9,207:1

I have an inordinate fear of leaving my bicycle unattended for any period of time. I don't even think of turning my head and having it out of view for even a moment, because I've heard a dozen stories of people who've lost their bikes while leaving them for a minute or two...like going into the Qwik Mart for a King Cobra. But you know, I don't have the same concern over my car(s). They are always parked outside, never in the garage, unlike all my neighbors...and I don't set their alarms.

Car alarms suck. They really suck. In my estimation, there are nine thousand, two hundred and seven false alarms for every real alarm. While camping at Lake Camanche last weekend I must've heard a half dozen alarms go off each night I was there.

Tell me. What are the odds that some idiot willingly pays to enter the Camanche campground, twenty miles from the nearest city, to steal a car at 2:00 AM from campers in their tents twenty feet away?

No, the real idiots are the people who set these fucking alarms in the first place, and while they never believe they'll be stupid enough to set them off unintentionally, they do. By the dozens. By doing so, they contribute to the din of superfluous noise technology brings us, like beeping respirators in hospital rooms, cell phone interruptions during presentations, the "clicking" of each character entered into a text message, an incessantly beeping fire annunciator, on and on and on and on and on.

Twenty seven years ago, when car alarms first entered the market, you'd hear one go off in a parking lot at the mall and you'd actually bother to look around, to scan the surroundings, to possibly see some "action." "Hey, a car's being stolen! Gotta be on the look out! I might get a description of the perp and I'll contribute to his arrest! I might get a heroes reward!"

Today, mall security guards won't even look over their shoulders if an alarm goes off because they know it's just another false alarm. Just another false alarm. Stack it up alongside the six hundred thousand other times he's heard the same thing. Today any one of us can hum the classic 6-tone alarm sequence, knowing what's coming next because you've also heard it six hundred thousand times:

Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh-Deugh Duuuuuuuu-Eeeeeeeee Duuuuuuuuu-Eeeeeeeeeee Duuuuuuuu-Eeeeeeeee Duuuuuuuuu-Eeeeeeeeeee Dooooooooooooooooooeeeep Doooooooooooooooooeeeep Ant-Ant-Ant-Ant-Ant-Ant-Ant-Ant Weeeooo Weeeooo Weeeooo Weeeooo Weeeooo Weeeooo Weeeooo Weeeooo

And don't you feel special, walking away from your vehicle amongst other people, and getting to make that Wah-Wah sound from your remote, letting you and everyone around you know that you just armed your car alarm? Doesn't that make you feel good? And don't you like to do it with some flair? Like really throwing your arm at the car, or a behind-the-back shot, or under the legs? Yes?

Yes. Then, say, you'll set it while you're at the California State Fair, where you set your alarm in the parking lot and where you won't be anywhere near it for the next several hours and if someone attempts to steal it he knows that no one's gonna give a shit, no one's gonna look, and everyone around will just assume he's just another stupid car owner who can't figure out how to disarm his alarm and indeed might even help the guy stealing the car figure out how to turn it off. I know I would. If I were parked next to someone who (unbeknowst to me) was stealing a car and I had to listen to that racket you're damn right I'd help him disarm the thing.

Car alarms. Just another item where we easily see the diminishing returns of technology.

Newston

The Sacramento area is readying itself for another 100,000 housal units by 2030, through the development of three large swaths of land to the east -- New Brighton, Newbridge, and Cordova Hills.

These planned developments are all but certain to be approved shortly by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors. Certain, because sprawl based moneyed interests have always held sway and always will. The regional economy is based chiefly on sprawl, from the aggregate miners to the baseboard installers to the re-fi lenders. If we didn't continue to approve sprawl this region would simply fall apart, for we have no other economic model with which to stand on.

With this approval we can be assured of three things: the new developments will not be self-sufficient; regional transit options will be completely ignored; and every one of them will look just like every other one built in the past forty years save for their newness, which will attract middle class money to occupy them, fleeing the earlier built run-down suburban slums of Elk Grove, Natomas, and Rancho Cordova, slums which they will inevitably become.

