#howard kunstler

[countesspetofi]

Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, anyone?

Americans love Disneyland because it’s a walkable city

[exhaled-spirals]

— James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

[the-city-in-mind]

The book this blog is named after

The City In Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition is a set of travelogues and essays from urbanism commentator, gadfly and magic-realism author James Howard Kunstler.

You probably know him from his TED Talk, and from his first book, The Geography of Nowhere, both polemics about sprawl suburbia.

Of late, Kunstler’s become a bit of a reactionary doomer so his politics aren’t hopeful.

But this book was enlightening in its examination of the evolution of different cities: Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston, and London; infused with his preference for traditional architecture (take it or leave it), he reserves his satirical criticism mostly for the grotesqueries of Vegas and Atlanta.

I always thought this would make a great Netflix series, and I hope one gets made someday, but perhaps it does show its age and its author’s biases now.

[tail-feathers]

This old saying remains powerful: “There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.”

[the-city-in-mind]

This.

In his book Home From Nowhere, the sequel to his acclaimed critique of suburban sprawl, The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler discusses ‘the victory disease’:

As we now know, stress and trauma actually change gene expression in offspring (the field of epigenetics). The traumatized Depression / WWII generation likely passed their trauma to their kids both figuratively and literally.

Studies have shown that people with an overactive amygdala (aka your emotional ‘lizard brain’) are less tolerant of strangers and ambiguity, and score much lower on the Openness facet of the Big Five psychological indicators of personality.

I think Kunstler and the New Urbanists jokingly stumbled upon a fact, that traumatized animals become less exploratory and curious, avoid interaction and potential sources of anxiety (noise, uncontrolled situations).

Sprawl suburbia is perhaps an unconscious reaction to decades of war, deprivation and disease, especially if you count WWI, the Spanish Influenza and polio epidemics which also killed or permanently disabled millions.

It explains why, despite all the logic and evidence to the contrary, the Boomers generally skew NIMBYist, argue against density and transit, to keep sprawl going, and driving cars, because of the feeling of space, quiet, power and safety they have become accustomed to.

There is a documented preference in humans and other primates for prospect and refuge - to see but not be seen, like from a treetop or other safe vantage point. It explains the appeal of both the ever-taller SUV and the ever-increasing number of video doorbells and other cameras we festoon our houses with.

It may even explain our new layers of disdain for offices, particularly open-plan offices, even before COVID emptied out downtowns.

I mean, we knew, but it's nice to hear so succinctly

[bonnieb23-blog]

OTHERS SAY IT BEST!

“Curiosity is the purest form of insubordination.—Vladimir Nabokov Here is a collection of quotes from well-known people who describe what is happening accurately and succinctly. I could elaborate, but it seems redundant. I hope you will read each of these quotes and then pause a moment to reflect on their truth. Try to clear your mind of the fear and colorful propaganda that is beamed at you…

[davidbrussat]

Waterplace and WaterFire, pt. 2

This tiny park sits at the new confluence of the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers forms the Providence River. The old confluence was under the old post office. (Photo by author) This post reprints the second half of Chapter 21, “Waterplace and WaterFire,” from Lost Providence. The Waterplace design by Bill Warner was so good that many experts were confused. It reminded me of the what several…

[kemetic-dreams]

Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (born Hubert Gerold Brown; October 4, 1943), is an American human rights activist, Muslim cleric, African separatist, and convicted murderer who was the fifth chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. Best known as H. Rap Brown, he served as the Black Panther Party's minister of justice during a short-lived (six months) alliance between SNCC and the Black Panther Party.

He is perhaps known for his proclamations during that period, such as that "violence is as American as cherry pie", and that "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down." He is also known for his autobiography, Die Nigger Die! He is currently serving a life sentence for murder following the shooting of two Fulton County, Georgia, sheriff's deputies in 2000.

Brown's activism in the civil rights movement included involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Brown was introduced into SNCC by his older brother Ed. He first visited Cambridge, Maryland with Cleveland Sellers in the summer of 1963, during the period of Gloria Richardson's leadership in the local movement. He witnessed the first riot between whites and blacks in the city over civil rights issues, and was impressed by the local civil rights movement's willingness to use armed self-defense against racial attacks.

Brown later organized for SNCC during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, while transferring to Howard University for his studies. Representing Howard's SNCC chapter, Brown attended a contentious civil rights meeting at the White House with President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Selma crisis of 1965 as Alabama activists attempted to march for voting rights.

