Sustainable Geometry

The Significance of 11-11-11

2011-11-12T12:40:00.001-08:00

Plenty of folks read into the digits some significance, including that it was a ones in a lifetime event. for me, it was 40% more significant when I got up late and finally went into the kitchen to see the stove clock read 11:11 and I was completely blown away. Not.

The 11s notwithstanding it was also a Friday, and we know who to thank for THAT. The Gregorian Monks, for it was they who set the start date for Our Calender and decided that the fifth day of the 5-day workweek would forever be a Friday.

It all seems so silly to me because there is only one day and that day is tomorrow. Never comes the day...

I'll have to look into this bit of information is as much as I do not know the answer yet. The Hebrew, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu and Gregorian calendars all point to a different year number that we label 2011, but do they all agree when it is Monday? I know that the Mayan calendar says this is Thursday, or as they spelt it Itxanolipanalwattimogan (with the accent on 'nolip') I cannot help but think that they were just being shortsighted to only chisel a calendar that was 600 years long.

Maybe it was as I have said and the Emperor hired a consultant to etch the calendar. When the consultant asked for partial payment for the 600 years worth he had already etched, The Emperor had died and the son who took his place was a fiscal conservative. With a refusal of payment due to widespread debt load for prior obligations, the consultant decided to stop his work right where it was. That was a bad move for the consultant because he was sacrificed to the Asteroid god, Utupiky, and there was no one left to continue the calendar. As far as the young Emperor was concerned, he saw no reason to have to pay for additional dates because he and everyone he knew would be dead long before the 600 years were up. And besides, as a hansom young Emperor, he NEVER had to pay for dates.

So now when those 600 years are almost up, Dec 21, 2012 on our calendar (aka 12-21-12), we think that the end of the world is at hand when all it is is the result of a reduction in public sector employment.

It's No Wonder that the Economy Sucks

2011-10-05T18:33:00.000-07:00

Economic prosperity is heavily dependent on one primary factor. That factor is confidence.

We don't have it – the economy sucks. When we had the Great Depression there was more than enough misery to go around. People were hungry, they were cold and they waited for a miracle to bring about a recovery that could once again sustain themselves and their families. Not merely one measure was employed to bring about the change of direction that eventually led back to a level of existence where people could live without wondering from where their next meal was coming. A lot of spending bills were passed by Congress. A lot of programs that did something tangible were implemented and people worked. Most of all they were lifted by a sense of confidence that there was indeed hope for the future and people strived to get there. The government channeled money to workers, who worked then spent that money up the chain to the wealthy at the top. Some of the money was taxed and send down to workers once again. Hope was strengthened and money moved. The economy recovered.

In the 2008-2011 stagnant economy there is little hope for the future. There is no consensus for what to do to get everything moving again. It is like a bunch of college Freshmen trying to push a car out of the soft sand with some leaning on the front bumper and other pushing on the rear. Still others are standing on the sidelines calling one group or the other a bunch of idiots for trying to push in the wrong direction. Meanwhile the middleclassman behind the wheel is spinning the wheels and shifting the gears from forward to reverse and back in an attempt to rock the car out of the rut. Nobody is instilling confidence that the car will ever get out of the sand.

Here in the latter part of 2011 we have the two houses of Congress at odds with each other and with the Executive Branch of government. We have staff economists who support one agenda and others who support the opposite. We have banks who received billions in taxpayer funded bailouts who paid bonuses to executives rather than make loans to people who wanted to buy a house, expand a business or fund an education. Those banks had so little faith in using that money for the business they were in they decided to give it to themselves.

Nobody wants to make any big purchases when they are being told that tomorrow the EU might implode. Business is off when China might not be able to ship product to America because Americans have decided that food and heat are more important than Plasma TV, yet another pocket phone, or toys that might have lead paint, melamine or mercury in them.

Every time the news media tells us another round of mortgage foreclosures in about to happen, the housing recovery gets pushed back another fiscal quarter or two. When there are millions of vacant foreclosed houses on the market, most buyers will not buy a newly constructed one. When state and local governments are laying off public sector employees and the Republican media calls them leeches on the taxpayer, few of them will be able to engage in economic activity above subsistence level.

All the activity that was the hallmark of the American economy has been strafed and left as scorched earth. Republicans and their uber-conservative Tea Party arm have undermined the hope that Americans have for economic prosperity. With out hope there will be a further decline in economic activity.

For the GOP and its supporters this is a good thing. Our economic prosperity was funded by taxation and the incurring of debt, both of which can only be paid off by the very wealthy who still have money. Meanwhile the middleclass taxpayers continue to pay the current operations costs of society.

Government jobs require government funding and that means taxes. If public sector employment is decimated, then so is the need for taxes. Less need for taxes means no more to be paid by people who still have money. When one is counting their money, they cannot see the people who were supported by the funding that used to be available.

Whether the fragmenting of hope of economic prosperity is an agenda item or merely the collateral damage of fragmented policy and conflicted opinions, the outcome is stagnation. The people who have retained their wealth are also victims of the loss of hope in the system the have come to rely upon. They sit on trillions of dollars of wealth waiting for the dove to return with the olive twig that signifies that there is solid dry land out there to land on. Until then they float without a captain and rudderless at the whim of the currents.

BWI Airport Rail Station Electric Car Parking/Charging

2011-08-07T13:15:00.000-07:00

Even as I write this posting, workers are converting a half dozen first level parking spots at the BWI Airport Rail Station to charging stations for yet non-existent electric cars. They certainly will come soon. When they first arrive I will see them and make additional comment here (with pictures.) This is a good element in the plan to make our continued society a bit more sustainable. We all know (though many won't admit it) that what brought us through the last century will not sustains us through the next (refer to National Debt, heating with coal, residential sprawl, driving everywhere burning oil.)

