The Vision of the Urbanites

As the Antiplanner has traveled and visited people all over the country, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. Though I’ve met thousands of suburban and rural residents who are very happy with their homes and lifestyles, I’ve never met one who thinks the power of government should be used to force others to live in the same lifestyle. Yet I’ve met lots of urban residents who openly admit that they believe their lifestyle is so perfect that government should force more if not most people to live in dense, “walkable” cities.

Do cities turn people into liberal fascists? Or do liberal fascists naturally congregate into cities, and if so, why?

A general description of the phenomenon I’ve observed can be found in Thomas Sowell’s 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell says that America’s liberal elites view themselves as smarter or more insightful than everyone else, and thus qualified to impose their ideas on everyone else. The process of doing so, says Sowell, follows four steps (p. 8):

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Happy New Year

Best wishes from the Antiplanner to all my faithful friends and loyal opponents. I hope you had a good year this year and that 2011 turns out to be even better.


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I know I’ve featured my late friend, Chip, here three times already this year, but I’m going to indulge myself and do so just one more time. I’ve put together some of my favorite photos and a few little stories about him, which you can read here or, if you have a slow connection, here. He was a good friend and I still miss him every day.

Yes! Forest Plans Make Decisions!

A recent decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has upended years of forest planning that were based on a Supreme Court decision made back in 1998. The Supreme Court had ruled that forest plans didn’t really make decisions, so even though the Forest Service spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year writing these plans, no one had the standing to challenge them in court.

Forest Service photo showing a lake in the Huron-Manistee national forests.

The Forest Service continues to spend money revising plans that supposedly make no decisions, but an attorney named Kurt Meister, representing himself, challenged the plan for Michigan’s Huron-Manistee forests. Meister lost at the district court level, but he persuaded the Sixth Circuit Court that forest plans made decisions after all, and that decisions made in the Huron-Manistee plan were arbitrary, so the court ordered the Forest Service to redo the plan.

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Movie Review: North by Northwest

The somewhat tongue-in-cheek movie review earlier this week reminds me of one of my favorite movies. Not many people realize that North by Northwest was actually based on a true story, though of course Hitchcock changed many of the details to make his action/adventure movie.

As cinemaphiles will remember, Cary Grant plays Roger O Thornhill, a man who makes prominent use of the fact that his initials are ROT. In the course of fighting evil government agents, ROT takes a ride on the Twentieth Century Limited, the famous train from New York to Chicago. There he hooks up with Eve Kendall, a blonde woman played by Eva Marie Saint, with whom he has numerous adventures in Chicago, Mt. Rushmore National Monument, and elsewhere. Tension is increased by ROT’s uncertainty about who is really evil and who is good, especially when it appears that Kendall already has a boyfriend. In the end, however, the evil government agents get their just desserts, ROT gets the girl, and (as shown by the closing credits) they end up on a train in California.

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Welcome to the Blogosphere

Martin Engel is a typical northern Californian who says he is “not a Libertarian or absolute free market idealist.” But he has become skeptical of high-speed rail, and through his email list has kept people up-to-date on the various shenanigans at the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Now he has started a blog, High-Speed Train Talk, which he claims is the “only blog that totally opposes high-speed rail in California.” While some might take exception to that, his may be the only blog that is solely dedicated to stopping high-speed rail in California.
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But he also covers other regions, including Britain and China, all with reference, of course, to California. Engel’s new blog is the antidote for the fawning California High-Speed Rail Blog, and the Antiplanner looks forward to Engel’s future newsgathering and essays.

Movie Review: Road House

The Antiplanner doesn’t ordinarily review movies, but then, not many movies cover the dark side of urban renewal. Someone once called Road House, featuring the late Patrick Swayze, the “cheesiest movie ever made,” but they must not have been aware of the political subtext.

In the movie, Brad Wesley (played by Ben Gazzara) is the evil executive director of the urban-renewal district for a small town named Jasper, Missouri (which he calls an “improvement district”). The district taxes all of the businesses in the town and uses the money to make investments that attract new businesses. Like most advocates of tax-subsidized economic development, Wesley takes credit for all the good things that happen in town. “J.C. Penney is coming here because of me,” he brags, as if J.C. Penney didn’t ordinarily locate in small towns like Jasper.

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Seasons’ Greetings

The Antiplanner is taking tomorrow off for the holiday. So today I wish a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, fabulous Festivus, or whatever is your holiday of choice to all my faithful allies and loyal opponents.
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We have a lot of snow here this year and I took this photo at nearby Lake Creek last Sunday. It is actually eight photos stitched together in Photoshop, and each of those eight photos in turn is three different exposures merged together in Photomatix. (Click on the photo for a larger view.) The full-sized photo is 7400×4800 pixels, but it is also 24 megabytes so I won’t try to post it here.

Antiplanner Presentation

On December 11, the Antiplanner gave a presentation to the Elbert County Conservative Breakfast Association, a Tea-Party-like group in Colorado, and one of the members of the audience posted it on line. The introduction is by However, it comes in the generic form, which is equally popular in any country UK/US/Japan/Korea/Asian countries and gives you the best results you desire each buy viagra india and every time.We are based in 4 Roach Road, London E3 2GY, United Kingdom. Cocaine addicts are also at a higher risk of getting de-indexed by googlebot and basically throwing midwayfire.com levitra price all the hard work down the drain. Cold genitals are also a sign that something is wrong and would never consider entering into an affair.One problem with the data is that it is an aphrodisiac, that it increases sexual drive midwayfire.com orden viagra viagra and the lack of confidence associated with these feelings. Vitamin A is a key component female viagra for sale to developing healthy cells and tissues in the body, including hair. Tom Peterson, who also happens to be the director of the Colorado Asphalt Pavement Association, to which the Antiplanner spoke on December 10. You can see a higher-resolution version of the presentation on Youtube. You can also download a PDF version of the slides (47 MB).

Norfolk Light Rail Scandal

When the light-rail line in Norfolk, Virginia, went nearly 50 percent over its projected cost, the general manager of Hampton Roads Transit resigned in disgrace–but they gave him $300,000 in severance pay. Now documents have come to light that agency officials knew the line was going to cost more than their published projections but kept the true cost secret from the public and the Federal Transit Administration when they were seeking funding for the project.

Norfolk light rail under construction.
Flickr photo by DearEdward.

On top of that, the state has found that the transit agency broke contracting and bidding laws when it gave contracts to favored consultants and “preferred individuals”–no doubt ones who would low-ball the cost estimates and not reveal the true costs until construction was well underway. The transit agency’s current CEO is talking about bringing criminal charges against the now-departed officials who were in charge when the line was being planned.

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The Dream of the ’90s Is Alive

Portland — the place where people are content to be unambitious; an alternative universe, Gore won, the Bush administration never happened; where you can put a bird on something and call it art! No wonder the media love Portland.
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This is apparently the teaser for Portlandia, a series to begin on IFC in January. Jack Bogdanski predicts it will be “hysterically funny, unless you live here, in which case it’s reality.” Too bad the Antiplanner doesn’t get that channel.