Interestingly enough, I am a great fan of the interior of IM Pei’s underground pyramid structure of the Louvre. First of all, he maintains an appropriate level of proportion and symmetry, so there is a sense of harmony in the structure. Pei also avoids another hallmark failure of brutalist architecture, and that is combining the overwhelming physical mass of concrete with rampant cantilevering, which makes people feel uneasy in the space. His staircase design and elevator are cantilevered, but they are not frightening, and the pyramid overhead allows in the sunlight through its fine lace-like latticework.

Next, the surfaces of the concrete are textured by the use of narrow wooden boards with visible wood grain to make the concrete forms. When the concrete forms were removed, the texture of the surface appears as a natural material. The concrete forms were built in such a way so that so that the dimensions of each board in the concrete form was properly proportioned relative to the geometry of the structure. This effect is fairly subtle and is difficult to capture in photos.

The color of the concrete is gorgeous too, and it may be from the use of ground Parisian limestone as an aggregate, or perhaps it was dyed to match the stone..it is the color of Paris. Pei pays homage to the Pantheon in his patterned concrete geometrical recesses of the ceiling, which have the same visual drama to the tiered recesses in the Pantheon dome. The geometry is combined with the textured and yellow/beige concrete and thus it has a similar visual effect as the travertine on the ceiling on the Pantheon. The walls and floors are designed with quality materials as well – so you have perfection. Additionally, there is a great deal of space not directly under the pyramid structures, and the attention to details extends to those spaces. If I recall correctly, even the bathrooms were done well.

My favorite POS brutalist structure: the English National Theater – because London is simply not depressing enough with the gray skies and incessant rain.

This is a horrific cultural loss. Some of the comments speculating that Muslim workers or someone else intentionally set fire to Notre Dame are shameful. Wait for the facts.

These kinds of accidental fires happen frequently. As an example, see the Chicago Pilgrim Baptist Church below.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_Baptist_Church

Here is another church fire on the Southside of Chicago:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/multiple-alarm-fire-scorches-landmark-chicago-church-shrine-of-christ-the-king-sovereign-priest/

Notre Dame has a leaded roof, which requires heat to melt the lead when repairing the roof. That might have been the cause. Maybe it was something else. No doubt the construction workers will report what happened on their shift.

It is because ducks are well known rapists. Plenty of established research on their behavior.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11764-female-ducks-fight-back-against-raping-males/

The entire EU experiment is an echo of the many attempts made to centralize control of the continent. Caesar and Rome, Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon, the Hapsburg Empire, Entente Powers vs. Central Powers, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Allies vs. the Axis Powers, and the Communist Eastern Block vs. the Capitalist West. Almost all of these attempts involved or often ended in massive bloodshed at some point. Examples include Caesar’s passification/genocide of the celts in Gaul, the 30 Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian Revolution, WWI and WWII. Millions and millions died. The exception seems to be the fall of the USSR, where most of the mortality was from alcoholism and pure despair.

In the current iteration, Germany has reeled in the spoils, along with the financiers of the City of London. Moreover, the unique status of the City of London allowed a tax haven for capital in the UE as it is currently structured. It was a conquest without a shot fired.

The EU experiment is not working in areas such as southern Italy because of mob corruption. The Greeks can’t bring it upon themselves to pay their taxes, and all the PIG loser states are simply too unproductive relative to the Germans to avoid huge imbalances. The native French population is out in the streets every weekend protesting their decline in living standards and the evisceration of the French way of life. Freedom of movement and employment within the EU eventually might have allowed economic and cultural equilibriums to be reached. That equilibrium however would have meant that the EU economic center of gravity would have continued to concentrate in the area between Stuttgart, Munich and Zurich.

https://www.regiodata.eu/en/news/1057-purchasing-power-europe-the-swiss-maintain-their-top-spot#gallery

Unfortunately, Merkel’s and Brussels’ failure to secure Europe’s borders seems to have doomed the economic and cultural unification of the continent. It was a bit too much to ask of the wage serfs of Europe to give up their historic cities, jobs, state benefits and culture, while being progressively displace by hostile foreigners. At the onset of the EU experiment, the peoples of Europe could perhaps see themselves becoming a bit more like their European neighbors, but the gulf between the cultures and peoples of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa is beyond their imagination.

Perhaps this failure to foresee the opening of EU borders to the third world as a bridge too far was due to the collective post-WWII German psychosis from the war, and the incessant guilt projected on the German people well after the principal actors of WWII have died. No doubt the desire of EU capitalists to secure cheap labor from outside the EU to undermine wages played a role too.

The question remains is whether the dissolution will be bloody, or can it be wound down peacefully. Will Europe even be recognizable without a violent purge? You can still safely take a walk at night in Prague, Vienna and some of the Balkan states, Paris – not so much.

There are sparks of hope in the Brexit and Gilet Jaunes movements, and some of the members of the political class in Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Austria seem to get it. The majority of Northern and German speaking Europe remains in doubt. The only hope is that typically, if the rules are officially changed in the Germanic world, Germans tend to comply with the rules. They can turn on a dime. Maybe new German leadership will have a different outlook, and we will only lose a few million that drink or drug themselves to death.

I think there has been a lot of fetishizing media and film studies in highschools during the past five or ten years. Believe it is a YouTube induced phenomenon. Our school calls their department “new media”. USC seems to have the most prestigious program. One of my son’s friends got in. Admittedly, she was quite talented, but it was a huge deal amongst her peers in our Northshore Chicago school district.

A hybrid car with a turbine generator set might be ideal. A relatively small turbine could run nearly 24/7, supplying enough to charge the battery. If it used compressed natural gas, the turbine would burn quite cleanly. The turbine in combination with the battery would work together for quick acceleration. Power could be generated during breaking as most hybrids currently do. When parked, the battery could charge off the grid if electricity prices are low. If stored outside, the car could dump excess turbine and battery capacity into the grid during peak electricity demand. The trick is sizing the turbine properly for If the battery gets too low, the car would just run at a reduced speed and/or no AC.

You might even be able to design a thermopile to generate electricity from waste exhaust heat.

Another plus would be extraordinary reliability. Turbines don’t have reciprocating parts so they don’t require as much maintenance.

You might be able to use a fuel cell in the same application, but I don’t know much about their reliability or power to weight ratio. Turbines can be quite small, yet powerful.

