The best way to fix the U.S. armed forces’ recruiting challenges may involve dipping further into the nation’s high schools.
As the Army, Navy and other services contend with a thriving economy and a directive to expand their ranks, there is a growing debate over whether the military should consider lowering the minimum enlistment age from 17 to 16. More than a dozen countries, including the United Kingdom, already have adopted the policy.
Critics say the idea is deeply flawed and presents a host of societal problems, but supporters argue that the Pentagon needs to think outside the box if it wants to continually overcome one of the toughest recruiting environments in decades.
Neither the military nor lawmakers have given any indication that they are entertaining the idea, but some analysts say that opening the ranks to younger Americans could provide unique benefits and may be the kind of fundamental overhaul the recruiting system needs for the 21st century.
“For one, many of the factors that disqualify older youths from joining — like criminal records — are not as present in younger teens,” said Shane McCarthy, chief marketing officer of Sandboxx, a leading technology platform that connects military members stationed abroad with families and friends at home. Mr. McCarthy also has advised military commands on how to better target recruits.
“Currently, of the 75% of 17- to 24-year-olds who are ineligible to serve, for example, 10% are ineligible due to criminal records,” he wrote in a recent piece for the Military Times. “And, according to the Department of Justice, there are twice as many arrests of 18- to 20-year-olds as there are arrests of 15- to 17-year-olds.”…
Miss Zhu’s pageant colleagues should rally around her and let Laurie DeJack know that if Miss Zhu goes, they go too.It will be interesting to see if women are as mutually supportive as feminists want them to be.
Kathy Zhu a pretty Asian Miss Michigan found out that she doesn’t have free speech.The organization Miss World America took away her Miss Michigan title and banned Miss Zhu from further participation in their pageants.The reason?Someone complained that Miss Zhu’s posted opinions on social media are “offensive, insensitive and inappropriate.”
Did Miss Zhu post hateful comments like “the squad” did about President Trump and America? No.Miss Zhu did much worse things:She refused to don a hijab, which means she is Islamophobic, and she stated that black Americans kill more black Americans than do the police, which means she is racist.
If Miss Zhu had donned a hijab, she would have risked being lumped in with congresswoman Ilhan Omar and said to be anti-American, not a helpful designation for a beauty queen.Have we already forgotten that, according to the official story, we were attacked on 9/11 by Islamic terrorists who destroyed 3 New York skyscrapers, part of the Pentagon and many US lives? Muslims are the reason we have TSA and searches of airline passengers. Why would Michigan’s beauty queen want to associate herself with these memories?
If Miss Zhu had said that the police are the main killers of black Americans, it would have been a lie, but not distressing to victim groups.By telling the truth, Miss Zhu caused “distress” and, therefore, was guilty of a racist act.Miss World America officials decided that as Miss Zhu was Islamophobic and racist she was no longer “of good character” and, thus, her association with the Miss World America organization was terminated by Laurie DeJack, Michigan state director of the organization.
Perhaps Laurie isn’t very bright and can’t tell the difference between free speech, truth, and racism and also cannot see good sense in Miss Zhu’s reluctance to associate herself with Muslims with whom the US is at war and has been at war since Miss Zhu was two years old. As my readers know, I think the “Muslim terrorist” threat in America is a hoax and a Ziocon orchestration to deceive Americans into fighting Israel’s wars, but most Americans don’t. The minute Miss Zhu donned a hijab and a photo was snapped, she would have been history.
There is an alternative explanation to Laurie DeJack’s arbitrary action against Miss Zhu.Perhaps Miss World America is a white supremacist organization and has seized the opportunity to get back one of its titles from a racial minority. It seems to me that Miss Zhu has a racial discrimination suit.
Miss Zhu’s pageant colleagues should rally around her and let Laurie DeJack know that if Miss Zhu goes, they go too.It will be interesting to see if women are as mutually supportive as feminists want them to be.
You’ve probably heard about the school board in Pennsylvania who sent a letter to parents with overdue lunch money tabs threatening to take their children away because of the debt. But did you hear that a local CEO offered to pay off every dime of the bills and the school board refused to take it?
They’d actually prefer to tear children away from their families.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is about the money. It’s not. It’s about power. It’s about humiliating and terrorizing poor families.
Dozens of families opened the most shocking letter of their lives last week when the Wyoming Valley West School District, one of the poorest districts in the state, attempted to collect overdue lunch money tabs by threatening to have their children removed from the home if they didn’t pony up immediately.
