According to this Reuters piece, the collective carbon footprint of the international climate change hypocrites gathered in Copenhagen is the “biggest ever” for a climate change summit.

Over roughly 12 days, including air travel (with much of that on private jet) those gathered in Copenhagen will “create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide…the same amount produced each year by 2,300 americans or 6,600 Ethiopians.”

So just how the heck can one  gathering of hypocrites throw off such an enormous carbon footprint?  Easy, as this recent piece from the London Telegraph lays out, “Copenhagen climate summit:  1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.”

So speaking as a guy who lives in a 900 square foot house and flies on a commercial jetliner at most a couple times a year, the international political class of hypocrites gathered in Copenhagen, on someone else’s dime as usual, can collectively kiss my ass.

Today the Denver Post published an in house editorial calling for more collectivist, nanny-state (read coercive) action towards addressing obesity and diabetes in the United States.  One of the more interesting, and telling parts of the piece, titled “We all pay the price for obesity, diabetes,” is a quote from a professor of nutrition, who really should know better:

“Many Americans have access to an abundance of relatively inexpensive, highly palatable food, and owing to technological advancements, physical activity has been engineered out of the lifestyles of many Americans,” says Chris Melby, a professor and department head at Colorado State University’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition. “To prevent obesity, one must often swim upstream against the norms of our current society.”

Note the negative context towards both an abundant food supply and the advance of technology.

So allow me to restate what the good professor has to say, but with the accuracy and positive context this deserves:

Thanks to our amazing free-market capitalism driven food production and distribution system, an overwhelming majority of Americans have ready and easy access to an abundance of relatively inexpensive and highly palatable food.  Thus, in the U.S., along with the rest of the developed world, we have solved one of human kinds’ greatest challenges:  Starvation.  Further, due to astonishing technological advancements (again, thanks to free-market capitalism), more people than ever before are able to  earn a living that does not require  daily, back-breaking labor and effort just to survive.  Because of these historically significant achievements, “ordinary” Americans  (or those who are not members of the political class) get to live a lifestyle that at one time was reserved only to nobility, royalty and the politically favored.

Not a terribly bad problem to have,  eh?

Actually published back in October in the Denver Huffington Post….my piece on the ongoing fiscal disaster that is the drug war in Colorado…that policy place where fiscal conservatives and  “limited government” Republicans go to abandon their principles.

Colorado lawmakers’ long-running devotion to the War on Drugs has helped push state prison spending to unsustainable levels. In the meantime, illicit drugs remain readily available throughout the state. This year, the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice (CCJJ) has broken down into several sub-groups including a Drug Policy Task Force, to take a hard look at the state’s drug laws and sentencing policies.

This is an excellent opportunity for fiscal conservatives to take the lead in bringing some much needed scrutiny and restraint to corrections spending in Colorado.

In 1992, Colorado lawmakers surrendered their prerogative to write the state’s criminal law and enacted the Uniform Controlled Substances Act, written by drug war bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and designed to bring state drug laws in to conformity with federal drug laws. The act, among many other things, created numerous new drug offenses, and sentencing enhancements for those offenses.

And the result?

Over the last several decades, the percentage of inmates whose most serious sentencing offense is a drug offense has quadrupled to around 20 percent of Colorado’s prison population. Drug offenders are by far the single largest category of new admissions to Colorado prisons at around 23 percent of annual admissions.

There are more drug offenders in Colorado prisons today than the entire prison population 25 years ago when the state’s inmate population was around 3,500.

Given this, you might think a drug-free Colorado is close at hand. You would be wrong.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2008 State Fact Sheet for Colorado notes that heroin is not only “available in the major metropolitan areas of Colorado,” but “various law enforcement and treatment indicators suggest that heroin use and availability may be on the rise in Colorado.” As for cocaine, “Enforcement activities reflect a steady supply of cocaine coming into and through Colorado.”

Crack cocaine is “available in the larger metropolitan areas of Colorado, generally in street level amounts.” And marijuana, according to DEA, “is available throughout Colorado.”

One of the main policy goals driving the mass incarceration of drug offenders — the supply-side strategy of disrupting illicit drug availability — is a long-running failure.

