Ea O Ka Aina: Suburbia

Showing posts with label Suburbia. Show all posts

Lima Ola mess to begin in 2018

SUBHEAD: This is a County program and is meant to be the spearpoint for heavy development of the Southside.

By Alden Alayvilla on 15 June 2017 for the Garden Island -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/lima-ola-phase-to-begin/article_7128d697-3797-5045-86a4-81e97aae6d93.html)

Image above: Architects rendering of the Workforce World plan in Eleele named Lima Ola. Note about 40% of the site is multifamily apartments, many of them multi-story. From original From (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/07/tax-donkey-purgatory.html).

[IB Publisher's note: The Land Use Commission has not approved the change of the Lima Ola site from Agriculture Use to Urban Use. But the fix is likely in. However, the bad news about the suburban future of Kauai keeps piling up. The County government of Kauai is dragging us into a dead-end up cul-de-sacs and empty strip malls with no resiliency or self reliance. Duck and cover - a speculator's shit storm of failure is on the way.]

An affordable housing project that may provide the community with 550 residential units will be on the table at a Land Use Commission meeting later this month.

The county of Kauai is petitioning for a land use district boundary amendment, which if approved by the LUC, will change the 75-acre parcel from a State Land Use Agricultural Land District to a State Land Use Urban district.

Since the proposed project would include development of more than 15 acres of land within the Agricultural District, as defined by the LUC, a petition is necessary, according to the project’s environmental assessment.

Members of the LUC visited the parcel Tuesday and were briefed on Lima Ola Workforce Housing Project’s start date, intersection improvements, a proposed regional park, wastewater plan and concerns regarding overflow of a reservoir near the site.

“Considering everything goes well, we would like to commence infrastructure in 2018 and we anticipate an 18- to 20-month build out,” said Kanani Fu, County of Kauai housing director. “For the actual homes, conservatively, we’re looking at 2019 for phase one.”

However, after the first homes are built, it will take another five to seven years for the the completion of phase one, according to county officials. Phase one would add 149 units of 38 single-family and 111 multi-family units.

Funding secured for phase one totaled $20.3 million in sponsor equity, according to the Lima Ola 201H exemption application. In 2010, the county purchased the site for $2.5 million.
In 2016, the project received $16 million from the Legislature.

The development would include single-family, multi-family units, as well as units for seniors.
Because the project is to provide residents with affordable housing, households earning from 80 percent to below 140 percent area median income may be able to purchase homes.

Image above: County Housing Director Kanani Fu, left, talks about the the Lima Ola Work Force Housing Development project to State Land Use Commission members during a site visit to Eleele on Tuesday, 13 June 2017. From original article.

The majority of units — 385 — are for households in the 80 percent median income category.
In the 80-percent AMI, a household of four would have to have an income of $68,250, according to the County of Kauai 2017 annual income limits.

That may change over time, Fu said.

“Based upon the types of funds that we used to do the vertical construction, that dictates the affordables we gotta serve. If we use low-income housing tax credit, we are required to serve 60 percent AMI,” she said. “Who we build homes for cannot be decided now. It comes at the time when we go after financing for the vertical construction.”

Ken Taylor, a Kapahi resident who attended the site visit, said the Lihue area would have been a better place to build affordable housing.

“Look at this area out here. There’s very few jobs. Why would you put affordable housing out here where there’s no jobs?” he said. “This is just a prime example of urban sprawling. It’s really sad. Before you know it, the coffee field will all be gone and we’ll be growing houses.”

The county said it has put 300 homes in Lihue and 100 in Poipu in the past decade and has not created a housing project on the Westside.

As far as employment on that side of the island, the Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai Coffee landscaping companies and KIUC employ over 1,400 workers.

The last housing project on the Westside sponsored by the county was the Eleele Nani Subdivision consisting of 96 units and built in 1993.

Sacrificing ag land to make room for homes is another county mistake, Taylor added.
The majority of the parcel is on land utilized by Kauai Coffee. The parcel is less than 3 percent of Kauai Coffee’s available farm land. County officials say, however, the varietal of coffee on the development site will be grown at an alternative location.

“There’s plenty of room for affordable housing without taking out ag land,” Taylor said.
Taylor added the development will cause traffic issues.

Fu said the development will actually improve conditions, such as a signalized intersection and pedestrian crosswalk at the intersection of Mahea Road, Kaumualii Highway and Laulea Street.
A bus stop will be added by the intersection.

The project would be built in four phases may take over 20-plus years to complete, Fu said.
Lima Ola will utilize the Eleele wastewater treatment facility.

“At full build out, if no other development were to come online, the treatment is at 80 percent capacity,” Fu said. “The county, in response to this development, are required to expand its treatment center when population requires it.”

Overflow of the Kapa Reservoir, adjacent to Hanapepe, was a concern brought to LUC members.
With a 16 million gallon capacity, the Kauai Coffee-owned reservoir averages about 8 million gallons a day.

Though it doesn’t have a spillway, the reservoir does overflow once it reaches capacity, officials said.
Water would go under the roadway and back down the valley.

A Land Use Commission hearing regarding the project in tentatively scheduled for June 28 and 29.

COMMENTS:

manongindashadow071 posted at 3:49pm June 15, 2017
"A waste water plant next o the reservoir.....Eleele residents beware ! If this housing plan goes through, we soon will be smelling the odor from the waste water plant. We will catch the down wind breezes. Can you imagine having a barbeque outside your lawn and inhaling the stink odor. Worse yet, "the smell flowing throughout your house while having dinner or sleeping at night."

LostInParadise posted at 3:06pm June 15, 2017
"Affordable housing" = middle to upper middle class. making six figures! at 140k a year you should be able to pay off a median priced(740k) house in a decade anyways."

Spatial posted at 10:25am June 15, 2017
“Who we build homes for cannot be decided now.". Well sister, either that's your job to figure, or we are entirely dependent on handouts from the federal government to finance this project. If affordable housing truly is a priority for Kauai, we would be financing this through our local budget. Not increasing salaries, and giving council members yet another pay raise. For now, this project is only a "maybe affordable", because that's all you can promise."

American way of life is negotiable

SUBHEAD: Communism coming to the US brought by corporations and in the name of technological progress.

By Ugo Bardi on 29 May 2017 for Cassandra's Legacy -
(http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2017/05/why-american-way-of-life-is-negotiable.html)

Image above: “Six cars for one driveway of this house every day. It’s not like they had a party… this is EVERY DAY! Who knows if they actually have more cars inside the garage?” – Jason in California. IB Publisher's note: Even here on the isolated tropical island of Kauai it is not unusual in crowded neighborhoods with small house lots with a two car driveway to find four cars in front of the house - One vehicle for every driving age individual living there. From (http://neighborshame.com/packed-driveway/).

In a previous post, I discussed the RethinkX report by James Arbib and Tony Seba on the future of transportation. The report discusses a technological revolution that would bring about a new concept: "Transportation as a Service" (TaaS) that will people to move mainly by using publicly available, driverless cars.

Many took the report (and my comments on it) as just another technofix aimed at keeping things as they are; business as usual. Indeed, the report, framed the "TaaS" concept in terms of economic growth. Nothing else is acceptable in the public debate, today.

So, it seems that few people realized what kind of sacred cow Arbib and Seba are planning to slaughter and serve as well cooked burgers. It is nothing less than the private car, the pivotal element of the American way of life (yes, exactly what George Bush 1st said "is not negotiable").

This idea is as far from business as usual as I can imagine, one of the most disruptive and revolutionary ideas that I came across in recent times. So, I think I can go more in depth into this subject and explain why it is so disruptive and revolutionary.

The growth in car ownership was the result of a political decision that most Western government took at some moment (Even Adolf Hitler did, at least in part). It was a decision that didn't have to be taken; for instance, the Soviet Government always discouraged private car ownership. But governments, although not benevolent organizations, are made of people and people can recognize a good business when they see it.

Image above: The Volkswagen Bug was introduced to America in the late 1940s but sales did not explode until the early 1960's when interest in the "big finned" gas guzzling Detroit "land yachts" waned. In the background is a photo of Adolf Hitler inspecting a model of a 1939 VW Bug before World War II. From (http://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/4235/soviet-mass-housing-novye-cheryomushki-belyayevo-suburbs)

More cars meant more highways, more bridges, more shopping centers, more housing developments, and more opportunities to build things. That meant a lot of money flowing. So, the explosive development of private motorization happened because it could happen.

