From my Taki's Magazine column:
What do people really mean by the word “vibrant?”
Until the disco era, “vibrant” was used only rarely, mostly in connection with vibrations, literal or metaphorical. My cursory online search uncovered zero examples of “vibrant” in the works of George Orwell or John Updike, one in Evelyn Waugh‘s (“that silence vibrant with self-accusation”), and two in Vladimir Nabokov‘s. (Humbert Humbert looks up to a “vibrant sky” through “nervous” rustling branches.)
According to Google’s Ngram, “vibrant” was an occasionally used word from the 1920s into the early 1970s. But then its share of all the words in books roughly quadrupled by the mid-2000s (when a few people finally started to make fun of it).
In 2013, it’s hard to avoid the word. For example, on Monday, President Obama announced, “Immigration makes us stronger—it keeps us vibrant.…”
Similarly, when new Secretary of State John Kerry paid a visit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month, he announced that the American-German relationship is “one of our strongest, most vibrant alliances.” (Is “vibrant” the post-Cold War version of “dynamic?”)
And downtowns are always vibrant, or will be Real Soon Now: “Planners in Maine Envision Vibrant Downtowns.”
Read the whole thing there.
When white people honestly consider a place full of white people to be "vibrant" (e.g., Matthew Yglesias praising a gentrifying corner of Washington D.C. in today's Slate), what do they mean, deep down?
I offer a reductionist definition of "vibrant" in real estate talk terms.
When white people honestly consider a place full of white people to be "vibrant" (e.g., Matthew Yglesias praising a gentrifying corner of Washington D.C. in today's Slate), what do they mean, deep down?
I offer a reductionist definition of "vibrant" in real estate talk terms.
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76 comments:
Dr. Vibrant angrily responded.
Unvibrantly responded?
Actually, what I do now when I'm reading wikipedia and I see a gratuitous "vibrant", I just hit the edit button and delete it.
FWIW, for all the complaining about left wing bias of wikipedia, if the complainers spent as much time editing as complaining, there would be a whole lot less to complain about.
Same goes for a lot of bigger issues as well.
And finally, vibrant means the scintillating essence of experience pleasing to those of the highest sensibilities, or something like that.
It's good to see some air seeping out of the Dr. Vibrant bubble. I raised some issues with his job creation ideas a while back: Richard Florida's Latest Job Creation Idea.
White people are the most easily bored people on Earth, aren't they? Without added "vibrancy", their lives would be meaningless (i.e., boring).
I mean, aren't iPhones and video games and microbrews enough? Do we really need blacks and Arabs and Mexicans to "enrich" our lives?
Hmm, vibrant neighborhood might be one filled with sexually attractive people who don't look like the girl or boy next door?
Porn industry must be very vibrant, what with all the vibrators. An orgasmic term for an orgasmic age.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAKWKfVcd04
Or maybe Brian Wilson had something to do with it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwrKKbaClME
OT: Singapore PSA campaign tells young women to get busy having kids, eschew extended adolescence. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/03/25/singaporean_fairy_tales_warn_women_about_ticking_biological_clocks.html
Is there anything the Singaporean government can't do wisely and well?
For the untalented, 'vibrant' means the people are noisy, colorful, and eat spicy food--unlike lame whites with meat and potatoes.
It's like complimenting dumb kids by saying they're full of 'spunk'.
For the talented, 'vibrant' means innovative, enterprising, and expressive.
When I hear "vibrant" in real estate lingo I think "high crime and ethnically mixed".
Like "cozy", the real estate guys are hijacking a word to use for their own ends. I'd pay good money to avoid vibrant. Vibrant may or may not include pretty women, but it will include young, drunk men up to no good.
When white people honestly consider view a place full of white people as "vibrant" (e.g., Matthew Yglesias describing a gentrifying corner of Washington D.C. in today's Slate), what do they mean, deep down?
Yglesias recently bought a $1.2 million dollar condo in DC:
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/homes/luxury-home-sales-what-76-million-buys/
"Journalist and political blogger Matthew Yglesias bought a three-bedroom, three-bath condo on Q Street in Logan Circle for $1.2 million. In a converted Victorian rowhouse, the unit has original exposed-brick walls and a private patio. Yglesias writes about business and the economy for Slate."