You also might also add a fourth item -- that a handful of landowners/developers get insanely wealthy in the process -- but this is the least of my concerns. This will happen regardless; it really doesn't concern me whatsoever. Just like our national obsession with CEO pay/compensation, this is just a distraction to the real issues. The continuation of sprawl is the real issue, that we continue to build places not worth living in, places not worth caring about. Newbridge will, after fifteen years, become just another suburban shithole, wholly car dependent, overgrown with incomplete and uncared for vegetation, occupied by another cadre of mortgaged-to-the-balls homehowners, homeowners in name only, while the new "community" of Newston will be approved in the 2030 plan, another fifteen miles distant, ready to lure those with means ever further away.

Newston, New Bridge -- the names mean nothing. These will become just another set of suburban losses by 2070, just like the myriad places we already have that are worthless...worth less each passing day.

Borrowed Time

I am following this public pension fiasco emanating from Southern California, where the City of Bell has snuck in an $787,637 salary for its City Manager. He graciously "stepped down" Friday, but with CALPERS' fantastic arrangement of basing retirement pensions on the highest annual salary and assuming he lives as long as our actuarial tables say he'll live, he'll garner another $600,000 per year, or $20 million before leaving this third stone.

What's interesting to me is that this so-called economic slowdown has certainly taken its time reaching the public sector, hasn't it. Nowadays we're getting word of school janitors, mental health service providers, city mayors, state geologists, and social services directors coming under fire after a full two years of recession...all the while water districts, city governments, county governments, state governments, and the federal government are all drowning in borrowed monies.

Add another $20,000,000 to fund Bell's City Manager's retirement.

I'm covered under CALPERS, working for a municipal electric utility. Truthfully, it's a total racket, and I live under no illusion that this will be funded upon my retirement because I'm hardly the only one to which these "promises have been made." I fall under this 2@55 scheme, where I supposedly get an annual pension of 2% of my highest annual salary for every year I work, upon reaching retirement age 55. If my retirement date were today, that'd be about $40,000...in addition to whatever I've already managed to throw into my 401(k), 457, my own self-directed IRA, social security, and my WAPA federal retirement.

That, sir, is a gross amount, but not half as gross as the sorts of benefits conferred upon our baby boomer generation, all of whom needed to only work half as long to receive the same benefits...particularly medical benefits which for the past decade have risen at a double digit pace and which will rise at a double digit pace for decades more.

These sorts of public pensions are completely and totally unsustainable and are a direct, direct! cause for why cities and municipalities are drowning in debt, and man, if we haven't yet taken any real action at curbing these benefits. CALPERS is cheerily assuming a future 8% rate of return on their investments ad infinitium going forward to fund all this -- and if it ain't there, well guess what ratepayers and taxpayers!

I am one of the doomier types, always hoping thinking how things are going to get worse. I suppose that's a prudent thing to do. I don't pin my future economic hopes on a pension that may well be burned at the stake in the coming years, or pin my hopes on the value of my housal unit going up 20% per annum ad infinitium while I sustain my lifestyle through borrowed equity. Truthfully, the City of Bell did shit just like this. So has the State of California. I believe that the last casualty in this mild economy will be the public pensions of public employees. We'll soon find significant outsourcing of these jobs to one of the six people willing to work for every job available.

Awash In Oil

In what are ostensibly low-energy intensive affairs (running, bicycling, and kayaking), my participation in yesterday's Eppie's Great Race was anything but -- my triathlon was awash in fossil fuels.

I figure for my three + hours during the race I burned an estimated 2,170 calories...but we had to drive to the start point the night before to pick up the race packet, drive to check out where to drop off the bike and kayak, drive home, drive back in the morning to drop off the stuff, drive again to pick it up, and drive home...in a truck. We probably burned seven gallons of gas. At 31,000 calories per gallon, the truck burned 217,000 fossil fuel calories -- one hundred times as many as I did.

I lied a little about that 2,170 calorie figure; I didn't really burn that much...it just fit well with one hundredth of what my truck burned. But my point is still valid.

In any event, multiply this by the 2,100 participants, by the number of these sorts of events held around the nation, and the recreational use of oil is staggering.