But, in recent times, the trend is reversing. The number of cars per person and per household is going down. These data by Sivak (2015) seem to be the most recent ones available.

And it is not just the number of cars that's going down, also the number of miles driven per person or per car is falling. The trend is the same in many Western countries: we went through some kind of "peak car".

So, what's going on? One factor is that cars are becoming more expensive.

That's mainly because cars are becoming heavier and more complicated. Today, a classic Volkswagen Beetle would cost very little, possibly less than it did at the time of the great motorization growth of the 1950s. But no insurance company would want to insure it, and no government would provide a license plate for it: too noisy, unsafe, and polluting.

But the increasing cost of ownership is probably a minor factor in comparison to deeper changes that are taking place. The increasing social inequality that leads to a larger and larger fraction of people becoming poor or very poor. See below the behavior of the "Gini Coefficient", a measure of the inequality in society.

So, cars are more expensive and there are more poor people. No wonder that car ownership is going down: a gradually higher fraction of the population cannot afford cars any more.

We shouldn't be surprised: for most of humankind's history, most people would walk; only a few could afford horses or coaches. One car in every garage was a very peculiar phenomenon that couldn't possibly last for a long time and that won't probably ever be repeated in the future. But the end of the cycle may not be painless for many. If you live, or have lived, in a Western suburban area, you know what the problem is.

Image above: Aerial photograph of a Pheonix suburban development, that looks like a computer circuitboard, used as an example of a neighborhood that would make residents sick. From (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-doctors-are-finding-neighborhoods-that-make-their-patients-sick)

There you are: miles away from anything that's not other people's homes. Miles from your workplace, miles from the nearest supermarket, miles from the closest train station. No car means no job, no groceries, no place to go.

By far and large, most families living in Western suburbs still own at least one car. They have to, even though that means an increasingly heavy strain to the family's budget. But, as the current trends continue, there will come a moment in which owning a car will become a burden too heavy to carry for a non negligible fraction of the suburban population. Then what happens?

Well, there are several possible ways for people to cope: biking, carpooling, using donkeys, move to the city to live in a shack made of discarded cardboard containers or, simply, go zombie and die.

Cities are unlikely (to say the least) to establish conventional bus services for the citizens who find themselves stranded in the bloated suburbs: it would be awfully too expensive. So, as it happens in these cases, technological innovation is supposed to come to the rescue. And it does that with the concept of "TaaS" (Transportation as a Service).

It is, basically, a high-tech car rental service where you use a vehicle only when you need it, thanks to the technological marvels of Global Positioning Satellites, automated driving, and electric power.

It is not obvious that TaaS will be less expensive than car ownership in terms of dollars per mile. But, with TaaS, you don't have the fixed costs of owning a car: you can save money by reducing your travels to the bare minimum.

So, you can use TaaS to reach your workplace (if you still have a job) and to reach a supermarket to redeem your food stamps. For the rest of the time, you stay home and watch TV or use the social media. What else do you need?

Arbib and Seba have correctly described in their report how this phenomenon is not going to be gradual: it is going to be explosive. As car ownership goes down, the cost of cars will increase simply because of diminishing economies of scale. Add to it the decreasing profits of the oil industry and the whole thing is going to implode fast, generating a textbook example of the "Seneca Cliff".

By the end of the cycle, people (those who will survive the ordeal) might abandon the suburbs and move into high-rise apartment building that can be serviced by public transportation at reasonable costs. At this point, the American landscape could look much like that of the old Soviet Union.

Image above: The Moscow suburb of Novye Cheryomushki (New Cherry Town) is made up of Soviet style apartment blocks, in the style of French architect Le Corbusier. By 1991 75% of all Soviet housing was in this style of Industrialized housing. It was serviced by mass transit and walking paths, as few Soviet citizens could afford to operate a private car. From (http://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/4235/soviet-mass-housing-novye-cheryomushki-belyayevo-suburbs)

Eventually, TaaS is just an example of the concept of the "Internet of Things" that's so fashionable nowadays. It means that you won't own things anymore: cars or whatever; you rent them. So, your refrigerator, your TV set, even your toaster, are not your property but of the corporations leasing them to you.

It looks like a good idea, because you can have the latest models and you don't have to worry about maintenance. At least as long as don't run out of credit, because, if you do, your toaster will refuse to toast your bread.

All this sounds like... well, you know what it sounds like. Would you have ever imagined that Communism would come one day to the US brought by corporations and in the name of technological progress? The "American way of life" really turns out to be negotiable.

.

Hawaii's feral chicken "problem"

SUBHEAD: What came first? The chicken or the Whole Foods parking lot in Kailua on Big Island.

By Kristen Downey on 25 May 2017 for Civil Beat -
(http://www.civilbeat.org/2017/05/why-wild-chickens-are-flocking-to-whole-foods-in-kailua/)

Image above: The Wild chickens are flocking to Whole Foods in Kailua on the Big Island. From original article.

The Kailua Neighborhood Board passed a motion recently asking the city to revise its feral chicken removal program to focus on trapping roosters.

In the past two years, regular customers at the upscale Whole Foods grocery store in Kailua have been noticing an odd phenomenon — more and more feral chickens are roosting in the parking lot.

Whole families of birds –roosters, chickens and chicks– are perching in and under the trees near the entrance to the store, nesting near the area where the shopping carts are stored, and strutting up and down the rows of the parking lot. They’re also crowing. A lot.

Inside the store, a 5-pound, free-range chicken from California costs about $20. Outside, in the blocks surrounding the store, about three dozen are roaming free.

“I don’t remember there ever being chickens like this. Never. Maybe on the Pali, but never like this,” said Amanda Gomez, 29, of Kaneohe, scanning the Whole Foods parking lot. “There are so many moms and babies. They love this area right here.”

Opinions are divided over the feathered newcomers. Some in Kailua admire the birds’ bright plumage and see them as charming wildlife. Some are irritated by their incessant crowing. Some wonder if they could carry disease and some are growing afraid of them. Some have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the birds.

And some people want the government to get rid of them.

“Are they pests or are they pets?” asked Scot Matayoshi, who serves on the Kailua Neighborhood Board. He has been pushing for the city to trap and remove the birds, particularly the roosters, but said that his effort has been controversial to some people on the board who would prefer the birds be left in peace.

“Whether or not one regards feral chickens as pests is a matter of individual preference,” said Sheila Conant, a professor emerita at University of Hawaii and an expert on Hawaiian birds.

“Having a neighborhood rooster that crows in the middle of the night or very early in the morning could certainly be exasperating. At the moment, I don’t mind the chickens. They can be fun to watch.”

According to the Hawaii Department of Health, the birds don’t present a public health risk.

The federal Centers for Disease Control, however, advises that people who have physical contact with poultry or poultry waste are at risk of salmonella infection. The germs can get on the hands, shoes and clothes of people who have contact with the birds or their saliva or droppings.

Complaints about chickens came up last month at the Kailua Neighborhood Board meeting. Board members passed overwhelmingly a motion asking the city of Honolulu to revise its feral chicken removal program to focus on trapping and removing roosters. They said that would be cheaper than eradicating both males and females.

But Matayoshi said city officials told him they haven’t been able to find a pest removal company that wants to remove the birds. There’s only one company on the islands, Sandwich Isles Pest Solutions in Pearl City, that can be hired to remove bothersome birds, and the city does not have a standing contract with the firm for the work, Matayoshi said.

Harold Scholes, a pest control consultant at Sandwich Isles Pest Solutions, said the company catches and euthanizes unwanted chickens for private clients. For $300 a week and $115 per trip to each site, the company will set up a trap, provide it with bait and water, and remove the animal humanely. He said that other parts of the island, not just Kailua, have seen an increase in feral chickens.

According to Sherilyn Kajiwara, director of the Honolulu customer services department, the city manages feral chicken issues only on its own property, and only on a case-by-case basis. Other property owners — whether private owners, the federal government or the state government — are responsible for dealing with their own problems.

But in response to growing calls for action, the city last year added what she called a “fowl response component” into its animal control contract with the Hawaiian Humane Society. The Humane Society began handling the job in January.

“Under the city contract, the HHS will respond to public complaints related to pet fowl nuisances,” Kajiwara said in a statement to Civil Beat. “It does not address feral animals and does not have a fowl eradication component.”

