Read it.

The race problem is usually defined in terms of black versus white. But it’s not really that simple. I asked one South African Indian what life was like before and after apartheid. He answered that  ”during apartheid the problem of South African Indians was that they weren’t white. Afterward their problem was that they weren’t black.”

Racism — it’s not just for white people any more.

It’s like the Indian convenience store managers in Ferguson, it’s not that the ‘reconciled’ Ebola fatalities don’t exist; it’s just that we don’t see them due to reporting problems. Yet the victims are as dead as the stores are burned. But it’s not just a problem of Potels or individuals with the Wong name. Oblivion can happen to white guys too. Chuck Hagel has disappeared from the news, which is remarkable because he’s still Secretary of Defense. But we have to rely on the ever retentive Joe Biden to recollect this forgotten man.

…

Do the Indians in Ferguson matter? Does Chuck Hagel really exist? You tell me.

Read it.

An article from The Wasington Post with the truth about the Ferguson Grand Jury decision.

The Washington Post has this extremely helpful graphical presentation of what happened during the shooting, with links to some of the physical evidence in the case.  What follows is my discussion of what appears to be some of the most significant.  To be clear, I do not purport here to completely describe all the forensic evidence and related testimony.  But I will commit to carefully reviewing all of the comments to this post and if anyone points to a significant omission in what I’m describing about the physical evidence — and provides a citation to the volume and page number of the grand jury testimony for that omission — I’ll be glad to consider adding discussion of it.  This post is limited to discussing the physical evidence, as witness testimony cuts in many different directions.

‘What’s this “Hope and Change” crap he’s always on about?’

Read it.

These darkies obviously don’t know as much as white progressives, so they have to be helped out.

Steven Hayward points out that ‘progressives’ are more accurately termed ‘regressives’.

After the fetish for renewable energy that’s expensive and intermittent, the greatest fixation of the utopian left is mass transit, especially light rail—a 19^th century technology for 21^st century mobility needs. (Who says the left isn’t reactionary?) It has long been an embarrassment that the cars for our various light rail systems that taxpayers have been massively subsidizing come mostly from overseas manufacturers.

Read it.

In celebration of Black Alternative History Month, the Carlyle Club continues to call the Attorney General’s bluff with a forthright conversation about the most uncomfortable aspects of race we could think of.

Table of Contents

1. Mind the Gap

2. Race Differences in Intelligence, plus:

   1. Return of the Derb

3. The Evolution of an Idea, including:

   1. Tropical Living
   2. Indian Artistry
   3. No Expectations
   4. “Like a Parrot Who Speaks a Few Words Plainly”
   5. “Almost Completely Worthless”
   6. “Political Partisanship and Liberal Hackery”
   7. Savage Africa
   8. Harsh Words

4. Mulatto History Month

5. A Different Sort of Delusion, plus:

   1. ’Tis Sixty Years Since

6. Rushton’s Case, featuring:

   1. Brainpower

7. The Celebration Continues at Radish

8. Recommended Reading

9. Letters to the Editor

Read it.

In San Francisco, flaunting your wealth has been elevated to new lows, if you will. The labels aren’t the usual lineup of foreign design houses; rather, we pay $300 for simple denim jeans or $200 for plain black yoga pants. We don’t go to the opera; we overspend on the simplest facets of life.

…

Good toast and a plain cup of coffee shouldn’t cost $6. But I can’t imagine the tech community putting the brakes on this trend any time soon. We’re obsessed with false ideas of quality. We fetishize the precious processes and benchmarks and prices that, in reality, have no bearing on how good something is.

Actually, it ought to read ‘how’ rather than ‘why’, since the author doesn’t really get into the ‘why’, but it’s still an interesting read.

In a word, we want to look smarter. Ours is an intellectual economy and one that prizes polyglotism. We want to show each other that we are amateur audio engineers and brewers and bakers, that we’re not only wealthy but also knowledgable to an unlikely extreme.

Read it.

China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

Read it.

