unless the stimulus is passed last week, if not sooner.

Denninger's thesis is that many of our big financial institutions are already bankrupt and that all the government can do to save them, which is a higher priority than saving millions of our citizens from bankruptcy, is to take the toxic assets (a self-contradictory term, that) and force the helpless taxpayers to buy them. And even that, he believes, won't work for more than a brief time.

President Obama, this next crash in the markets, if it occurs, is your sole responsibility.

It will come as a consequence of your policies where you intend to try to shift the BANKRUPT institutions' losses to The Taxpayer - a debt that America cannot finance and which foreign governments and investors WILL NOT cover.

I'm well-aware of the Washington DC policy called "kick the can" but the can is now full of cement and if you think you'll get through your term before this all comes home to roost you are, to be polite, nuts. You must stop the stupidity and you must stop it NOW. The game of obfuscation and literally violating investors both foreign and domestic as a consequence of fraud countenanced by our government is over.

Both Americans and foreigners know about the lying and fraud; it is pointless to continue to dissemble and obfuscate as you are merely making a fool of yourself. If you do not understand this and are being led by your "advisers", many of whom are the very people who advocated the changes in policy over the last 20 years that brought us here, you need new advisers, and you need them today.

It's no surprise that the president's playbook consists of oratory and spending borrowed money. And while there's no shame in needing, even relying on, advisors in specialized areas like economics, he needs advisors who don't just reflect back his own limited understanding. He might start by replacing his Treasury secretary or Fed chairman with someone who has demonstrated a knowledge of honest accounting and ethics, such as Harry Markopolos, the Cassandra whose warnings to the SEC about Bernie Madoff were ignored for almost a decade.

Process servers

A fascinating, important, and depressing posting with commentary at Belmont Club concerns the shift in government and organizations from result-based action to process-based action. The argument is that in our bureaucratized jobs, workers are now primarily tasked with following prescribed forms and being able to prove that they have followed them, rather than achieving what they are ostensibly there to achieve.

The most shocking recent example was the case of so-called "Baby P" in England (warning: the details in the linked story are extremely upsetting), where a sociopathic man tortured an infant under the care of him and his feckless, on-the-dole mother, a situation that went on for months despite 60 "interventions" (in social-work babble) by welfare professionals. "Baby P" finally, and under the circumstances you have to say mercifully, died.

Richard Fernandez, the Belmont Club author, writes:

At the core of [Theodore] Dalrymple’s critique is the idea that in many modern bureaucracies, appearances have become the actual measure of performance. They exist to fulfill their own procedures. And things may now have reached the point where people have actually forgotten what the point of the job is. …

Eavesdropping on the British bureaucratic debate following the death of Baby P … is like listening to people talk nonsense in what outwardly resembles English, yet in a language with completely different semantic rules. It is a language which seems designed, for example, to express as little meaning as possible in the greatest number of words. Everyone is always talking about ‘regret’, ‘appropriateness’, ’safety’ and ‘protection’ in such a disembodied tone that it is almost rote; and moreover where there is considerable doubt those words mean anything like their entries in a dictionary; and even some doubt about whether they mean anything at all, apart from what they imply in terms of procedure.

But what are we to make of speech deliberately emptied of significance? The first would be to recognize, as Orwell did, that the advantages to saying nothing at all in a bureaucratic world are very great. If you say nothing, no one can blame you for anything. It used to be the case that only macroeconomists were allowed to make deliberately ambiguous statements. But today it is a general virtue to be like Sergeant Schultz. I know nothing, I see nothing. It is a strange world we live in when to express a dislike for murderers or spot the dying baby — is to invite complication and trouble. We live in a world full of noise and glitz and yet is afraid to speak. No wonder Baby P could not be saved by an army of social workers. Not a one of them could risk saying the obvious. They just filled in the forms.

Fernandez is bang on about the propensity for meaningless, important-sounding doubletalk having become a standard way of doing business. It's second nature with politicians and people who deal with politicians. At legislative hearings, a witness will say, "That's an excellent question, senator, and I'll be glad to respond to it," and spend the next 10 minutes speaking words but not replying. He is demonstrating that he's following the rules: buttering up the senator by acknowledging his brilliance in asking, then declaring that he not only will answer, but will be happy to answer — which substitutes for the deed.