This thing about the coxswain spots being part of the scandal really cracks me up. I knew a girl who coxswained for the University of Michigan in the 1980’s. They took anybody that was small, loud and willing to freeeze their ass off day-after-day on the front end of the shell. It was essentially a walk-on spot. Maybe M woman’s crew was only a club team then, but my how things have changed.

Is there a gene driving a preference for lots of MSG as an additive? Funyuns, flaming hot Cheetos and Doritos as well as Takis Chips, seem to a have a lot of monsodium glutamate.

These kinds of snacks are very popular along with menthol cigs in my old neighbohood on the south side of Chicago. This could be contributing to health problems in African Americans.

In the United States, the value of owning productive land or real estate has been vastly diminshed. In states where property taxes are at a confiscatory level, it is very difficult to stay afloat unless your holdings are enormous, or you allow yourself to be coopted by government Section 8 income, TIF tax incentives or government arranged financing, which typically specifies a percentage of low income units in a development. You then have to rent to whom they tell you, and build what and where they specify.

Farmers have to grow certain types of crops such as corn or beans based on Ag policies or ethanol subsidies to make adequate income. Profit from Agribusiness goes to mega farms, firms like ADM, Bunge and Cargill.

By eschewing the entire rigged system, the Amish seem to manage some level of independence. It seems they knew instinctively to avoid the Swift network.

I just use the same cheap earplugs at movie theaters as I do when running my mower, snowblower, or the dreaded gas weed wacker. I suppose if I would quit doing the work other Americans refuse to do, I would not have this problem.

Earplugs really help and you can still hear perfectly well in the theater. Unfortunately they don’t improve the low quality of the typical movie these days.

Note to Ron Unz. I posted two comments here because the first initially disappeared into the ether. I thought I had inadvertently deleted it. Tried to post the comment again to no avail, and they both showed up under moderation halfway through the day, and now they have both beeen posted.

EDIT This comment behaved normally in that it immediately appeared as under moderation and this addenum was completed within the four minute editing window.

Companies that have a higher ration of capital costs versus labor costs tend to pay more.

Industries that have an expense structure where the cost of capital is extremely high relative to labor costs tend to pay more that companies with a lower ratio.

I really love this video by Daniella Witten that explains statistical methods used to infer direct relationships between different variables in complex biological networks. There is a lot of detail beyond causation and correlation, but if you can follow her discussion, you will have cause and correlation down cold.

Sure some have seen it. Believe Steve Hsu originally posted it on his blog.

Video Link

Maybe I should just break it up into 200 separate sentences, and publish each one separately. Or better yet, turn the whole thing into a series of “memes” involving cartoon frogs and crude insults…

That seems like a fine idea, but really, can we move past the amphibians and pick on another class of creatures as I am sick of images of frogs and toads..

Seriously, as for reading your article, your thesis appears to be that the practice of smearing Latino/hispanic immigrants as a highly criminal population by those favoring the restriction of immigration, illegal or otherwise is harmful to their cause. This is because the data do not support this position and secondly, this emotional and xenophobic position by some on the alt-right merely provides an opportunity for unthical MSM journalists/propagandists to point and sputter, dehumanize the anti-immigrant alt-right as deplorables. This is a suggestion to stop being stupid.

Of note, you said a national discussion on whether immigration levels in the US are too high is long overdue, which seems to be a change from what I have viewed as your generally pro-immigration stance. Maybe I am being too hopeful here? And yet you are taking flak from commenters. Oy Veh!

I find 95% of the movies coming out extremely boring and predictable. Most plots are unbelievable, and they often are preaching about some politically correct topic. But perhaps most movies have always been crap in one way or another, and it is only the excellent ones we remember.

The most recent film that I actually enjoyed was Wildfire, about a family dissolution from the perspective of a teenage boy. It was good because the plot was believable, and the movie simply showed what happens when people make bad decisions. Then as you might expect, bad things happen. It is the critical component of what makes a good story and a good movie.

The postmodern reality is somewhat disconnected from reality, and as this drives most movies these days, the stories are not true to life.

I don’t know much about screenwriting itself, but it seems as if it is a supreme act of distillation when translating a richly writtent three hundred page novel into ninety minutes of dialog. Everything else has to be narrated or translated into something visual, or captured in the sound track.

Paleo,
Walker saved Wisconsin from financial ruin. You are sitting with a good view of Illinois and Chicago as we slowly self destruct due to corrupt politics. This has led to out of control public sector labor costs and entitlements.

You should thank your lucky stars.

Scarcity of resources is a fact. The UW system will ultimately do just fine. You will notice that the Illinois public university system is the one having trouble maintaining enrollment because anybody that can bail out of here is leaving Illinois. There is not money to subsidize higher ed, pay exorbitant public pensions while supporting an enormous welfare state at the same time.

The real estate market in the Chicago area is one of the worst performing in the nation. This reflects Illinois dire financial and political situation.

http://www.chicagonow.com/getting-real/2018/08/case-shiller-chicago-home-price-appreciation-still-sucks/

I like the written word best. I find some topics require a second reading and some rumination to fully understand. Furthermore, the act of writing out what you think you mean in the comments section allows you to refine your understanding as you put forth your observation or opinion. This is why a robust editing function is nice.

The act of writing also seems to be more left brain than right, and helps me separate my initial emotional reaction and allow a more analytical kind of understanding.

This is an idea whose time has come. I really cannot explain how influential this site has been on my thinking. For this, I am truly grateful. I arrived here a number of years ago following Sailer’s move to Unz after following him since I guess 2005? Found Steve via old Griffe du Lion posts or perhaps Razib.

Regardless, I was afraid to even read the material at the time because it seemed heretical, and looking back, it was and it remains so. I think the most profitable thing you could do is set up a commercial blogging site. Your software for publishing, commenting and facilitating the discussion of ideas is the best I have seen. It beats sites like blogspot hands down.. just a thought.

I suppose a contribution here would do less harm than the money I send to the NYT for three papers each weekend, most of which I cannot bear to read.

Currently reading “the Master and his Emmisary” by Ian McGilchrist which seems to deal directly with the physiology and function of our split brain, and it’s impact on consciousness and western culture. Rather ambitious thesis on its face.

Picked it up based on a recent post by Steve Hsu on his inforproc blog on blogspot. Given that I am on page 100 of 550, I remain agnostic on whether McGilchrist succeeds, although Hsu’s recommendations rarely turn out to be journeys down a rabbit hole.