THIS season millions of Americans will celebrate with turkey on the table. The turkey is, after all, the native North American animal that Benjamin Franklin considered “a much more respectable bird” than the scavenging bald eagle. But while the eagle landed on the country’s Great Seal and the turkey gets pride of place at our holiday dinners, neither bird can claim to have changed American culture more than their lowly avian cousin, the chicken.

Read it.

The dynomak is a variation of the most popular type of research fusion machine, the tokamak. Essentially, a tokamak is a doughnut-shaped machine that generates helical magnetic fields by combining toroidal fields (which go around the doughnut’s equator) with poloidal fields (which wrap around the outside of the doughnut). These fields have to be strong enough to keep plasma stable and contained indefinitely at the tens to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius necessary to induce fusion.

David Henderson, a Real Economist, lays out how much having the government run things sucks.

Some beneficiaries of Medicare, the federal government’s medical insurance system for the elderly, are finding that doctors are unwilling to accept them as patients. According to a study by Sandra L. Decker of the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2011, 17 percent of doctors would not accept new Medicare patients. The problem: Doctors cannot legally charge more for a service than the amount that Medicare pays, and Medicare often pays a low amount. That’s a classic recipe for a shortage of doctors.

Supply and demand, something that the government has heard of but treats as merely a rumor. Remember the bread lines in the Soviet Union? There was a reason for that.

The problem starts with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that sets prices for the medical services of Medicare patients. CMS is really a giant central-planning agency. It sets hundreds of thousands of prices. What are the odds that it sets all the right prices? Zero. In fact, with central planning, an organization like CMS cannot ever know what the right price is.

But by God they’re going to set it.

An obvious solution to this problem is to have a free market in healthcare—with no Medicare. But since that is unlikely to happen soon, incremental changes can be made to move closer to a free market. Despite the socialized system of CMS, it’s possible to approximate free-market prices with “balance billing.” In its purest form, doctors would be able to charge whatever they want for their services, and patients would pay the difference between that price and the amount Medicare pays. Today, doctors who accept Medicare reimbursement are not allowed to charge anything more.

This makes a great deal of sense, and so the chances of it happening are close to zero.

As any health economist can tell you, one of the biggest problems with our healthcare system, one that existed even before ObamaCare, is that the majority of what people spend on healthcare is “other people’s money.” One reason we know so little about prices is that few of us actually pay the price of medical care. Instead, we pay nothing, a small co-payment, or a small percent of the price. The main thing I learned in my two years as the senior economist for health care policy with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers is that health care costs so darn much because we pay so darn little for it. Why hesitate to say yes to a $500 test your doctor wants to order if you know that you will pay only $50 for it?

Welfare for sick people, essentially.

Economists of various political stripes point out that a price system, aka the free market, works best when potential buyers get to see the actual prices. But under Medicare, as with much of the rest of the U.S. healthcare system, patients often don’t get to see prices. Or, more exactly, given that health insurers, whether government or private, pay so much of a typical bill, patients don’t get to see the relevant prices. As a result, they spend much less carefully than if they were spending their own money. This problem is especially acute with Medicare, a system in which people are spending mainly taxpayers’ money.

In today’s America, the customer isn’t the patient, it’s the government or the insurance company. It’s like taking your dog to the vet; the dog has very little to say about what happens.

Read it.

Have our health authorities been spouting unscientific nonsense for the last few decades?

Ya think?

The rationale is that saturated fats are associated with obesity and risk factors for cardiovascular disease. This is effectively the consensus opinion from government health agencies across much of the world, not just the UK and US.

Does the evidence support this advice? The obvious point is to ask what evidence there is for the core idea that reducing dietary saturated fat intake makes a difference to health. The answer is that there’s not much.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Consider GiveDirectly this holiday season for your charitable giving. As you may recall, GiveDirectly was started by four economists and it gives money directly to the very poor in Kenya and Uganda. GiveDirectly is a top-rated charity by GiveWell. The founders are committed to providing independent, randomized controlled trials of its process. One RCT has already been conducted with positive results and 3 others are under way. GiveDirectly publicizes the trials of its process before the results are produced. Impressive–the drug companies had to be forced to do this. Check out their website, they even provides real-time performance data. Here’s a bit more on their process.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a similar program for poor people in America? Perhaps we could get the Kenyans and Ugandans to set one up; obviously Americans are too busy.

