A simple maze that can be solved by young children. The “Easy Maze” Series is an activity book feature intended to involve even the youngest readers. • A school bus ride can be a scary experience.
Form Based Code planning is the most authoritarian and self-serving method of zoning this side of an imperial palace — everything is ordered for the benefit of those with power and influence.
Cornithaca County’s only city and seat of power is using Form Based Codes to make their “vibrant” community a place of “historic districts,” “parks,” “walkability,” and “single-family homes and row houses” while the same Codes allow building tracts of multi-family housing and a large urban sprawl bedroom-community in rural greenspaces by calling it a “Node.”
They are building a new marina; while we are getting a drug rehab center. Their city is one of the country’s 20 most expensive to live in; so we get the affordable housing mandates.
There are so many buses at their University that it’s difficult to drive a car around; while I would have to walk two-and-a-half miles and stand at the side of a ditch to wait for one of the few that travel the periphery.
Form Based Codes don’t help the needy; they just build walls to keep them out
You could use this as a coloring page, but there’s not much space for coloring; or anything else. Some of the most devastating examples of invasive species are also examples of deliberately introduced species. I found it interesting that some authorities downplay the problem with statements like: “‘invasive’ is a loaded word and harm is difficult to define” and that “Most introduced species do not become invasive” — this is the same as arguing that you don’t usually beat or abuse your kids or that nuclear power plants don’t usually have problems like Chernobyl; the severity of the result should override the frequency of the occurrence as a factor. Human suffering is important.
Forbidden Planners – On an ancient world depopulated by Form Based Code planning: space explorers discover a Bureaucrat searching for the secret of ultimate power!
Planners of the Apes – Scientists ignore warnings of over-specialization and create a genetically perfect human for each task — but as global warming continues to accelerate change; a static society crumbles on the brink of extinction!
The Beast from 20,000 Fandoms – Pop Personalities incite their followers to a world-wide binge of political violence! Mass cell-phone radiation fries brains as the total of “likes” goes astronomical. Is This The End?
The Amazing Colossal Mandate – Exposure to doctrine results in a government Mandate that continues to increase in size out of all proportion to the society around it. Outstripping state and federal guidelines; it grows angry and confused — destroying the community it was meant to help!
Creature from the Frack Lagoon – Gas is escaping from a crack in earth; and Industry scents a profit — but WHAT HORROR will they unleash FROM BELOW?
Monolithic Monsters – Mammoth Skyscrapers of Doctrine thundering across the Earth . . . crushing ALL that stand in their path!
People argue that ideas for significantly reducing bureaucracy are simplistic; but won’t admit that their own arguments are equally simplistic. Sometimes their argument boils down to finding that the actions taken to make a smaller, simpler, and less expensive government would make large, complex, and expensive government impossible.
Narrow-view arguments allow for the “externalizing” of costs and benefits that are important factors in making a balanced decision. Industrial Agriculture likes to point to the cheap price of food in the stores, but that [not even counting environmental and human costs] is only a fraction of what the public is paying for that food — there are investment tax credits, school tax credits, electricity cost reduction, gas tax elimination, school tax credits that can return 100% of their tax from state tax revenues, and a host of subsidies, giveaways, and incentives, that are hidden from casual view.
A “Flat Tax” could free up a significant portion of the 75,000 IRS workers [and who knows how many tax preparers, lawyers, etc.] for other careers that would be of much more value to society; this is an “opportunity cost” that Flat Tax opponents don’t like to deal with. Or how about the benefits from not forcing the public to navigate the tax form bureaucracy? There would certainly be an upswing in productivity.
Any societal debate that doesn’t include all the costs and benefits, and doesn’t put the welfare of people as the most important factor is closing the door to our future.
You Can’t Do That
You cannot do what laws forbid you cannot do that thing
You can’t do that with all the changes changes always bring
You can’t do that you’ll rock the boat upset the status quo
Not doing things is all we’re taught and learning never grow
This story highlights how the focus of a government or charitable institution can switch from the welfare of the recipients to the welfare of the program itself. After all, the program is where the time and money, and reputations are committed. It’s an actual story of the effectiveness of a school breakfast program somewhere. [And maybe many-wheres.]
Programs and charities become vested with goodness; cloaking themselves with the same moral protections as the people that are supposed to be helping — the perfect environment for bureaucracy, inefficiency, and waste.
Our government and our institutions would be much more effective if they saw themselves as self-dissolving servants of our welfare; rather than enthroning themselves as administrators.
Modern technology may be used to reduce the paperwork, but not the work. It’s like inventing the internal combustion engine; and using it to circulate air among the galley slaves.
Why do we spend $100,000 to pay someone to distribute $1,000, when it could be done with a $10 chip?
This series will examine the dictionary meanings and the common perceptions of certain words and phrases, and show how they can be used to hide the intentions and actions of powerful political and corporate interests from the public.
50 years ago; the idea of “killing for peace” was used to ridicule war. Today, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to imagine a government program called “Future Love” or “Affirmative Love” that would kill to achieve “Love.”
Pluto was redefined to no longer being a planet; and the individual you has been redefined as a fill-in-the-box – put-in-the-box person [“person” is added because you are “respected”]. What’s in the future? More control means smaller boxes.
It’s ironic that while Biology is turning from physical characteristics to the actions of organisms as a means of classification; government is turning from people’s actions [the only workable structuring for a free society] to a policy characterized by physical characteristics.
You know they “love” you — just maybe they’ll “love” you to death.
The tiles in this image form a repeating pattern where the Green crosses never touch sides, the Magenta crosses seldom touch sides, the Blue crosses usually touch sides, and the Yellow crosses almost always touch sides: explain this pattern in terms of inclusion, exclusion, and loss of identity.
As Cornithaca County steamrollers its way into ever more blatant displays of dictatorial and doctrinal hubris; the use of “meaningful participation erasers” is a bureaucratic given for every public policy enacted.
Their theocracy [The Revealed Church of Secular Self-interest] empowers the elite to hand down policy from the highest possible level: themselves [soon to be capitalized.] And unlike the Divine Right of Kings, they don’t share their authority; even with God.
There is an uneasiness that can actually be felt. There is no job security. People who have differing opinions are lashed out at and defiled in public. Scary stuff.
Is this just over the top rhetoric? What do you see? Maybe there’s no “post” to go with apocalyptic. Extinction is just as natural as evolution.
