K.O.P.

I scanned across the BET awards last night, wondering what sorts of impromptu and hurried tributes to Michael Jackson were going to surface. There were plenty.

For someone who was [likely] bankrupt, addicted, [likely] guilty at least one acquitted charge, who hadn't done anything with any remark in, say, the last two decades...Michael Jackson was revered last night as a God by nearly every living black entertainer.

Isn't this tragic narrative wholly similar to everything else in our America? A bankrupt nation, addicted to cheap foreign labor, cheap foreign oil, and even cheaper foreign made products, guilty of falsely promoting democracy through the waging of wars for freedom, and a nation that really, really, hasn't done anything worth a shit in the past two decades unless you call building out more freeways, strip malls and suburban wastelands worth a shit. And this nation, as it's dying, is still revered by the inhabitants of all other nations.

I would suspect that for a lot people living in America, their lives mirror that of Mr. Jackson's -- financially and morally bankrupt, unemployed, living in a Neverland dreamworld, desperately pinning their hopes on a supposed economic recovery just around the corner.

Fresh Start

I am trying to understand how Spain has managed with double digit unemployment for decades while here in the U.S. we approach 10% and the sky falls.

While I am personally immune, bombproofed, and on high ground vis-a-vis our recession, many around me are not. But one thing that every unemployed person I know has to keep up in a bad or good economy is a motor vehicle...something that not every Spaniard has to deal with.

This point isn't widely appreciated. Paul Blanco's Chevrolet's FreshStart credit program advertised on the radio yesterday and said, "You need a car." No matter how much debt you currently carry, "You need a car." Bad credit? No credit? "You need a car."

And you, the radio listener, deserve a car. Even if you've fucked over every other lender in the past, you deserve a fresh start

because without you buying sixteen million cars a year our economy falls apart.

No shit. My unemployed cousin still has his car...not to drive to interviews, he gave up looking for a job long ago. No, his car is used daily to get to the store, to buy his malt liquor, and to get his second DUI...come on, what American is going to walk? Certainly not the unemployed. And certainly not anyone who bought a "home" in some suburban landscraper two miles from the nearest supermarket (because neighborhood markets are illegal) and five miles from every other service.

So to live in America, the greatest nation in the world that somehow can't seem to culturally manage even a small economic downturn, car ownership is mandatory. Mandatory maintaining, gassing, and registering all come with citizenship. This isn't something most 24 year old Cordobans have to deal with, because they aren't forced to own a car just to live. Unemployment, while never pleasant, is at least easier managed without the specter of a car payment every thirty days.

Here in Elk Grove, every unemployed soul would be forced, absolutely forced, to own at least one vehicle to even get to the unemployment office, let alone to manage the daily tasks of living. So I say fuck 'em -- a large portion of their economic plight is self-created -- they chose to live in such arrangements.

Pop Tarts

I must have spent three hours yesterday in the California delta waterway getting tore up by all the brambles on the myriad banks of the sloughs around Thornton...but it was worth it:



I collected over three pounds of blackberries, two of which shall be eaten today, and should provide me with 1/3rd of my daily calories and over 40 grams of fiber.



I mentioned my food axiom before and I'll repeat it -- any food you eat should require a modicum of your own preparation. In this case, my preparation was getting pulverized by thorn stabwounds, raised welts and a full night of wheezing and congestion from the wild grasses I had to plow through to get to the berry bushes.

But it was worth the cost.

I will eat as much fiber from these berries alone than an American will get in four days with his standard American diet. The antioxidants, I hope, will kill all my developing lung cancers from bicycle commuting alongside motor vehicles and deposit them directly into my colon, where the berry fiber will grind them up and the high water content will flush them back to the delta.

In case you were wondering, reheating a blackberry Pop-Tart in a microwave does not qualify as your own preparation.

The Millstone

I'm not a budget/billing guy, but I gotta think that California State is SMUDs largest single customer, by far. All those downtown Sacramento buildings...consuming electricity whether there are two or three furlough days per month per state employee.

I am a doomer, sure, and the writing I see on the wall is this -- California will fail to make payments for electricity sometime before autumn and SMUD will have to eat it. An IOU isn't a payment, dear.