Read it.

New lawsuits filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) challenge so-called workplace wellness programs that seek to provide financial incentives for workers who take steps to reduce obesity, smoking, and other lifestyle factors that can may result in costly illnesses, reports Reuters. The EEOC lawsuit contends that employers requiring medical tests may violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. Moreover, “the lawsuits are based on the view that it is no longer voluntary if employees face up to $4,000 in penalties for non-participation, loss of insurance or even their jobs,” reports Reuters.

Read it.

Sheriff Clarke is a black Democrat politician (sheriffs are elected), and a refreshingly outspoken law enforcement officer. The whole speech at the Press Club, of which this is an excerpt, concerns his observations about the “vultures” who flew into Ferguson Missouri in order to take full advantage of the crisis there, even perhaps hoping to have a hand in creating the resulting conflagration. At the time of this speech the grand jury had yet to reach a decision regarding the lawfulness (or not) of the actions of the Ferguson police officer who shot the young black man, Michael Brown.

Read it.

In this predictably difficult year for the Democrats, the party of the people is turning, of all people, to its plutocrats. However much the party stigmatizes right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers, a growing proportion of America’s ultra-rich have become devoted Democrats, giving them an edge in fund-raising. Indeed, an analysis of billionaire contributors this year by Politifact found that 13 supported liberals while only nine backed Republicans.

…

All this reflects a changing class system far more nuanced than the overworked meme about the “1 percent” arrayed against the toiling masses. Instead, we have a plutocracy increasingly divided, mostly along regional and industry lines, among themselves. It’s no surprise voters, notes columnist John Kass, are confused by this recent headline in the Chicago Tribune: “Obama decries income inequality in speech after $50,000-a-person fundraiser for Quinn.”

Read it.

I wonder if her talk included anything about income inequality.

Read it.

A group of black Ferguson residents armed with AR-15s and other weapons stood guard around a Conoco station, owned by a white man, and saved it from being burned after looters began wreaking havoc on November 24.

Because of the armed citizens, the Conoco was not only spared, but the owner did not even have to board up the station’s windows.

…

Store owner Doug Merello said, “We would have been burned to the ground many times over if it weren’t for them.”

Things are not yet entirely hopeless.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, lays out some inconvenient truth.

It’s all too drearily familiar, isn’t it? Newark and Detroit; Miami; Crown Heights; Los Angeles; Cincinnati; here we go again.

…

The problem with separatism is that blacks would be nuts to want it. With all the real or imagined indignities of minority status, life is far better for them in a white nation.

Read it.

Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva says today’s racism is fomented without the use of actual racists. Or something like that.

He’s also written a book by the same name — Racism Without Racists, that is — and says that such is “a new way of maintaining white domination in places like Ferguson.”

If an Enemy doesn’t exist, one has to be invented, in order to preserve Victim Privilege.

Emmanuel Goldstein, we have a new gig for you….

Read it.

A select group of cities elected black mayors during the brief and tumultuous Black Power Era, seeking to implement an activist social justice platform.  These cities – notably Cleveland, Gary, Newark and Detroit among large cities — became stigmatized in a way that few have been able to recover from.   A negative narrative was developed about most of them that stuck, despite considerable efforts to dispel them.  Cities that elected “first black mayors” after the Black Power Era, during a period of relative calm, were able to adapt as the political skill set grew in the African-American community.  However, the Black Power Era’s near-toxic combination of heightened white racism, black disenfranchisement and disillusionment – and ill-prepared black political leadership – accelerated the downfall of these select cities.

If the cities that elected black mayors during this tumultuous period are ever to move forward, to achieve their potential, they must be released from the purgatory they inhabit.

Magazine stool.

Bacon-making kit.

Keyboard-shaped-waffle maker.

Self-defense keychain.

Melting Nazi-Face Candle. For the man who has everything but puberty.

12-in-1 Scissors.

LED Keychain Light. I have one of these and wouldn’t be without it.