She referred further questions to the Hawaiian Humane Society.

Fines For Nuisance Violations

Suzy Tam, communications director for the Humane Society, said the $80,000 contract for poultry remediation services calls for the Humane Society to respond to “nuisance” complaints. That’s defined as any animal “making noise continuously for ten minutes or intermittently for 30 minutes or more,” and causing a disturbance, or owning an excessive number of animals.

Violations can lead to fines of up to $50 for a first offense and up to $1,000 for further offenses.
She said the Humane Society does not remove nuisance chickens, whether owned or free-roaming.
Tam said the Humane Society has gotten 289 complaints about chickens since late January, with calls coming from all over the island.

She said they have mailed out 83 warning letters and issued six citations to residents with chickens on their properties during that period, but have no way of comparing the numbers to previous years because the contract is new.

Outside Whole Foods in Kailua, there is a whole range of perspectives about the chickens and speculation about where they came from.

Dallas Pabilona, of Hayward, California, a tourist, squealed with laughter when she spotted a cocky rooster strutting in the median in front of her car. She was dismayed to hear that some people want to cull the flock.

“If they weren’t here, where would they live?,” she asked. “This is everybody’s home.”

Bob Beard, the oceanarium manager at the Pacific Beach Hotel and a long-time Kailua resident, on the other hand, scowled at the birds as he sat at an outside dining table near the entrance to Whole Foods, only a few feet from a rooster perching noisily in a tree.

“They’re chickens,” he said. “They do what people like to do. They copulate. I’m surprised there’s not more cats around—there’s a lot of free meat.”
He also thinks they’re dirty.

Michael La Rochelle, 25, a nanny and student, said he called 911 one day this week after spotting a young man trying to catch a large rooster with a kind of lasso. He said Kailua police said they would check it out. When he returned, the man was gone, and the rooster was still the cock of the walk.

La Rochelle said he thought the man was trying to catch the rooster to use it for cock-fighting. “He was going after a rooster,” he said. “If he wanted to eat it, he would pick a chicken.”

Pumehana Piko, who grew up on Molokai and Maui but who has lived on Oahu for 14 years, said she believes the chickens in Kailua have been released or escaped from cockfighting businesses because they seem unusually fierce. Cockfighting is illegal in most parts of the country but is only a misdemeanor in Hawaii, and the events can be popular and well-attended.

“They breed for chickens that are aggressive,” said Piko, 37. She said people who organize cockfights earn big money from it–$5,000 or $20,000 for a match—and that more people are trying to get into the business.

“You’ll see kids try to grab them for pets or experiment to get them to fight each other,” Piko said.
Pauline Menor-Ozoa, of Kailua, who works in the human resources department at Queen’s Medical Center, also believes the chickens are escapees from cockfighting operations.

“My girls are afraid of them,” she said. “Usually chickens run away, but these follow you and look at you.”

Conant, the bird expert, said she is growing curious about why chickens are proliferating so quickly. In an email to Civil Beat, she said she believes that more people have been raising chickens to get their own fresh eggs, and that when it proves troublesome to care for them, they are releasing them, and they become feral.

“Feral chickens, much like feral cats, can do quite well without assistance (food or shelter) from people,” she said in an email to Civil Beat.

She identified one of the birds at the Kailua Whole Foods as a rooster, and she said his color patterns and the lack of any unusual plumage characteristics, such as feathers on the feet, or an ornate crown of feathers or distinctive markings, make it likely the bird is what is known as a “jungle fowl.” That’s the common name for the wild species from which modern chicken breeds have been developed.
There are more than 200 breeds of chickens, Conant said.

“Once individuals escape and breed on their own, they revert back to the appearance of jungle fowl in very few generations,” she wrote.

Why Kailua? And why Whole Foods? The managers at Whole Foods, as well as their public relations firm, declined repeated requests for comment.

So for now, the question is open. Perhaps the fowl feel particularly safe there.
After all, the chickens only need to cross the road.

On the other side, they get to the Kawainui-Hamakua Marsh Complex, the largest single wetland in the state, a safe haven for birds.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Chicken Odesssy - not from Polynesia 3/18/14
Island Breath: Moa - Red Jungle Fowl 10/31/06

.

Clothesline at the end of the world

SUBHEAD: The apocalypse of climate change is not going to come with a bang but with a whimper.

By Charlotte McGuin Freeman on 6 May 2017 for Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/dark-mountain-issue-11-clothesline-at-the-end-of-the-world/)

Image above: Steel framed washing line with clothes blowing dry in sun and wind. From (http://lawoffashion.info/old-fashioned-washing-line-pole/).

On the first warmish March day, I’ll be outside hanging my wash on the line even if my boots are crunching on snow. If the sun is shining, if there’s even a hint of warmth on the breeze I’ll be bringing my wash outside, freeing it from the clotheslines in the basement.

I am a tiny bit fanatical about my clotheslines. The outdoor line is attached to my side yard fence and, like all people who engage in a repetitive physical task, I have a specific method for hanging the clothes. Pants, dresses, bathrobes – long items get hung on the back line against the fence.

Then shirts, which must be hung upside down, connected at the corners to save on clothespins. (If you hang them right side up by the shoulders, you get weird bumps dried into your shirts that make you look like you’re continually shrugging.)

Smalls get hung on the end furthest from the street, between the dresses and the shirts. No need to embarrass the neighbours. Then last are the socks – matched together, hung in pairs. A load of wash takes me maybe ten minutes to hang. I work at home so it makes for a nice break in the day, and I love my washline. I love the way things look hanging there in the breeze.

But I don’t hang clothes just because I like the way they look. I am a true believer in the power of the clothesline. For one thing, the clothes dryer is second in American homes only to the refrigerator for electricity consumption, and while I know that eliminating my use of the dryer individually isn’t going to slow the onslaught of climate change, it’s something concrete I can do. Also, as a freelancer,

I’m broke, so anything to bring down the electric bill.

But I hang laundry for a less concrete reason, because hanging the laundry is about taking care, it’s about a version of domesticity that is not oppression, but which models the sort of caretaking we’re all going to have to learn to value in order to make a hotter, drier, more crowded world habitable.

I live in a small town in Montana, a town that until about 20 years ago was solidly working class. It was the headquarters for the Northern Pacific Railway, and it’s a town of small railroaders’ houses with tiny yards, nearly every one of which has a sturdy clothesline out back.

Because we’re one of the windiest towns in America and these are serious clotheslines – usually built from six–inch plumbing pipe, sunk into three or four feet of concrete.

And yet, I’m one of the few people I know who actually dries my clothes on the line. As the cost of appliances dropped and dryers became ubiquitous, clotheslines came to be seen as ‘trashy’, a symbol of poverty and sloth.

Even as the new people moving to town buy hybrid vehicles and put solar panels on their roofs, even as greenhouses and chicken coops spring up in backyards, those sturdy old plumbing-pipe clotheslines, painted silver, are always empty.

I moved here from California in 2002 for a number of reasons, but chief among them I was anxious about climate change. It made me nervous, California. It had been good to me career-wise, twice.

First when I moved there to do my master’s degree at UC Davis; then when I left Salt Lake City after my PhD and went back out to live with my brother and find a job.

Desperate to pay off my student loans, I got work in a tech company, editing user and administration guides. I liked it. I liked the people I worked with and the intellectual challenge of figuring out how to present information to people in the most useful format possible. But California was giving me the willies.

It was so crowded, and the Bay Area is such an enclosed space, bounded by the Pacific on the one side and the coast hills and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on the other.

Three years into my tech job, I’d seen field after field on my evening commute disappear under the onslaught of ugly housing developments, just as I’d watched the last few migrant workers hoeing a zucchini field that was doomed to become another Cisco campus.

I wish I’d had a camera that day. I was stopped in traffic, and across from me were several guys with computer cases standing at a bus stop, while behind them four or five Mexican guys hoed zucchini rows, and behind them another three–storey Cisco building, identical to all the others, was going up.

I could feel the big change coming – whatever we want to call it, climate change, global warming, the Anthropocene, the great acceleration – I don’t know what it is, but having been raised by unreliable parents you develop antennae for impending doom.

You can tell by the energy level, the degree of frantic vibration, that something bad is about to happen. And that’s how I felt in California. I couldn’t put a finger on it exactly, but I knew something wasn’t right and I wanted to get out of the way.