While I attempt to reduce my overall energy consumption, I really haven't made any strides in reducing my recreational use of energy. I still burn as much as ever flying to Europe for holiday, driving to the bay area for concerts, driving to Oregon or Colorado to visit relatives, or running a triathlon. Here on my monologues I decry the very specific use of energy for commuting and our living arrangements that mandate automobile use...but as it applies to my own use to recreate, I burn as much as I damn well please. That certainly seems highly hypocritical, yes?

It's a paradox that's easy to rectify. Just don't go anywhere or do anything...or do them less often; but that's not about to happen. It is for this reason that I and the remaining three hundred million of us will continue to import ever larger percentages of foreign oil until there isn't any left to import, and until there isn't any left to domestically develop.

The difference with recreation use is that a rising price signal will curtail this use first, but we'll have no option but to continue to shuttle ourselves into and out of our Elk Grovian suburban bunkers. Our living arrangement mandates imported oil, period, no matter how much we might think we're gonna offset it with batterized Ford trucks, windmills in every backyard and algae-based diesel burning farm equipment growing ever larger amounts of corn and soybeans. It is for this reason I still think I've got an argument. If we didn't build out Elk Grove into such an automobile dominated shithole our residents might be able to recreate somewhat more often without having to work twelve years of their lives just to pay for their cars and all the energy used to get them around.

I will continue to recreationally use oil for as long as I live, as my costs associated with it are offset by my savings in not using as much oil to power the other areas of my life, and more importantly, my own overall energy use is still far below the U.S. average.

That's good enough for me.

And Drive Only

A quote from J.M. Greer in The Long Descent: If USAnians used only as much energy as the average European, we'd be an energy exporter, not an importer.

Yesterday I recorded stage 7 of the Tour de France and every time I watch that bike race I have to stand in awe of the towns and cities in Belgium, in Holland, in France. The way they are laid out, with urban cores usually rising more than one story, with defined demarcations between their urban limits and rural areas -- these are the hallmarks of living arrangements that support lowered energy use. A European, generally, can find her way to the store, to work, to her sewing club, and back home again both with relative ease and without ever having swung open a car door.

It goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway) that an Elk Grovian can't possibly do any of those things without having swung open their own car door...multiple times.

We must be different. We must be special. We must have the entitlement to use as much energy as we see fit, because we are doing it, we've always done it, and we [clearly] intend to continue to do it for the foreseeable future. I would suggest that because we built our cities hundreds or sometimes thousands of years after the first Europeans laid out their cities, we've only ever known energy prosperity, and built our cities accordingly.

And I would add that energy intensive living arrangements might be perfectly acceptable if we had no concerns over energy, water, and other natural resource availability. Indeed, we are living as if we had no concerns.

I see this every day. There isn't a single Elk Grovian who considers her energy use in the commissioning of her daily activities. This Sunday morning there's assuredly a steady stream of motor vehicles to and from the donut shop at Laguna and Franklin. Granted, those who patronize the donut shop generally aren't the same types who would walk or bike, but not a single one of these people even gave it a second thought. Drive. And drive only. And who would really want to be walking back two miles with an unwieldy box of a dozen maple bars? No one I know...including me.

But these donut patrons don't consider preparing their own food in the morning an option, either, and if not donuts, then processed food prepared earlier in the year by others. I'm simply saying that not a single consideration towards energy use is ever made. Multiply this by three hundred million, thirty times a day. It's not hard to understand that if we collectively had the option to choose the less energy intensive solutions we might be energy neutral.

But we don't have those options. We've imprinted profligate energy use into every aspect of our lives and if it's not imported oil to power our cars it'll be coal fired electricity, if it's not processed foods then it'll be notional imported foods. We will never willingly build cities that aren't car dependent. This is the reality that we live in. I believe we would rather destroy ourselves than change, and in some respects we are already seeing this through oiled pelicans and mountains of unpayable debt.

It goes well beyond simple European fascination with bicycles and the Tour de France. It is a fundamentally different approach to how our different societies view natural resources.

Leaves And Volts

In preparing for next week's Eppie's Great Race I've taken the bicycle most days to work and haven't carpooled with the neighbors. Indeed, yesterday was the first time in three weeks, during which time they've undergone a schedule change to get their kids to daycare/school.

