At least a few federal agency buildings could be greatly improved by the complete omission of entrances.
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Robinson Meyer tweets:
Trump has put architecture centre stage in the culture wars. Which will make it all much more interesting. Especially if more creature buildings are built, like the one in the picture above. And especially if they built something like a huge panda building or huge frog building, in Washington. Eventually, there should be a giant building in Washington, the tallest in town, shaped like Donald Trump. A giant Trump sculpture. That would drain the swamp. They’d all flee in terror. To be a bit more serious, but only a bit, just think about Trump’s edict, which says that from now on, all Federal Government buildings in the USA must be designed in the “classical” style. No more office blocks looking like multi-story car parks or international space stations. From now on, they’ll have to have a Parthenonic frontage stuck onto them. Were any such buildings actually to get built, everyone who looks at one of these buildings is going to see … Trump. But all the people who work in government buildings hate Trump from the depths of their tax-dollar-sucking bossy-boots souls. So, they’ll make a huge stink to ensure that no such buildings ever get built. How beautiful is that? The governmental classes will, for the duration of Trump’s reign of architectural terror, expend huge amounts of energy opposing the expansion of the Federal Government. The more I hear and see of Trump, the more I like him. But I’m talking about America, and what do I know about America? Luckily, we have plenty of commenters who do know about America, because they live there. Gentlemen, start your engines. February 22nd, 2020 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
 February 21st, 2020 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Of this:
Oh, it goes far beyond that, for me and surely for many others. My whole life was made possible by this sort of stuff. With thanks to Instapundit. It’s little postings like this that keep me going back there. If all there was there was politics, I’d keep going back, but surely not so often. Imagine having to copy out just the two links above, letter by letter, number by number. Absurd. A BIT LATER: I put together all of the above for my personal blog, but then I thought: this should go to Samizdata. So I copied and pasted it across. Took me about two minutes. February 21st, 2020 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The fact that British Indians have been so successful and have integrated into society should be celebrated by the left. Here is a story of migrants, refugees and their descendants making notable contributions to British public life – in business, politics, media, entertainment, sport and more. However, the identitarian left is much more interested in keeping ethnic minorities locked into a perpetual state of victimhood. The values of personal responsibility, individual initiative and self-sufficiency, which run deep in British Indian communities, challenge the left’s grievance-driven narratives. The fact that British Indians have managed to thrive also calls the widespread notion of ‘white privilege’ into question. February 20th, 2020 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Is the challenge from YT Vlogger ‘bald and bankrupt‘, in this video, filmed recently in Cuba. ‘bald’ as he is referred to, appears to be a chap from Brighton (if you watch his oeuvre) who walks around various parts of our Earth and makes short documentaries about what he sees. He speaks fluent Russian (it seems to me, and his former wife we have been told is Belarusian) but not such good Spanish, and his sidekick is a Belarusian woman who does speak enough Spanish to get by and who interprets for him. He presents Cuba by the simple device of walking around and going into several retail outlets to show what is on offer, and it looks pretty grim. He also talks to locals, most of whom seem well-drilled in what to say about the Revolution and to profess their loyalty to Fidel. He notes that everyone seems to want to escape. There is an unresolved side-issue of an abandoned kitten in the video. And yet 10,000,000 people in the UK voted last December for a party just itching to get us to this economic state, without the sunshine. And in the USA, there seems to be far too much enthusiasm for socialism. Bald’s ‘back catalogue’ contains a great travelogue for much of the former USSR. Whilst he admires all things ‘Soviet’ in terms of architecture (there is a running ‘gag’ about his excitement at finding himself in a Soviet-era bus station, he does acknowledge the grim reality of Soviet rule. February 19th, 2020 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
But I am. By the way, the “Postrel” mentioned as having given Sally Satel her first donated kidney is Virginia Postrel, whose writing will be familiar to many of you. February 18th, 2020 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“A citizens’ assembly on climate is pointless”, writes Stephen Buranyi in the Guardian, “if the government won’t listen”. Perhaps a better person than I am would not have split the quotation at precisely that point. But no one who uses the phrase the “real will of the people” has any call to complain about misrepresentation. This is what Mr Buranyi says a “citizen’s assembly” is:
“Conceit” indeed. Mr Buranyi’s complaint is that the elected government does not obey this body. I would complain if it did. I do not see why the very atypical 0.00016% of the UK population who agreed to participate in this Citizen’s Assembly lark have any better claim to mystically represent “the real will of the people” than 110 customers of your local Wetherspoons who turned up last Thursday for the Curry Club. February 18th, 2020 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was in Ankara on December 23 last year, in the commercial centre of town in the middle of the day. I walked past a street with a number of cafe/restaurants. I realised I was hungry. I sat down at an outdoor table, looking away from the street. I ordered a sandwich. My sandwich came. It was mediocre, but satisfied the “I am hungry” problem. (This was slightly disappointing of me. Turkey is a country of terrific food, and one should plan one’s meals better than just going for the nearest food when one finds oneself hungry). I got out my phone and started reading a book on the Kindle app as I was having my lunch. After an indeterminate period of time, I realised I was hearing a high pitched scream behind me. It was probably a woman, but I couldn’t be sure about that. I turned around. There was an almost literal phalanx of riot police, separating the public from what was going on. There was a police van on the other side of the riot police. The person who was screaming was somewhat violently pushed into the van. The rear doors of the van were then closed fairly violently. The van drove off. The riot police then dispersed. They looked like this was heavily rehearsed, and this was something they did every day. There was no riot. There was no demonstration. I don’t know how this started, because I was looking in the opposite direction and I was distracted until I heard the screaming. This looked like a well planned operation to grab a particular person off the street. In broad daylight. In the middle of a busy city. So that people would notice. When I saw that this was happening, I noticed that other people in the cafe were taking pictures with their phones. So I briefly stood up and took a picture with my phone. The police were looking in other directions. One day I will get myself into trouble doing things like this, but in this case, well, I think the police wanted to be noticed. By locals, at least. Maybe not foreigners such as myself. A few days later, after visiting a few wonderful archaeological sites in parts of Turkey, I was on a bus travelling along the Turkish Black Sea coast from Trabzon to the Georgian city of Batumi. During this journey there were two stops at police checkpoints. At the first one, a police officer got on the bus and everyone was required to show ID. The Turkish people had bar codes on their ID cards scanned electronically by a reader being carried by the police officer. (I held out my passport – the policeman looked at it and nodded). At the second one our ID documents were taken off the bus and into the police checkpoint building, before being brought back on the bus. When you book a train ticket in Turkey and you are Turkish, you don’t even need a ticket. You simply give your ID card number when booking the train, and when you board they scan the ID card and associate it with the booking. Turkey tracks the internal movements of its citizens electronically. They do it like this if you catch a bus or train or plane. If you drive your own car, I suspect it is done with number plate recognition. Turkey is a wonderful country full of magnificent things. I visit often. It is also a police state, and a very nasty one. I enjoyed my trip to Turkey, but I felt some relief when I reached Georgia. A much freer country. February 16th, 2020 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
You don’t need to be that well connected to benefit. Bobby b, commenter of this parish, worked for a time as a criminal defence lawyer in the twin cities of Minneapolis / St. Paul.
We’ve seen the US Department of Justice exercise a lot of ‘discretion‘ recently (and not so recently). Bobby warns us that this bit of the deep state runs a lot deeper than that. (After ‘discretion’ finally ran out for him, I assume it was a different but liaising bit of the deep state who arranged that one fine day in the middle of the night the ‘forever’ safe Epstein suddenly expired in his ‘guarded’, ‘suicide-watched’ cell.) February 15th, 2020 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a separate story from the one I quote above, the BBC goes on to report that
I did not know we still had judges like that. Edit: This is the text of the judgement: Miller -v- College of Policing, 14 February 2020. February 15th, 2020 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
The wise & incorruptible state can be trusted to decide what people are allowed to watch, read & listen to, no way would they abuse such capabilities once they are in place #MakeOrwellFictionAgain – Perry de Havilland in response to this. February 13th, 2020 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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