Strawberry Trees

This last summer, while walking nearly 200 miles in an effort to shore myself up physically, I had a goal to be able to identify (by common name) every tree in my 3-mile walking radius.

This is no small feat.  By volume I think I can identify about 80% of all trees here in my Laguna Springs "neighborhood," but those remaining 20% represent probably 40-50 different species that are going to take this amateur arboriculturist quite a while to identify.

However, along Franklin Boulevard, between Cosumnes River Drive and Laguna Blvd, I have been able to determine that many of the trees in the median are strawberry trees (Arbutus undeo) and, as timing would have it, are in season this very moment.  One can risk death or anatomical dismemberment by jaywalking across the 45MPH four-lane boulevard inhabited by 65MPH traveling vehicles and pick oneself enough fruit for a sumptuous repast.

OK...maybe not sumptuous.  Strawberry tree fruit, while vaguely resembling strawberries, are not even vaguely identical in flavor.  The tree unfortunately is poorly named.  Ohh!  Strawberries!  In November?  I can hardly wait!

This fruit, though, is compelling.  I've eaten several dozen and some are quite tasty.  Most of the berries do not have enough sugar content to enjoy them as we expect fruit to taste, but I suppose this could be rectified in the Insania kitchen.  The thing is, I cannot seem to be able to get through more than about a half dozen at any given time -- they just don't do it for me.

The photo above is characteristic of the fruit but are unripe specimens.  Pick berries that are very bright red and that will just fall off the peduncle as you so much as look at them.  The best ones are extremely soft and will bruise easily.  Indeed, bruise is not a correct description -- a really ripe fruit will virtually explode on contact.  The problem is, when it's prime picking time a thousand other fruits will have already fallen off the tree and you will have to mash your way through all those fallen heroes.  Very much like wading out to a duck blind, you will collect an awful lot of jam on your shoes.

Enronization

How, exactly, is it that Jon Corzine is not incarcerated at this moment? Wouldn't you consider him a flight risk? Apparently our Justice Department (or is it the Department of Justice?) doesn't assume that the ownership of a fleet of private jets and continued access to a half billion dollars of other peoples' money could be, in any way, shape or form, construed as risk-worthy.

A parallel: In our electric power industry we are [supposedly] bound by the North American Electric Reliability Councils (NERCs) reliability standards. One example: the loss of a single generator, transmission line, or transformer should not result in the overload of any remaining facility, in that we operate with sufficient capacity to absorb the loss of that one resource. Well, PacifiCorp did indeed have an issue in 2008 where a lockout relay failed to operate, resulting in 15 standards violations and the loss of a few hundred thousand customers. What I was floored by, in reading the report of this event, was how PacifiCorp was fined $4 million but did not have to admit to having failed to meet any of these reliability standards. They violated 15 standards, but do not admit having violated them! And NERCs position is that they didn't violate them, either! But $4 million was levied, $4 million was paid, and everyone's hands have been washed.

Corzine will be allowed to do the same thing, you watch. The SEC will levy a token fine in the coming years, say, fining his defunct company $50 million for having looted $800 million but also not having to admit to having done anything wrong or illegal...and most importantly, Corzine cannot be prosecuted for anything because he did not have to admit to having done anything.

Say there were a string of crimes committed here in Elk Grove. A murder at the Post Office, a kid caught for selling meth on a street corner and a robbery at the Safeway. I'm linked to all of them -- because I drove through that intersection where the kid sold the dope, was caught on the red light camera, as I was driving to the post office to ship a Christmas gift and to Safeway for a 6 pack. But instead of being charged, I meet privately with the county prosecutor and we cook up a deal -- I don't have to admit to having committed any crime, but I'm willing to spend the next 20 months under housal unit arrest with an ankle monitor.

What judge would sign off on that? Did I murder someone or was I just selling a dimebag on Franklin Blvd? Or was I innocent? But these are just the way these sorts of SEC fines are levied -- we don't get to know the true level of fraud committed, and clearly by accepting to pay a fine some presumption of guilt is assumed...but really, this is just the simple cost of doing business, having to work with such a regulatory agency. PacifiCorp did exactly that with NERC...and I argue that my utility SMUD should approach the levying of fines in exactly the same way -- treat them as any other cost of doin' business here in our grand nation where one-eye-open justice reigns on high.

Jon Corzine and MF Global -- if this one case doesn't provide you with all the ammunition you'd need to encourage you to take your money out of their criminal hands, well, continue to chase such hallucinated rates of return and prepare to lose the surplus wealth you think you "were entitled to" based on your "years of hard work." Here's a further example of how Enronized accounting is still a legal form of theft some fifteen years after Kenneth Lay (God Rest His Soul, May Peace Be With Him) started it. Indeed, ratings agencies gave sterling marks to MF Global right up until they declared bankruptcy.