Major federal civil rights legislation was passed in 1964 and 1965, including the Voting Rights Act, to establish federal oversight and enforcement of rights. In 1966, Brown organized in Greene County, Alabama to achieve African voter registration and implementation of the recently passed Voting Rights Act.

Elected SNCC chairman in 1967, Brown continued Stokely Carmichael's fiery support for "Black Power" and urban rebellions in the Northern ghettos.

During the summer of 1967, Brown toured the nation, calling for violent resistance to the government, which he called "The Fourth Reich". "Negroes should organize themselves", he told a rally in Washington, D.C., and "carry on guerilla warfare in all the cities." They should, "make the Viet Cong look like Sunday school teachers." He declared, "I say to America, Fuck it! Freedom or death!"

In this period, Cambridge, Maryland had an active civil rights movement, led by Gloria Richardson. In July 1967 Brown spoke in the city, saying "It's time for Cambridge to explode, baby. Black folks built America, and if America don't come around, we're going to burn America down." Gunfire reportedly broke out later, and both Brown and a police officer were wounded. A fire started that night and by the next day, 17 buildings were destroyed by an expanding fire "in a two-block area of Pine Street, the center of African-American commerce, culture and community." Brown was charged with inciting a riot, due to his speech.

Brown was also charged with carrying a gun across state lines. A secret 1967 FBI memo had called for "neutralizing" Brown. He became a target of the agency's COINTELPRO program, which was intended to disrupt and disqualify civil rights leaders. The federal charges against him were never proven.

He was defended in the gun violation case by civil rights advocates Murphy Bell of Baton Rouge, the self-described "radical lawyer" William Kunstler, and Howard Moore Jr., general counsel for SNCC. Feminist attorney Flo Kennedy also assisted Brown and led his defense committee, winning support for him from some chapters of the National Organization for Women.

The Cambridge fire was among incidents investigated by the 1967 Kerner Commission. But their investigative documents were not published with their 1968 report. Historian Dr. Peter Levy studied these papers in researching his book Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland (2003). He argues there was no riot in Cambridge. Brown was documented as completing his speech in Cambridge at 10 pm July 24, then walking a woman home. He was shot by a deputy sheriff allegedly without provocation. Brown was hastily treated for his injuries and secretly taken by supporters out of Cambridge.

Later that night a small fire broke out, but the police chief and fire company did not respond for two hours. In discussing his book, Levy has said that the fire's spread and ultimate destructive cost appeared to be due not to a riot, but to the deliberate inaction of the Cambridge police and fire departments, which had hostile relations with the African community. In a later book, Levy notes that Brice Kinnamon, head of the Cambridge police department, said that the city had no racial problems, and that Brown was the "sole" cause of the disorder, and it was "a well-planned Communist attempt to overthrow the government."

While being held for trial, Brown continued his high-profile activism. He accepted a request from the Student Afro-American Society of Columbia University to help represent and co-organize the April 1968 Columbia protests against university expansion into Harlem park land in order to build a gymnasium.

He also contributed writing from jail to the radical magazine Black Mask, which was edited and published by the New York activist group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. In his 1968 article titled "H. Rap Brown From Prison: Lasima Tushinde Mbilashika", Brown writes of going on a hunger strike and his willingness to give up his life in order to achieve change.

Brown's trial was originally to take place in Cambridge, but there was a change of venue and the trial was moved to Bel Air, Maryland, to start in March 1970. On March 9, 1970, two SNCC officials, Ralph Featherstone and William ("Che") Payne, died on U.S. Route 1 south of Bel Air, when a bomb on the front floorboard of their car exploded, killing both occupants. The bomb's origin is disputed: some say the bomb was planted in an assassination attempt, and others say Payne was carrying it to the courthouse where Brown was to be tried. The next night, the Cambridge courthouse was bombed

Brown disappeared for 18 months. He was posted on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most Wanted List. He was arrested after a reported shootout with officers in New York City following an alleged attempted robbery of a bar there. He was convicted of robbery and served five years (1971–76) in Attica Prison in western New York state. While in prison, Brown converted to Islam. He formally changed his name from Hubert Gerold Brown to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin.