Chicago State University

I was in a country recently with a lot of people with names ending in “ic”. The urinals were mounted so high on the wall I nearly had to stand on my toes.

Then I went back to Italy and I was a giant again.

Should the US save the Saudi Alliance?

Since the Sykes-Picot agreement, the collective answer from the has been YES.

As the great John Mearshimer said recently as yesterday, we will continue to be concerned about the Persian Gulf as long as the Saudis continue to have an enormous amount of oil.

If the US wishes to maintain the dollar role as the leading reserve currency in the world, and the subsequent benefits, we should pray that the Saudis continue to accept it in exchange for their oil. Otherwise we are looking at a real war in the Middle East versus the skirmishes we have been creating in Iraq Libya and Syria.

If these young clerks are women that belong to the Federalist Society, I would say he is simply training the next generation of federal judges and prosecutors. That is what SC Justices have done for years.

The bonus is that given the left’s demand that all women are to be believed despite no corroboration, they will by virtue of their gender be innoculated against claims of pubic hair left on the top of coke cans, or attempted rape as a 17 year old.

The southwestern area of Wisconsin is known as the driftless area. Some of the area extends into Iowa. If you like to fish, it has some of the best trout streams for fly fishing in the US. Very different feel though from out west. There are small, numerous cold flowing streams in small, narrow valleys. All catch and release, and carefully managed and maintained by Wisconsin DNR. Best enjoyed with a guide as stream conditions can vary widely by the day and year.

The difference between Michigan and Wisconsin was palpable, even before the 2008 crash. I would suggest that Michigan suffered more from NAFTA than Wisconsin because the production work was more skilled work in Wisconsin than Michigan assembly line type work. Assembly line work was shipped to Mexico.

Michigan has more Scots-Irish rednecks who immigrated from Appalachia during the great migration that took place to staff the Arsenal of democracy in WWII. The outcomes for the children of these folks are not as good as the Germans and Norwegians in Wisconsin. Michigan has 20% sun people vs 10% in Wisconsin, so between that group and the rednecks it is baked in the cake.

That sounds great to me. They can keep the jerk chicken royalties. Tesla was from my family’s hometown. If I get a cut of the royalties for AC generation, transmission and AC motors, I think I can live on that. Add that to the inventions of my scots, German and English ancestors and I think I am in the money. Oh wait, maybe that is exactly what happened.

I don’t think this movie captures crazy rich. I knew a guy who attended the marriage of Lakshmi Mittal’s daughter in Paris, which included events at Tuilleries Garden at the Louvre and at Versailles. He said it was outrageously extravagant. His airfare and hotel from the US was covered by the family as well. That is a crazy rich Asian/Indian.

Amazon is the cloud, period. Amazon Cloud services are the source of lions share of Amazon’s profits. The size of Amazon cloud services provide a scale that no other organization can compete with.

Why has London continuously grown? How about the fact that the ancient City of London Corporation, protected by the Magna Carta and ancient English law is the largest tax haven and safest business friendly square mile ever created, thus making London a magnet for the world’s gold, the owners of that wealth and the army of professionals and bankers that service them. Woe unto Kings that challenge the corporation.

https://www.ft.com/content/7c8f24fa-3aa5-11e4-bd08-00144feabdc0

https://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/02/london-corporation-city

My wife remains astounded that nearly all English lavatories have two separate spigots for hot and cold water, versus a single spigot/mixing fixture that combines hot and cold water. This might be hampered by archaic plumbing codes though.

I think the major negative of UK weather is the combination of the cold/damp with the shorter amount of daylight from being so far north. It can be depressing. The glassed English conservatories that many people have help get you exposed to more light during the winter.

I have had a number of trips where I was cold from the time I left Heathrow until I got back on the airplane to go home because so many of the buildings have poor heating and are made of stone or masonry.

I wonder if the pub culture developed as a result of people just trying to find someplace warm.

I have made a numbet if trips to visit family over the Christmas holiday and I have made a point of VRBO’ing places that are newer construction to insure we won’t be cold or be in a damp mouldy place. Of course I keep my own pair of wellies there to traipse about.

Travelling there Thursday. We will see about the heatwave as AC is not as common.

Facebook is for moms and leftists. My HS and college aged boys make fun of moms using Facebook. They are more likely to use snapchat, instagram and even 4chan before they would be caught dead on Faecesbook. Some men use Linked-in and they also use legitimate dating sites. Players cruise Tinder for hookups – . That is the first issue.

Secondly, Facebook has an BLM/NFL/ESPN type problem. They have censored people, and actively attacked Trump and the deplorables. Nearly 1/2 the country despises Facebook and Zuck because of what they have done. Facebook is the new Myspace.

Good Riddance (except I am going to get nailed in my equity index funds!)

If you recall, one of the triplets had not only attended the community college, but he had dropped out. They were clearly having problems. These three boys had some kind of emotional and/or psychological issues. They also appeared to party heavily and maybe did drugs. In their defense, did anybody go to Studio 54 and not do those things in 1980? I remember quaalude jokes were as common then as 420/vaping (marijuana) allusions are today.

The kid that committed suicide had the most distant and emotionally aloof parents. If anything the movie attests to the fact that tendencies towards substance abuse and mental health are genetic, and that the environment has an impact on how these tendencies are expressed. I am sure living in the Disco/Studio 54 era, running a restaurant and the fame from their situation harmed them. Thank god Steve Dahl’s disco demolition put an end to that (Chicago joke).

I felt the movie tried to minimize the impact of genetics at the end with excerpts from interviews with some of the parents. Either way one of the better movies I have seen this summer, and members of the Tribe were eating it up last weekend at the local theater in Highland Park, IL despite in being very unflattering to the freudians and the Jewish Board.

Around here, shorthand slurs in high school for white racial archetypes are Chad and Stacey, but it is pretty waspy in these parts.

This election should not be a surprise. Bernie Sanders was a contender that was wiped out by the establishment DNC Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her ilk to support Hillary Clinton. The Sander’s platform is a product that left leaning voters would happily buy. The problem for them is that if this collection of far left policy positions becomes the defacto Democratic platform, I don’t believe they can control all the branches of government inthe near future.

It is the final undoing of the Clinton triangulation where the Dems completely sold out their traditional allies. Ultimately, financial interests will find a way to undermine them.