If you can't see how this whole system is geared not to providing needed liquidity to producers and sellers but also to bilk you out of a percentage (yes, sometimes 100%) of your money, well, I'm glad you're there to lose it instead of me, to grease the skids of our wonderful free-market economy.

The Withered Leaves

Wa-hey! Elk Grove High School gets the honor of a visit by a Real American Hero -- NASCAR driver Robbie Gordon.

Really. Do you really think that some C- average high school senior is somehow going to suddenly spring up and realize he's been fuckering away his last 6 years in middle/school all due to some 35-minute paid-for-speech by a guy who makes consecutive left hand turns at a high rate of speed for a living? Really?

I wonder why Robbie Gordon was invited. Why not Kyle Busch? -- recently arrested for 128mph in a 45mph zone. Kyle would be a far superior motivational speaker at EGHS. Who wouldn't like to not be arrested and not have their license suspended after driving 3x+ the speed limit, huh? I'm pretty sure every damn senior at Elk Grove high, that's who.

I will read the first two minutes of speech notes as prepared by Kyle that would have been delivered, had he not been cockblocked by driver Robbie Gordon delivering his speech here in our small, humble village:

"Greetings, Elk Grove High! This is a day of national consecration. And I am certain that although I've had four vodka martini's just prior to taking this dais that I will address you with a candor and a decision which the present situation of my NASCAR career impels.

"This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from the honesty facing restrictions on our ability to speed today. The ability to drive recklessly will endure, as it has endured, and will revive and prosper.

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is not fear itself -- it's those godforsaken CHP pigs -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terrorists which paralyzes our need for speed. In every dark hour after beating the wife that we are not allowed to drive 3 times the speed limit simply to relax and calm down, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding -- we ought have the right.

"We face common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things such as a fast car that will shit-n-git with 20" rims and a pimpin' sound system that King George himself would find worthy. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

"But I ain't no fool, fool! I know how to drive fa-fa-fast! You shouldn't limit my right to drive 128 through your simple 45! My citation comes from no failure of substance. I'm stricken by no plague of locusts! Compared with the perils that our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, I have much to be thankful for. I didn't die like #3 -- plenty is at my doorstep!"

And so it goes here in NASCAR inspired Elk Grove. And so we will graduate several hundred drivers who will think Franklin Blvd. as their own private drag strip, as Robbie Gordon's message sinks in...

CCC-

I wonder how it is, that we at large somehow believed, even for a minute, that Herman Cain had any possibility of winning the Office of the Presidency...let alone the Republican nomination.

This slow-moving train wreck of a candidate is exactly why Obama will remain in office until 2016. Really. What would you think of a future President Cain, having to make a snap decision with the red button on the desk...when he can't even manage allegations of a consensual affair. A total waste of Republican energy, he was.

A complete, total sham. He had no real intention, along with no real financial support, to win the Republican nomination. An outsider like Cain cannot win the nomination, ever. Proof of this is former Louisiana governor Buddy Rohmer, running for the office who hasn't even been invited to debate, a candidate who's held office before, unlike Cain. There's no reason to wonder why he's an outlier, as he's campaigning against the monetary power structure that infects the current political process.

So you Republicans should focus your energies on 2016. Rubio. Christie. Who knows who else, but certainly not the dumbasses running in 2012.

What do you think this nation would have become, had Ross Perot not dropped out of the 1992 race because of some perceived "shame" to be brought upon his daughter's wedding by the Republican establishment. What a sham that was, too. Some sort of "disgraceful event" foisted upon the ceremony of an unknown daughter of an outside candidate is apparently sufficient to derail the candidacy of an up and comer for the office of President? What is this?

All of this is representative of the shallowness, the ineptitude, and the slow-failure of our once worthy American culture. I will argue (and have argued here on this blog) that we are past the point of no return. We are slovenly. We are lazy. We think of ourselves as entitled above all others. We treat the presidential election as an extension of any reality TV episode nowadays, where we mentally equate Brandi Glanville's most recent tit-job with the Republican field running for president.

I have been, am, and will likely continue to assign American culture a CCC- rating...if I don't rate it at junk-status in the near future. And...just as Standard and Poor's ratings...this is only a opinion...

PIIGS

A cunning array of protests going on both ten miles away in Davis, CA, and ten thousand miles away in Cairo, Egypt. People, seemingly, are pissed off at something.