The letter was only sent to the “worst” offenders – meaning those whose children had a meal debt of $10 or more.
“Your child has been sent to school every day without money and without a breakfast and/or lunch,” the 200-word letter read. “This is a failure to provide your child with proper nutrition and you can be sent to Dependency Court for neglecting your child’s right to food. If you are taken to Dependency court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care.” (source)
The letter was signed by Joseph Muth, director of federal programs for the Wyoming Valley West School District. Joseph Mazur, the president of the district’s board of education, has defended the letter because “it worked.”
Mazur emphasized that despite some students not having enough money to afford breakfast and lunch, the school district still fed all the children.
“Every poor kid got a meal,” Mazur said. “If the Board of Directors was mean and cruel they’d just honestly say, ‘Stop the lunches,’ but we didn’t.” (source)
Mazur claimed that the school district’s $8 million budget was stretched thin and that they were desperate to claim the money owed by parents.
A philanthropic Pennsylvania businessman TRIED to step in.
If the school board is truly desperate, then why on earth would they turn down a businessman’s offer to pay the entire $22,000 debt?
Todd Carmichael, chief executive and co-founder of La Colombe Coffee in Philadelphia, says he grew up poor and knew what it felt like to be hungry. So Carmichael, in true voluntaryist spirit, offered to take care of the outstanding lunch money bills.
In a letter sent to papers in the Wilkes-Barre area on Monday, Carmichael said his offer was motivated in part because he received free meals as a child growing up near Spokane, Washington.
“I know what it means to be hungry,” Carmichael wrote. “I know what it means to feel shame for not being able to afford food.” (source)
But Joseph Mazur, who says the school district is cutting every possible cost to stay afloat, turned down the offer.
Why would a desperate school district turn down a check for 22,000?
Because Mazur believes “the money is owed by parents who can afford to pay.”…
Furthermore, his refusal to accept Mr. Carmichael’s offer tells me that this isn’t about the money, as Mazur has proclaimed. It’s about wielding power over the parents of these kids. And about making them ashamed….
In other words, by cutting worker hours, the Sanders campaign elected to provide fewer “services” in the form of campaign activities. In practice, this will likely mean fewer rallies, less travel, or fewer television ads.
Sanders reacted the same way any real world business man would react if he wanted to stay in business.
The Washington Postreported last week that some workers on the Bernie Sanders campaign for calling for a wage increase to a the equivalent of 15 dollars per hour. This, of course, is the hourly rate which Sanders has long pushed for in legislation and on the campaign trail.
But that’s more than what many Sanders employees make per hour.
Many campaign workers are salaried, so the problem lies in the fact that total campaign salaries, when calculated on a per-hour-worked basis, come out to less than $15 per hour. Many employees work around 60 hours per week — as is often typical for full-time workers on a presidential campaign.
For a staffer working 40 hours a week, [the typical campaign salary] comes out to about $17 an hour. But 40-hour workweeks on presidential campaigns are rare.
So, some Sanders employees have complained they aren’t earning a “living wage” and have demanded Sanders raise wages immediately. Recognizing the bad optics of the situation, Sanders apparently began looking for a way to raise the per-hour wage.
But how to do it?…
So what is Sanders’s solution?
Not a Raise in Terms of Total Income
According to the Register:
Sanders said the campaign will limit the number of hours staffers work to 42 or 43 each week to ensure they’re making the equivalent of $15 an hour.
It’s not really an increase in total earnings for workers, of course, although workers do now have time to work a second job. Workers won’t be getting any closer to that “living wage” they keep talking about, but by cutting hours for salaried workers, the campaign can claim it raised hourly wages. The move is a masterstroke of cynical public relations.
There are a couple of things we can learn from this.
First of all, we learn that Sanders is not willing to put his money where his mouth is. He’s not willing to use any additional portion of his personal wealth to supplement worker wages.
He is willing to cut back on campaign activities to raise the per-hour wage. In other words, by cutting worker hours, the Sanders campaign elected to provide fewer “services” in the form of campaign activities. In practice, this will likely mean fewer rallies, less travel, or fewer television ads.
The Long Term Effects
Ironically, in the longer term, this may nonetheless turn out to represent a very real pay cut for campaign workers by reducing their employment options moving forward…
The result will be concentration in the industry: smaller and less-capitalized firms will go out of business. Larger firms will gain even more market share. Ultimately, consumers will pay more as a small number of firms can then raise prices more easily. And workers will have fewer options among potential employers — and this will mean wage compression at all levels above the mandated minimum.