Daniel Pipes is not afraid to ask the hard questions. Unlike Obama.

After decades of working closely with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and its related institutions, the Persian Gulf monarchies (with the single, striking exception of Qatar) have come to see the MB complex of institutions as a threat to their existence. The Saudi, Emirati, Kuwaiti, and Bahraini rulers now view politicians like Mohamed Morsi of Egypt as their enemies, as they do Hamas and its progeny – including CAIR.

While the Gulf monarchs have not become any less Islamist, they have acquired a clear-eyed appreciation of the harm that MB-related groups can do.

Read it.

Obama was wrong, at least in the case of Darren Wilson. In viewing thousands of pages of FBI interviews and grand jury testimony, it becomes eminently clear that many members of the local community did make up the story about Michael Brown being executed by Wilson – and pressured others to lie to police or keep silent.

According to the St. Louis County Police Investigative Report, the mob mentality took root almost immediately after the shooting. By the time detectives arrived at the scene of the incident, there was “a large crowd of bystanders and a large uniformed police presence at the scene when detectives arrived.” That crowd included both Brown’s mother and his stepfather, according to witness testimony. The police report states, “Many individuals were clearly upset and were expressing their frustration, by at times yelling obscenities and threats, and attempting to encroach on the crime scene itself.”

‘Black Lives Matter’? More accurately, Black Lies Matter.

Read it.

The man, who uses an oxygen tank, was talking to Jaye Perry, 52, of Ferguson in the parking lot of the Faraci Pizza as they watched the rioters. He turned to her and said, “Only in America do you see stuff like this,” then returned to his car to retrieve a new oxygen tank so he could breathe.

Two men collared the man at his car, proceeding to steal it, though the man tried to hold on to his steering wheel. His effort was unfruitful; the men ran over his body as they fled in the car. He called for the tank as he lay on the ground, and was later taken away by ambulance.

I guess Black Lives Matter more than Elderly Lives.

ISIS drive for Kobani blunted as Kurds gain momentum

Al-Shabab militants hijack bus in Kenya, kill 28 non-Muslims on board, police say

Raid Shows Enhanced Use of Fireworks as Palestinian Riot Weapon

Iraqi PM orders more airstrikes, weapons for soldiers battling ISIS

Afghan parliament approves security pacts with US, NATO. Because of course Afghanistan borders on the North Atlantic. Makes perfect sense, really.

Islamic State recruiting, exploiting children in Syria and Iraq as spies, fighters

Two NATO servicemembers killed in Afghan attack as volleyball bombing death toll passes 50

Two US soldiers killed in bomb attack in Afghan capital

Boko Haram kill 48 Nigerian fishermen

Suicide bomber kills at least 50 at volleyball match in Afghanistan

Pentagon ready to supply $1.6B in chemical warfare gear to Iraqi and Kurdish forces in fight vs. ISIS

US drone strike kills 4 militants in Pakistan, officials say

Nigeria suicide bombings kill at least 30

Suicide attack kills 5, including British national

Bollywood actress sentenced to 26 years in jail for blasphemy in Pakistan. And the feminists say … [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

Syrian troops kill 30 opposition fighters in Damascus

Polio Crisis Deepens in Pakistan, With New Cases and Killings

Read it.

Natalie Dubose of Ferguson, Missouri, is a small business owner who was proud to have opened her local cake bakery just over a year ago, but rioters from her own neighborhood destroyed her hard-earned shop this week. Now, thousands of Americans across the country have generously donated over $200,000 to help her rebuild.

Read it.

Speaking at California State University at Fresno last week, Dr. Cornel Pewewardy gave a lecture to students titled “How the Grinch Stole Thanksgiving.” Pewewardy spoke about the historical and cultural implications of the holiday.

“Like other holidays, including Christmas and Columbus Day, Thanksgiving is not based on historical accuracy, but rather on the importance and prevalence of maintaining a consumer culture”, Pewewardy, who is a member of both the Comanche and Kiowa tribes, said on Tuesday.