Steve, I am waiting for your article discussing the relationship between the Harvard Asian admissions lawsuit and the University of Chicago’s decision to drop the ACT/SAT from their application requirements. Steve Hsu has an excellent three part discussion about the fact pattern of the case on his infoprocessing blog. Believe U of C is hoping to make it impossible for Asians to prevail in a lawsuit because their will be no data available.

There are other things going on in Chicago besides our normal outbreak of summer shootings and the inter-ethnic fights to rename various streets. These fights are just the neighborhood dogs pissing on the fire hydrants to show who is boss.

It is possible to reach a temperature to melt iron in coal powered fire, but only by blowing air (oxygen) to it. Were there any conditions for such a mechanism? I do not see them

You actually had a blast furnace going at both WTC towers during the fire. Tall buildings such as skyscrapers generate powerful upward drafts. This is why you have to use revolving doors. Because the stairwells were only shielded with thick drywall, and no doubt the elevator shafts had been blown open their had to be lots of air flowing to fan the flames.

A few thoughts:

Afro-centric music is generally highly syncopated and there is an emphasis on the off beat, which would be in the style of swing. There is probably more than just cultural preferences here. There is also the aspect of improvisation versus performing a piece precisely as written, with improvisation clearly being a hallmark of African influenced music such as jazz…..and God knows the bagpipes are played to make the guy over the hill miserable.

In reading the book “The Evolution of Beauty” by Richard Prum, he examines birds with respect to song, dance and visual asthetics as part of mating. These behaviors seem hard wired and not learned. It would be quite interesting to monitor brain waves of individuals using the sensors in a typical neuro-feedback machine to see different brain wave responses. I believe these waves are influenced by the level of synchrony between major structures of he brain. Many sensory and other types of neurological issues are characterized by this disregulation betweeen structural parts of the brain. In fact, managing synchronization was one of the major hurdles in making internet nodes function.

If I had to guess, I would expect to see different ratios of activity in the visual, auditory and prefrontal cortex depending on the music being listened to and the person doing the listening. Certain music makes some people’s brains hurt.

I suppose some people dislike Vivaldi instinctively just as much as I dislike brutalist architecture. I know this is not a good rule of thumb in Miami, but on the South side of Chicago or in Detroit, you can infer much about a neighborhood. when the houses are painted pink or purple – purple houses just hurt my head.

Having worked also in engineering, I have noticed that there seem to be many fewer Jewish

Dave thanks for your comments.

Having tribe members in my family,
I make the following observations.

They tend to have poorer interface with the physical world, and a poorer ability to understand their physical position in space, and to interact with the physical world. There also seems to be a lack of interest. Verbal and logical processes seem to be stronger. Again averages here – Some Jews are outstanding in these traits.

Putting together a cheap Grill from Home Depot or crap furniture from Ikea can create a crisis despite the 140+ IQ. I have had to rescue many wielding an Allen key and a screwdriver.

As for physics, the theoretical stuff I am talking about is not Newtonian with carts rolling down inclined planes, or heavenly bodies whirling in circles above. It is Einstein being able to infer true physical relationships based on integrating disparate equations and creating a highly abstract model of new, previously unimagined understandings in his head. There is very limited use of representations of the existing and known physical world in this process.

Most Engineers model the physical tangible world in their head and then apply their understanding to resolve concrete physical problems. It is theoretical but less abstract.

Engineers often intensively use theory, measurement and mathematics in this pursuit to fine tune and test their solutions. Now they do FEA for some of that work as well, but in the old world they would just build shit and break it until they got it to work.

Moving from mechanical, to metallurgical/material, chemical, and electrical engineering, it seems the work becomes more abstract, and requires a different set of aptitudes and interests. Thus the ME’s always seem to mock the EE’s while everyone thought the Metallugists were wierdos. Theoretical physics, particularly the high energy particle stuff seems to be efforts of total abstraction to me.

I am not a physicist, but a former HR guy. Have hired many scientists and engineers and these are my observations.

Are you suggesting a lack of opportunity to flourish in this field for Jews? Where have I had this discussion before?

I just don’t see an outstanding body of work. Granted the story telling shows up in lyrics for musicals and motion pictures.

If the culture does not value a trait, particularly the women when choosing a mate, then there will be no selection for this trait.

Have recently read a great book – The Evolution of Beauty, by Ornithologist Richard O. Prum. There are lots of interesting ideas in the book, but the general idea is that male behavior and traits, aside from being guided by fitness, is also heavily influenced by sexual selection, i.e. does it please the ladies?

I have always been fascinated by style and aesthetics, and what drives these sensibilities. Prum discuses the appearance, songs and mating behavior of birds and concludes these traits are highly influenced by female choice. This gets interesting when you apply this type of thinking to human male behavior across ethnic groups. No doubt wit can help one survive and be a fit individual in the Darwinian sense, but humor no doubt is a tool to soften up a woman to your advances.. Other tools such as appearance, manner, music, and other sparkly lovely things can be helpful as well. Another interesting relationship Prum observed is that the more a species tilts toward bling, the less monogamous some species of birds tend to be.

Complicating matters is that some species of birds appear to rely on forced mating, the duck being a prime example as species that seems to have perfected the gang rape as a method of promoting ones genome. Thus female choice becomes less important in reproduction. Societies that arrange marriages no doubt would have a much different relationship to aesthetics and mate selection than a society where the concept of romantic love flourishes.

Regardless, Jews seem to have great theoretical imagination, abstraction and symbolic manipulation ability. Seems like a great fit for theoretical physics. As a general rule, they don’t seem to be as good as artists, designers, architects etc. Most of their artistic work seems to end up in abstract soulless dead ends. But if you want somebody to figure it how 10 dimensional space works with super gravity – you need a Jewish mind like Ed Witten. I just can’t figure out what these Jewish girls were looking for that caused these traits – maybe mom wanted a nice Jewish boy with some shekels in the bank? It was certainly not his style. Maybe that’s why everybody wears black in New York City.

Sometimes, though, it’s the hour that makes the man. Yes: Trump is inconsistent and unreliable. So was Winston Churchill. He changed parties twice. He was widely regarded by parliamentary colleagues in the 1930s as a second-rater and showman. When the hour came, though, Churchill was a rock.

The real problem with Trump is that he does not drink nor nap like Sir Winston. A nip and a bit of shuteye might clear his mind and steady his hand.