It costs around $31,000 per year to keep someone in prison. A June 30, 2008 snapshot of the state’s prison population showed just under 4,500 drug offenders. So Colorado’s failed attempt to incarcerate away the drug issue costs taxpayers roughly $140 million per year just for prison beds.

Colorado’s often irrational drug policies are a major driving force behind decades of run-away prison spending that has pushed Colorado’s corrections budget from less than 3 percent to almost 9 percent of general fund spending, or from around $97 million to over $675 million of general fund appropriation. For years, budget hawks in the legislature have turned a blind eye to one of the most extreme spending sprees in state history. It is well past time to bring prison spending under the same annual fiscal scrutiny as the rest of the budget.

Overuse of criminal sanctions for drug offenses also inflicts huge indirect economic costs on the state, because drug offenders who are given a felony conviction (note that in Colorado, simply being in possession of an amount of illegal drugs weighing less than an American nickel is a felony crime) will have a much harder time getting jobs and becoming productive, tax-paying citizens in the future.

A core problem is the irrationality of treating drug offenses like violent and property crimes.

For instance, incarcerate a serial burglar or strong-arm robber and not only is a string of crimes solved, but untold numbers of future crimes are prevented (at least for as long as that criminal is incarcerated).

But the imprisonment of one drug dealer (or even an entire network) only temporarily disrupts the flow of illegal drugs. As soon as one supplier is gone, another quickly moves in to take his place. Basic economic laws of supply and demand say that as long as there is a demand for a product, a market will make that product available.

Using incarceration to try and halt the availability of drugs can only be achieved by imprisoning every drug user and addict (who constitute the majority of the small-time dealers) and everyone willing to break the law in return for financial reward (dealers in the upper levels of the drug world).

The cost to taxpayers of Colorado’s failed experiment in the mass incarceration of drug offenders has simply become unsustainable. Fiscal conservatives, both Republican and Democrat, should be urging the CCJJ to present legislative recommendations to significantly pare back the War on Drugs in Colorado.

City planners are seeking to slam the brakes on duplex development in the Berkeley neighborhood of northwest Denver by simply downzoning the whole area. But the fact is that duplexes play an important role in both the ongoing demographic shift from the suburbs back into the city, and in the organic development of Berkeley into an ever more dynamic, walkable and desirable neighborhood.

In June, the first draft of Denver’s new zoning code was introduced to the tax-paying public. Under the draft code, Berkeley–along with a significant portion of the rest of northwest Denver–is to be re-zoned from R-2 (which depending on lot size, allows for multi-family construction) to an “Urban” district neighborhood with a “Single Unit” designation.

“In the future, only single-unit structures will be allowed in any Single-Unit zone district after the new code is adopted” wrote Denver City Councilman Rick Garcia, commenting on the draft code in the North Denver News.

But it’s not as though the entire Berkeley neighborhood is in danger of being bulldozed for duplex development. The ability to build and sell duplexes profitably is constrained already by lot size requirements and land prices.

Many of the houses that have been torn down to make way for duplex construction have either been uninhabitable, or simply outlived their useful life. The new, large and often quite nice duplexes built in their place simply satisfy the lifestyle choices of fairly affluent contemporary home buyers who want to live in a Denver urban core neighborhood, but demand the square footage and amenities (master suite, home office, etc.) that before were mostly available only in suburban neighborhoods.

Some complaints about duplexes are valid; that they’re too big, and block out the potential solar access of adjacent houses. Fair enough, but those same complaints are also often made about new single family construction. Such issues can be mitigated with some basic design standards. City planners claim to already be working on such standards for single family building, so why not simply include some design standards for duplexes?

More importantly, duplex development has helped pave the way for developers to test the waters of new single family construction in Berkeley. For instance, developer Bruce Prior has recently been building (and selling) highly attractive Craftsman style single family homes on large lots in Berkeley. If this movement proves to make economic sense, we should see a market-driven–rather than a government mandated–move away from duplexes and towards new single family construction.

The proposed blanket downzoning of Berkeley is an arbitrary ban on housing choice that is at odds with the vision for the Tennyson Street Corridor (Tennyson Street between 38th and 46th avenues) as Berkeley’s “pedestrian friendly” business district.