But this kind of rule-following, checklist-checking, process-driven behavior is now pervasive at every level of interaction other than between friends and family. The following examples are by no means equivalent in moral depravity to the welfare bureaucracy's unwillingness to confront the reality of Baby P, but they represent ways in which the process takes the place of an outcome that the process nominally serves.

You're no doubt familiar with one of the most common, the recording that comes on when you phone customer service.

"Due to an unusually heavy volume of calls, our service representatives are busy with other customers. Please stay on the line. Your call is very important to us." And so on, every 60 seconds between stretches of pop music.

Who is so thick as to believe that the call volume is unusually heavy? You have no doubt that if you phoned at 3 a.m. Sunday morning (assuming it's a 24/7 service) you'd get the same message, your call being the unusually heavy volume. And if your call is so flaming important to them, why don't they see to it that you get answered? A few companies manage to, so it's not impossible. But management wants you to accept the words in lieu of the fact.

I once called the employee assistance plan that came with my health insurance for a referral to a specialist within the area, part of the insurer's network, etc. The call was answered promptly enough. I started to explain my mission — just a moment, sir. Name? Address? Home phone? Work phone? Group number? Member number? Shoe size? (Okay, I made that last one up.)

Once we'd gotten through the preliminaries, I again started to explain what I was after — just a moment, sir. Please stay on the line and I'll connect you with an employee assistance specialist.

I sighed the sigh of one of the noble Duke of York's ten thousand men that he marched up the hill and down again. Still, I can see the sense in not lumbering a presumably knowledgable professional (a nurse, in this case) with taking down mundane details.

Sure enough, in a few moments she came on, listened carefully, asked intelligent questions. Finally, someone was taking a serious interest, and would sort things out dedicatedly. I was advised that she'd be working on it, and that it might take a few days before I heard back.

I don't need to finish this story, do I? Maybe my "case" was a little unusual, couldn't be dealt with posthaste by pulling up a list with a few keystrokes. Quite possibly the employee assistance professional actually did make an effort, followed the approved steps. That was the important thing. Her bosses wouldn't have expected, or wanted, her to take an inordinate amount of time getting me answers.

The organization and its representatives were doing their job, that being to respond to an incoming call and fulfill the company's protocol. I'm sure my call became part of their data in someone's report to the CEO: another customer served! The process working!

As someone notes in the comments at Belmont Club, the front-line worker, or even supervisor, can't — dares not — cut through the procedural jungle and get down to producing results. Because he or she is answerable to someone else, and that someone else is answerable, each person enclosed in another layer like a Russian matryoshka doll. As often as not, it leads to a government regulatory worker under a government macro-regulator.

This is what happens when a population is systematically taught from the day it enters kindergarten that individuals can't be trusted to make decisions, that the flow chart is the key, that wisdom comes only at the end of a long chain of command leading to a regulatory agency, preferably at the national level. In other words, the socio-political philosophy called centralism, statism, or Marxism, of which our president is the prize specimen to take root in the soil that once nurtured liberty.

Most of us are luckier than Baby P. But we are not much likelier to encounter service that is geared to outcomes rather than the appearance of correctness.

The city in James Howard Kunstler's mind

Kunstler is our virtuoso scold of the manmade environment, a one-man death squad for the idea of suburbia. He not only believes our modern way of life is doomed, but that it deserves to be. Here he is writing about the "suburban outlands" he saw during a recent visit to Montgomery, Alabama:

Along the low horizon, mall followed strip mall followed "lifestyle center," book-ending the "one house" failed subdivisions of otherwise empty unsold lots in a cavalcade of floundering enterprise. It seemed at times as if the terrain was a kind of sea-like expanse, and all the retail boxes ghost ships drifting to oblivion. … So far, the Obama team has not been willing to identify the suburban system as the heart of our economic problem. They can't recognize it for what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future – and an economic, ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over two-thirds of the oil we use every day.

Our present economic sinkhole, fears of "peak oil," and our dependence for much of our petroleum on good friends — of our dollars — in the Middle East have made Kunstler an intellectual rising star, especially (though not entirely) on the Left. I've read some of his online essays and found them rather one-dimensional and shrill: his extreme expressionism is suggested by the title of his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, within his Web site.