Obviously an affirmative action hire; this is what passes for scholarship on the Left Coast. (How can you be a member of two tribes who were historical enemies? Is that like being a ‘white Hispanic’?)

Historical ignorance in modern America being what it is, of course, few are aware that the Pilgrims were celebrating the traditional European festival of Martinmas:

St. Martin was known as friend of the children and patron of the poor. This holiday originated in France, then spread to Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. It celebrates the end of the agrarian year and the beginning of harvesting. From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Europe, including the UK, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin’s Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days, and was therefore, called “Quadragesima Sancti Martini”, Latin for “the forty days of St. Martin.” Sundays were not counted as part of the fasting period. Gaudete Sunday, which can fall anywhere between December 11 through 17, was also not counted as a day of fasting, thus giving the 40-day count. On St. Martin’s Eve, people ate and drank very heartily one last time before they started to fast. This period of fasting was later shortened and called “Advent” by the Church.

And, indeed, the Orthodox Christian Church still starts the Nativity Fast on the Saturday after Martinmas, something of which ‘Professor’ Pewewardy is probably also ignorant — but, then, his ‘historical accuracy’ is obviously based on a political agenda rather than real history.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

The Medici Palace in Florence was built in the 1440s with heavy stone on the street level and delicate windows on the top floor, both to express the upward-yearning spirit of the Renaissance and to keep the urban mob from dismantling the place when they got uppity, as they were known to do.

…

One of the best of the retro stadiums was Jacobs Field in Cleveland, which opened a couple of years later and sold out 455 games in a row. A friend told me an interesting rumor. He’d been talking to Mr. Jacobs, owner of the Cleveland Indians, and they got on the topic of why the White Sox new ballpark was so uninviting and closed-off. Mr. Jacobs told him that the owners of the White Sox had some kind of arrangement with the city of Chicago to use the ballpark as a giant holding pen for rioters, much in the traditional manner of a South American soccer stadium.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

While I was writing my new Taki’s Magazine column on Ferguson across Monday night and Tuesday morning, the sense was palpable that the dominant media had taken a humiliating double blow in a battle of their own choosing:

– The grand jury’s finding after months of careful research contradicted the Narrative promulgated in August and tenaciously held to ever since despite the piling up of evidence.

– The looting and arson by “protesters” in Ferguson was disgusting.

The first mainstream media pieces trying to snark about the events of Monday were deluged that night by critical commenters clearly better informed than the paid journalists.

Granted, a low bar.

Read it.

In the end it wasn’t vampires that the castle owners of Transylvania had to worry about, it was Communists.

Read it.

From $1.5 billion in cost overruns on its new D.C. headquarters, to $8.7 million a year in unearned employee overtime, the agency has not lacked for examples of fiscal mismanagement and lax oversight.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it. And watch the video.

What goes around, comes around.

Read it. And watch the video.

Although the media is desperate to keep the false narrative alive that the family of Michael Brown is only calling for peace, the fact is that on Monday night, just before all hell broke loose in Ferguson, while Michael Brown’s mother stood silently by, Brown’s stepfather repeatedly ordered the mob surrounding him to “Burn this bitch down!”

The next morning, the Brown family church was one of about a dozen or so buildings burnt to the ground. Worse still, a 20 year-old man was found dead.

Michael Brown was trash and he came from trash, as is becoming increasingly obvious.

Steve Sailer critiques the Ferguson ‘protesters’.

Months of egging on the mob in Ferguson, Missouri by the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party, and the national media in order to goose turnout in this month’s midterm elections have culminated in the Night of Undocumented Shopping.

Read it.

One the victims wounded in the November 20 attack on the Florida State University (FSU) campus had a concealed carry permit (CCP) but was not allowed to carry his gun on campus for self-defense because of Florida law.
A bill to change that law and allow campus carry was thwarted by current FSU President John Thrasher in 2011, when he was a state senator.

According to Students for Concealed Carry at Florida State (SCCFS), shooting victim Nathan Scott has a CCP, but the campus carry ban rendered him defenseless when 31-year-old Myron May opened fire. In other words, although he had “the training and skills necessary to end the shooting… [Scott was] powerless due to Florida’s laws.”