SMUD just approved a three-tiered rate increase, the first of which is set to take hold in September. They also just approved the installation of new metering units, a very expensive [up-front] proposition. Now, we're going to see the effects of a state that can't govern itself and can't balance itself manifest as unpaid liabilities to a whole host of lenders...SMUD being one of them. I don't know how my job or my projects will be affected by this, but in any event I ain't too worried.

What I see is a state and local economy that has been hanging on, carrying on like nothing ever happened, like the prognosis that the patient's chemotherapy has actually cured him, when indeed all it did was buy some time before the really bad shit starts. Every day without pain or sickness provides a glimmer of hope, a chance. But I don't see how we've changed the fundamentals...the patient is still smoking, eating fried pork and 'resting.'

I see more bottom ahead. More foreclosures, more jobs lost, debt will become even a bigger millstone around our necks, and sustained market malaise. My local government and my state are leading the way with loads of debt and we haven't seen anything yet regarding either curtailment of services, the cutting of jobs, or increasing taxes.

Baked Fakery

I am admittedly enamored by certain European lifestyles. I am particularly enamored by their urban design, how they've developed their cities and countrys (sic), how they've succeeded in keeping them distinct and different from one another.

Where I live in Elk Grove we've bulldozed virtually every square inch of countryside, bermed up our creeks, bridged them over and installed hundreds of divisions of homes. In fact, our city's web portal links you to a map comprised of just our subdivisions, because that's all this city is...a subdivision wasteland with alluring names like Shadowbrook, Quail Ridge, Hampton Village, and Parkside Meadows. There ain't no meadow. Ain't any quail anymore. Ain't no village in Hampton Village and no brook in Shadowbrook.

This is a minor point in all that we are, but fake names reflect the fakeness of the people we've become, the fake people we are.

The very first thing I saw when I arrived at the Minneapolis airport earlier this month, returning from Europe, was this airport food service establishment:



I was immediately struck by its total fakery. Welcome home to America, I thought.

Really. This is a bakery? What the fuck do they bake, huh? There's nothing wrong with making $7 an hour, nothing at all, and least of all if you are employed in meaningful, dignified work. There were literally hundreds of small storefronts all over every city I visited in Europe where people baked bread daily that local residents lined up in droves to buy...and likely these bakers earned about the same as any airport food service technician in Minneapolis. But daily they prepared raw materials skillfully, meaningfully, into food they cared about providing.

Here at home, this "bakery" hires a few unskilled workers, trains them to remove their frozen pre-baked products at 3:45 AM, to thaw just enough so that when they push the muffin button on the re-heating oven the product will be ready for the morning commuter crush. The unskilled remain perpetually unskilled. The dignity of work has been removed. They don't give a shit about where they work or what they provide. "It's a job, man." And it's nothing nothing! like their company emblem

suggesting locally, daily made bread on a country morning with bluebirds aloft above and wildflowers underfoot.

Our raw material had all the nutrition stripped away at the centralized processing mill in Eastern Washington state, milled into flour by the trainload and shipped to another processing facility in Arkansas, where machines, flash freeze technology and automated palletized packaging converts the raw food materials into pre-baked "units," ready for shipment. They are loaded into tractor trailers and across our free interstate highway network they are delivered to hundreds of airport terminals. These units are assembled in the back of the Meadow with other food units derived elsewhere and presented to you as a $9 croissant sandwich.

I can be facetious about a great many things, but my presentation always rings true to an extent. The automation of our food production, the fake presentation suggesting we're grounded in a thousand year old tradition of preparation...these lead to very bad things. Oil dependence for delivering all those non-local food units; people who never learn the dignity of work and the social ills this manifests; fat Merikans, fat medical problems and fat insurance premiums; living in total isolation to our natural world. This is who we are.

Comfortable Consumption

My little burg, Elk Grove, as car dependent a city as you'll find in America, prostrated itself to the motor vehicle even more with the announcement today that e-Tran funding is staring at a $1,700,000 deficit next year -- and services will be cut.