We're in west Elk Grove, where their new plan is to drive southwest towards I-5, drop off one kid, then head east along Whitelock, past Franklin High School, then further south to drop off the second kid, then start the trek (now some seventeen miles distant) north along Highway 99 to work. They will be leaving 30 minutes earlier, starting Monday, to get to work on time. I think I'll just stick with the e-Tran #52 from now on; I've used it many times before but now it will be my primary option.

What I didn't realize was just how much of an automobile sewer the 'new' subdivision tracts of Quail Ridge (where there's no quail, and no ridge) and Bilby Meadows (where there's no meadow) are. Damn. These 'new' subdivisions in this part of Elk Grove are total automobile dominated suburban wastelands, but, as it is, are the most desirable places to live in Elk Grove because the trees haven't yet leafed out, the housal unit exterior paint hasn't yet been discolored from the patina of automotive emissions, the schools are shiny and new with no hint of graffiti or vandalism, the sod in the parks are still homogeneous, no Crab or Dallis grass infestations...that is, the houses look like they've just emerged from the autoclave, sterilized; in other words, they are idyllic and beautiful places to live.

They are. So long as you don't mind the mandatory ownership of the 2.3 vehicles needed to get yourself in and out of Shangri La, so long as you don't mind having to compete with the 12,000 other Shangri La'ians who are also trying to get in and out of there, so long as you just live and don't mind playing, working, and consuming elsewhere, and so long as you don't mind having to deal with the thru-commuting of a west Elk Grovian family driven by a speeding impatient man trying to shuttle his kids from one side of this suburb to another.

My neighbors were 105% car dependent before having to take the scenic route through south Elk Grove, but now they are even more so. One only hopes that Nissan and Chevrolet manage to build Leaves and Volts that accelerate as quickly as their gasoline powered models or we're going to have a national riot on our hands, if our tens of millions of thru-commuters can't take the 25-mph curvilinear streets at 45, or can't take the 40-mph collector roads at 60 to get their kids to softball or tuba practice.

I have to hand it to our Elk Grove city council -- can't imagine how a rotating group of five people could fuck things up so badly as to build a city so car dependent and so devoid of jobs to pay for it all. But they did.

I have to hand it to our Elk Grovian residents -- can't imagine how a rotating group of a hundred forty thousand people could fuck things up so badly as to be so enamored with car dependency and traffic, living nowhere near their jobs to pay for it all, living nowhere near their stores, their GameStops, their Asian foot massage "therapists." But they did.

And I have to hand it to my neighbors -- nice individuals, to be sure -- but I can't imagine how it is that they've just assumed that driving 60 miles a day is just...simply...normal, that we'd have to fuck up our sounds, coasts, beaches and marine life so badly in the relentless extrication of oil needed to power their normal.

But they did.

Major Landmarks

There was an amazing contradiction in this week's edition of the Elk Grove Citizen. The lead article described some of the "major landmarks" in the 1o years since Elk Grove became a city...and predictably, this week's article highlighted the improvement of 5 Elk Grovian roadways as "major landmarks."

Meanwhile, the question of the week "What's an important issue that's being ignored in Elk Grove," was answered by resident Tami Ross: "Traffic...I've lived here for over thirty years and the traffic has gotten so bad. And I don't have an answer for it. I hate all the stop lights, too."

So on one page we've got a city praising itself for having spent so much money building roads while the citizens are bitching about the lack of roads.

That a city defines two highway interchanges as its most important "sites of historical significance" or "prominent identifying features of a landscape" is completely ridiculous, yet, not at all unexpected for Elk Grove. We've not built anything worth a shit in the past thirty years. The city hall?

Just another strip commercial building in just another single use zoned parcel totally removed from the citizenry, accessible solely via motor vehicle. Are you gonna take the bus there to a council meeting or file a permit, slick? Styrofoam muntins, blank featureless windows, a pointless sweeping cupola -- this is 'prominence?' Could it possibly last fifty years, let alone a hundred?

Unlikely.