Among other things, “pedestrian friendly” development assumes that people who live within walking distance of Tennyson will help support that development. But downzoning puts up artificial barriers to sustainable growth, meaning that as Tennyson Street seeks to continue its development, the number of neighbors within walking distance will remain roughly the same.

“The proposed zoning moves in the direction of freeze-drying our neighborhoods, as if they are already the best that they can be.” says Denver architect Michael Knorr. “This only stifles new ideas and discourages monetary investment. It will limit the number and diversity of people attracted to our redeveloping neighborhoods,” continues Knorr.

Put another way, simply downzoning Berkeley and most of the rest of northwest Denver flies in the face of the sustainable and contextual development that the designers of the new zoning code claim to want to encourage. The new code should empower property owners at least as much as it empowers planners, regulators and politicians. We aren’t there yet.

The website for the new zoning code is www.newcodedenver.org. It is interactive, and public comment is being taken for the next draft of the code.

Under the current Denver zoning code, I could scrape off my little house in the Berkeley neighborhood of northwest Denver and build a duplex on my double lot (6,250 square feet).  But I can’t build a detached accessory dwelling unit (granny flat or carriage house) on the back of my property.   Under the proposed new Denver zoning code, I can’t do either.   In other words, the proposed zoning code is even more hostile to property rights than the existing one.

From the July 15 Denver Daily News, my piece on why I should be able to build an accessory dwelling unit on my property.

Under Denver’s current clunky, antiquated and bureaucrat-friendly zoning code, the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs, also know as granny flats or carriage houses) is not allowed in Denver neighborhoods.

But in June, and with remarkably little media attention, city planners introduced the first draft of Denver’s new zoning code that quite smartly allows ADUs again, but only in certain parts of Denver.

One big problem though: As currently written, the new code doesn’t allow ADUs in my part of town, the Berkeley neighborhood in northwest Denver.

This is a big mistake that needs to be remedied.

Under the draft code, Berkeley — along with a significant portion of the rest of northwest Denver — is being re-zoned from R-2 (which, depending on lot size, allows for multi-family construction) to an “Urban Single Unit” neighborhood designation that allows single family detached housing only. In other words, no more duplexes, and more significantly, no granny flats allowed.

But that the new zoning coded denies the option of ADUs to Berkeley residents, as well as other areas of Denver, defies logic and flies in the face of the sustainable and contextual development that the new zoning code is supposed to be encouraging.

For example, my wife and I could only afford to live in Berkeley by buying an 800 square foot “fixer-upper” with no garage and no closet space (in other words, a house that has outlived its useful life) that happens to sit on a large (double) lot. We love it here. According to WalkScore.com, my little Berkeley shack has a “walk score” of 92 (probably a bit inflated, but still great), making it a “walkers’ paradise.” There are numerous other properties like ours scattered throughout Berkeley. Since we can’t (yet) afford to tear down our house and build something that better suits our tastes and lifestyle, being able to build an accessory dwelling unit that could be used as a home office or extra living space, or a garage with a studio on top, would be an excellent and economical way to add both square footage and value to our property.

John Norquist, president of the Congress for the New Urbanism (www.cnu.org), which promotes “walkable, neighborhood-based development as an alternative to sprawl,” was surprised to learn that the draft Denver code denies ADUs in Berkeley and in other Denver neighborhoods. By allowing ADUs, “Denver can grow gracefully, as an American you should be able to put a small house on your lot so a relative or caretaker can live there,” said Norquist.

Moreover, denying ADUs in Berkeley is at odds with the ongoing development of the Tennyson Street Corridor (Tennyson Street between 38th and 46th avenues) as Berkeley’s “pedestrian friendly” business district. Among other things, “pedestrian friendly” development requires that people who live within walking distance of Tennyson Street (for the sake of argument, lets say five or six blocks on either side) will actually be among the pedestrians who support the Tennyson Street businesses. Yet the re-zoning of Berkeley puts up artificial barriers that ensure the density of the neighborhood never really increases, despite market demands for housing choices. Meaning that as Tennyson Street seeks to continue its development, the number of neighbors within walking distance available to support that development will remain roughly the same.