I knew about Livingston from having run writers’ workshops while I was in graduate school. The nature and western writers were a friendly lot, most knew one another, and talk across the patio tables at Squaw Valley often turned to places where a person could live cheap. Livingston was one of them.

Like a lot of beautiful places left empty when an industry implodes, Livingston has attracted writers and painters and fading movie stars for decades now, along with a vibrant population of hunting and fishing guides, building contractors and former cult members. It’s a creative bunch and, with the exception of the rich summer people who build trophy homes in the valleys that radiate out from town, it’s a place where no–one has ever had much money.

Most of us live in one- and two-storey houses on small lots in town. Old railroaders’ houses like the one I bought. Mine was built in 1903, and hadn’t had anything much done to it since they put the indoor plumbing in sometime in the forties.

It’s a small house on a town lot that I bought for a number of reasons, chief among them the five-foot clawfoot tub, and the well-used vegetable plot that took up half the back yard.

I was lucky enough to get to hang around Gary Snyder when I was at UC Davis, and Snyder’s advice to us wasn’t about poetry, well, not directly. Gary told us that if we wanted a creative life, we should find someplace cheap to live, where a person could afford to buy and pay off a house.

Cheap housing attracts artists, he said, so chances are you’d wind up with interesting neighbors, and if you had a place to live you wouldn’t have to go teach in places you didn’t want to be. You’d have your freedom.

And that’s what I was aiming for when I moved here. I’d been living with my brother for four years, a roommate arrangement that had worked out so well we thought we’d better break up before we wound up like one those pairs of spinster siblings you used to see sometimes out in the country near our grandmother’s farm. The ones in the white farmhouse they’d been raised in, still sleeping in their childhood bedrooms.

In the four years we’d lived together we’d both found better jobs and had repaired some of the anxiety we had about domestic life. We’d been raised in a world of unstable alcoholics, the kind who pick a fight whenever they’re feeling existentially itchy.

By teaming up, we’d figured we could practise domestic life on one another, see if we could figure out how to live in a house with another person you love without screaming fights or tears of recrimination. That we’d done it and had righted our little ships, both financially and emotionally, was a major accomplishment. But it was time to move on.

Time to take those skills and go find real partners. And so when my manager agreed to let me telecommute, I went looking for a house I could afford, and since I wasn’t tied to the Bay Area anymore, a house I could afford back in the Rocky Mountains I loved.

Pretty quickly, things fell into place and I found myself in possession of a mortgage and the keys to a small bungalow in Montana. I packed the cat and computer and boxes of books into my Honda, and arrived three days ahead of the moving van.

That I’d been able to not only buy a house, but could afford a moving van felt miraculous to me. We’d moved every 18 months or so growing up, renting U-Hauls or borrowing horse trailers.

Despite having managed to get a mortgage, purchase a house and arrange for a moving van, I still felt that first night, setting up the inflatable mattress in my empty house, that I’d broken in, that any moment someone was going to burst through the door and shout at me to leave.

The first year went pretty well. Patrick, my brother, wound up moving here after me, having been laid off from his job just as I was leaving California.

I got a dog, and built raised beds in the existing vegetable patch, and made friends. Patrick found a cheap apartment on the other side of town, took up with his first girlfriend in ages, and set about building himself a niche running events and helping with wedding planners, work he’d done since his teens.

We were settling in. At his birthday party in early September he made a sentimental speech to our new friends, thanking them for taking us into their lives, saying he’d never had such a happy year.

On 28 September that first year I lived here, on a beautiful, blue-sky, golden sunshine autumn day, I was in the hammock strung between my apple trees when the Assistant Coroner of Park County Montana walked through my front gate.

I got up to see what the dogs were barking about only to meet this big man, taking off his feed cap as he saw me, who put one enormous hand on my shoulder and said;

‘Ma’am. There’s no good way to say this. There was a car accident last night. Your brother is dead.’

Time stopped.

The world as I knew it ended that day, and while a new life has taken root, it is not at all the same. It is a replacement world.

Patrick dying was the one thing I had feared above all others. It was like being simultaneously orphaned and widowed.

Our divorced parents are unreliable at best, our youngest brother had died as a toddler, and we had survived it all together. We were less than two years apart, and in every photo I have of us, from earliest childhood until the end, one of us has an arm around the other.

I’d gone from the oldest of three, to being the big sister, to being an only child.

In losing Patrick, I lost the one person on this earth who loved me absolutely, whose faith in me was unshakeable. Without Patrick, it took me a very long time to piece together some kind of identity, and even now, 13 years later, it feels false, because he hasn’t been here to see it.

It was terrible, and I survived it in large part due to the tender ministrations of the town of Livingston. ‘If you’re going to have a disaster,’ I tell people when the story comes up, ‘you want to have it here. Everyone came, and they stayed.’

My house filled up that first night as word got out. They got me through a funeral, and saw that I was never left out. I had people to go to Happy Hour and dinner with on Fridays, and they took me in for holidays, and some, like my friend Jennifer, occasionally walked in my front door that first year or so and said ‘No really, how are you?’

My best friend had twins (after a terrifying pregnancy), so for a couple of years there was always a screaming baby to tend, and her two big girls needed an auntie as much as I needed kids to take care of. I was taken in by a tribe of people, people who became my new family, people who I love with all my heart. And yet.

When I say the world stopped, I mean that I have a very strange relationship to time now. There was my life until 2003, a life that hummed along and things changed and I moved from place to place and attended schools and published a novel and got a job and eventually moved to Montana. My story kept unfolding.

And then Patrick died, and it feels in some weird way like my story ended. However, I’m still here.

To compare my personal loss to the avalanche of loss that is heading our way as a planet would be unbelievably callow, and yet there are things you learn when you lose the person you thought you could not live without that seem germane.

For one thing, the surprise at still being alive. You have to figure out how to live in this diminished world. You have to figure out how to go on after the fourth, or seventh, or 15th time you pick up the phone to call the person who is no longer here.

Those first months after Patrick died, I remember thinking, ‘Forty years? Fifty years? I have to live like this for how long?’

The literature of climate change is mostly of the apocalyptic variety. There will be a disaster and then it will ALL END. But if there’s anything I have learned in these intervening years, it’s that it doesn’t end. You’re still here. The sun comes up.

The apple trees bloom in the spring, and the garden needs planting, and the children you love will keep growing and even, eventually, you might be lucky enough to meet someone who loves you and who doesn’t mind when you spend the first three or four years telling him stories about your dead brother, and who you love back even though you find it inconceivable that you’re spending your life with someone who didn’t know Patrick, and who Patrick will never know.

Apocalyptic stories are sexy in their drama. The end of the world as we know it will be big and dramatic and everything will change, and we will be living in some mythical landscape where we’ll be freed from all the boring conventional aspects of our daily lives. My instinct, however, is that this is not how things are going to unfold.

More likely it’ll entail the slow chipping away of things we’re accustomed to, changes like our fruit trees dying. We had a frost three years ago, a freak freeze in October that killed every cherry tree in town. We didn’t find out until spring, when they didn’t come back. Here in Montana we get much of our fruit in the summer from Utah.

Orchardists will drive up and set up roadside stands where they sell raspberries and plums and currants and peaches. Beautiful peaches. They were late this year, and my first thought was, ‘Is this it? Is this the year they don’t come? Is this the year we’ll look back on and say, “Remember when there were peaches?”’

One reason I’m such a fanatic about the clothesline is that, like clearing the table after dinner and doing the dishes in the sink with soap and hot water, hanging your wash on the line keeps you in actual physical contact with the world.

You have to touch each piece and in doing so you can see which tee shirts are wearing thin, which socks have holes in the heels, which trousers are getting worn in the knees. It is this physical contact, this clearing up of messes that I think is at the root of the peculiar hostility toward clotheslines that has taken root in those neighborhoods where clotheslines have been forbidden and even outlawed.

For two or three generations now we’ve been told by the culture that success is measured by the distance we can put between ourselves and the physical acts of both making and cleaning up.

I know perfectly competent grown people who cannot cook themselves dinner, who rely on restaurants or make a sandwich, who have no idea how to do something as simple as roast a chicken. People rely on clothes dryers and dishwashers.

We hire cleaners for our houses. We hire gardeners to mow our lawns.