After his release, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he opened a grocery store. He became an imam, a Muslim spiritual leader, in the National Ummah, one of the nation's largest African Muslim groups. He also was a community activist in Atlanta's West End neighborhood. He preached against drugs and gambling. It has since been suggested that al-Amin changed his life again when he became affiliated with the "Dar ul-Islam Movement"

On May 31, 1999, al-Amin was pulled over while driving in Marietta, Georgia by police officer Johnny Mack for a suspected stolen vehicle. During a search, al-Amin was found to have in his pocket a police badge. He also had a bill of sale in his pocket, explaining his possession of the stolen car, and he claimed that he had been issued an honorary police badge by Mayor John Jackson, a statement which Jackson verified. Despite this, al-Amin was charged with speeding, auto theft and impersonating a police officer.

On March 16, 2000, in Fulton County, Georgia, Sheriff's deputies Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English went to al-Amin's home to execute an arrest warrant for failing to appear in court over the charges. After determining that the home was unoccupied, the deputies drove away and were shortly passed by a black Mercedes headed for the house. Kinchen (the more senior deputy) noted the suspect vehicle, turned the patrol car around, and drove up to the Mercedes, stopping nose to nose. English approached the Mercedes and told the single occupant to show his hands. The occupant opened fire with a .223 rifle. English ran between the two cars while returning fire from his handgun, and was hit four times. Kinchen was shot with the rifle and a 9 mm handgun.

The next day, Kinchen died of his wounds at Grady Memorial Hospital. English survived his wounds. He identified al-Amin as the shooter from six photos he was shown while recovering in the hospital[citation needed] Another source said English identified him shortly before going into surgery for his wounds.

After the shootout, al-Amin fled Atlanta, going to White Hall, Alabama. He was tracked down by U.S. Marshals who started with a blood trail at the shooting site, and arrested by law enforcement officers after a four-day manhunt. Al-Amin was wearing body armor at the time of his arrest. He showed no wounds. Officers found a 9 mm handgun near his arrest site. Firearms identification testing showed that this was used to shoot Kinchen and English, but al-Amin's fingerprints were not found on the weapon. Later, al-Amin's black Mercedes was found with bullet holes in it.

His lawyers argued he was innocent of the shooting. Defense attorneys noted that al-Amin's fingerprints were not found on the murder weapon, and he was not wounded in the shooting, as one of the deputies said the shooter was. A trail of blood found at the scene was tested and did not belong to al-Amin or either of the deputies. A test by the state concluded that it was animal blood, but these results have been disputed because there was no clear chain of custody to verify the sample and testing process. Deputy English had said that the killer's eyes were gray, but al-Amin's are brown.

At al-Amin's trial, prosecutors noted that he had never provided an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the shootout, nor any explanation for fleeing the state afterward. He also did not explain why the weapons used in the shootout were found near him during his arrest.

On March 9, 2002, nearly two years after the shootings, al-Amin was convicted of 13 criminal charges, including Kinchen's murder and aggravated assault in shooting English. Four days later, he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole (LWOP).He was sent to Georgia State Prison, the state's maximum-security facility near Reidsville, Georgia.

Otis Jackson, a man incarcerated for unrelated charges, claimed that he committed the Fulton County shootings, and confessed this two years before al-Amin was convicted of the same crime. The court did not consider Jackson's statement as evidence. Jackson's statements corroborated details from 911 calls following the shooting, including a bleeding man seen limping from the scene: Jackson said he knocked on doors to solicit a ride while suffering from wounds sustained in the firefight with deputies Kinchen and English. Jackson recanted his statement two days after making it, but later confessed again in a sworn affidavit, stating that he had only recanted after prison guards threatened him for being a "cop killer". Prosecutors refuted Jackson's testimony, claiming he couldn't have shot the deputies as he was wearing an ankle tag for house confinement that would have showed his location. Al-Amin's lawyers allege that the tag was faulty.

Al-Amin appealed his conviction on the basis of a racial conspiracy against him, despite both Fulton County deputies being black. In May 2004, the Supreme Court of Georgia unanimously ruled to uphold al-Amin's conviction.

In August 2007, al-Amin was transferred to federal custody, as Georgia officials decided he was too high-profile for the Georgia prison system to handle. He was first held in a holdover facility in the USP Atlanta; two weeks later he was moved to a federal transfer facility in Oklahoma, pending assignment to a federal penitentiary.

On October 21, 2007, al-Amin was transferred to ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He has been under an unofficial gag order, prevented from having any interviews with writers, journalists or biographers.