I was reading War and Peace and was struck by the willingness of the author to confront and incorporate human weaknesses and vices, especially stupidity’s role in the bolloxing-up of things in course of human events.

I think Tolstoy was onto something.

Not an expert here, however, I believe the nature of the rules of evidence and the legal test that the government must meet is designed to make an extra high hurdle before FISA will grant a warrant.

The subject person of the potential warrant has no ability to argue in their interest or rebut the governments’ claim to need a warrant because the court is secret, therefore the government and its attorneys have bothlegal and an ethical respsonsibilitties as an officers of the court to uphold the law in their role as attorneys.

Ethics for attorneys are serious business. Law firms retain significant staff members to abide by ethics rules. It is why Jeff Sessions’ recusal from deciding issues regarding the Mueller probe was so wise. He was working at the pleasure of, and in the interest of the president. No one can accuse him of having a conflict of interest, because he recognized there was a problem and declined the job. .

The attorneys representing the DOJ and working for the FBI, should be working in pursuit of the truth..yet on the record, their motivation and the evidence they presented was clearly biased. I believe they have perhaps committed a crime or at a minimum an ethics violation.

If the evidence used to secure the warrant was knowingly incomplete, then any evidence or action done afterwards may be considered inadmissible or improper. This would damage the Mueller probe.

Any experts?

Creditors can’t put a municipality into bankruptcy. There’s no such thing as an involuntary chapter 9 case .

You are completely correct, however, Illinois and many other states are broke, and this is the best of times. Whether there is a provision for States or municipalities in the federal bankruptcy code, they will default, just like Puerto Rico. Congress will either pass a law to allow a bankruptcy, or we will see a chaotic dissolution of these states.

Imagine the economic impact of three or four states failing to pay pension payments, Medicaid bills and food stamps, and defaulting on trillions in tax free municipal bonds held in private retirement accounts nationwide.

See wirepoints.com

The default rates really took off in mid 2008. But your subprime loan borrowers were living on the margin and were the most vulnerable to a gasoline price shock. I believe they were already under great stress in 2006-2007 and could no longer afford homes at the given price. Existing home sales began to tank in 2006 when gas prices adjusted for inflation became volatile and went way up. Supply was becoming too tight pre-fracking and demand was inelastic. The pricing in the housing market and the default rates did not catch up with reality until mid 2008.. Once massive layoffs became a reality, demand for gas to drive to work tanked.

2008 and later, I knew employed attorneys that were walking away from their house that could pay their note, but chose to default. The working stiffs were screwed by 2006-2007.

Mortgage default rates
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS

Gas prices adjusted for inflation.
http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.html

Existing Home Sales
https://www.statista.com/statistics/226144/us-existing-home-sales/

The 2008 recession was triggered by a price shock in the crude oil markets in 2007. People could no longer pay their transportation costs AND their mortgage. This created a vast aggregate debt that could no longer be paid. All the other dominoes then fell.

http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart

I remember driving on the newly rebuilt Dan Ryan in Chicago and the road was busy immediately after work, then it emptied out. People were running errands on the way home to save from having to make extra trips.

The next shock will be from a large state government going belly up. Illinois is a good candidate. Somebody will file against a state government in US bankruptcy court. The court will initially reject this claim in the name of state sovereignty. The state will raise taxes so high it collapses and destroys its economy overnight, or the US Supreme Court will rule the state can go through bankruptcy, and then all the wealth of the bond holders will be destroyed and the public pension holders will lose their income like in Detroit. This will cause a huge drop in demand and real estate values, and down goes the heavily leveraged economy, which lacks resilience due to high debt ratios. This crash might be avoided if the government, the Fed and the banksters get together a la Lehman/AIG and bail out the state’s debt.

In the mid 90’s after the Soviet collapse my company hired a Ukrainian that specialized in magneto-hydrodynamics. Stupidly complex math. He had worked on 1) trying to contain plasma with magnetic fields for the Tokamak fusion reactor 2) a silent magnetic water propulsion system for soviet subs and 3) built a completely non-ferrous small surveillance watercraft so as to be invisible to US sensors. We hired him to research the control and shaping of molten metals in magnetic fields until the metal solidified. The research was ultimately cancelled, but he did design some lovely direct drive motors for clothes washers that you can buy in stores today.

We hired at least 5 former USSR scientists as well as a number of Soviet educated African scientists in the nineties. Ph.d. Metallurgists in particular were in short supply because US Universities had transitioned their metallurgy departments to be broader materials science programs, and were cranking out specialists in thin film/solid state specialties for the chip making industries, as well as ceramic engineers.

Interestingly, the Chinese had already hijacked nearly all the slots in US Universities educating Ph.d. s in computer modeling design known as finite element analysis (FEA). There were absolutely no non-Chinese students studying FEA. We hired some, but most were shipped back to China. Now Tsinghua and Beijing Universities mint their own. We will pay dearly for this transfer of knowledge.

My observation is that at low to moderate rates of immigration, high IQ Hindu immigrants assimilate well and are a net plus. I would bet based on my observations that second generation Hindu immigrant children are marrying out of their groups at a rate around 65-70%, and from a values stand point they seem make good citizens. Within four generations I would expect them to be fully assimilated.

I don’t believe any low skill, low class Hindus or any other group should be allowed in the country because this hurts the working class too much.

Yous Guys are missing the forest for the trees. Luis’ ward isn’t as Hispanic anymore. The ears on the ear muff shaped district have turned more white (Wicker Park, Bucktown, Pilsen, Logan Square, even some of Humboldt Park) and some of the headband has trended towards black.

The district was part Puerto Rican and Mexican. It was a political marriage of convenience. They don’t like each other, as anyone can attest during Cinco de Mayo or Puerto Rican Independence Day.

https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160413/pilsen/pilsen-gets-whiter-as-10000-hispanics-families-move-out-study-finds

https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160222/west-humboldt-park/606-loan-program-aims-stop-gentrification-humboldt-park

https://www.housingstudies.org/media/filer_public/2016/02/02/logan_square_west_town_home_prices_have_more_than_doubled_since_2000_-_logan_square_-_dnainfo.pdf

Poor/homeless/vagrants have always been a problem.