He uses his media presence as a soapbox to promote policies that protect and increase his real estate holdings. These policies involve gentrification i.e. population replacement and ethnic composition adjustment. He also attacks suburbs and argues for getting rid of them and herding people into high density cities, which would of course increase the property value of his real estate holdings while leaving most people as property-less tenants:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/07/the-suburbanist-paradox/43047/
Did I ever mention that the best place to live is on a culdesac in an inner suburb?
Yglesias recently bought a $1.2 million dollar condo in DC:
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/homes/luxury-home-sales-what-76-million-buys/
Note that everyone on that list is a lawyer, doctor, developer, semi-notable contemporary sculptor, etc. except for Yglesias. Yglesias has just been churning out really dumb 3 paragraph blog posts for a decade.
If Yglesias's blogging merits $1.2 million dollars worth of real estate, you should be like Ted Turner, Steve.
'When I hear "vibrant" in real estate lingo I think "high crime and ethnically mixed".'
This, pretty much exactly.
Did you read sports journalist Buzz Bissinger's bizarre and creepy piece on his fashion addiction?
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201304/buzz-bissinger-shopaholic-gucci-addiction
"The United States is a country that has raged against enlightenment since 1776; puritanism, the guiding lantern, has cast its withering judgment on anything outside the narrow societal mainstream. Think it’s easy to be different in America? Try something as benign as wearing stretch leather leggings or knee-high boots if you are a man."
"Was I homosexual because so much of what I wore is associated with gays? I did experiment. And while I don’t think it is my sexual being, I can tell you that gay men as a group are nicer, smarter, have a shitload more fun than straight whites. Was I veering toward becoming a dominant leather master in the S&M scene, the leather fetish an obvious influence in most of the clothing I purchased and in much of high fashion itself? I did experiment. Was I a closeted or maybe not so closeted transvestite? Tom Ford makeup is divine; the right foundation and cheek blush and eyeliner and lipstick can do wonders for the pallid complexion. Thigh-high boots add to any wardrobe, although walking on six-inch stilettos for hours is just a bitch and therefore confined to the privacy of my house, seen only by the UPS man, who at this point could not possibly be surprised by anything."
Here's more from Bissinger:
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201304/buzz-bissinger-shopaholic-gucci-addiction?currentPage=2
"Before I started shopping with her at Gucci, I could count on one finger the number of compliments I got from strangers on what I was wearing. Now I get dozens, 99 percent of them from women and gays and African-Americans who appreciate go-for-it style. No wonder male heterosexual whites are aimed toward obsolescence, boring the rest of us to death."
Was Buzz the sports reporter who interviewed all those high school football players in their locker rooms for "Friday Night Lights?"
That's reassuring ...
Was Buzz the sports reporter who interviewed all those high school football players in their locker rooms for "Friday Night Lights?"
Yes.
That's reassuring ...
I'm surprised he didn't title the book "Friday Night Tights".
I'd pay good money to avoid vibrant.
In a scene from the 1982 movie, First Blood, Brian Dennehy's sheriff character is trying to persuade the disheveled Rambo (Sly Stallone) to leave his little town. About his little town, the sheriff said, "It's a quiet little town. In fact you might say it's boring. But that's the way we like it. And I get paid to keep it that way."
As for me, when I go looking for real estate, give me boring over vibrant any day.
You know, when I hear vibrant, I think "safe for good food for lunch, but I wouldn't want be there after dark."
So you need white men with money, to attract beautiful women, to attract, gays, diversity, et al, to attract vibrancy, to create more money?
"So you need white men with money, to attract beautiful women, to attract, gays, diversity, et al, to attract vibrancy, to create more money?"
Everybody seems convinced that there must be some other, cooler way for a neighborhood in America to be prosperous and fun and interesting other than to have "white men with money," but I haven't noticed too many examples.
"If Yglesias's blogging merits $1.2 million dollars worth of real estate, you should be like Ted Turner, Steve."
Yglesias's father is a successful novelist and screenwriter, so I presume Yglesias got some help from him with the townhouse. It's fairly common for affluent parents to help their adult children buy homes in expensive cities.
It sounds like a reasonable longterm investment for the future grandparents: enough room for a child or two, and it's not like Washington D.C. real estate is going to collapse. Is the federal government going to stop printing money?
Vibrant became popular in the UK in about 2003, as a liberal code word for immigrants. British people always regard themselves as boring, unable to dance, and that is why vibrant foreigners are required.
Here's a vibrant organism, which really should be adopted as the emblem of the modern, ever-more enriched West:
Vib and Let Die
is "vibrant" perhaps a euphemisms for "violent"?