On July 18, 2014, having been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, al-Amin was transferred to Butner Federal Medical Center in North Carolina. As of March 2018, he is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Tucson.

Al-Amin sought retrial through the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Investigative journalist, Hamzah Raza, has written more about Otis Jackson's confession to the deputy shootings in 2000, and said that this evidence should have been considered by the court. It had the potential of exonerating al-Amin. However, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his appeal on July 31, 2019.

In April 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from al-Amin. His family and supporters continue to petition for a new trial.

[darkmaga-returns]

The meltdown has gotten so heavy liberal bureaucrats are ready to form antigovernment militias and fretting about black helicopters —Max Blumenthal

James Howard Kunstler

Nov 15, 2024

“Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them. They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda” — The New York Times

      In July 27, 1794, the non-insane members of the Convention, or national legislative body in Paris, suddenly turned on the rabid Jacobin leader Maximillian Robespierre and overthrew his ruling tyrannical bunch — who had killed 40,000 of their fellow countrymen in the paranoid orgy known as The Reign of Terror. The next day, Robespierre rode the tumbrel to his own appointment with “the national razor” and the Thermidorian Reaction was on!

     By the way, in one of their many acts disordering French society, the Jacobins had changed the calendar, renamed all the months, and changed the weeks from seven to ten days (to eliminate Sundays as a holy day of rest in their anti-church crusade). Thus, Thermidor, the month of mid-summer. This was but a small part of their proto-communist agenda, but you see in it the flavor of their radical extremism.

     The Woke Democrats of recent times were our Jacobins, and the election of November 5, 2024, marks the kick-off of America’s Thermidorian Reaction. The crazies have been overthrown and our country awaits a restoration of norms in culture and law. No more sexualizing of children, no more flood of criminal mutts across the US border, no more furtive censorship of public speech, no more creative lawfare, no more women on the battlefield, no more “anti-racist” racism in the workplace, no more intel takeover of everyone’s private life. . . you get the picture.

[mosertone]

via James Howard Kunstler's "Eyesore of the Month" : This beast sets sail in January of 2024. Ask yourself: what sort of economy supports a venture like this? And what if it isn’t there anymore when this thing is ready to launch?

Behold, Royal Caribbean International’s new ship, Icon of the Seas. Well, okay, but icon of what, exactly, of the seas? Of the wretched excess that the cruise industry is sending forth to sail the oceans blue?  I remind you: societies build their most extravagant monuments just before they collapse. This looks like the perfect vehicle for partying at the end-of-the-world (that is, the world as we know it). This monstrosity is so huge — equivalent of a 20-story building — that the promoters say it has “neighborhoods.”  Below is the Royal Bay Pool in the new “Chill Island neighborhood.” Very posh, indeed. Excludes all the waddling, land-whales of the lower decks with their slushies and burritos in-hand.

[exhaled-spirals]

« The Revolution swept away the prerogatives of the Crown associated with English land tenure in America. In America, ownership meant freedom from the meddling of nobles, the right to freely dispose of land by sale at a profit. . . American land law was predicated on the paramount principle that land was first and foremost a commodity for capital gain.

. . . Other Old World values toppled before this new system—for example, the idea of land as a physical container for community values. Nearly eradicated in the rush for profit was the concept of stewardship, of land as public trust. . . [T]he genius of American land law [...] "lay in its identification of land as a civil liberty instead of a social resource."

. . . A system was needed to divide [land] up for sale. The answer was the national grid. . . It was fair and square and easy to understand. The federal survey platted land into square units measuring six miles on each side. . . Over five million [family] farms were platted on public land between 1800 and 1900. Expeditious as it was—indeed, it is hard to imagine a more rational method—the national grid had some serious drawbacks. . . In terms of rural life, the grid institutionalized the trend toward scattered farms, rather than agricultural villages, giving physical expression to the powerful myth that only the individual mattered in America.