We sometimes have to hire people to raise our babies so we can continue to work at jobs we might love, or just need in order to bring in the money we require to keep the machinery of consumption humming along.

We rent storage units where we put the stuff we worked all those hours to buy but that no longer fits in our houses.

That my household chores are largely physical in nature – hanging out wash, cooking dinner and then cleaning the dishes, mucking out a chicken coop, tidying the garden to get ready for winter – marks me as old-fashioned and an outlier.

I don’t live in a city, or even a particularly large town. I cook all my own meals, in part because our town is so small that there aren’t cheap takeout places. I work at home so I don’t have a commute anymore. I’m already a throwback, to the extent that when I visit folks ‘out there’ I do find the noise and pace and sheer amount of disposable trash of modern life a little disorienting.

What I learned when my brother died and left me here alone is this: it is in taking care that we can save ourselves and others. Nina’s twins, with all their mess and screaming those first few years (and they were screamers, those two), that’s what saved me. Having something useful to do. Something immediate.

The baby cannot sleep without being held, and there are two of them. So days we spent, on Nina’s big white sofa, watching Barefoot Contessa reruns and trying to get those girls to sleep.

What I learned is that the garden can save you, because it doesn’t give a shit if you’re having a freaked out, weeping kind of a day. It’s spring and things need planting, or it’s the end of the season and snow is coming and if you don’t get the tomatoes in and taken care of the whole summer will have been a waste. And so you do it.

You find a rhythm in the physical world that carries you through, because the bottom line is that you are not dead. You are still living on this earth, and there are days of stupendous beauty, even in the midst of unbearable sorrow.

And so, because I love the world, even in its diminished state, I hang the laundry outside. I hang laundry and refuse to use my clothes dryer. I bought a tiny, efficient little car. I grow food in my backyard and put it up in jars for the winter and I’ve pretty much stopped flying on airplanes. I know that these actions, taken as an individual, are not going to slow down the changes we see happening. The freak frost that killed the cherry trees.

The fish parasite that bloomed in the Yellowstone River this summer, when the river was at its lowest-ever recorded flow, when the water was hotter than it had ever been and so a parasite bloomed and thousands upon thousands of fish died. So clear was the danger that the state banned our sacred sport, fly fishing, for a month. Which was unprecedented.

For the 14 years I’ve lived here I’ve watched that rusty brown creep across the mountains as the pine beetle kills off the trees and, more years than not, there are no chanterelles or boletes in the fall, not even up high in the mountains, because the late summer rains didn’t come.

But I hang my wash on the line, and grow vegetables in the backyard, and love the girls I’m helping to raise even when they turn into terrible teenagers who are acting out in the most ridiculous ways possible. Because I’m still here.

Apocalyptic stories about of the end of the world are sexy, in part because they allow us, in much the same way as fantasies of past lives do, to cast ourselves as important players in grand historical dramas. They strip us of boring domestic chores. They set us free from our stuff and give us a blank slate with which to start over.

However, I think our job is going to be more complicated than that. My hunch is that we’re not going to get a big, sexy, end-of-the-world do-over. What we’ll be faced with is more ordinary. A series of diminishments. The loss of one thing we thought we could not live without, and then another, and then another yet.

Every so often, when someone mentions that something happened years ago, in say, 2011, I’ll find myself startled at how far in the temporal past 2003 has slipped.

For me, it’s still right here. The day the world stopped. The day that Mike Fitzpatrick, that big kind man who is himself dead now, walked into my side yard bearing the worst of all possible news.

It’s right there with me as I hang wash in that same side yard, dresses and pants and shirts waving in our stiff winds, as the cottage roses and cosmos and hollyhocks wave back. We might all be living in the end times, living in the aftermath, but we are still living.—

Source's Note: You’ll find more articles where this came from in our latest book. Dark Mountain: Issue 11 is available through our online shop

.

We likely missed an orderly collapse

SUBHEAD: If we knew better we'd have climbed down from our precarious perch when the housing bubble burst.

By Juan Wilson on 20 April 2017 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2017/04/we-likey-missed-orderly-collapse.html)

Image above: Tankers and freighters are brought to the shores of Bangladesh to be taken apart for scrap metal and other valuables. If we only could do this with suburbia. From (https://www.pinterest.com/yolimk/shipbreakers/).

Back in September 2008 George W. Bush spoke the truth when he said of the US economy;

"If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.”

This was in reference to the unraveling of a $700 million bailout package. Had we accepted the ramifications of the collapse of the "fake" economy we had become dependent on at that time our losses would have been minimal to what we are facing now.

But that is not the way it went. In a matter of weeks Obama won the presidency and was "on board" with saving the USS Titanic. With Obama at the helm US debt went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. All that debt was in order to keep the wheels on the bus after it went over the cliff.

Since most Americans are overweight children with an appetite for colorful noisy screens neither Bush nor Obama was ready to let Americans know that the party was already over and that they had to go home in the dark and awake the next morning as peasants.

We had our chance to accept failure and deal with it before it meant losing the farm. The way it is going now, most Americans will be lucky to find a working farm and get a part time gig as a field hand.

ENTER TRUMP
Since 2011 the United States has reached its limit in borrowing money from the future several times. The U.S. Treasury Department's power to borrow money expired on 15 March 2017 and Congress will have to authorize moving on past $20 trillion in IOUs, or not be able to cover financial obligations like monthly Social Security checks. As Michael Snyder wrote in (http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-debt-ceiling-deadline-has-passed-and-now-the-biggest-test-of-donald-trumps-presidency-begins)

So now the federal government is not going to be able to go into any more debt until the debt ceiling is raised. For the moment, the Trump administration can implement “emergency measures” to stay under the debt limit, but it won’t be too long before we get to a major crisis point because the federal government is quickly running out of cash. Already, the U.S. Treasury has less cash on hand than Apple or Google, and that cash balance is going to keep on dropping until the debt ceiling is finally lifted.

Yes there is a little wiggle room in that there is some cash on hand once US borrowing stops, but that will be gone in weeks.

President Trump plans to bleed $15 trillion in new red ink over the next decade with military and infrastructure expenditures. That is unlikely to happen as planned, and there are real risks of an American—and a global—economic catastrophe.

WAKE UP CALL
Most Americans are in complete denial as to the dire straights we are in. Today Tyler Durden wrote at Zero Hedge: A Quarter Of Millennials Living At Home Neither Work Nor Study

At one point in time in America, living at home with mom and dad after crossing out of your teenage years and into your 20s was embarrassing and something that was generally avoided at all costs. And while hard times come and go, 20-somethings who were forced back into their parents' care worked their tails off until they could save up enough money to once again regain their freedom.

But, these days millennials seem to be embracing the free room and board provided by their parents. According to Bloomberg, there are 2.2 million millennials. A new study from the Census Bureau found roughly one-third of all millennials live at home with their parents and one-fourth of them can't be bothered with enrolling in school or finding a job. Of those, 40% of them are already in their 30's - predominantly white, male and no college experience.

It's time for these millennials to smell the smoke, get up from the PlayStation4 in the basement and go outside and help put out the fire. It is not for a lack of work that needs to be done that they are idle. That goes for the "better off" comfy life of many of the Baby Boomers and luckiest of the X-Geners too.

Get out of your car.
Shutdown the entertainment system.
Turn off your iPhone.
Think and feel.

That may be all you will have time for if you don't start the process soon. If you reach "Think and Feel" move on to the advanced work of:

Find a place where there is water and one can grow food.
Join or make a community.
Master a useful trade.
Brace yourself.

Understand that the "economic growth" con-job with all its utopian regalia of financial centers filled with avant garde art amidst prosperous city-living surrounded by suburbia and more distant McMansions is about to come apart like a plush carpet left in the rain. The "growth" fantasy is over but its dreamers and planners are not quite awake yet. But you are - and so, seek self-reliance, self-sufficiency and resilience.

SO WHAT'S THE PLAN?
Here on Kauai, Hawaii our dim witted county government has the gas peddle to the floor trying to awaken the "Growth Beast".

On a island that is about as sustainable as any county in the American Empire, they are proposing an update to our General Plan that will double the population in a generation, spreading suburban sprawl over what have been agriculture fields.

Do the words "self inflicted wound" mean anything to the greedy? They are not thinking past Amazon, Costco and Walmart as the source of life.