Steve, if you keep using Ngram for these nefarious schemes to see things that you aren't supposed to be looking at, they're gonna pull the plug on Ngram. Vibrant is a term used widely to express an appreciation of, an awe of, really, the profound contributions that are too numerous to list that minorities, especially NAMs, make to our previously lilywhite, orderly, friendly, safe, productive downtowns.
"Steve Sailer said...
Did I ever mention that the best place to live is on a culdesac in an inner suburb?"
I don't know, I see places like Sausalito, and practically everywhere there looks nice. Of course at this point, the housing there is probably so obscenely high, its pointless to even think about.
Expect "vibrant" to become a quaint, wink-wink code word to let customers know the demographics while they search. Expect this word in about 8-10 years,after going from apotheosis to irony, becoming the subject of some damning piece in the Atlantic on racism in real estate.
When I saw your title, I guessed the true meaning of the "v" word was "vagina" and I turned out to be right. (The accompanying photo was a clue.)
The vibrant=beautiful women theory makes me wonder if Tyler Cowen ever uses the word to describe the restaurants he likes. He takes it as a signal of quality food if there are no beautiful women and mostly unhappy-looking people, because why else would people come to a depressing place other than for good food?
Jerry: "Sixty-six years old?" Elaine: "Yeah, well, he's in perfect health."
Elaine: "He works out, he's vibrant, you'd really like him." Jerry: "Why do people always say that? I hate everybody. Why would I like him?"
Elaine: "So, what do you think? Would you go out with a 66 year old woman?"
Jerry: "Well, I'll tell you, she would have to be really vibrant. So vibrant she'd be spinning."
Isn't it an odd coincidence that "vibrant" and "gay" both had quite similar meanings originally but have been used to candy-coat much harsher realities? Christmas trees, Easter baskets and a kid's birthday decorations are vibrant and gay. We all know that what's now called "vibrant" and "gay" can get all lot grittier than cake and balloons.
Let's be honest, "vibrancy" also entails stuff like this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/crime-scene/post/three-shot-outside-u-street-nightclub-overnight/2012/12/03/fcb334fe-3d37-11e2-a2d9-822f58ac9fd5_blog.html
As a very wise old professor once told me, " Art always follows the Money " Artists didn't make Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, London, or New York wealthy, wealth drew the artists there, and since a lot of them are gay, drew gay people there as well. Mr. Vibrant is confusing cause and effect with each other. Even to gentrify a bad part of a city you need some degree of money still left in a city. No one bothered to gentrify Detroit, because all of the people with money had gone a long time ago.
Did I ever mention that the best place to live is on a culdesac in an inner suburb?
Works well for me.
http://forward.com/articles/173720/jewish-groups-push-for-immigration-reform-on-passo/
Cons going over to gay and amnesty camp.
Why?
Cuz Jews say you better or no dessert.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/trolling-or-transformation-cpac-matt-heimbach-scott-terry-and-the-end-of-conservatism-inc
If you are a lying opportunistic whore, you are a mainstream conservative.
If you tell the truth, you are a troll.
Netanhayu supports Romney. Romney plays total whore to Aipac to win Jewish support. Jews go with Obama and use media to lionize Obama and tar/feather Romney.
And now Obama and Netanhayu are the best of friends and Israelis just love Obama.
Will the jilted lover GOP still scream and throw tantrums about how Obama is 'throwing poor helpless Israel under the bus'.
GOP is actually even lower than a jilted lover that clings to her man who abuses her.
It is just a cheap whore to a lowlife pimp.
"No wonder male heterosexual whites are aimed toward obsolescence, boring the rest of us to death."
Great! Just greatI Another aspiring "Power Bottom" with a penchant for fashion basking in the affirmation of the three groups about whose opinion I care about the least telling me I'm headed for obsolescence!
Get back to me in five years Paul Lynde....we'll see who is still around!
"FWIW, for all the complaining about left wing bias of wikipedia, if the complainers spent as much time editing as complaining, there would be a whole lot less to complain about."
eh, we covered this years ago. you can't edit wikipedia much. most pages have some loser, unemployed "guardian" who watches over it like a hawk, checking it for changes every day, or even every couple hours, and when they notice a change you made, immediately revert it back to it's previous state.
the message is clear. you won't be welcome to edit established pages. even small minor helpful edits on pages that are not controversial or political are soon reversed.
this is actually how i encountered the phenomenon. surveying pages on topics which i knew a bit about, and rewriting 1 or 2 sentences to make them more accurate or easier to read. 8 hours later, boom, gone. reverted. this was 10 years ago so i imagine wikipedia is like a police state now, most pages locked down tightly by it's "guardian".
i'm guessing a lot of these people are official wikipedia editors, so maybe in a way, you could say they are "employed".