Thus, not only will a minimum wage hike mean fewer products and services offered per firm, it may also mean fewer firms providing products and services.
It’s debatable, of course, whether or not the Sanders campaign provides a “service” many people want. But by cutting back on total hours in order to pay higher hourly wages, the Sanders campaign is illustrating what private firms must do whenever government regulators and legislators raise costs: they must become less competitive.
The result is workers working less, firms offering fewer services, and smaller start-ups losing out to bigger competitors.
Unfortunately, Sanders is unlikely to learn anything from the experience.
Senior Google Engineer: “I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do.” Google’s algorithms are deliberate — are they politically biased? #GoogleExposed
Current Sr. Google Engineer Goes Public on Camera: Tech is “dangerous”
Brave insiders working in tech can contact Project Veritas at VeritasTips@projectveritas.com
So which is it? Did @sundarpichai tell the truth when he went before Congress? Another exec, Karan Bhatia told @MarshaBlackburn there were no “black lists” at Google/YouTube. Veritas exposed these black lists earlier this month. IS GOOGLE TELLING THE TRUTH UNDER OATH?
Meet @coppola_gregory: a current Google engineer who is blowing the whistle on political bias. FYI — Google testified before Congress and said there is no political bias at Google. Coppola says, “I’m just so sure that’s not true.” #GoogleExposed
Current Sr. Google Engineer Goes Public on Camera: Tech is “dangerous”
Brave insiders working in tech can contact Project Veritas at VeritasTips@projectveritas.com
*Current* *Senior* Google Engineer goes Public, *On Camera* “It’s a time to decide, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?” Good on @JamesOKeefeIII@Project_Veritas giving these whistleblowers a voice $GOOG$GOOGL
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Army Secretary Mark Esper was sworn in as U.S. secretary of defence on Tuesday, hours after being confirmed by the Senate in a strong bipartisan vote that ended the longest period by far the Pentagon had been without a permanent top official.
Esper was sworn in at the White House by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in a ceremony hosted by President Donald Trump and attended by a number of Republican lawmakers. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on a vote of 90-8 several hours earlier.
“That’s a vote that we’re not accustomed to, Mark. I have to say that, so congratulations,” Trump told Esper, a former professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
Esper, 55, a former soldier and lobbyist for weapons maker Raytheon Co <RTN.N>, received strong bipartisan support despite sharp questioning during his confirmation hearing by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren about his ties to Raytheon and his refusal to extend an ethics commitment he signed in 2017 to avoid decisions involving the company.
Warren, a 2020 presidential hopeful, was the only member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to voice opposition to Esper’s confirmation during the hearing.
Raytheon is the third-largest U.S. defence contractor…
I write a lot about how important it is for political dissidents to research and understand cognitive biases, the large number of well-documented logical glitches in the way human brains process information. I do this because the science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for more than a century, so if public domain psychology is aware of these glitches we can be absolutely certain that the propagandists are as well, and that they are exploiting those glitches currently.
If you don’t cultivate a healthy respect for just how advanced modern propaganda has become, you won’t be able to understand what the propagandists are doing when observing the behaviors of the political/media class, and you’ll almost certainly wind up being fooled by the propaganda machine in various ways yourself.
The fact that people think of themselves as rational creatures, but in reality have many large cognitive vulnerabilities which can and will be exploited to cause them to interpret data in an irrational way, is not some amusing-yet-inconsequential bit of trivia. It’s an absolutely crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding why the world is as messed up as it is, and in figuring out how to fix it. The immense political consequences of this reality extend into every facet of civilization.
For example, have you ever wondered why ordinary people you know in real life often harbor highly negative opinions about Julian Assange, seemingly to no benefit for themselves, even while he’s being viciously persecuted for his truthful publications by some of the most corrupt political forces on the planet? You’ve probably correctly concluded that it’s because they’re propagandized, but have you ever wondered why that propaganda works? Even on some of the more intelligent people you know?
The reason is partly because of a glitch in human cognition known as the just world hypothesis or just world fallacy, which causes us to assume that if bad things are happening to someone, it’s because that person deserves it. Blaming the victim is more psychologically comfortable than seeing that we live in an unjust world where we could very easily become victim ourselves someday, and we select for that comfort over rational analysis.