And while Tami doesn't have an answer for this city's horrible, awful, agonizing, wrist-slitting traffic, neither does the city. No matter how much money our city council throws at road widening, interchange redesigning and traffic lighting, they fail to understand that expanding the capacity of our roadway has never and will never "solve" the issue of traffic. The question isn't how much traffic relief we will get from road expansion; the question has always been "How many lanes of congestion do you want?" No city in the U.S. has ever, ever "solved" traffic through more road building. Ever. That Elk Grove thinks it can demonstrates its lack of foresight and its misunderstanding of what makes a city livable. Has building more freeways and interchanges in Los Angeles or Austin solved their traffic problems?

And while Tami bitches about all the stoplights, if she's anything like every single one of my neighbors (and statistically she is), the number of utilitarian trips she's ever taken on foot, on bike, or by bus is clear: zero. Yet it goes well beyond this oft heard stupid call for just "bike and walk more" we hear over and over from TV ads, local politicians and newsprint, because the way we laid out Elk Grove demands multiple car ownership along with their mandatory use for every facet of living, from buying a ballet leotard to donating blood. Single use zoning forces all the residents over here, with all the retail over there, with all the jobs over...well, nowhere near Elk Grove proper. The only people walking anywhere are walking their dogs, which in any event would be banned inside our "public landmarks" comprised chiefly of gas stations, Asian foot massage & table shower parlors and big box stores.

Suppose Tami goes "green," and buys herself one of those snazzy new hybrid vehicles with the solar panel on top, or one of those snazzy new all-electric vehicles that are going to save our world -- do you suppose this, in any way, will reduce the burden on the roadway? Will this, in any way, reduce the need for petroleum based asphalt, coal based steel rebar, and CO2 releasing cement to meet her and everyone else's expectations for "roads available to at all times" and "free from other users" (read: traffic)? No! Being stuck in Elk Grovian traffic in a hybrid or in a Hummer is just the same, slick. Just the same.

Tami And-I-don't-have-an-answer-for-it Ross falls in line with virtually every other Elk Grovian -- all of them suffering from mass delusion -- each thinking that traffic ought to be eased through the reduction in other peoples' use of the roadways or through increased square acreage of asphalt...both of which are patently absurd for their failures to address the real problems of traffic.

Good For What Ails You

I oft mention how I'm not going to be voting for California state initiatives any longer. The initiative process seems flawed to me, in that we weigh in on how chickens are raised, how some archaic rules for auto insurance are calculated, what special interest receives funding for stem cell research, etc. A whole lot of little shit adds up to a big pile of shit, to the extent that the Legislature is hamstrung trying to work around mandatory educational spending requirements and so on and so on and so.

In any event...I suppose after reading the text of the upcoming proposition 19 to legalize decriminalize marijuana, I'm not exactly sure I'll follow my own advice, and might indeed vote on this one.

I really don't like pot, having tried it numerous times as a kid and adult. What I don't like is really good marijuana -- I can't stand the high and I wonder "how can anyone not consider this illegal?" I can't imagine being behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle (or my own bicycle, for that matter) while under its influence. It can be an extremely potent and debilitating high, and in my mind, dangerous.

Then again, even if this proposition passes, it'll still be illegal to drive impaired, and employers may still discriminate against users. What I like about this proposition is that it decriminalizes an action that many do already, and I personally don't believe in the slippery slope arguments of gatewaying. I don't think this is something that will be easily taxed, either, and the arguments that it will increase state tax revenues is probably bogus. I like the idea of legalizing it because people, such as myself who can't stand the stuff, will quickly discover their own limits regarding its use, and this proposition is not a free license; that is, you can abuse alcohol today, drink all you want, but there are limits to when and where you are entitled to do so. I see pot being managed in the same fashion, and managed effectively.

That said, I must say that our two female plants (one sativa, the other indica) are doing quite well in the backyard, both having started budding nicely:

I say "our," but indeed they are only my wife's, for only she has a valid state-issued identification card and we are legally entitled to cultivate six mature plants here. Remember -- in every graduating class of doctors, there is always one who graduates at the very bottom of his class. The guy below him didn't get to be a doctor. He's the one who, with a 20-minute visit and an $80 bill, will write you a prescription for whatever ails you.

These plants seem to grow quite well in the Elk Grovian sun...better than anything else around here. For years years! I've tried to grow tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, and a hundred thousand other vegetables and all have failed miserably in my north-facing backyard. But alas! Pot grows like a weed!