The new towns of the Midwest were more often than not laid out on grids that echoed the larger grid of the surrounding countryside, with some unfortunate results. The grid was primarily concerned with the squares of private property that lay within the gradients, not with the gradients themselves, or how the two related to one another. This dictated a way of thinking about the community in which private property was everything and the public realm—namely, the streets that connected all the separate pieces of private property—counted for nothing. This spawned towns composed of blocks unmodified by devices of civic art, checker-board towns without visible centers, open spaces, odd little corners, or places set aside for the public's enjoyment. »

— James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The rise and decline of America's man-made landscape

[pissditching]

my god we must burn down suburbia .

found a book i've been wanting to read for a while in the free bin outside of the library everyone suck me off silly style

[tail-feathers]

The Art of James Howard Kunstler

[not-available-for-comment]

Ok, so Firefox’s pocket suggestions have been trying to get me to read a list of “8 life-changing nonfiction books selected by top authors” and while I don’t really feel like reading that article, I think it could make a cool prompt. Nonfiction tends to have a rep for being dry or trite, but I think it can be powerful and engaging as well. I probably don’t have near enough followers to be doing a book rec post, but whatev, I like talking about books, we’re doing this.

Prompt: List 5-8 Life-Changing Nonfiction Books

In no particular order:

1. The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani (2008)

This is probably the book I’m most scared to go back and read, because I suspect parts of it did not age well. I think she’s released an updated edition and I’m interested in revisiting that one. That said, as someone raised in a very conservative environment, this book completely revolutionized my thinking on harm reduction strategies like needle exchanges and free condoms from the cOnDONinG bAd beHaViOr bullshit I believed when I was younger to “oh look, a way to keep people alive and healthy”. She also had some eye opening comments on the “rescuing women from developing nation brothels” charities that were so popular in the 90s. I still think about the insights in this book often.

2. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler (1993)

I don’t know if I can even describe how foundational this book was for me when I first read it in my early 20s. Kunstler describes the way cars have usurped human comfort in American architecture, land management, and city planning in meticulous detail. It made me look at my environment with new eyes, and appreciate alternatives I had barely even grasped, in spite of having traveled internationally. I don’t recall Kunstler’s book explicitly speaking to the disabled community’s concerns with anti-car rhetoric, which have gotten increasingly relevant over time. But I still highly recommend the book as an excellent introduction for USians interested in improving our lived environment and anyone else who wants to know What The Hell Happened With The US And Cars.

3. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman (2009)

I’ve never been an intuitive cook: the kind of person who can look in the cupboard and throw together a dish based on what I can see. I actually started out baking almost exclusively, because the precision of baking recipes helped keep me from going astray. Ruhlman’s book was the first to help me crack the cooking code. Ironically, I’ve made very few of his recipes, which tend to have an overly fussy, professional chef ring to them. But learning about the basic ratios and techniques that went into popular western dishes helped me start to understand how cooking worked. It’s been 10 years since I read Ruhlman’s book, and I still often cook with a recipe. But sometimes I don’t. And his book is part of the reason why.

4. My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Nagata Kabi (2009)

I’m sure this one isn’t new to a tumblr audience, but it deserves its excellent reputation. This graphic memoir is hard to quantify accurately. It is, of course, an important work on the experience of being queer in Japan. But it’s also a searching, thoughtful, and sometimes brutal examination of the self, a coming of age story that is unsentimental but insightful and, I think, ultimately hopeful. I bought the book several years after it came out, at a time when I personally felt like a failure and a disappointment to my parents, and devoured it and felt less alone. Highly recommend to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. (Note that it does at one point describe the author’s eating disorder.)

5. Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose (2017)

This book revolutionized the way I thought about personal essays. This is not “I had a mildly risqué experience as a young white middle class cis woman which I will now recount to you for money.” Nor is it really my much-beloved genre of creative nonfiction that combines rapturous descriptions of the taste and scent of peaches with rigorously researched discursions on the history of the state of Georgia. No, this is a creative explosion, raining color and candy, flashing by your face too quickly to be fully registered but delightful all the same. Chew-Bose writes stream of consciousness, but one loaded with sharply observed images and quicksilver thoughts, tangents to tangents to tangents, some circling back and some not, personal memory and constant cascades of cultural commentary threading together into universal but deeply personal tapestries. If you have any taste at all for either essays or virtuoso writing you MUST read this book.

I think that’s a good stopping point for me. Curious to see if anyone else does this prompt and if so, what they pick.

[andronetalks]

Kamala Unwinding…

Zero Hedge BY TYLER DURDENFRIDAY, OCT 11, 2024 – 05:00 PMAuthored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com, “…we are facing a catastrophic collapse of governance. With democracy reduced to a tragedy or a farce (probably both things)…” – Ugh Bardi “As the US increasingly resembles ancient Rome, being president is more and more dangerous. Something around 35 emperors met violent deaths, most from…