This link is to a nice little summation of how the English tried to tackle the problem.

http://www.cornellcollege.edu/english/Blaugdone/essays/vagrancy.htm

Here is a snippet:

In 1601, England passed the Act for the Relief of the Poor, which would be the commanding authority on this issue until 1834. This act established the church as the sole establishment responsible for the care of the poor. If a family was not able to get by, it was the responsibility of the area parish to ensure that the family was taken care of (Woodbridge 272). However, it also established the deserving from the undeserving poor. Common traits of those considered deserving included the hard-working, the disabled, the locals, the householders, and the settled. The undeserving poor were the idle, the ones that feigned disability, the foreign, the homeless, and the wanderers (Woodbridge 22-23). Those that were considered undeserving were the ones targeted for vagrancy.

Ultimately the most workable solution allowed the church to deny assistance to the undeserving. Widows and orphans are OK but bastards, prostitutes and malingers are on their own.

God forbid the rural kids go to college. Who would volunteer for the military that could actually shoot straight, understand and operate their equipment and lead soldiers into battle?

The coddled suburban kids and the urban underclass sure are not going to make the army function.

Maybe, but what if the Chinese raised wages and expanded consumer credit and just consumed all they produced without sending it here for worthless paper currency?

It is all right here:

It appears that a soldier’s ability to resist is a function of the capacity of his immediate primary group (his squad or section) to avoid social disintegration. When the individual’s immediate group, and its supporting formations, met his basic organic needs, offered him affection and esteem from both officers and comrades, supplied him with a sense of power and adequately regulated his relations with authority, the element of self-concern in battle, which would lead to disruption of the effective functioning of his primary group, was minimized.

Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II
EDWARD A. SHILS MORRIS JANOWITZ(1948, p. 281):

If you kill the platoon leader, the next (probably really pissed off) guy in line steps up.

You have to incapacitate the group. It is like a small ant team, as understood by E.O. Wilson. If the they can’t communicate, the group becomes ineffective. Is this really so difficult for the folks in Portland to grok? It is why gangs flourish in prisons when gang members are concentrated together. They form social groups and and do stuff they enjoy. The endorphins they get from risk taking is the strong force that binds them together.

Could you explain what was the plan behind letting Chine grow in the first place? Did they do it out of greed? W/o western technology China would not grow.

I viewed the change in US policy as having two distinct eras. Kissinger/Nixon and the Clinton eras.

During the Nixon/Kissinger era, relations with China seems to have been used as a method to counter the USSR.

The Clinton era pushed through NAFTA, and most favored nation trade status for China to benefit global capital/financial interests, retailers like Walmart and big agriculture, who benefitted from global labor arbitrage and relaxed agricultural export restrictions. Clinton sold out the traditional Democratic base, made himself rich and had all the trashy women he desired in the process. This strategy was called triangulation by Clinton. He turned the domestic political order on its head by taking money from traditional Republican donors, as well as interests outside the US, much to the GOP’s consternation. The level of corruption in government ushered in by Clinton reached new heights, and I believe the Clinton family as a rule internationalized pay to play politics in a way heretofore unseen as well.

Kissinger maybe wrongly thought that the US could beat China in the long game. Clinton probably did not give a damn and figured he would be dead prior to the reckoning.

The most popular car with the moms in my town is the Range Rover HSE. It is an enormous pile of metal that typically costs between $100k and $125k loaded. It is the brass ring for today’s socially ambitious mother. Functionally it is a wagon.

No doubt the lovely ladies in their Lululemon yoga pants feel secure sitting on their glorious plinth of an automobile. Driving around town, they are a hairball of social signaling and distracted driving, with their screaming kids and frantic texting to their girlfriends to schedule their next paddle tennis match or pilates class.

They are inefficient, unreliable and very expensive to repair, but they are by far the most comfortable car I have ever ridden in.

The answer to this question is easy. My female friends had all read “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan when I was in college. Many of them often paraphrased the following passage from the book when they told me in no uncertain terms that they did not want to drive children around in a station wagon.

Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor.

The demise of the station wagon was an unintentional casualty of the feminists war on motherhood via Betty Friedan. I believe this meme thrived primarily among women. Just ask your wife about it.

Maybe they want to be able to fly sorties from the gravel pit to blow up China’s one belt road in the event of a major conflict. Every major empire seems to develop a desire to conquer Central Asia just before their empire collapses. Guess it is just our time.

You are either misunderstanding the issues, or purposefully mis-representing them.

The primary issue is whether or not Google committed an unfair labor practice as defined under the National Labor Relations Act, the various regulations promulgated by the Department of Labor and the related case law when it fired James Damore for publishing his internal memo discussing company policy and working conditions.

Of importance to determining this case is whether or not the memo was a protected activity under the NLRA, and if so, can a defense that argue that the discharge of Mr. Damore is mitigated because the memo created a hostile working environment for protected groups under EEO case law.

The brilliance of this memo is that it causes a conflict between labor law, (think Unionization and the NLRB) and anti-discrimination law (think sexual harassment, discrimination in hiring EEOC)

This case is perfectly structured to force google to justify its firing of an employee exercising his rights regarding a protected activity (discussing working conditions – NLRB)and its oppressive diversity policies, which they will argue exists to avoid creating a hostile work environment for women and minorities from an EEO perspective.

The workplace issue being raised just happens to be the oppressive Diversity/PC policies of the company that restrict any discussion of what portion of the company’s lower ration of women and minorities in the company’s technical workforce compared to white men is due to genetics or environment.

One can only hope that the discussion about the cause of this underrepresentation of women and minorities continue to be discussed should this case go to court, as it relates directly to the EEOCs four-fifths employment discrimination test.

The four-fifths rule prescribes that a selection rate for any group (classified by race, sexual orientation or ethnicity) that is less than four-fifths of that for the group with the highest rate constitutes evidence of adverse impact (also called ‘disparate impact’), that is, discriminatory effects on a protected group.

This is called a prima facia case if discrimination. An employer will be found guilty of discrimination if its hiring practices fail the four-fifths rule. A defense for the four fifths rule is that the application of bona-fide job requirements used to screen out employees caused the improper ratio.

This story of the number of animals in One’s herd reminds me of a story from college. I was working on a crew painting university owned student housing over the summer. A female friend of mine was assigned to work with a male Kenyan graduate student cleaning apartments. She was a pretty, large blond girl, tall, with big bones and broad hips.