Read it.

CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups have been trying to worm their way into the current no-justice-no-peace uproar ever since the trouble began last summer in Ferguson, Missouri. The latest wrinkle involves an NFL star named Reggie Bush, who entered the debate to promote an equivalence between the “youths” of Ferguson and the “youths” of Palestine.

Of course! It’s obvious — why didn’t I notice the resemblance before?

A “youth” in Ferguson shoplifts from a store, roughs up the owner, attacks a cop, tries to take his gun, and gets shot for his efforts.

“Youths” in Palestine set up launchers, fire rockets at schools with them, and get shot (well, some of them do) for their efforts.

Yes, come to think of it, the two places have a lot in common.

Read it.

When five liberal Democratic senators were elected in 1992, pundits gleefully proclaimed it the year of the woman. Yet their arrival in the Senate, along with that of 24 female freshmen representatives, brought the total number of women in Congress to about 60, or little more than half of what it is today. “A defining moment of change was the general election of 1992 dubbed the ‘Year of the Woman,’ “the official House of Representatives web site proclaims. “The arrival of 28 new women in Congress resulted from the confluence of historic circumstances that have not recurred since.”

How about that War on Women, eh?

Read it.

Black people killing black people. Not news.

Read it.

And most of the rioters weren’t ‘protesters’, they were just thieves — and thieves always prey on the weakest targets they can find, because they are basically lazy.

Read it.

The statistics are staggering: Researchers predict that by 2025, the world will have 37 megacities, defined as urban areas with more than 10 million people. New York City and Newark are expected to have more than 23 million inhabitants; Tokyo, more than 38 million people. All told, well over half of the world’s population will be living in these super settlements.

Uh-huh. Name one instance where predictions by ‘urban planners’ have come to pass.

Indeed, one might extend that challenge to ‘researchers’ generally. Well, let’s see, there’s ‘peak oil’, and ‘climate change’, and the exponentially explosive growth of population that the Zero Population Growth people warned us about…. (Oh, wait….)

Read it.

Haven’t seen this sort of action in the neighborhood since they tore down the Delaware Terrace projects. The cops raided a house about a block away from TOF, looking for a fellow who had been dealing heroin on a nearby playground. There is an alley running behind the duplexes shown in the picture, and the playground is across that alley. In TOF’s youth, that playground was actually a cornfield, improbably surrounded by houses and (on one side) by a carpet factory. Every spring the farmer would drive his tractor down from the hill and plow it up and plant corn. Eventually, a new generation of kids arose who regarded the corn as free for the taking, so he gave up and sold out and the city built a park where people could pedal heroin. The carpet factory is also gone. There is a drug store on the site.

Funny how all the behavioral sinks tend to be in areas governed (if you can call it that) by Democrats.

Read it.

It makes sense that string cheese was most likely invented in Wisconsin, cheese capital of the United States. Brian (referred to by his first name here to avoid confusion between various members of the Baker family involved in this story), is the president of a family-owned and operated cheese brand named Baker Cheese, a company that has made cheese for nearly 100 years. Over the course of four generations string cheese has become close to the entirety of their business.

Read it.

But only if you’re stupid.

“As the head tilts forward the forces seen by the neck surges to 27 pounds at 15 degrees, 40 pounds at 30 degrees, 49 pounds at 45 degrees and 60 pounds at 60 degrees,” Hansraj writes.

Those loads are rather larger than one experiences in conventional postures, and that’s not good because “people spend an average of two to four hours a day with their heads tilted over reading and texting on their smart phones and devices.”

Much like AIDS, this strikes me as a self-correcting problem. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

“There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”

I guess tech companies lie to us as much as old Rust Belt companies do. Who knew?

Read it. Ponder the graphs.

Indeed, the “peak car” is antithetical to the reigning urbanist paradigm of highways known as “induced demand.”  Induced demand is Say’s Law for roads: supply of lanes creates its own demand by drivers to fill them. Hence building more roads to reduce congestion is pointless. But if we’ve really reached peak car, maybe we really can build our way out of congestion after all.