Mr. Vibrant is confusing cause and effect with each other. Even to gentrify a bad part of a city you need some degree of money still left in a city. No one bothered to gentrify Detroit, because all of the people with money had gone a long time ago.
Vibrancy follows the money, but it also follows thorough, sustained policework of "clear and hold", so those brave bohos can feel safe. That's never part of the narrative, though.
I agree Steve - by your definition San Francisco is definitely not vibrant.
"Great! Just greatI Another aspiring "Power Bottom" with a penchant for fashion basking in the affirmation of the three groups about whose opinion I care about the least telling me I'm headed for obsolescence!"
Check this out: Buzz Bissinger’s Midlife Sex Crisis.
Just remember, what has been seen, cannot be unseen.
"White people are the most easily bored people on Earth, aren't they? Without added "vibrancy", their lives would be meaningless (i.e., boring)."
It's called The Negro Fad:
"To be frank I should admit, perhaps, that it was the "Negro fad" which sent me to Harlem. Not that I was particularly eager for Harlem night life, but rather because I imagined Harlem to be a strange sort of street carnival, where one might stare in admiration at the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round, even if one didn't care to ride them. When I left Harlem, I was confident that someone had lied about the whole thing. Then I began to wonder if we had always lied about our Negro population, and if so, whether such dishonesty might not be a potent contributor to the misunderstanding which continues to exist between the black and white races.
The Negro fad has existed in America for more than ten years. Still New York does not tire of seeking entertainment in Harlem; club women still show intense interest in novels by Negro writers; and the exoticisms of Negro illustrators are increasingly popular. In fact, the successes of the Negro artist, musician, and poet have become current topics for magazine articles and drawing-room discussions. Yet after ten years of this Negro Renaissance, the race situation remains unaltered. The only conclusion to be drawn is that intellectual competency and artistic popularity are not determining factors in the right to equality.
Steve: Did I ever mention that the best place to live is on a culdesac in an inner suburb?
Clive C.: I don't know, I see places like Sausalito, and practically everywhere there looks nice. Of course at this point, the housing there is probably so obscenely high, its pointless to even think about.
I live in Sausalito. It *is* an inner suburb of SF, an easy commute by bridge or ferry, which makes it attractive to city professionals. It *does* have numerous culdesacs, or at least small, quiet winding roads. And housing *is* obscenely expensive (18 single-family homes from $1.3M to $8M).
And it *is* a very nice place to live, full of Persons Of Niceness, although interestingly we have a Community Of Vibrancy across the street, a legacy of the WW2 shipbuilding industry. Tupac lived there. Because we share a school district, our astonishingly expensive (and low-performing) public schools are unusable for most White/Asian families in Sausalito.
Sincerely,
Dock of the Bay
But remember, V-words have been used for a century if not longer. Here's Randolph Bourne, the godfather of multiculturalism and the hero of paleo-libertarians, in 1916 (note the two V's in "vivid"):
Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day.
Will immigrants be renamed immibrants?
If non-whites are so wonderfully vibrant in their native lands, why do they wanna come here?
Since US has a lot of lame whites whereas non-white nations are filled with vibrant non-whites, wouldn't the immigrants be culture-shocked by the vibrancy gap?
I mean why escape the vibrancy of Pakistan to come to lame UK where a lot of whites still go for tea and crumpets?
It seems immigrants are trying to escape from the vibrancy in their native countries in favor of the stability of the West.
Why do vibrant people wanna run from vibrancy and embrace stability?
I don't think I'd call Sausalito "vibrant" in the real estate agent sense. It's 90% white and 5% asian with a median age over 50. But I don't think it's legal to advertise it as a SWPL enclave.
"Expect "vibrant" to become a quaint, wink-wink code word to let customers know the demographics while they search. Expect this word in about 8-10 years,after going from apotheosis to irony, becoming the subject of some damning piece in the Atlantic on racism in real estate. " - Words do derive meaning from their context so that is certainly possible. Orwell had it right in making doubleplusgood a longer word, something like that won't really get a negative connotation due to its cumbersome nature. Vibrant is simply too short to not be used in a derogatory manner.