MADD is opposed to this proposition. I can understand their point; I can't possibly see myself within 25' of a set of car keys while under the influence of marijuana, but then again, it will still be illegal to drive while impaired. Indeed, as a regular bicycle commuter in traffic on Franklin Blvd., I am most certainly passed by thirty times as many drivers who are loaded than who are legally drunk, and for whatever reason I don't consider them dangerous. Personally, from my own observation -- I am much, much more afraid of a 42-year-old sober female Asian minivan driver than I am a 24-year-old stoned white male truck driver. I would be much, much more afraid of that last-in-class doctor, recently divorced, driving his expensive imported machine while emotionally frayed and loaded on really killer prescription pain meds, knowing his ex is gonna take him to the cleaners.

That's what I worry about...

Double Duty

Promise me that when I die, I'm not buried in an imported Chinese casket overlooking a freeway.

I am willing to pay money to an American to manufacture my coffin. I am willing to pay money to not have to be buried alongside xx,000 cars/day. I really need to start planning for this, because in my America today, cheapness reigns supreme, and the most cost effective means of burying someone is in a Chinese coffin along undesirable stretches of land -- those near freeways. Chinese caskets are increasingly the choice of American consumers, as they are steeply discounted relative to the costs of having an American company build one.

I hate to think of the irony of blogging and criticizing our American culture of wanton consumption of cheap foreign shit and perpetual motoring, then spending eternity surrounded by imported vinyl trim listening to the din of a trillion motor vehicles. This must not be allowed to happen. Maybe I can make my own coffin, and until I'm dead, use it for a coffee table:

This would really pull double duty, no? It makes sense and cents -- I can save money, I can use local hardwoods using American tools and craftsmanship, I'm allowed to be buried in the coffin of my own choosing in the state of California (provided it meets certain characteristics), and it would look nice in my living room...for as long as I'm alive.

I already built a very nice toe-pincher coffin in 2007, used to house a pneumatic pop-up skeleton for Halloween. It fits me nicely. My son wanted to spend the night it in soon after I built it, although my wife would have none of that. Even that would work, although I really don't want to be buried in a plywood coffin. Hardwood only, and one very simply made similar to that used to bury the pope:


Clean lines, tight joinery, good craftsmanship -- the no-frills-approach to burial -- I'd like one of these, save for the cross on the lid. No, my casket will have inlaid horns instead:

President Number Nine

I recently found the following diagram, showing the cost to clean up a ton of leaked/spilled oil:

Clearly, we ought to stop drilling in North America and simply let Africa meet most of our needs. Instead of wasting money trying to clean up our own spills, let's spend the money to contract for Angolan, Congan, Algerian, and Nigerian crude. Let the poorer African continent manage their own spills, as they don't have to spend nearly as much to mange the inevitable spill or two.

You are likely unaware how much of our energy is imported from Africa; likely unaware because you are likely just another dumb fucking American consumer, mindlessly and perpetually consuming energy without any consideration of its source, while bitching about how the price keeps going up, how those "wicked oil companies and their Arab co-conspirators" have jacked up prices. An Arab conspiracy? UhHuh. It's too easy for you to assume that it's just a handful of sand niggers who are making your life more difficult, isn't it. Hey, I only use authentic, American language here on my Monologues.

No, it's not just them Arabs! It's them Africans, too! Another group of people whose values, appearances and customs are different than ours! It's gonna be easy to regard them with the same contempt as we hold today for people in all those wicked Arab oil nations, once we make the natural assumption that African oil witholding has raised our cost of gasoline by a nickel per gallon. Good old American racism will be alive and well. We will be importing 15% of our energy from Africa by the end of this decade, while the last eight presidents have all promised and assured us that we will be energy independent:

• In 1974 with 36.1% of oil from foreign sources, President Richard Nixon said, “At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need.”


• In 1975 with 36.1% of oil from foreign sources, President Gerald Ford said, “We must reduce oil imports by one million barrels per day by the end of this year and by two million barrels per day by the end of 1977.”


• In 1979 with 40.5% of oil from foreign sources, President Jimmy Carter said, “Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 – never.”