In the early 1960s a social psychologist named Melvin Lerner discovered that test subjects had a curious tendency to assign blame for an unfortunate event to the victims–even when said event couldn’t logically have been their fault–and to assign positive attributes to people who received good fortune–even if their fortune was due solely to random chance. Lerner theorized that people have an unconscious need to organize their perceptions under the fallacious premise that the world is basically just, where good things tend to happen to good people and bad things tend to happen to bad people. Nothing in a rational analysis of our world tells us that this assumption is in any way true, but tests by Lerner and subsequent social psychologists have backed up his theory that most of us tend to interpret events through the lens of this irrational assumption anyway.
Like other cognitive biases, this one fundamentally boils down to our annoying psychological tendency to select for cognitive ease over cognitive discomfort. It feels more psychologically comfortable to interpret new information in a way that confirms our preexisting opinions, so we get confirmation bias. It feels psychologically comfortable to assume something is true after hearing it repeated many times, so we get the illusory truth effect. It feels more psychologically comfortable to believe we live in a fair world where people get what they deserve than to believe we’re in a chaotic world where many of the most materially prosperous people are also the most depraved and sociopathic, and that we could be next in line to be victimized by them, so we get the just world fallacy.
When news first broke in November of last year that the Trump Justice Department was preparing to charge Julian Assange for 2010 publications by WikiLeaks, establishment Democrats suddenly began babbling about “karma”. These people weren’t Buddhists or Hindus, yet when the Trump administration (who they claim to oppose) began an aggressive assault on the free press (which they claim to support), they began reaching for eastern philosophical concepts which have no evidentiary basis whatsoever in order to justify it. Their irrational belief in a just world was psychologically more comfortable than going against their confirmation bias about the guy who spilled dirt on Queen Hillary, so they selected it. Not because it was more truthful, but because it was more comfortable.
You see this more and more often as facts in evidence make it abundantly clear that the Trump administration’s persecution of Assange pose the greatest threat to the free press in modern history, both among the rank-and-file citizenry and among the political/media class. Countless opinion segments and articles have flooded the mainstream media denying that Assange’s persecution poses a threat to press freedoms, on the basis that Assange is different from the mainstream press in some way.
This isn’t due solely to the fact that these establishment lackeys know they’ll never publish anything which inconveniences power like Assange did (many mainstream journalists sincerely believe that they hold power to account in some way); a lot of it is due to the fact that it’s much more psychologically comfortable to believe that Assange is being savagely persecuted because he deserves it. Believing that Assange is getting what’s coming to him is just plain more psychologically comfortable than believing you’re in an endlessly out-of-control world where bad things happen to good people, and that in fact you live in a world where your own government will torture and imprison a journalist for publishing embarrassing facts about it. And it’s certainly a lot more comfortable than believing you could be next.
The just world fallacy explains so much about what’s going on today. It explains why everyone scrambles to defend their government when it begins victimizing a sovereign nation for refusing to comply with the demands of the powerful. It explains why people have been so easily propagandized into believing that poverty is caused by the laziness of the poor rather than the exploitation of the rich. It explains why people are so quick to justify the censorship of a perceived political enemy on the internet. It explains why any time video footage of a controversial police shooting goes viral, the comments are always flooded with people saying the victim should have known better than to get down on the ground so slowly or reach for his wallet so quickly. It explains why attempts to discuss rape culture are so often bogged down by moronic comments about how its victims should behave. It explains why people justify mass government surveillance claiming that if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Some of these issues are more obvious to those on the left of the partisan divide, and some of them are more obvious to those on the right, but the impulse to create a false sense of safety in yourself is the exact same in all examples.
Even those who are wide awake to what’s going on in the world and don’t fall for any of the victim-blaming dynamics described above still often fall for a victim-blaming illusion of their own: the impulse to blame the propagandized masses for being propagandized, instead of blaming the propagandists. This one is just as deluded as any of the others, and it works for the same reason: it’s just plain more psychologically comfortable to believe that someone is being victimized by the system because of some flaw in the victim.
If we had a just and fair world, creating propaganda would be illegal along with murder, theft, fraud, and every other infraction on an individual’s personal sovereignty. To be clear, I don’t think that trying to make it illegal would work. I believe we need to evolve beyond the manipulations so they no longer affect us, but that requires us to see it as the serious offense that it is. If in the future we are to evolve to see it clearly, propaganda will elicit an instant and aggressive backlash from the collective against the propagandist. But right now it doesn’t, and it’s protected in part by people who believe that the crime of manipulation is outweighed by the crime of being trusting. Deliberately manipulating people for money, power or both is an attack on people’s psychological sovereignty, and until we see it as such then we will never turn our anger where it’s meant to go: on the perpetrators. If we can’t eradicate propaganda then we will never be able to see and understand what’s going on in the world clearly enough to fix it.