Some "forward" thinkers are looking to advanced Artificial intelligence and autonomous robotics to save the day. Humans could then have Universal Basic Incomes and Medicare for All and continue living in the basement... but why would an autonomous artificial intelligence put up with that waste of protoplasm and energy.

Considering the alternatives, forget that plan - go organic!

FACE SAVING WAR
A disorderly collapse is one thing - a nuclear war is another. Unfortunately for jingoistic leaders like Donald Trump, the only thing they find in their tool drawer is "WAR". If your only tool is a "hammer" everything is a "nail". If your only tool is "WAR" everybody is an "ENEMY".

It is vitally important to all life on Earth that World War Three is not the way The Donald saves face. Let's let him believe he invented the "New New Deal" and move on.

.

Millennials abandoning suburbia

SUBHEAD: A generation is turning its back on suburban sprawl and automobiles for homesteading.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 13 April 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr17/millennials-halfx4-17.html)

Image above: Millennials are embracing gardening like no recent generation. From (http://thechronicleherald.ca/homesnews/1440355-millennials-on-the-hunt-for-outdoor-spaces).

Real solutions have two parts: changes in values and operational changes in habits and processes. Many Millennials are homesteading, buying affordable homes and building community.

While it's certainly good sport to mock "snowflakes," not all Millennials are snowflakes. Many are homesteading, buying affordable homes and building communities that get stuff done.

I discuss these trends with Drew Sample, who is living them in Ohio. ( hear a 60-second excerpt or listen to the full podcast on Drew's site.)

Although the mainstream media focuses on bubble-priced Left and Right coast homes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are perfectly serviceable houses that can be had for $50,000 or less elsewhere in America. Drew just bought one, and rather than go through a bank for the mortgage, he arranged (with the help of a real estate attorney) for a family member to put up the mortgage.

This arrangement is win-win: the family member earns a much higher return on the cash than a savings account or equivalent, the loan is secured by the property, and Drew cuts out the bank/lender.

It may surprise those who only read media accounts of Millennials living in their parents' basement playing videogames, many of the Millennials in Drew's "tribe" are growing food via homesteading.

This is arguably a global trend, as the short video below from Japan reveals.

An increasing number of Japanese Millennials are abandoning the high-cost, long work hours life in big cities for a rural lifestyle that is described as "half farmer, half X," with X being whatever part-time work generates the modest incomes needed to sustain the village lifestyle.

I recently watched a Japanese TV program (Soko ga Japan is the name of the series) profiling the young residents of a Japanese farming village. Each household pays $200 or $250 per month for a spacious old house and adjoining farm plot.

This is roughly 10% of what the households were paying for cramping flats in Tokyo. One of the homes is an expansive 200-year old farm house which the young tenant has fixed up to host informal gatherings for those interested in the village community.

Drew reports his mortgage is a bit over $300/month. Including property taxes and homeowner's insurance, the basic cost of ownership is roughly half what neighboring homes are renting for.

So what is X, the other source of income? Raising animals and high-value vegetables that can be sold to restaurants is one source, but many of the young homesteaders continue to do the work they did in the city, only remotely: graphic design, illustration, IT (information technology), translation, etc.

This is an example of what I call the Mobile Creative class, the non-age specific class of people who have broken free of Corporate-State wage-slave serfdom by cobbling together multiple income streams doing work they care about, and radically slashing their cost of living to enable this freedom to do meaningful work.

America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014)

The New Class: Mobile Creatives (May 1, 2014)

The Nitty-Gritty of Financial Independence: The Self-Employed Mobile Creative (February 8, 2017)

I describe how to fashion a mobile creative work life and income in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

When people say they want solutions, they're actually seeking only a specific kind of solution, one that leaves everything they have now intact but guarantees them more of something: more security, more healthcare, more education, more money, etc., but at no cost or inconvenience to themselves.

Anything that fits these parameters isn't a solution; it's magic. Magical thinking and magical fixes are endlessly appealing precisely because they don't require us to change anything or work at anything outside our comfort zone.

In the real world, solutions change core values and processes. If they don't, they're not real solutions.

Fake fixes come in various types: cosmetic band-aids, alleviation of the symptoms while the disease continues unchecked, public-relations relabeling of the problem so it appears to go away via semantic trickery, and so on.

The credit-card fueled shopping-spree of suburban malls is dying for a variety of structural/systemic reasons. Embracing that as the only model we have is to choose extinction.

.

Musktopia here we come!

SUBHEAD: How delusional USA is these days that Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X is taken seriously.

By James Kunstler on 3 April 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/musktopia-here-we-come/)

Image above: Elon Musk sits for photo-op in one of his Tesla battery operated cars in a 2013 autoshow. From (http://oppositelock.kinja.com/tesla-posts-surprise-profit-1058185106).

It ought to be sign of just how delusional the nation is these days that Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X is taken seriously.

Musk continues to dangle his fantasy of travel to Mars before a country that can barely get its shit together on Planet Earth, and the Tesla car represents one of the main reasons for it — namely, that we’ll do anything to preserve, maintain, and defend our addiction to incessant and pointless motoring (and nothing to devise a saner living arrangement).

Even people with Ivy League educations believe that the electric car is a “solution” to our basic economic quandary, which is to keep all the accessories and furnishings of suburbia running at all costs in the face of problems with fossil fuels, especially climate change.

First, understand how the Tesla car and electric motoring are bound up in our culture of virtue signaling, the main motivational feature of political correctness. Virtue signaling is a status acquisition racket.

In this case, you get social brownie points for indicating that you’re on-board with “clean energy,” you’re “green,” “an environmentalist,” “Earth –friendly.” Ordinary schmoes can drive a Prius for their brownie points. But the Tesla driver gets all that and much more: the envy of the Prius drivers!

This is all horse shit, of course, because there’s nothing green or Earth-friendly about Tesla cars, or electric cars in general. Evidently, many Americans think these cars run on batteries.

No they don’t. Not really.

The battery is just a storage unit for electricity that comes from power plants that burn something, or from hydroelectric installations like Hoover Dam, with its problems of declining reservoir levels and aging re-bar concrete construction.

A lot of what gets burned for electric power is coal. Connect the dots. Also consider the embedded energy that it takes to just manufacture the cars. That had to come from somewhere, too.

The Silicon Valley executive who drives a Tesla gets to feel good about him/her/zheself without doing anything to change him/her/zhe’s way of life. All it requires is the $101,500 entry price for the cheapest model. For many Silicon Valley execs, this might be walking-around money. For the masses of Flyover Deplorables that’s just another impossible dream in a growing list of dissolving comforts and conveniences.

In fact, the mass motoring paradigm in the USA is already failing not on the basis of what kind of fuel the car runs on but on the financing end. Americans are used to buying cars on installment loans and, as the middle class implosion continues, there are fewer and fewer Americans who qualify to borrow.

The regular car industry (gasoline branch) has been trying to work around this reality for years by enabling sketchier loans for ever-sketchier customers — like, seven years for a used car. The borrower in such a deal is sure to be “underwater” with collateral (the car) that is close to worthless well before the loan can be extinguished.

We’re beginning to see the fruits of this racket just now, as these longer-termed loans start to age out. On top of that, a lot of these janky loans were bundled into tradable securities just like the janky mortgage loans that set off the banking fiasco of 2008. Wait for that to blow.

What much of America refuses to consider in the face of all this is that there’s another way to inhabit the landscape: walkable neighborhoods, towns, and cities with some kind of public transit.

Some Millennials gravitate to places designed along these lines because they grew up in the ‘burbs and they know full well the social nullity induced there. But the rest of America is still committed to the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world: suburban living.

And tragically, of course, we’re kind of stuck with all that “infrastructure” for daily life. It’s already built out! Part of Donald Trump’s appeal was his promise to keep its furnishings in working order.

All of this remains to be sorted out. The political disorder currently roiling America is there because the contradictions in our national life have become so starkly obvious, and the first thing to crack is the political consensus that allows business-as-usual to keep chugging along.

The political turmoil will only accelerate the accompanying economic turmoil that drives it in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

That dynamic has a long way to go before any of these issues resolved satisfactorily.

.

Fumbling towards Collapse

SUBHEAD: We need no more McHousing subdivisions, and other accoutrements of our fast zombifying mode of existence.