• In 1981 with 43.6% of oil from foreign sources, President Ronald Reagan said, “While conservation is worthy in itself, the best answer is to try to make us independent of outside sources to the greatest extent possible for our energy.”


• In 1992 with 47.2% of oil from foreign sources, President George Bush said, “When our administration developed our national energy strategy, three principles guided our policy: reducing our dependence on foreign oil …”


• In 1995 with 49.8% of oil from foreign sources, President Bill Clinton said, “The nation’s growing reliance on imports of oil … threatens the nation’s security … [we] will continue efforts to … enhance domestic energy production.”


• In 2006 with 65.5% of oil from foreign sources, President George W. Bush said, “Breakthroughs … will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.”


• In 2009 with 66.2% of oil from foreign sources, President Barack Obama said, “It will be the policy of my administration to reverse our dependence on foreign oil while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs.”

Not gonna happen in my lifetime, slick. It won't be too long before the combination of a domestic offshore drilling moratorium and the resumption of growth of our Elk Grovian suburban slum will force that percentage north of 70%, 75%, and further.

I will wager a week's paycheck that president number nine, whoever that is, will make the same claim to American consumers and that our dependence at that time will be greater than it is today. I will wager that.

In the meantime, call your senators and representatives in Congress and ask them to save our oceans and our beaches by letting the Africans fuck up their own oceans and their own beaches drilling for oil to meet our wants.

Wars For Consumption

I can blame my type I diabetes on weigh gain, but I'll tell you, I am grateful for having contracted this disease. It forced me out of the Army on a medical discharge, and for that I have been given the last fifteen years of my life back to me, instead of having wasted it fighting pointless foreign wars.

I presumably would have stayed in the Army and would have been a senior Captain by now, had I not been given the boot in 1998. At that point in my life it might have been simply easier to stay in, as I was only an Army reservist. I could tolerate that. I learned that my local signal unit that I was assigned to was deployed thrice to Iraq and Afghanistan. I just happened to serve in-between wars. What dumb luck.

Since then, I've developed a fantastic contempt for serving in our armed forces. I do not support the troops. I don't ride a motorcycle in a Harley parade for fallen heroes. I don't support the war effort(s). I admonish my own boys not to join. I developed this contempt because I was unable to accept my nation's decision to engage war in 2001-2003, and our nation's prosecution of these wars since. Both were totally and completely voluntary, and have done nothing to promote our national security; indeed, they have only worked to decrease it in my opinion. I see them as nothing but an extension of American Consumption.

I chatted with a fellow Elk Grovian on the bus a few months ago who volunteered for a one year assignment to work as a civilian contractor in Iraq to rebuild their infrastructure, and ended up staying for three. He felt personally empowered by the experience, felt he was making a difference, and felt his efforts were much needed there. He suggested that the U.S. media routinely fails to report on how the U.S. presence there has positively impacted the lives of Iraqis.

That might be absolutely true. But truthfully, I don't give a fuck about how this Elk Grovian on a bus feels about providing indoor plumbing to a Diyala village. I don't give a fuck about building up a foreign infrastructure after having destroyed a sizable share of it during an invasion. It might feel good to do that, yes, but really, did we have to go to war to get this done? Does having invaded two countries, then build them back up, favor improved national security?

I don't think it does.

What it does do is create GDP. Going to war creates gross domestic product even if that product isn't produced domestically, and instead is produced foreignally (sic) by bombing foreign soil. No, I would like to see our wars simply declared "won," and then get out of there. But we can't do that, now can we, because we've entrenched ourselves so damn deep due to our evolving missions of "freeing the Iraqi people" and "removing regimes who harbor terrorists." These are high-minded and noble-sounding phrases, yes? The wars were sold as battles for freedom, for liberty, for democracy, for good-vs.-evil. We will continue to follow these tag lines for the next XX years, for as long as it takes for us to declare the wars finally won. We could have done that five months ago, or five years ago, I believe, but we chose not to. It will be another five years forward, or fifteen, for us to finally see the light and withdraw.