Wonderful. On the same week this fucking city received a Tranny award for the most beautiful new interchange in the state

we get word that transit will be cut back, curtailed, eliminated, or otherwise reduced.

Gotta love that new $83,000,000 interchange, eh? At night it will become a sight to behold -- what with its classic light fixtures reminiscent of a planked carriageway of a bygone era, anti-suicide fencing barriers reminiscent of a chain of wagons, those wagon wheels marching...marching along...triangular orange cones atop triangular concrete abutments, and the gorgeous concrete keystone at mid-span! We'll be mesmerized by the beautiful trail of weaving red taillights from the freeway to the turnstop on Christmas eve 2017, when another wave of our cyclical bubble economy bathes Elk Grovians with newfound, unearned housal unit wealth to buy new vehicles as consumer chariots to haul their purchases home from the Elk Grove Promenade.

The purpose of this interchange was twofold -- primarily, to shuttle personal motor vehicles to the vacant weed-filled quarter-finished soon-to-be-completed new mall but also to lay the groundwork for a potential freeway connector project from here to Highway 50 near Sunrise/Hazel, creating either a mini-freeway or a macro-expressway.

First of all, there ain't gonna be any SouthEast Corridor freeway. Just like trying to shoehorn in a choo-choo train track atop existing suburban sprawl, the open spaces needed for a new freeway and concomitant on/off ramps were sold off long ago to campaign-fund-providing land "developers," while the proposed route is planned to run through residential-agriculture zoned land whose owners are wealthy and well connected. They stand a better chance of fighting this project off than, say, the poorer, disorganized Del Paso Heights or Oak Park residents. These communities were sliced in half by freeway projects of the 1970s as they threw parades celebrating their new interchanges, too. No. I say Sheldon will successfully fight like Pasadena and the 710, or San Francisco and the 101, the byproduct of which will be tens of thousands of commuters shovelled off to collector roads and stoplights. Just because they'll successfully kill a freeway doesn't mean they'll kill southern Elk Grovian expansion and the hordes of fresh commuters to jobs elsewhere.

So really that $83,000,000 was spent to allow Elk Grovians to more comfortably consume at the future open-aire mall to raise tax revenues for the city. While the cost of car registration will go up another $15 per vehicle to fund state parks due to the state's insolvency, the cost of insurance is rising to account for my and millions of other stolen vehicles, and gas is $3 and will likely permanently arc upward, we build an environment where driving is the only way these residents will get to their new Jewel o' the Valley. Never a long term thought to build a light rail track down the middle of that new interchange. Never a thought for a safe bicycle lane, either. Wasn't even considered by our myopic one dimensional urban planners. Nope. I suppose if we ever do consider building a track across that in fifty years time, we'll have to raze this new one down and build anew, costing twelve times what it otherwise would if we had planned for it today.

And then, just like today, they'll claim that transit doesn't pay for itself! Well, no shit! When it costs $1,000 per inch to lay light rail tracks, what do you expect?

Peace Sells

Mr. Gates wants to provide some missile defense protection for Hawai'i, in case North Korea launches a missile over the Pacific Ocean.

Please.

What do you suppose the odds are, the odds, that Pyongyang has developed a sufficiently accurate ballistic device that could deliver munitions within even a few leagues of a target 4,700 miles away?

Please.

I suppose I should lie awake in terror each night, frightened that my little Elk Grove is not just some blip on a map anymore, that it's such a large sprawled out suburban landscraper worthy of a North Korean assault on my Freedoms and My Way Of Life...presupposing they have a missile capable of reaching the west coast. While I'm not advocating that Mr. Il raze this city with an atomic device so that we could start over with building a city that's worth a shit,...

Please.

We're going to hear it again, that America the world will be safer once we remove this threat to peace. I'd bet my investments in Raytheon are going to do very, very well because peace sells, and defense contractors are about the only bright spot in our wretched economy aside from WalMart and McDonalds

What those two corporations wouldn't give to open new markets in North Korea someday...

and someday they might...if Mr. Il and his Ilk are forcibly removed! Wa-hey! Thankfully, wheew, Raytheon offers defense systems that are ready to help to protect our Way Of Life. I'm sleeping better tonight.