Okay, the man detests suburban development. It's not exactly a daring, bleeding-edge position. Most of us have experienced the sinking-heart feeling of driving through one of the monotonous landscapes of contemporary sprawl — malls lacking architectural character, big box retailers, the standard franchised fast food outlets, clogged six-lane highways, parking lots large enough to hold tank maneuver exercises in. While virtually no one defends this kind of design anymore, it wouldn't be fair to accuse Kunstler of attacking a strawman. After all, places like this continue to be built, or at least were until our recent economic paralysis began.

But wait. The commercial side of suburbia is only a part, maybe the smaller part, of Kunstler's "J'accuse!" What he really hates is the residential mode of suburbs. He is the enemy of single-family housing. Those lawns and backyards — wasteful! Worse still, suburbs depend on a cultural bubonic plague, the automobile.

We need to begin planning right away for a transition away from automobiles, not in order to be good socialists but because Happy Motoring is at the core of our unsustainability trap. The car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not, and it will fail due to circumstances already underway. For one thing, it will cease to be democratic as the remnants of the middle class find it impossible to get car loans, or pay for fuel, or insurance, and that will set in motion a very impressive politics-of-grievance setting apart those who are still able to enjoy motoring and those who have been foreclosed from it.

He may be right. I hope not, and for me, this kind of absolutism and probable exaggeration undercuts many of Kunstler's good ideas. He's a big-picture man, and although he's ideology-driven, at least it's his own ideology, not off-the-shelf cultural Marxism of the kind so popular in our academic pest houses. He was ahead of the curve in understanding what many people are coming, unwillingly, to understand: that an economy can't be based on endless "growth" and debt-spurred consumerism. We have to develop a steady-state economy that doesn't require endless artificial stimulation of the need to own more and more things. But to get back to the housing question, if Kunstler believes we should shoot our cars and exit the suburbs, where and how are people to live?

When I ran across his book, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition while browsing in the public library, I decided to read it to see if it might offer clues about his alternative to suburbia. (It should be pointed out that The City in Mind is copyrighted 2001, and doesn't necessarily represent his current thinking.) Does the man love cities as much as he hates suburbs? The answer would seem to be, he likes some cities and is disgusted by others. He likes some things about cities and dislikes others. He likes old cities and dislikes their modern disfigurement. Or perhaps, he likes the idea of cities, the city in his mind.

It was a little surprising, and pleasing, to find that Kunstler can express himself with a certain literary grace and touches of wit — qualities not often evident in his recent eco-sermons. I enjoyed the book, even where I thought he was off his head; more about that shortly.

The City in Mind contains chapters on Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston, and London, with occasional side glances at New York. He has spent time in all of them, researched their history, and gives just enough of their background to provide a thoughtful context for his judgments.

He is enthusiastic about Paris, celebrating Georges Eugène Haussmann's tremendous do-over in the 19th century, resulting in the wide boulevards, round points, vistas, and buildings of uniform height that have retained much of their beauty and charm even in the ultra-commercialized, automobile-centric 21st century. I agree with Kunstler that Haussmann's project was a spectacularly successful example of large-scale urban renewal ... and, I would add, virtually the only one.

No such enterprise would be possible today in a democratic country. Haussmann's enabler was France's last emperor, Napoleon III.

But Paris's re-creation was not without a cultural debit, which he ignores. The fabric of the pre-Haussmann Paris included large areas of housing dating from the Middle Ages onward, which Haussmann knocked down, sending their poor residents to live in the, er, suburbs -- a pattern of wealth in the center city with an outer ring of slums that continues to this day. Many Parisians at the time and since have lamented the destruction of so much of the city's history and architectural heritage. The razing of the old and planning of the new created a marvel, but such "rational" planning, beloved of urbanist theoreticians ever since, comes at a cost.

However, it's only partly the elegant streetscape that thrills Kunstler. He also sees it as an early exemplar of one of his favorite prescriptions for sensible modern life: population density. Paris adopted, or was forced to adopt, apartment buildings, which had been rare in the Western world since Roman times.

Londoners had a horror of sharing common hallways and stairs with strangers. The Parisians appreciated the convenience of apartment life and developed a supple social armor to deal with its surprises. The social relations in Parisian apartment blocks built under Haussmann followed the same hierarchical pattern as before his time. The lower floors remained most desirable. The upper floors and attic stories were occupied by the less well-off. The difference now, however, was that the buildings were brand-new, the middle class had grown enormously, and occupants of all ranks could benefit from modern domestic amenities and decent sanitation.