I am one who is perpetually pissed off. But I lack the advantage of youth to drive me to join protests. If I were 20 years younger I might be responding to things differently than I do today. I ruminate on our energy intensive living arrangements, our cultural shallowness, and people who don't signal when changing lanes -- hardly things we'd gang together and decry in a public square.

Yet, for all my yammering and contempt for the American lifestyle, and for all my longing for a more European living arrangement such as walkable human-scaled communities, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (the PIIGS) are completely fucking broke. I am left wondering if bankruptcy is inevitable everywhere.

A hundred thousand are assembling in Cairo as I write this, facing down the unknowns of a fledgling, dictator-less government. A hundred thousand are assembling in Athens, too, facing down the unknowns of a lifetime of austerity brought about by financial industry malfeasance. A few hundred are assembling tents tonight in Davis, facing down 21% pepper spray more suitable as a bear repellent than human repellent, and facing 100% tuition increases just since 2007.

I happen to have little debt and depression-proof employment. I have little to protest about, and as such I'm able to comfortably blog about trivial matters such as the lack of a bicycle lane on 65th street. I'm not $92,000 in the hole with college loans. I don't owe more than my housal unit is worth. I'm not unemployed. I lack the perspective of many who are protesting, but they are all doing so because they, like I, believe that things ought to be better. But to what extent is all this our own doing? We've:

Complicity allowed corruption and avarice to take root in our political system.
Never once considered our own culpability in creating the hallucinated wealth bubble of 2000-2006.
Allowed government and public institutions to create unsustainable pension guarantees.
Grew our households over the last thirty years not through the accumulation of capital but the accumulation of debt.
Complicity engaged in discretionary wars to cloak our growing dependency on non-renewable energy.
Grew our debt in periods of growth and in periods of recession we grew our debt.
Allowed 135 separate federal programs for the needy to perpetuate dependency on them.
Cheerfully fuckered away our manufacturing base to save $0.35 on a box of Chinese matchsticks.
Allowed 20% of our GDP to be driven by financialization, where every florist became a real estate specialist and every housal unit owner a flipper.
Allowed ourselves to be classified as consumers, not as citizens.

Yet, for all this, Italians too are entering an unprecedented era of austerity while having not engaged in a fifth of the reckless behaviors we have. Perhaps parallels do exist, and likely they too have promised themselves lifestyles they could not maintain.

Escape From New York

I am, most certainly, a doomer. I personally cannot envision any reasonable scenario where the next generation of Americans has a better standard of living than us today...or any scenario where the current generation of Americans maintains their standard or even comes remotely close to the hallucinated standard we had back in 2005.

Oh! To return to those heady days seven years hence! A new Escalade in every other South Sacramentan rental unit! And in those without the Escalade, a new plasma HDTV. $21/hour manufacturing jobs at the Kramer Carton Factory with benefits.

This nation has experienced stagnant wage growth for the last thirty years, save for many in the top 1% who have effectively stolen their 250% increases through political machinations. That we've had thirty years of stagnant wage growth is a good thing -- a good thing, because it will condition us for the next thirty years of continuing stagnant wage growth. We'll be used to it, and experience clearly is desirable in such things...it ought to count for something.

I carry no doubt that the working classes of the future will find themselves in a more precarious position than their parents. A father who spent his life working at a canned soup plant in the 1970s earning $21 in today's dollars will find his son working at a suburban Christian bookstore in a strip mall in the early 20s earning $12. The manufacturing of canned soup will have long since been transferred to Uruguay, where cake frosting is already being manufactured (yes, the tub in my fridge is from central South America). The only jobs available in 2022 (for those unwilling to carry $245,045 in college debt) will be strip mall retail workers, which, based on Elk Grove planning models, will be the growth industry over the next fifteen decades. Asian foot massage therapists and Christian book sellers and pool chlorine salesmen and 12-G network compatible iPhone peddlers and spring water kiosk tenders and mother's day card salesladies and seasonal Roni Deutch tax preparers -- all fantastic non-benefital $12/hour at-will non-union jobs.

I worked hard as a landscaper in 1991 following my escape from West Point. I landed a good, hard job and I was willing to work. I lasted five months, at which point I landed an engineering assistant position. Twenty one years ago we hadn't yet had the influx of Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants who today dominate that industry -- no, us white boys did that work. Today, if a white boy is found mowing a lawn in Elk Grove, some part of his upbringing must have broken down. Maybe his parents aren't sufficiently "successful" to afford to hire out that work to "the help." White Americans have become accustomed to "no more dirty work." Fuck filleting Alabama catfish for $11 an hour -- it's hard, it's icky, and that one can receive nearly perpetual entitlements for not working really means that the real wage is only about half of that advertised. The redeeming of Alabama food stamps means that one can buy nearly all the catfish one wants...without spending 10 hours a day/5 days a week in a cold, damp kill room.