After a few weeks, the Kenyan confessed to her that in his country, a large girl like her would be highly favored over the thin ones that seemed to be preferred in America. She was, the Kenyan said, the ideal beauty in his country given her size. He said that in Kenya, she would be worth many, many cows. When she told the story to me she jokingly said she did not know if she was offended or flattered being compared to a large herd of cattle, but she admitted that she simply could not resist asking him “how many cows?”

In the US, we give an essentially useless diamond ring for the same purpose.

In retrospect, it would have been far more beneficial for our future family had I given my wife something useful like a number of cows, or perhaps some securities versus a diamond ring for our engagement.

The 1967 black riots cause many in Detroit to leave, but it was the court ordered desegregation via busing that caused the mass exodus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKk0M7r43sg
Video Link

This is almost as fun as picking out the inside Jewish jokes in Broadway shows. i.e.

“…this one’s a queer, this one’s a Jew, but what can you do?” – Master of the House, Les Miserables

Conscience is a product of your thoughts and beliefs about yourself and your relationship to others. It is a product of introspection, and thus maturity.

I find most social justice types more concerned about what others think about them. They are very concerned that what they have and what they do is perceived as cool by others. It is as if they are stuck in an adolescent stage of moral development.

They do things that they hope will appear altruistic, but they are not true altruists.

So you can shame them. And if a popular TV show like SNL made fun of them en mass this would change behavior.

Most conservatives already believe they and the human race are imperfect and will remain so. When a progressive has a utopian vision (such as universal healthcare or eliminating poverty), a conservative sees a hopeless pipe dream. Poverty, sickness and death are a feature of human life, not a bug. It is why we promise in front of our community to stay with our spouse in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer.

The book “Mary’s Mosaic” has an interesting twist on the Kennedy assassinations.

http://www.marysmosaic.net/

Have you ever smelled the sweet eucalyptus mingling with the cool breeze as it blows off the Pacific as you head into Santa Cruz, or Capitola? Have you watched the sun set at the Marin Headlands, Stinson Beach or Half Moon Bay? Can you remember biting into the most lucious peach ever while standing in the farmers market in San Fran, picked yesterday from an orchard on the other side of the bay? Have you stood at the base of El Capitan, gazing up as the brilliant light bounces off the granite and forms rainbows in the mist of the waterfalls flowing into the Merced River? Have you ridden a bike down the PCH from Monterrey to Slo-town? If you have done any of these things, I don’t know how you can ask this question.

I know of no place with a more fortuitous confluence of climate, terrain and sheer natural beauty than California. Jobs had a superb aesthetic sense. None of the virtues of california were lost on him. He could see there could beauty in simple typeface, and that each person could have a tiny moment of transcendence if the materials, design and workmanship of an everyday thing like your cell phone gave you a shiver when you touched it. Having the object respond perfectly to your desire, requiring no effort or though on your part as you used it was part of his vision. How could a person like Jobs not appreciate California in the 50s and 60s? Who doesn’t yearn for it now?

Life is short. Beauty is rare and fleeting.
Carpe Diem.

It is a pity that this has happened. They should have expelled this student instead of granting concessions. The school administration has learned nothing from Trump on how to deal with these people.

I visited St. Olaf, Carleton and Macalester recently on college visits with my son. I always look at the books on the shelves in the student bookstores to evaluate the curriculum. St. Olaf by far had the largest selection of materials in history, religion, literature etc that I would consider part of the western canon. Included were also materials on the many religions, and peoples and languages of the world. There were your usual marxist, feminist, LGBT social justice materials. Most of this stuff is nonsense, but I don’t mind it being covered, as part of a balanced education. Everybody can benefit from a critical analysis of Das Kapital and The Wealth of Nations in the same semester. I also met a number of people in the classics department. Qualified, talented and most importantly, very good people. It seems the social justice warriors object to having an outlier institution like St. Olaf that has not been culturally cleansed, so the heat is on.

The campus at St. Olaf is small, but lovely. The physical plant was nicely planned and in good condition. The architecture was coherent and used lots of natural materials. It was not the jumble of hateful brutalist concrete you see at so many schools: and the choral program is out of this world. More notable was the high level of trust among the students. Students left all their book bags and computers in large metal racks prior to entering the dining hall. The hall itself was a large room with a high vaulted ceiling made of wooden beams, allowing a great deal of light.

Carleton had far fewer important works, but it was not a complete disaster, and Carleton did seem to take their hard sciences and mathematics seriously. The architecture of the school was less coherent, and not maintained in the tidy fashion of the Lutherans down the street and up the hill.

Macalester was truly horrific. There were practically no materials covering traditional history or viewpoints. The school has been culturally cleansed by the new church. The bookstore featured a number of publications written by the faculty. It was all social justice nonsense and the faculty appears to be infested with these types of people. I am unwilling to drop a cool $250k to have this tripe force fed to my child.

Right next door to the Macalester bookstore was a retail bookstore owned by none other that Garrison Keilor.

The next visit will be Hillsdale College. Hillsdale is half the price and twice the education.

Time for parents to vote with their feet.

Why change teachers when you can just institute different standards for black and white students on what constitutes bad behavior.

http://northcooknews.com/stories/511104961-should-north-shore-public-schools-set-lower-academic-discipline-standards-for-black-and-hispanic-students-activist-to-make-the-case

Fred,
Being a father with boys, I have literally hundreds of pounds of legos in my home.

The Hubble telescope in your captioned photo is a lovely lego creation. I maintain that even a child can build such a thing.

Jim Harbaugh, coach of the Michigan Wolverines football team is a huge fan of Fairlife Milk, which has the lactose filtered out of it.

The marketing arm is headquartered in Chicago and the farms are located half-way between Chicago and West Lafayette Indiana. You can buy it all over the Midwest.

It it is the milk of choice for white cisgendered patriots. No doubt Tom Brady, Bobby Knight and da coach (Ditka) are pounding the stuff too. Fairlife Milk = MAGA Milk Fairlife.com

This is great news! The lines will be so much shorter at the Cattlemen’s Quarters to buy a hot beef sundae at the Iowa State Fair this summer. No waiting to see the butter cow sculpture! Maybe I would rather have the pork chop on a stick? Oh what to do? I sure hope there are helicopter rides again.

The pressing danger is what method will be used to retire the widespread national debt of so many nations.

The typical response has been war, versus a chapter 11/09 type workout. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Trump is bent on modernizing the US military. I am not sure that anybody gets out of the next world war alive so perhaps it is time for the banksters to take a haircut.

