If this proves true, the geopolitical implications – and those for American cities – are profound. Fingers crossed…
Read the full article here: America, the Saudi Arabia of tomorrow – CNN.com.
Tag Archives: America
Poor Richard’s Almanac for Planners | Issue 9
Courteous Reader,
I am tempted to win your favor by declaring I wrote this Almanac for Planners solely for the public good. However, this is insincere and you are too wise for the deception of this pretense. The fact is I am excessively poor and, unfortunately, excessively wifeless. To address both problems, I must begin to make some profit since every potential wife always asks, “What kind of car do you drive?” I always have to reply, “I walk”, and the potential wife thinks I am a deviant.
Indeed, this motive would have been enough to write this Almanac many years ago except for the overwhelming desire of the public and professionals to only hear what they want to hear and my overwhelming desire to secure a salary. I am now of sufficient age to no longer care about telling people what they want to hear but only about what they need to know. This has freed me to write this Almanac for Planners in increments of ten cause it worked for Moses and the Almighty. Hopefully, my Almanac gains your likes and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my efforts but also your charity to this poor Friend and Servant,
Richard
81. “Gizmo Green” (Steve Mouzon) is often a vague promise to have your cake and eat it too by avoiding the real problem all together.
82. Hitler’s greatest devastation of British cities occurred after the war, courtesy of British town planners.
83. Americans consume land like prostitutes consume clients. These days, in both cases, the outcome is rarely as good as we imagined.
84. Parking is never a right or a privilege but should always be a pleasant surprise. Why do you want to take surprise out of our lives?
85. Having to take out the garbage by car is unnatural… and kinda disgusting.
86. Cul-de-sacs are not just about disconnecting streets. They are about disconnecting ourselves from the world around us. Isolation is their nature.
87. No man is a traffic island.
88. British town planners had already started devastating their cities before World War II. Hitler only sped up the process.
89. Fortune never knocks at the gates of a suburban community. It hides like a thief within…
90. A pedestrian who never slows is in a hurry. A car that never slows is a harbinger of death.
The Issue 10 cometh soon!
The American Pyramids
Driving down I-95 along the Atlantic Coast to CNU 20 in West Palm Beach last month, there was nothing so jarring as coming upon these landfill mountains in the flat Floridian landscape. 
It’s one thing to come across these artificial hills of filth in the river bluffs along the Mississippi River or other Midwestern rivers, where the hilly topography affords some aesthetic opportunity for these behemoths to blend into the natural landscape (putting aside the issues of any potential environmental impact arising from a mountain of buried garbage). It’s another thing to find them in a landscape no more than a few feet above sea level. These are the American Pyramids, a testament to our culture of mass consumption. The Egyptians built their pyramids as tombs for the pharaohs and monuments to the gods. In America, we build our pyramids as tombs for our refuse; monuments to what we consume and mostly defecate.
Photographs by Mark David Major.