In reality, we live in a very unjust world. We live in a world where money is the only real valuing system, and money selects for ruthlessness. Money elevates those who will do what it takes to get ahead, and so money elevates sociopaths. No amount of muddle-headed magical thinking about “karma” is going to make that untrue. There is no grand arbiter in the sky selecting for goodness and badness. We must select good and badness. People must be held to account for their actions by those that observe that those actions are unjust. Great things happen to bad people, and awful things happen to good people, and when culture elevates greed and sociopathy that is only going to get more true until we put an end to it.
It is psychologically comfortable to believe that we live in a just world. It is much less psychologically comfortable to understand that we don’t, and that we never will unless we fight very hard for it. One is an illusion, the other is reality. A preference for reality over comfort is the primary factor which separates those who serve corrupt power from those who speak out against it.
________________
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon orPaypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
“People need to wake up. This radical bill is going to totally eliminate women’s and girls sports,”
THIS WILL AFFECT SPORTS!!!
Women’s sports will be decimated. Particularly singles sports like tennis.
I hope this becomes law. Maybe that will wake us up to what PC is destroying – our country. Maybe even those whose only news channel is ESPN will be able to figure out who is to blame.
What about transgender girls boys (this is confusing) on male sports? SEXIST LEGISLATION!
The Democratically controlled House of Representatives voted Friday 236-173 in favor of the Equality Act, which would require schools to include male athletes who identify as transgender girls on female sports teams.
Eight Republicans crossed party lines to vote for the bill, which had unanimous Democratic support.
The bill amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make “sexual orientation and gender identity” protected characteristics under federal anti-discrimination law.
Among other things, that would force public schools to expand female athletic teams to include biological males who identify as transgender girls.
Republican Florida Rep. Greg Steube introduced a last-minute amendment to the bill that would have preserved Title IX’s protections of female athletic teams, but Democrats rejected it.
Every House Democrat but one co-sponsored the legislation. The only Democrat who wasn’t a co-sponsor, Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, announced his support for the bill following pressure from left-wing activists.
“People need to wake up. This radical bill is going to totally eliminate women’s and girls sports,” Republican Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko warned in an op-ed Thursday…
And so, candidate Clinton, the DNC, and the mainstream media (forever quoting anonymous “current and former intelligence officials”) appear to have colluded…
On the third anniversary of the release by WikiLeaks of the DNC emails, Ray McGovern looks back at how the DNC diverted the damaging contents into a trumped up conspiracy blaming Russia with no evidence at all.
Three years ago Monday WikiLeaks published a trove of highly embarrassing emails that had been leaked from inside the Democratic National Committee. As has been the case with every leak revealed by WikiLeaks, the emails were authentic. These particular ones, however, could not have come at a worse time for top Democratic Party officials.
The emails made it unmistakably clear that the DNC had tipped the scales sharply against Democratic insurgent Bernie Sanders, giving him a snowball’s chance in hell for the nomination. The posting of the DNC emails is also widely seen as having harmed the the electoral prospects of Hillary Clinton, who could not escape responsibility completely, while a handful of the very top DNC officials were forced to immediately resign.
Relatively few Americans read the actual emails, their attention diverted to the incessant media-fostered question: Why Did the Russians Hack the DNC to Hurt Hillary? For the millions of once enthusiastic Democrats who favored Sanders, however, the disclosure that the nomination process had been fixed came as a bitter pill, leaving a sour taste in their mouths and a passive-aggressive reluctance to promote the candidacy of one they considered a usurper. Having had a huge stake in Bernie’s candidacy, they had little trouble seeing through the diversion of attention from the content of the emails.
Clinton Prevails
A mere four days after the WikiLeaks release, a well orchestrated Democratic Convention nominated Clinton, while many Sanders supporters loudly objected. Thus, she began her campaign under a cloud, and as more and more Americans learned of the fraud that oozed through the DNC email correspondence — including the rigging of the Democratic primaries — the cloud grew larger and darker.
On June 12, 2016, six weeks before the convention, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange had announced in an interview on British TV, “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication.”