The construction of a domed football stadium ( Minneapolis?), had four or five iron workers killed when a huge truss swung into the lifting crane’s boom causing it to fail. The falling crane and truss hit another crane that had a man cage, with two or three ironworkers, in it.

Did you mean the Miller Park Crane collapse in Milwaukee?

Video Link

That is easy, Done!

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/erika-d-smith/article132551589.html

If you look at the primary spillway on google maps, you can see there were repairs made to the concrete in the recent past, right where the spill way developed a gaping hole. Those repairs were either done wrong or the were inadequate. They probably filled the spill way area and paved over it. In 50 years there has been subsidence and the concrete was failing.

As for the emergency spillway: there is no way that thing was designed to handle any kind of continuous overflow. My suspicion is that is was designed to handle a big one-off wave in the pool triggered by a landdslide or an earthquake. It would naturally be lower than the dam because under no circumstances would they want the mini tidal wave to over top the primary earthen dam.sl

My grandfather was an operating engineer, and he claimed that it was best to be on the iron workers side in bar fights.

Additionally, he claimed that iron workers would quickly run off any crane operator from a job that they didn’t like.

You might find this new movie interesting:
http://www.bridginguamericafilm.com/phone/index.html

Joe, are you one of the fearless Iroquois Iron Workers?

Can’t speak for anywhere else, but in Chicago snitches get stitches (if they are lucky).

I have been making comments on Steve’s blog for many years. From the iSteve days to the current Unz Review blog, I cannot recall ever having a comment I have submitted that was not published. I guess that makes me a sycophant.

I have seen a number of posts from NIck Diaz. So clearly you have not been banned. I call BS.

To answer your question, I know a highly gifted young man. Last year he was a senior during the presidential campaign. For fun he and his friends went to Milo rallies and went to the University of Illinois circle campus to heckle the paid SJW types at the Trump rally in Chicago despite my warnings to him that there might be violence instigated by the left.

He is taking a gap year and is involved in politics and exploring Buddhism prior to attending the University of Chicago next fall.

Meanwhile the 13 and 14 year old middle school boys that are friends with my son are making jokes about their female SJW teacher’s attempts at indoctrination constantly among themselves.

BTW, that V-8 Cutlass that they are mourning had less hp than a modern 4 cylinder and terrible space utilization – it was all hood for that giant V-8 with a cramped passenger compartment and 2 doors because GM was too cheap to give you 4. The reason the engine had no power is that the Big 3 refused to switch to fuel injection because carburetors were really really cheap. If it made it to 100k miles before it rusted through or blew the engine it was a miracle. The good old days – they were awful.

Yes, all true, but you have to make comparisons to cars available at the time. For its time, the Cutlass was a fantastic car. The Olds 8 cylinder Rocket Engine was a reliable and durable engine. Owners were able to drive the car almost alway to 120k miles without major repairs. Having a car last this long was uncommon at the time. This was not true of most other vehicles at the time. If you wanted a four door version, you bought a Delta 88 or a 98. These cars were mostly made in Lansing Michigan plants, which historically were some of GMs best.

There were two issues that heralded the end of the design.

1) In the late 1970s and early eighties, fuel shocks made running the cars to expensive. 2) While the rear wheel drivetrain was excellent, the bodies of the cars still rusted. In fact it was a rare car that did not have holes in the rocker panels and lower fenders after 2-3 years.

Japanese manufacturers capitialized on these shortcoming by having smaller, more efficient cars. Additionally, the work of coatings researcher Yoshio Shindo and others at Nippon Steel developed patent corrosion resistant galvanized, electro galvanized and aluminized Steels. Honda in particular had car bodies that lasted far longer than any others and that were also lighter and thus far more fuel efficient because lighter gauge corrosion resistant metal could be used. There were other innovations such as transverse front wheel drive, unibody construction, McPherson struts, aluminum engines etc that made Japanese cars eclipse US models.
The GM Olds Omega, Chevy Citation, Ford Escort and Chrysler K cars were made in response, but all of them were initially inferior to the Honda Accord.

Also, Attorney General Jeff Sessions will spend the next eight years raining down on that feckless police department like a bag of anvils.

The majority of the Chicago cops are not the problem. It is the brass, the mayor and especially the Cook county prosecutor.

I think the widespread use of a specific language is just a symptom of the existence of a hegemonic political monoculture (redundant I know). Empire might be the right word.

Once you have a monoculture, you are exposed to the inherent dangers from lack of redundant yet dissimilarly structured systems. The problem is monocultures and standardization are very tempting because they are insanely productive. Until, as you said they are not. Thus the rise and fall of empires.

I believe we are in agreement. Public transit is only viable on a grand scale when it is quicker and cheaper for the rider than driving. It also must be safe and reliable. Otherwise it is only a mover of poor and marginalized people in society that cannot drive or cannot afford a car.

The point of my prior post is that building a subway to the appropriate design standards in densely developed areas is necessarily very expensive. Maybe the government is paying too much through corruption, say $800 million per mile vs. $500 million, but it still costs a fortune to build.

Notwithstanding; anyplace that has population density high enough to justify a subway is an intolerable place to drive. Then there is LA, where driving is often intolerable even though it is spread out.

I don’t agree with the business insider article that the larger and more spacious stations are unceccesary.

The London Jubilee line was deeper because it had to go below existing lines. The platforms and stations need to be larger than legacy lines like the Piccadilly Tube line because experience has shown the platforms and stations are too small to handle the volume of passengers generated in dense, modern cities. Subway stations become extremely dangerous when overcrowded. Persons can be trampled, pushed off of platforms and even suffocated due to inadequate ventilation. Think Who concert or trying to get in and out of the Rose Bowl with a capacity crowd using the old tunnels. Early lines were built using the much cheaper shallow trench and cover method, and the dimensions of the stations would fit under most of the existing street without having to demolish or shore up many existing buildings. Most of the low hanging fruit of routes under wide boulevards have been used, and places such as NYC are too dense for these smaller stations to handle the volume.

The problem is the failure of municipalities to adequately tax developers that raise the density of an area to make extra profits from their buildings, while foisting the cost of the required infrastructure on everybody else in the community. This is the primary way all developers make money. They buy a piece of land with a value based on the current intensity of usage, and then do everything they can to build the largest structure politically possible on the parcel.