By James Kunstler on 20 February 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/fumbling-towards-collapse/)

Image above: Toronto suburbs during zombie apocalypse from the remake of is 2004’s Dawn of the Dead. From (https://scarina.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/when-hell-is-full/).

In all the smoke and fog emitted by Trump and his adversaries, it must be hard to make out the actual issues dogging this society, and even when you can, to find a coherent position on them.

This was nicely illustrated in Paul Krugman’s fatuous column in Monday’s New York Times, “On Economic Arrogance” — the title describes Krugman’s own attitude to a T.

In it, Krugman attempts to account for the no-growth economy by marshaling the stock-in-trade legerdemain of academic economics: productivity, demographics, and labor metrics.

Krugman actually knows zip about what afflicts us in the present disposition of things, namely the falling energy-return-on-energy-investment in the oil industry, which is approaching the point where the immense activity of getting oil out of the ground won’t be worth the cost and trouble of doing it.

And since most of the things we do and produce in this economy are based on cheap oil — with no reality-based prospect of replacing it with so-called “renewables” or as yet undiscovered energy rescue remedies — we can’t generate enough wealth to maintain anything close to our assumed standard of living.

We can’t even generate enough wealth to pay the interest on the debt we’ve racked up in order to hide our growing energy predicament.

And that, in a nutshell, is what will blow up the financial system. And when that department of the economy goes, the rest will follow.

So, the real issue hidden in plain sight is how America — indeed all the so-called “developed” nations — are going to navigate to a stepped-down mode of living, without slip-sliding all the way into a dark age, or something worse.

By the way, the Ole Maestro, Alan Greenspan, also chimed in on the “productivity” question last week to equally specious effect in this Business Insider article.

None of these celebrated Grand Viziers knows what the fuck he’s talking about, and a nation depending on their guidance will find itself lost in a hall of mirrors with the lights off.

So, on one side you have Trump and his trumpets and trumpistas heralding the return of “greatness” (i.e. a booming industrial economy of happy men with lunchboxes) which is not going to happen; and on the other side you have a claque of clueless technocrats who actually believe they can “solve” the productivity problem with measures that really only boil down to different kinds of accounting fraud.

You also have an American public, and a mass media, who do not question the premise of a massive “infrastructure” spending project to re-boot the foundering economy. If you ask what they mean by that, you will learn that they uniformly see rebuilding our highways, bridges, tunnels, and airports.

Some rightly suspect that the money for that is not there — or can only be summoned with more accounting fraud (borrowing from our future).

But on the whole, most adults of all political stripes in this country think we can and should do this, that it would be a good thing.

And what is this infrastructure re-boot in the service of? A living arrangement with no future. A matrix of extreme car dependency that has zero chance of continuing another decade.

More WalMarts, Target stores, Taco Bells, muffler shops, McHousing subdivisions, and other accoutrement of our fast-zombifying mode of existence?

Isn’t it obvious, even if you never heard of, or don’t understand, the oil quandary, that we have shot our wad with all this? That we have to start down a different path if we intend to remain human?

It’s not hard to describe that waiting world, which I’ve done in a bunch of recent books. We’re going there whether we like it or not. But we can make the journey to it easier or harsher depending on how much we drag our heels getting on with the job.

History is pretty unforgiving. Right now, the dynamic I describe is propelling us toward a difficult reckoning, which is very likely to manifest this spring as the political ineptitude of Trump, and the antipathy of his enemies, leaves us in a constitutional maelstrom at the very moment when the financial system comes unglued.

Look for the debt ceiling debate and another Federal Reserve interest rate hike to set off the latter.

There may be yet another converging layer of tribulation when we start blaming all our problems on Russia, China, Mexico, or some other patsy nation. It’s already obvious that we can depend on the Deep State to rev that up.

.

End Of American Consumerism

SUBHEAD: A re-posting of an Island Breath article about consumerism from a decade ago.

By Juan Wilson on 15 July 2007 for Island Breath -
(http://www.islandbreath.org/2007Year/20-HookahiKauai/0720-08Consumerism.html)

Image above: The Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping preaches in Times Square, NYC. From original article.

Bad Day at Kukui Grove
Americans are happy when buying stuff. We have come to love brand-names as if they were family members. We imbue the release of the next hip gadget as a spiritual revelation. Some techno-gurus have even dubbed Apple's new iPhone "The God Machine".

But often it is what gives us the greatest pleasure that is the source of our greatest frustration and suffering. Ask any junkie or ice-head. This truism not only applies for drug addicts, but to those addicted to consumption as well.

I'm speaking about that person who is bored and mildly depressed. You are looking forward to jumping in the new Honda Element and driving through winding tropical scenery to Kukui Grove.

The plan is to charge a $400 Champion Juicer at Macy's so you can "live off the land". Then your life will have meaning, and all will be right with the world. Afterwards, you can top off your shopping conquest with a mocha-latte-grande at Starbucks.

Unfortunately, in the real world, due to a raging wildfire on the way to Kukui Grove, the Honda got stuck in a three hour highway meltdown south of the Wailua Golf Course. You almost ran out of gas idling in traffic and the car's AC couldn't overcome the smoke, and now the Element doesn't smell so new.

When you finally get to Macy's and swipe your Capital One card they tell you the juicer purchase has been declined. You realize you're tapped out because you used the credit card for last month's car payment.

You head off to Starbucks for a latte to wash down a couple of aspirins and a Valium while you figure out how to tank up the car and get home before rush hour. Is this really fun?

American Consumerism
"Consumerism" is a word invented in America after the Second World War that coincides with the birth of Baby Boomers and the explosion of suburbia. Today, Americans have become characterized, more than anything else, as consumers.

Consumerism is defined as;

The concept that the ever-expanding consumption of goods is advantageous to the economy.
The term is used to equate personal happiness with purchasing material possessions.
The movement for the protection of the consumer against useless, inferior, or dangerous products as well as unfair advertising and pricing.

There are some who are trying to save Americans from their shopping addiction before it is too late. One is Bill Talen, who as the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, warns of the coming Shopocalypse. He is funny and dead serious at the same time.

The Reverend Billy travels in a biodiesel fueled bus with the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir to preach from the parking lots of WalMart and Starbucks. While the Choir sings the Reverend does interventions and exorcisms.

He asks us "What would Jesus buy?" and exhorts consumers to stop shopping. Reverend Billy recommends that if you have to buy anything you should avoid the corporate franchises and chains stores and buy from locally owned businesses.

The Perfect Economic Storm
Consumerism may be the basis of our economy and the source of our "happiness", but as the central organizing principle of our culture has just about run its course. I believe consumerism, as we know it, is going away (kicking a screaming) and we will simply have to learn to sustain and entertain ourselves without it.

There is a perfect storm coming that will move us away from being consumers. The elements of the storm include...

The demand for oil is exceeding supply - Sticking it out in Iraq won't fix the Peak Oil Crisis.
The Result: Much more expensive oil.
The failure of the US housing market - Hope you weren't counting on selling at the top of the market.
The Result: Shutting off the consumer credit engine.
The loss of economic leadership to China - We didn't want to make all that plastic junk anyway. Besides, it wrecks the environment.
The Result: The US stock market crashes and the dollar can't buy anything.

The Empire Has No Clothes
It is my opinion that the there is a great struggle going on that threatens the way we live. But Bush-Cheney never really examined the underlying source. They just labeled it "The War on Terror" and started an endless shooting war with the Moslem world.

Underlying much of the resentment and hatred we see aimed at us is a rejection of Western culture and economics. It is not so much a war of religious fanaticism against our freedom and wealth as it is a clash of between socioeconomic models. It is really a battle between the First World and the Third World.

On the one hand is The First World (Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian-Agnostic Culture, a Global Economy, Corporate Rule): Its secular forces uses technology, cheap energy and cheap labor to transform us all into consumers without regard to history, local customs or spiritual development.
To what end? - Economic Growth at any cost.

On the other hand is there is the Third World (Underdeveloped Nations, Islamic Culture, Fierce Nationalism and Armed Tribalism): Its parochial forces attempt to use rigid codes to maintain cultural and religious values that preserve the traditional, stable and modest ways of living by strict adherence to arbitrary rules.

To what end? - Preservation through Obedience.

Both sound like hell to me. I'm hoping that "victory" leaves us somewhere in between. I'm looking for a modest sustainable lifestyle with intellectual and spiritual freedom - In the aina and with ohana.