I see these wars as another facet of American Consumption. We think nothing of using a quarter of the world's resources to supply the wants of 5% of its population, and these wars, in effect, seek to continue access to that consumption, regardless of how we cloak them in "freedom," and "liberty." You can hear it at the water cooler at work amongst your coworkers -- "if we're gonna stay in Iraq for the next decade or two, at least make gas prices stay low for that time." Our consumers have a complete disregard for our wars; their sacrifice, back in 2003, was to climb into their vehicles to drive to the malls to do a little extra shopping. Mine is a simplistic and rather ostentatious view of our foreign policy but I believe it rings true.

I don't disregard our wars -- I actively regard them -- and I actively regard them as a total, complete waste of human capital. Interestingly, so does Representative Nadler of NY. Yet he was forced, due to party politics, to vote for the new war funding bill. Our own representatives can't vote their convictions.

Only in my America.

Hunter Gatherer

Last year at this time I blogged about gathering wild blackberries along the delta, and today we did the same, in roughly the same section of delta, near Wimpy's Marina.

Until I re-read that post from last year, I had forgotten my food axiom -- any food you eat should require a modicum of your own preparation. Well, not really forgotten it as I still follow it, but I had forgotten it in words.

If you hadn't noticed, of late my posts have focused on the food choices we collectively make, and I think this fits in well with other blog posts because industrialized food generates a large share of the waste we U.S. consumers generate. Remember -- in the eyes of the food industry, you aren't a citizen -- you're a consumer. And seeing how the news, the food industry, 3M, KB Toys, and China only ever think of you as a consumer, that's all you really are. That you vote or offer anything else to the public realm is only ancillary to your primary role: to consume consumables.

I have been fascinated with several books of late regarding the increasing industrialization of our food, the increasing rates of diabetes and obesity, and the changes to our culture of eating. I am fascinated with it as 1) I'm diabetic, 2) was substantially overweight, and 3) was mostly unaware of how my food got to my plate.

I can't change #1. As a type I diabetic I either take insulin or die, and the day I started using insulin in November 1995 #2 started -- I gained 30# within three months and have been mostly overweight since then. I like to blame it on the insulin, but that's only one piece of it -- #3 had a much, much more substantive impact on my weight -- a failure to understand what I was eating, and how that food got to me.

There's a lot of ideas floating around out there trying to answer the question why Americans are so fucking fat...and while there doesn't appear to be a single cause, I am inclined to think that it's because my food axiom is not being followed. Interestingly, I thought of this axiom independently of M. Pollan's food rules which I recently read. My axiom isn't listed among his 64 rules, but it easily could, and indeed would dovetail in beautifully between, say, number forty seven and forty eight.

Admittedly, I can't say that preparing my own food is something I would want to do. I've spent the better part of 40 years letting other people do that, so I'm somewhat accustomed to spending my time engaging in other leisure activities...like blogging. But I was looking more and more like the guy in my last post. Something was askew. For as much as I was becoming educated about how our food moves, I was still getting heavier and heavier. I was stuck in the same traps along with 60% of the rest of our consumers.

I elected to change the way I eat:

First, I enrolled into a Community Supported Agriculture program. At least I know exactly where and how a small portion of my food comes from...and, yes, it's unprepared. I have to cook the kale, slice open the melon, shred the lettuce and (ug) the arugula, and grill the eggplant.

Second, I set a goal to eat 20 heads of raw cabbage per year, which requires my own preparation. I understand that Polish women who eat raw cabbage have very low rates of breast cancer, while Polish women who immigrate to America who eat much less to none at all have the highest rates in the world. This, I say, will prevent the development of my own breast cancer.

Third -- eat less than 60# of meat per year. The average American consumer consumes over 200# of meat per year; the world average is 90#. I elected to eat less than the world average, and in doing so, I'll join the rest of the world with their lowered risk of osteoporosis, arthritis, colon cancer, and myriad other meat diseases.

There are a number of other changes, too many to post, but among them is to get stabbed, welted and sliced by the brambles while trying to gather berries. Blackberries are among the only foods that the food processing industry can never lay their hands on, because they can only ever be gathered by hand. Tomorrow morning I will start celebrating the Fourth of July at sunrise instead of sunset when I make my own whole wheat blackberry muffins.

Yum.