"If you tell the truth, you are a troll. " - Only the court jester may speak frankly with the king.
"If non-whites are so wonderfully vibrant in their native lands, why do they wanna come here? " - White privilege works according to the inverse, inverse square law. The more distance the worse it gets for non-whites.
"Mr. Vibrant is confusing cause and effect with each other. Even to gentrify a bad part of a city you need some degree of money still left in a city."
This theory has a lot in common with Cargo Cultism. Replace airports with gays and it's the same basic thing.
When I hear "vibrant" in real estate lingo I think "high crime and ethnically mixed".
Um, did you really think this before Steve started promoting that meme? I don't think I've ever read or heard "vibrant" used in that euphemistic sense.
And doing a quick Google search for real estate listings and discussions in which neighborhoods are described as "vibrant," I see references to North Beach and North Pandhandle in San Francisco, Capitol Hill in Seattle, Bethesda, Maryland, Greenwich Village, La Jolla...
If anything, vibrant seems to be most often used to describe upscale, walkable neighborhoods with lots of amenities. The idea that vibrant was used as a euphemism for "sketchy area full of minorities" was basically a meme invented by Steve that had no basis in reality.
Check for yourself. I googled "'vibrant neighborhood' mls"
At what inflection point does "vibrancy" produce negative returns to scale?
I suppose we're about to find out thanks to the Gang of 8.
Incidentally, I love that "Gang of..." is the new description of bipartisan group engaging in progressive policymaking decisions a la Jiang Qing.
Soon as I hear the word "vibrant", as in, "its a vibrant neighborhood" or "its a vibrant area", that is my cue to get out of there. PRONTO.
On another point. About America's "vibrant" alliance with Germany, Great Britain has announced that all remaining British troops will leave Germany by 2019. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Britain finally feels it is safe enough to leave.
Any thoughts on when Washington will feel Germany no longer needs its protection from those Danes, Czechs and Poles? I guess its just a vibrant thing.
I've often wondered about the workings of a system that allows Dr Florida and others like him to charge $35000 or whatever for a talk. Somewhere along the line there's an unspoken agreement to pretend that a talk you'd switch off if you saw it on TV is worth a year's wages when you listen to it live. If some chamber of commerce wants the benefit of Dr Florida's wisdom, couldn't they just get a transcript of the last speech he gave at a similar location?
"Mr. Vibrant is confusing cause and effect with each other. Even to gentrify a bad part of a city you need some degree of money still left in a city."
And to have money, you need some sort of industry. For example, the flourishing of Motown music was made possible by the flourishing of Detroit's auto manufacturing business: well-paid factory workers could afford to patronize live music acts, by their records, etc.
This may seem to be a pretty obvious point, but it's one that has apparently gone over the heads of a lot of people. If memory serves, Barack Obama was, at one time, involved in an initiative to revitalize some blighted Chicago neighborhood by encouraging the development of secondary businesses such as restaurants. It doesn't work that way though. The restaurateurs follow the industry. Lower Manhattan is full of those chic eateries Steve mentioned because Manhattan is home to industries (finance, advertising, etc.) with well-paid workforces.
FWIW, Obama's approval rating in Israel is less than 10%. Bibi seems to have some sort of green light because Obama is scared of being the President who allowed Iran to go nuclear, and kick the US out of the ME; forcing the US into a crash measure of fracking that takes more than 10 years. His ME policy is in tatters, leading from behind was a disaster in Libya, Syria is on fire, chemical weapons already used.
Just remember, what has been seen, cannot be unseen.
Eeeewww....just eeuuuuwwwwwww!
Man he totally blows the gay Cinderella fairy tale by looking like.....well looking like he looks.
Give me a 'dull' (white) area over a 'vibrant' (black and brown area) anytime.
Just like the good sheriff said to Rambo, "We like it that way".
Anon: I don't think I'd call Sausalito "vibrant" in the real estate agent sense. It's 90% white and 5% asian with a median age over 50.
True. It was Steve's criterion about cul de sacs to which I was responding, arguing that Sausalito does meet his criteria.
As to Steve's definition "vibrant = there are attractive women walking around at night," there are some gorgeous women here, but you are absolutely correct that they tend to be older.
Want to see attractive, well-dressed 40+ year old women walking around at night? Sausalito has got that. Want to see attractive 20 year old women walking around at night? Sorry. Go to SF.