I remember well several of the other white guys who worked in that landscaping outfit. One quit after three weeks to find success as a traveling Arkansas carnie. Another would work well only under constant supervision. A third was quite the loafer but quite the stand-up comedian, too -- he cracked Richard Gere/gerbil jokes all the way up until Friday afternoon when he'd suddenly jettison the comedy routine and bitch and complain about his shitty paycheck.

I did my job, got stronger, took the job seriously, and moved on quite soon to be sure. Glad I did, too. That job would have sucked the life out of me. I can't imagine today, can't even imagine, working a single 8-hour shift cutting asparagus or eggplants, let alone two consecutive shifts, let alone a week, or let alone a year. As a white, privileged, middle class male I'd refuse to take that job. Fuck that -- unemployment benefits would have to run out first, which would last me 99 weeks, or well into 2013. Then I'd tap all the social services my cousin in South Sacramento and his neighbors take advantage of, such as a one time month's free PG&E or SMUD bill pay each calendar year, or emergency room visits for common issues like staph infections or testicular swelling. And once all that runs out, sometime in 2016, I'll have learned how to correctly grow hydroponic marijuana and sell two pounds each month to buyers in the Bible Belt whose state's legislatures are holier than thou. Then, by 2020, I'll bank on my diabetes! You think for one fucking minute I couldn't apply for and be awarded lifetime social security disability benefits for my "chronic and acute suffering from this debilitating disease?" What, you don't think I couldn't use my last thirty years with this disease to all but guarantee perpetual payments for my 40 consecutive quarters of work? I'd be considered "totally" disabled by my hand-picked doctor, who will be forced to provide services for my "neuropathy," my "partial blindness," and my "inability to sleep."

There's no way you'll ever find this white guy filleting fish for $11 an hour.

No way.

Too Little Exponentiality

When the national debt first reached one million million ($1,000,000,000,000), there were no bloggers. The web was still a few decades away. Today it reached fifteen million million. And oh! To hear the conservative punditry! It's all Obama, who raised it four million million just over his term. And! We'ven't even yet hit the coming health care bill in full stride.

I argue here that the national debt is meaningless. $3 trillion meant nothing nothing! to my generation; we easily survived those "unpayable debts foisted upon our children" by our parents in the 1970s. My parents easily survived those "unpayable debts foisted upon our children" by their parents in the 1950s.

And so it will be with our children. $16 trillion is a meaningless number. I'd bet that less than 3% of our youth under 18 can even quantify the debt within +/- $5 trillion. A student in 1987, there was no way I knew what the national debt was; it was as meaningless then as it is today.

We constantly hear we need to grow, too. That if interest on our debt was, say, 3%, we'd better grow our economy by at least 3% just to keep up with the Kardashians. Growth is necessary we're told. But really -- why do we think we need to grow more? Aren't there already sufficient housal units for everyone? Water? Food? Why does my Elk Grove feel that we have to grow more? To the Cosumnes River and beyond? Following three decades of heedless suburban sprawl, can't we survive on what we've already built? My real question is -- at what point will we decide that we've grown enough?

Even 0.2% growth is exponential...yet apparently in our "advanced" Western economy even 2% isn't even close to breaking even with our perpetualized debt based economy. Look at the forecasts for 2012: here's one at 1.4%. Here's another at 3.3%. But really, think about four hundred years from now -- do you really think the next 25 generations can and should expect 3-4% growth? What would this fucking planet look like? Apparently, 0.2% perpetual growth ad infinitium is considered too little exponentiality.

But, grow we will try. We must try, for a reversion would fuck up the entire gambit we're currently playing. Lowe's has to build more tilt-up concrete warehouses filled with Chinese shit for American consumers -- to not do so would squander everything already created. Their shareholders require a rate of return above and beyond inflation. To not grow impacts everything already grown.

To rub salt into the collective wound of the 16% of you who hold no job, I'm up for a 2.3% wage increase in 2012 (after factoring in health care/unemployment insurance/dental/eye/life insurance rate increases)...which according to everything I understand, isn't anywhere close to nearly enough to cover the incremental cost of electricity, water, gasoline, sewer, federal and state taxation, cable, college tuition, garbage and property tax increases. In effect, I'm losing ground with a paltry fucking 2.3% raise. That the majority of the rest of this grand nation isn't even coming close to a 2.3% increase means absolutely nothing to me -- I don't pay their bills. I could care less about them. But me? I'm going to be suffering soon! I'll have to substitute my weekly 2# of sopressata salami with a generic genovese variety? Oh, the humanity!