Read it.

Republicans are getting feisty in Trump’s America.

(How ya gonna keep ’em down in the swamp/After they’ve seen Trump win?)

Read it.

It’s been widely noted that trust in institutions has been declining across the board in America. Government, religion, media, and business have all seen declining trust. To be quite honest, that decline in trust is deserved. These institutions by and large are not meeting the challenges of our present day and are often dysfunctional.

The root of this at some level is the maturity curve. Our institutions are old and either in maturity or decline. (As I’ve observed many times, one reason sprawly suburbs seem so great in the now is simply that they are new, and so in the youth phases of their lifecycle).

At some level it’s hard to appreciate how old many of our institutions are. Some of them date to the American founding or before. Others are legacies of the 19th century or the New Deal. The high water mark of institutions was in the immediate postwar era – the Marshall Plan, NATO, the UN, the institutional infrastructure between things like the interstate highway system, structures like the GI bill, a then decently functioning corporatist combination of big business and big unions, and many other things.

But World War II ended almost 75 years ago. This is roughly the same distance as from the Civil War to World War I, and from the Revolution to the Civil War. These roughly 70 to 80 year epochs (the span of a human life, interestingly), produced major institutional resets in America, often after a process of upheaval. If history is any guide, we’re due for another one. (I gather that this might be the premise behind the book The Fourth Turning, which I have not read. My observations are my own, but I think rather obvious).

The Antiplanner actually runs some numbers.

An op-ed in last Friday’s San Antonio Express-News argues that San Antonio is “one of the least-suited big cities in the world for building rapid transit.” This is because, though San Antonio is the nation’s seventh-largest city, it’s jobs are so spread out that transit just can’t work for most people.

According to Wendell Cox’s report on downtowns, in 2008 transit carried more than 10 percent of people to work in just five metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. These also happen to be the only metro areas that had more than 240,000 downtown jobs. Transit in Philadelphia, which had just under 240,000 jobs, carried only 9.3 percent of metro-area jobs. San Antonio has only about 60,000 downtown jobs, so is less than a quarter of the way to needing an improved transit system.

The problem with public transit is that it takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be, i.e. there are additional efforts needed to get from your home to the transit stop and then from the destination transit stop to your objective (job or shopping or whatever). Back in the days when jobs in an urban area were concentrated ‘downtown’ because information and goods moved at the speed of feet (so concentration made sense), and when people lived in a broad catchment area where they needed to go from OUT to IN and then back OUT again, mass transit made a lot of sense — and it still does in places like New York City where that logic still applies.

Otherwise, it’s just a reactionary bureaucratic wish-we-were-back-in-the-good-old-days-of-the-horse boondoggle, as one can tell from the boilerplate talk about ‘getting people out of cars and into trains’.

Read it.

Kanye West’s tweet storm about the Democratic Party’s dark past showed no signs of slowing down Monday following a series of posts in support of President Donald Trump last week.

I find this very curious.