Independent forensic investigations demonstrated two years ago that the DNC emails were not hacked over the Internet, but had been copied onto an external storage device — probably a thumb drive. Additional work over recent months has yielded more evidence that the intrusion into the DNC computers was a copy, not a hack, and that it took place on May 23 and 25, 2016.
The DNC almost certainly knew what had happened — not only that someone with physical access to DNC computers had copied thousands of emails, but also which ones they had copied, and thus how prejudicial to the Clinton campaign they would be when they saw the light of day…
In an unhampered market economy, entrepreneurs anticipate what we want and need and then use labor to turn land and natural resources into things that are most urgently needed: like houses, schools, hospitals, food, cars, and energy. Consumers respond by either buying or not buying what entrepreneurs have produced. The resulting profits and losses provide signals and incentives to the entrepreneurs in such a way as to encourage economizing behavior and discourage its opposite, waste.
To economize simply means to do the best you can with what you have. Since our limited set of available resources can be used in multiple ways, we have to make choices over how to use them such that we attain our most important goals and forgo less important goals. The inescapable logic of this fundamental fact of life applies just as much to land developers as it does to somebody perusing a menu at a restaurant.
There are a few built-in checks on what businesses do to nature and the environment. One is that entrepreneurs have an incentive to maintain whatever resource is making them money. Such a thing is dependent on time preference, but most would prefer $20 million over the course of 20 years to only $2 million in one year. Notably, lower rates of time preference, a characteristically Austrian prescription for economic growth and human flourishing, also leads to long-term care for the resources that generate wealth.
Environmentalists Shut Down Land Development
A recent case in the UK highlights the environmentalists’ opposition to human flourishing.
Barwood Land, a land development business, submitted plans to build houses, schools, and a medical center (things humans want and need) on the outskirts of York. They knew that the land was close to Askham Bog, a nature preserve protected by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. So they included a 125 meter wide band of buffer zone between any development and the adjacent bog, which would actually prevent the current encroachments into the bog through its northern boundary. According to their application:
Most notably, this includes a 125m wide Ecological Protection and Enhancement Zone (EPEZ) along the shared boundary with the SSSI, which separates the SSSI from both residential development and public open space and will prevent uncontrolled access into the SSSI which currently occurs along its northern edge.
In the illustration below, you can see Barwood Land’s plans include new housing and recreational areas, but also the buffer zone which extents even beyond their development plan. The new housing would certainly ameliorate what the Local Democracy Reporting Service (a BBC partner) has called a housing crisis in York. By my rough calculations, house prices in York have roughly quintupled UK inflation over the past 20 years.
What the above image doesn’t show is that a golf course already almost completely surrounds the rest of the bog. Also, the land in question is currently used for farming, which has its own environmental impacts. It isn’t clear to me how new development with a buffer zone is any worse than the road, golf course, and farmland that are currently adjacent to the protected land.
The plans, however, were rejected by the city council after Sir David Attenborough and the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust came out against it. According to Attenborough, who was “disappointed” with the development plans:
York is exceptionally fortunate to have such a wonderful place within its boundaries — why would anyone want to put that at risk?
The YWT said the bog contains “an incredible richness of plants.” Regarding the city council’s rejection, they said that they “couldn’t be happier with this outcome.”
Land Developers Care about What Consumers Care About
What the building plans show is that land developers are conscious of their consumers’ values for nature. This is another check on what businesses will do with nature in an unhampered market economy. Simply allowing land developers to do whatever they anticipate will be profitable doesn’t mean that the earth will be full of high-rise apartment buildings and dirty factories. The reason is because profit-maximizing choices must be consumer-satisfying choices, and many consumers value undisturbed, undeveloped nature.
The conclusion is that we get exactly as much nature as we want. It’s true that people like Sir David Attenborough will be “disappointed” sometimes, but he would still have a say by participating in the market economy and peacefully encouraging others to value the same things he values. Wouldn’t this be a better scenario than some loud environmentalists having the ear of city councils with the authority to prevent land developers from anticipating and responding to everybody’s preferences over the use of land?
The most recent census says that York has a population of about 200,000. This article says that David Attenborough and the YWT gathered 7,600 people to “object to the proposals.” It’s unclear if those 7,600 people are from York, but even if they are, what is preventing them from pooling their money together to purchase the land and let it sit unused? Shouldn’t environmentalists put their money where their mouths are?
Project Veritas 
Meet 
“It’s a time to decide, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?” Good on 
James O’Keefe 