The nubile young things are rare here because Marin County in general suffers a demographic dip as local teens leave for college, then cannot move back to Marin until they've saved up money, if ever.
But I don't think it's legal to advertise it as a SWPL enclave.
You got that right! We're having a dust-up at this very moment of Marin Liberals vs. Marin Radicals. The Rads want to cram poor NAMs into the county under the flag of Affordable Housing while the Libs fret about their property values and about not being seen as racist/classist/nimby.
Sincerely,
Dock of the Bay
our astonishingly expensive (and low-performing) public schools are unusable for most White/Asian families in Sausalito
A bit of research shows that Sausalito high school students go to Tamalpais High in Mill Valley. According to Greatschools.org the school is 74% white and 10% Asian, has standardized test scores well in excess of the statewide average, and only 4% of its students meet the income standards for free lunches (compared to 52% statewide!).
Unusable for whom?
Peter
"Barone is right. Immigration waves always end. The Quebecois flooded new england from 1880 to 1940, and some had dreams of reconquering it as a catholic new France,"
Blacks seem to make fun of and hate wealthier white males, but who does Michael Jordan hang around with at all the boring country clubs he plays golf at?
Of course, he also has houses in wealthy white neighborhoods.
FWIW, ... because Obama is scared of being the President who allowed Iran to go nuclear, and kick the US out of the ME;
What are you talking about? Iran is going to kick the United States out of the middle east? How is that going to happen?
North Korea has nukes and that did not kick us off the Korean peninsula.
The USSR had nukes and that did not kick us out of Europe.
Russia has nukes and that has not stopped us from encroaching upon her borders by adding Poland to NATO and threatening to do the same with Georgia.
China has nukes and that has not stopped us from patrolling off their coast, or keeping troops in Korea and Okinawa.
Pakistan has nukes and yet that has not stopped us from launching drone attacks on their territory.
We understand that you and the neocons do not like Iran. But pumping up some third world hellhole as the next incarnation of the Third Reich is getting a little old.
Google Trends on "vibrant" gradually rises and then explodes around August of 2010 for several months then returns to a higher baseline.
"vibrant San Francisco Real Estate" = "The Inner Mission has long been a destination for excellent cuisine, but now luxury homes are adding appeal to this vibrant neighborhood. " --SF
Don't go to the Mission District after dark unless you really need a heroin hit.
"vibrant los angeles real estate" = "Sky loves introducing people to the vibrant, dynamic and (relatively) inexpensive East side of Los Angeles" nuff said.
Silver Lake is sometimes called "vibrant". 40% latino, 35% white, 18% asian (often filipino) , 3% black, mid-range crime.
Any thoughts on when Washington will feel Germany no longer needs its protection from those Danes, Czechs and Poles? I guess its just a vibrant thing
There is a worthwhile argument for keeping at leas token US armed forces in Germany, at least until approximately now. The purpose is to deter Russia from annexing Poland and the three Baltic states
It would be better if the US Army was in Poland and in the Baltic, but that's considered to be too provocative.
I agree, the economic and political re-emergence of D-land may soon make the US mil.'s presence there superfluous, at least with regard to protecting Poland from its eastern neighbor.
... Kalingrad ... Didn't that place used to be called Koeningsberg?
Look for "Is Germany Becoming Too Strong?" worrywart pieces in the NY Times in the near future, if the Times isn't printing such already.
Peter, you're correct that the high schools available to Sausalito residents are excellent.
The problem lies in K-8. Sausalito operates its K-8 school district jointly with Marin City, which is the WW2-era housing project I mentioned earlier. Where Sausalito is wealthy and White/Asian, Marin City is poor and NAM-heavy. It makes a strange combination. This joint district receives $42,302 per student but has the lowest test scores by far in Marin County.
Sausalito-Marin City's underperforming K-8 schools, which range from 63% to 98% NAM and 62 to 95% poor, scare off many White/Asian families, who go private in K-8 or who leave Sausalito for the excellent K-8 districts nearby once they have school-age kids. It's dramatic, Sausalito has a fair number of babies, but only one quarter the California average of school-age children: 4.4% vs. 18.2% (and double the rate of old fogies). It's a pleasant place but not at all a normal place.
I hope this helps clarify our odd local situation. The SF Bay Area has several such striking contrasts of wealth and poverty side-by-side, with a story behind each one. See Piedmont/Oakland for the flipside of our situation.