Walkable communities require market-driven density to flourish, and accessory dwelling units can help achieve just that. Or as Norquist put it, ADUs allow the neighborhood to “have more people without actually feeling like a denser neighborhood.”

Through a combination of changing demographics, entrepreneurial efforts and free-market dynamics, the Berkeley neighborhood has been developing into an ever-more vibrant, walkable and desirable area. But by first down-zoning Berkeley to single family only, then denying ADUs to the area, Denver’s new zoning code seeks to slam the door on housing choice in Berkeley, thus diminishing the future prospects for sustainable development in the neighborhood.

The Web site for the new zoning code is www.newcodedenver.org. It is interactive, and public comment is being taken for the next draft of the code.

Don’t let city planners and politicians deny you the ability and freedom to develop your property in a way that suits your own tastes and lifestyle choices, while adding value to both your own property and the neighborhood at large. The new code should empower property owners at least as much as it empowers city bureaucrats.

A common theme among communist regimes, and authoritarian regimes in general, is intense paranoia…often about the most absurd things.  And “state-run” media makes exercising that paranoia all the more efficient.  From the editorial board at the Rocky Mountain News comes this too funny tale of paranoid censorship in Beijing:

Employees of China’s national TV network, celebrating the lunar new year with illegal fireworks, managed to lob a skyrocket onto the roof of a nearly complete ultramodern hotel adjoining their own headquarters building.

The resulting fire gutted the 44-story structure, leaving a charred, smoking shell looming over the Beijing skyline. Despite their complicity in the blaze, you would think this would be a real break for China TV’s reporters: How great is it to be able to cover one of the biggest stories of the year simply by looking out your office window?

But China’s ever alert propaganda office immediately issued a directive: “No photos, no videos, no in-depth reports.” Fortunately, technology, the bane of the censors’ existence, prevailed, and amateur photos and videos were posted on the Internet faster than the authorities could block them.

Still, pity the poor official tour guide who is required to respond to a tourist’s question about a 44-story fire-blackened hulk in central Beijing with, “Building? What building?”

I have a piece in today’s Colorado Daily newspaper on how President Obama can change U.S. policy toward Taiwan for the better…without having to commit thousands of U.S troops or billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to either regime change or nation building.

Here is the piece, re-printed in its entirety:

For 30 years, the U.S. has maintained an “unofficial” relationship with Taiwan.

And while this outdated policy acquiesces nicely to communist China’s absurd (and equally outdated) claim of sovereignty over democratic Taiwan, it also badly undermines the American tradition of supporting democracy around the globe.

President Barack Obama could begin undoing this backward policy and send a significant foreign policy message by simply instructing his State Department to issue new guidelines lifting travel restrictions on Taiwanese officials to the U.S. and allowing direct contact between Washington and Taipei.

In fact, Mr. Obama suggested this during the campaign.

In March 2008, Taiwan held a presidential election. Ma Ying-Jeou of the Nationalist Party defeated the Democratic Progressive Party candidate. It was Taiwan’s second peaceful transfer of party power through democratic elections.

Commenting on the election, then-candidate Obama stated that the U.S. should respond by “rebuilding a relationship of trust and support” with democratic Taiwan. “The U.S. should reopen blocked channels of communication with Taiwan officials,” Obama said.

What is President Obama waiting for?

The State Department issued its first backwards set of Taiwan guidelines in 1979, when the U.S. ended diplomatic relations with Taipei in order to recognize the communist dictatorship in Beijing.

Since then, Taiwan has transformed itself from an authoritarian regime (much like China remains today) and into a vibrant representative democracy with a market economy — precisely the kind of country whose representatives should be able to not only communicate directly with their counterparts in Washington, D.C., but who also should be welcomed into the United States for official visits.

The Bush administration continued undermining American support for democracy abroad by expanding and re-issuing the backward guidelines in 2008.

For instance, high-level Taiwanese officials, including the democratically elected president of Taiwan, are barred from visiting Washington. On the other hand, the unelected leader of China’s thuggish communist party has been welcomed into the White House.

Another rule precludes U.S. embassy personnel from accepting invitations to “official” Taiwan-hosted functions, or functions held at “Taiwan’s official premises” and vice versa.