Convenience, high on the social engineer's scale of values. I don't have the ghost of an idea what supple social armor is, and it sounds uncomfortable to strap it on every time you enter the common hallways you share with strangers. Good sanitation and modern domestic amenities are pluses, in my opinion, but I fail to see why you must live in a human kennel to enjoy them. In fact, every suburban residential neighborhood that makes Kunstler see red proves that you need not.

Our author is good in describing the urban pathologies of Mexico City and Atlanta's failed development schemes. Surprisingly, Rome, which is the most endlessly fascinating city I know, doesn't seem to inspire him. His account quickly devolves into an academic treatise on classical architecture theories and their revival a thousand years after the fall of the Western Empire. The magic of the city eludes him. It's like explaining a great garden by a lecture on pistils and stamens.

Kunstler is funny in his word pictures of Las Vegas. But Vegas, of course -- the Strip and downtown -- is a target as big as a barn door. Everyone understands that it isn't, and never has been, a model of a city. It's a fantasy playground, an out-of-body and out-of-mind experience, a one-off that probably can never be duplicated (and I share his wish that it never will be).

But in Vegas, the former boom town now a bust town, people don't live in the casinos and hotels with mad architecture. They live in normal residential areas. Uh-oh.

... The plain truth is that the single-family detached house is an inappropriate building typology for the Las Vegas climate. [Or, in Kunstler's mind, for any climate.] It handles temperature extremes poorly. The attached courtyard house [get out your supple social armor!], of the type found in Latin America and North Africa, would make a lot more sense [for Latin Americans and North Africans], would take up a lot less space [the less space you have to yourself the better], would regulate heat and cold better with less artificial air conditioning, and built at high densities [his ideal again] with integral shopping [wouldn't it be convenient to live above a bagel store that opens at 6 a.m.?], would require a lot less compulsory motoring -- but, alas, the so-called stand-alone California ranchburger in a pod subdivision of identical ranchburgers, detached from the shopping and office pods, is what the builders are used to supplying to a market that doesn't want to consider anything else.

The boldfaced, bracketed interjections are mine, if you had any doubts.

Where to begin? How about at the end of Kunstler's fatuous paragraph? Builders will build what they think they can sell (currently, nothing). If people decide they want to live in 40-story replicas of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, developers will clamor straightaway for the services of Tibet's superstar architects.

He is scornful of homeowners who want California ranchburgers (huh? I don't get the metaphor), and he has every right to his own rejection of them. I know the kind of development he's on about, and have some reservations about it myself. But it's just condescension on his part to assume that "the market" doesn't want to consider alternatives. Could it just be that homeowners have considered alternatives, like Kunstler's efficient factories for living (Le Corbusier's phrase, and while Kunstler is rightly appalled by Corbu, his own belief system seems to be Le Corbusier Lite) and said no thanks.

Kunstler is clearly an intelligent man with a good ability to observe and reflect. But like so many intellectuals, he is a utopian who is frustrated by the unwillingness of others to conform to his rationalistic template. Some people are urbanites by temperament or upbringing -- Kunstler appears to be one -- and heaven knows they have plenty of urban environments to choose from. I have no quarrel with them until, like Kunstler, they insist that their preferences (overlaid with a dubious environmental rationale) become an imposed norm.

Most Americans, if they can afford to, still want to live in a house of their own, not an apartment building or Latin American hacienda. They like space around them. Even today, some prefer the relative quiet of suburbia compared with the noise of cities and apartments or condos that share walls with the neighbors.

Kunstler invariably plays what he thinks is his trump card, the running-out-of-oil scenario. If we're not persuaded by his utopian vision, then by golly he'll haul in environmental shortfalls and deputize them as enforcers. He dismisses alternative fuels or technologies, with no particular argument that I've read, just his own flat rejection.

Maybe we will have to abandon our cars and our houses and move into Blade Runner cities. Kunstler would look forward to that. As long as I have a car, house, or non-urban setting, though, he is going to have to come and try to take them from me.

Feeling lucky, Mr. Kunstler? Well, are you?