Sincerely,
Dock of the Bay
FWIW, ... because Obama is scared of being the President who allowed Iran to go nuclear, and kick the US out of the ME
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130318/DEFREG01/303180015/>Russia Sees ‘No Concession’ in U.S. Missile Defense Move
Mar. 18, 2013 - 08:42AM | By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
MOSCOW — Russia on Monday said it saw “no concession” in the U.S. decision to abandon the final phase of its missile shield for Europe while deploying new interceptors against a possible attack from North Korea.
...
The U.S. decision means it will not go through with the fourth phase of its missile defense deployments in Europe under which interceptors trained on Iran were due to have been placed in Poland. Hagel said the decision was part of an overall restructuring of how Washington viewed missile defense and international threats.
Russia has long argued that the European missile shield was aimed against its own nuclear deterrent and has held up negotiations on other disarmament agreements as a result. Ryabkov said that Russia believed that extra U.S. interceptors in Alaska “significantly expand U.S. capabilities in the area of missile defense.
“We are not experiencing any euphoria about this,” he added.
...
Missiles travelling from Iran to the USA or northern Europe would travel a great circle route, which is not the same as the point to point distance on a flat map.
By the way, sometimes I feel Isolationist ... Be interesting to see what would happen if US armed forces withdrew from both the Middle East and Europe.
BTW, I poked around a little for mentions of "vibrant Palo Alto real estate" and hits were pretty light. It's got a nice downtown area, lots of money, ethnic food, and hot chicks, but lacks the frisson of danger. You're probably not going to get mugged in Palo Alto. Unless you count the venture capitalists when you're asking for second round financing.
Does falkenblog read iSteve?
http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-perennial-urban-allure.html
BTW, I poked around a little for mentions of "vibrant Palo Alto real estate" and hits were pretty light.
Just google "vibrant palo alto" (without the quotation marks}. Tons of hits, mostly in reference to downtown Palo Alto.
I'm telling you, no one outside this blog thinks of "vibrant" as a euphemism for "full of minorities." It's just a joke Steve made up.
The irony here is that the really vibrant urban settings are those which are most Caucasian.
We went to "The Flying Dutchman" at Covent Garden when we were in London a while back. After the show we walked though center of the city. It would have been near midnight. The cafes were filled. Well dressed people were strolling the way they do in Rome or Venice.
I almost wept for America. We have lost all that. I lived then in San Francisco - the city that many think of as the most European. But San Francisco only has a few spots of gemümlich night life, and none of them are downtown.
Where I grew up Washington D.C. is far worse. There are still happy classy people out on the streets of Georgetown but most of the town hides behind locked doors when the sun goes down.
Albertosaurus
@Dock of the Bay:
6-7 weeks ago I was walking in the Sausalito hills 6-7 and passed two brothas on their way down from Spencer. They're looking up at a house, and one guy says to the other, "you just tell them you need to use the bathroom ..."
"By the way, sometimes I feel isolationist....be interesting to see what would happen if US armed forces withdrew from both Europe and the middle east."
I've always shaken my head at that assinine word "isolationist". Mexico has no troops in Europe or the middle east. Is Mexico an "isolationist" country? How so? In what sense? Doesn't Mexico have embassies in European countries? Don't people from Europe vacation in Mexico? Only America seems subject to this bizarre, silly little word "isolationist", anytime somebody suggests perhaps it would be better off if it didn't keep troops in a 100 different countries around the world and intervene in matters of no moral or strategic concern to itself like dropping bombs on Serbia for 78 days in 1999. A country that never did anything at all to America in all of its history.
Personally i don't think anything bad would happen to Europe if US troops left, since the only conventional threat, the USSR, vanished 20 years ago. Even the Brits get it. All British troops will be returned from the continent by 2019. But Britain doesn't have the USA's military-industrial complex.
@mel belli
Hmm, obviously a breach in the containment wall.**
We had a Moment Of Vibrancy at the containment wall a couple years ago: one Person Of Vibrancy encountered a fellow POV there and stabbed him seventy times.
Pretty Vibrant for a region where the police blotter mostly contains noise complaints and improperly parked cars.
Yes, all you need is one tiny Island Of Vibrancy to bring all sorts of delightful Urban Texture to your otherwise bland region. Plusgood!
Sincerely,
Dock of the Bay
** Marin City is separated from Sausalito by the 101, with just an underpass with a narrow sidewalk to connect them.
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