In a particularly bizarre ban on communication, U.S. officials are not allowed to communicate directly with their counterparts in Taiwan, but rather must send letters to each other through a third party.

As the Taipei Times newspaper describes, “Even personal thank you notes must be written on plain paper and put in a plain envelope to disguise the sender’s official identity.”

All of this, and more, just to appease the Chinese communists in Beijing.

President Obama could change this — without having to commit thousands of American troops, or billions of U.S. tax dollars, to either regime change or nation building.

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Obama noted that “we cannot meet 21st century challenges with a 20th century bureaucracy.”

If this is so, how can we meet 21st century foreign policy challenges while tied to a 20th century Taiwan policy that contradicts everything the U.S. is supposed to stand for?

U.S. Congressman John Linder, a Republican from Georgia, has introduced House Concurrent Resolution 18 (HCR 18) calling for diplomatic recognition of Taiwan by the U.S., and an end to America’s backwards “one China” policy.

Concurrent  resolution are not submitted to the president, and lack the force of law.  Rather they are intended to express the sentiments of the Congress in an official way towards a particular issue.

One of Taiwan’s biggest supporters in the U.S. Congress, Tom Tancredo from Colorado, retired last year.  He had introduced several similar resolutions in the past, all of which of course failed…China appeasment runs deeep in the U.S. Congress.   It is good to see Representative Linder keeping the issue alive.

The Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) offers a link to ask your member of Congress to support HCR 18 here.

Read all about it in the Tapei Times.

I recently watched the film “The Lives of Others.”   The German language film (with sub-titles) shows life in the mid-1980s in the German Democractic Republic (GDR, or as it was commonly known, East Germany), an authoritarian communist regime that fell almost twenty years ago, along with the Berlin Wall.  The film features the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police force.  It was a time and a place where the slightest criticism of the regime, the merest hint of disloyalty, might earn you a visit from Stasi thugs, a round of  interrogation and torture and maybe some time in prison or a psychiatric hospital.  It was a time and a place where a lunatic fringe of paranoid bullies ruled a nation.

The GDR may be gone, but we still have the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

From the Associated Press on Christmas day:

Authorities in Tibet have detained 59 people accused of disseminating rumors aimed at inciting ethnic tension and have cracked down on illegal downloads of “reactionary music” online, Chinese state media reported Thursday.Law enforcement officers have found 48 cases of “rumor spreading” since March, when anti-government riots rocked the Tibetan capital Lhasa, a report by the China Tibet News said, citing a local public security official.

Xin Yuanming, deputy chief of the Lhasa public security bureau, said those being investigated were instigated by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, according to the report. It did not name those detained nor give other details.

The rumors posed a threat to public security by fanning ethnic hatred and damaging the image of China’s ruling Communist Party, the report said.

Arrested for spreading rumors that might damge the image of the communist regime…the old GDR and its Stasi would be proud.

So has the United States Postal Service decided that Taiwan is just another captive province in Communist China’s empire? And if so, does this mean the post office is now setting U.S. foreign policy?

On his Taiwan focused blog, The View From Taiwan, Michael Turton has a great post (pics included) on the United States Postal Service’s apparent practice of stamping packages addressed to Taiwan with “Taiwan, Province of China.”

Turton’s post includes lots of details, possible conclusions and good questions regarding this practice, so check it out. Turton concludes:

Let me add this simple fact: the policy of the US government is, and has been for the last five decades, that the status of Taiwan is undetermined. As a government entity, USPS should not be flouting official policy.

keep looking »

Recently Written

• Irony meets hypocrisy in Copenhagen
• Abundance of food a blessing, unless you’re a collectivist
• Colorado’s drug war addiction a fiscal disaster
• Downzoning northwest Denver is contrary to sustainable development goals
• Why Denver’s new zoning code should allow accessory dwelling units (granny flats)
• More Communist Paranoia From Beijing
• How President Obama can show support for Taiwan
• Taiwan supporters in U.S. Congress alive and kicking
• Communist Chinese Authoritarianism at its Paranoid Worst.
• Is The U.S. Postal Service Practicing Beijing Appeasment?

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