On the surface the clash between the First and Third World is lopsided in favor of the West, but that is only on the surface. As we have found out in Iraq, high-tech maneuver warfare can be ground down by persistent door-to-door low-tech resistance.

As energy becomes more expensive (and it could be $75 a barrel for oil by the time you read this) the worldwide economic playing field will begin to level. We will all be living in the Third World - but with internet access.

Variation of the Golden Rule
Many in America consider themselves Christians. A central tenet is The Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do onto you."

An important corollary of that rule is "Act in a way that if everybody acted your way, the world would be a better place."

This would include an accounting of the share of the world's resources you consume. And that does not allow for trading pollution rights with natives from New Guinea.

If the Post-Peak-Oil economy does anything good, it will reduce our reliance on consumerism as our measure of our success. A wasteful use of resources will force us to face increasingly greater consequences.

We all will be forced to transform ourselves from consumers to artisans; from corporate employees to local entrepreneurs, from celebrity-wanna-bees to good neighbors. Consumerism will become a self healing wound - if it doesn't kill us first.

In the long run Americans will see that letting go of what Dick Cheney called "our nonnegotiable lifestyle" is the best thing that could happen to us. A new kind of economy and culture is self-organizing here on Kauai.

As it unfolds we will all become more native to this place - if not kanaka maoli maybe kama`aina. It will mean you won't have to make so much money or be stuck in your car all the time. It will mean you won't have to be hypnotized by your glowing TV and cellphone screen to get through the night. Kauai might even begin to feel like Kauai again.

See also:
Island Breath: Paradise Denied 9/1/10
Reverend Billy preaches against consumerism a Hanapepe's Storybook Theatre on Kauai.
.

The Trumpotopia to come

SUBHEAD: President Donald J. Trump has risen... but for how long Trumpotopia last?

By James Kunstler on 23 January 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/he-is-risen-but-for-how-long/)

Image above: The United States Trumpital on Inauguation Day. From (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/19/trump-inauguration-parade-how-to-watch-live-stream-online.html).

If the first forty-eight hours are any measure of the alleged Trumptopia-to-come, the leading man in this national melodrama appears to be meshuggeneh (Yiddish for "a mad or idiotic person").

A more charitable view might be that his behavior does not comport with the job description: president. If he keeps it up, I stick to my call that we will see him removed by extraordinary action within a few months.

It might be a lawful continuity-of-government procedure according to the 25^th Amendment — various high officials declaring him “incapacited” — or it might be a straight-up old school coup d’état (“You’re fired”).

I believe the trigger for that may be an overwhelming financial crisis in the early second quarter of the year. In, the first case, under Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment, it works like this:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Or else, it will be an orchestrated cabal of military and intelligence officers — not necessarily evil men — who fear for the safety of the nation with the aforesaid meshuggeneh in the White House, who is summarily arrested, sequestered, and replaced by an “acting president,” pending a call for an extraordinary new election to replace him by democratic means.

I’m not promoting this scenario as necessarily desirable, but that’s how I think it will go down. It will be a sad moment in this country’s history, worse than the shock of John Kennedy’s assassination, which happened against the background of an economically stable Republic. History is perverse and life is tragic. And shit happens.

Returning to the first forty-eight hours of the new regime, first the ceremony itself: there was, to my mind, the disturbing sight of Donald Trump, deep in the Capitol in the grim runway leading out onto the inaugural dais.

He lumbered along, so conspicuously alone between the praetorian ranks front and back, overcoat open, that long red slash of necktie dangling ominously, with a mad gleam in his eyes like an old bull being led out to a sacrificial altar.

His speech to the multitudes was not exactly what had once passed for presidential oratory. It was not an “address.” It was blunt, direct, unadorned, and simple, a warning to the assembled luminaries meant to prepare them for disempowerment.

Surely it was received by many as a threat.

Indeed an awful lot of official behavior has to change if this country expects to carry on as a civilized polity, and Trump’s plain statement was at face value consistent with that idea.

But the disassembly of such a vast matrix of rackets is unlikely to be managed without generating a lot of dangerous friction. Such a tall order would require, at least, some finesse.

Virtually all the powers of the Deep State are arrayed against him, and he can’t resist taunting them, a dangerous game.

Despite the show of an orderly transition, a state of war exists between them. Anyway, given Trump’s cabinet appointments, his “swamp draining” campaign looks like one set of rackets is due to be replaced by a new and perhaps worse set.

Trump was correct that the ruins of industry stand like tombstones on the landscape. The reality may be that an industrial economy is a one-shot deal. When it’s gone, it’s over.

Even assuming the money exists to rebuild the factories of the 20^th century, how would things be produced in them? By robotics or by brawny men paid $15-an-hour?

If it’s robotics, who will the customers be? If it’s low-wage workers, how are they going to pay for the cars and washing machines? If the brawny men are paid $40 an hour, how would we sell our cars and washing machines in foreign markets that pay their workers the equivalent of $1.50 an hour.

How can American industry stay afloat with no export market? If we don’t let foreign products into the US, how will Americans buy cars that are far more costly to make here than the products we’ve been getting? There’s no indication that Trump and his people have thought through any of this.

Trump can pull out the stops (literally, the regulations) to promote oil production, but he can’t alter the declining energy return on investment that is bringing down the curtain on industrial society. In fact, pumping more oil now at all costs will only hasten the decline of affordable oil.

His oft-stated wish to simply “take” the oil from Middle Eastern countries would probably lead to sabotage of their oil infrastructure and the cruel death of millions. He would do better to prepare Americans for the project of de-suburbanizing the nation, but I doubt that the concept has ever entered his mind.

The problems with Obamacare, and so-called health care generally, are burdened with so many layers of arrant racketeering that the system may only be fixable if it is destroyed in its current form.

The overgrown centralized hospitals, the overpaid insurance and hospital executives, the sore-beset physicians carrying six-figure college-and-med-school loans, the incomprehensible and extortionate pricing system for care, the cruel and insulting bureaucratic barriers to obtain care, the disgraceful behavior of the pharmaceutical companies, all add up to something no less than a colossal hostage racket, robbing and swindling people at their most vulnerable.

So far, nobody has advanced a coherent plan for changing it. Loosing the Department of Justice to prosecute the medical racketeers directly would be a good start.

Overcharging and defrauding sick people ought to be a criminal act. But don’t expect that to happen in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters. A financial crisis could be the trigger for ending the massive medical grift machine. Then what? Back to locally organized clinic-scale medicine… if we should be so lucky.

Saturday afternoon, Trump paid a call at CIA headquarters, ostensibly to begin mending fences with what may be his domestic arch-enemies. What did he do? He peeved and pouted about press reports of the lowish attendance at his swearing in. Maximum meshuggeneh.

I’m surprised that some veteran of The Company’s Suriname outpost didn’t take him out with a blowgun dart garnished with the toxic secretions of tree frogs.

Do you suppose Trump is going to improve? That was the hope after the election: that he’d take on some POTUS polish.

No, what you see is what you get. I can only imagine that what’s going on behind the scenes in various halls of power would make a Matt Damon Bourne movie look like a sensitivity training session — grave professional men and women on all fours with their hair on fire howling into the acoustical ceiling tiles.

Don’t forget that it was the dismal failure of Democratic “progressive” politics that gave us Trump.

His infantile lies and foolish tweets were made possible by a mendacious political culture that excuses illegal immigrants as “the undocumented,” refuses to identify radical Islamic terror by name, shuts down free speech on campus, made Michael Brown of Ferguson a secular saint, claims that there’s no biological basis for gender, and allowed Wall Street to pound the American middle class down a rat hole like so much sand.

You think this is the dark night of the national soul? The sun only went down a few minutes ago and it’s a long hard slog to daybreak.

.

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Ea O Ka Aina

Lima Ola mess to begin in 2018

American way of life is negotiable

Hawaii's feral chicken "problem"

Fines For Nuisance Violations

Clothesline at the end of the world

We likely missed an orderly collapse

Millennials abandoning suburbia

Musktopia here we come!

Fumbling towards Collapse

End Of American Consumerism

The Trumpotopia to come

FROM KAUAI HAWAII

NEWER ARTICLES

OLDER ARTICLES

TITLES IN ORDER

ADD ARTICLE

PARTIAL INDEX

GET BY EMAIL

WEEK'S VISITS