Today's Reasons to Exist

2011-07-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

If there is a picturesque landscape, a town may be able to attract visitors. Rolling hills and green pastures are not very effective at attracting people unless there is something to do. With many Americans accustomed to eating burgers, fries and sodas in their cars, fine dining in the country is not a high volume opportunity. Outlet stores are a dime-a-dozen and must be clustered on one site to attract a variety of customers. Unless the location is really far out of the city, few people will stay overnight.

Swimming and water craft are good attractions if there is water and the body large enough to accommodate the use. Skiing is seasonal and must generate an entire year of commerce in the few months of winter.

Business and industrial parks are a viable attractor of commerce but the community must also have a suitably aged drug-free workforce who can do the work. There is little use for such a business park in a community if all the labor must commute to the location. There must be ancillary commerce like grocery shopping, medical services, car repair, etc. collocated such that people will leave a portion of their earnings in the local community. Newcomers who seek to live nearby need available housing.

Many businesses that seek to locate in such prepared sites demand tax abatement as an inducement to come therefore, tax revenues will not be immediately benefit the community. Some industries are so mobile that when the tax abatement expires they can relocate once again to some other community that is hungry for commerce.

Retirement homes as a viable option if there are adequate medical services available to treat older residents, transportation available to get everyone to where they need to go and local amenities where their money can stay local.

Private house ownership is far more affordable in small presently economically depressed towns. What is lacking are the grocery stores, doctors, dentists and pharmacies. Without such services long distance travel is required and that offsets the affordability of the location.

Factors That Are Missing

2011-07-09T09:31:00.001-07:00

The local bank or Savings and Loan was a wealth builder for the community. Farmers and merchants, miners and the schoolmarm but their money into savings at the bank and the bank lent the funds out to local people who needed it to build their house, buy a tractor, stock a General Store. The interest paid increased the value of the bank and thereby its ability to grow the community.

Today with all of the NAs, banking and the wealth it helps build is drawn away from the community to disinterested investors who live on the few percentage loans generate. The rural areas and small towns pay that interest to them. When a big box store moves in on an area, they come fully capitalized and ready to mine the money from the communities they serve. They don't lodge their revenues at a local bank and don't fund their store construction with local money that will keep a portion of the cost of operation in local hands.

When ones food come in a metal can from 1,000 miles away, little wealth is kept in the small towns. Local food works the other way. It keeps local money local and may bring wealth into the small economy. When Wal-mart locates 30 miles away from a dozen small towns and rural areas, all the clothing and appliance money leaves the community.

Sustainable economic activity depends on the ability of a dollar to recycle in the community several times before it evaporates. A dollar spent externally is gone at once. This is why many small communities try to trade on their status of being a place where people will come to spend their money. In the absence of MMFF to generate raw wealth, tourism and visitors provide the money the communities keeps spending externally. But if the town or area that is not much more than a few homes along a now bypassed highway, they have little hope of being such a place where people will come and spend money. A tiny strip mall or building supply center cannot sustain an entire community.

Not every town can be the home of an antiques market or an outlet market for several coat and shoe manufacturer. Unless there is a lake, a mountain with snow, a navigable river, vacation villas are not going to be built. Being too far out from an urban area is also a barrier to survival.

A Shared History

2011-07-04T15:25:00.001-07:00

What makes a human settlement into a community? A suburb of culturally diverse homeowners may be a community but mostly they are not. In any population of approximately 5,000 people who live in a set of suburban subdivisions may attend as many as 50 different churches, buy groceries at a dozen different supermarkets, bank at a dozen different banks and have children who attend a myriad of public and private schools. Each new arrival came from a unique origin and settled there for the wide open yards and greater distances between front doors. In those residential land uses, people come and go isolated in their automobiles and may not know the names of the families even as close as two doors away. They all share a physical location but they do not have a shared history.

Swissvale, Pennsylvania is a small urban center now incorporated as part of the City of Pittsburgh. It was originally settled by Germans and Scandinavians who arrived from Europe to work in the steelmills on the Monongahela River Valley far below the bluffs where the streets of houses were built. So common was the employment in the valley and residence on the hillsides that several electric streetcar companies laid tracks through the neighborhoods and pointed them straight at the mills. It seems that everyone went to the mills each day to earn a living. They all spoke the language. They all had something in common: Emigration and working in the mills.

The next town over is Braddock. It was home to a large population of Polish immigrants. Their churches and fraternal association buildings still give testament to their former dominance of the area. The level of homogeneous character has since diminished considerably after the exit of steel making in the valley. These towns were sustained by the common history of the people who lived there. Today, Braddock is dying while Swissvale still lives. Both towns rely heavily on the pensions and retirement income of the people who still live there. The difference is Swissvale did not see the influx of lesser unskilled people who replaced the original population that left when the mills closed.

Railroad workers, lumberjacks, farmers, miners, steelworkers immigrated here from all over Europe and found work in company towns where they shared a past and the present. Wilkinsburg, another urban area just outside of Pittsburgh's city limits, is the town of churches. There are cross streets in that borough where each corner has a church. Although there might be a common employment in an area, people of diverse cultures did not mix well and formed their own communities. Irish and Chinese men and their families may live adjacent to each other and interact on an economic basis, but they lived apart. Still they share a common situation as cheap labor to a young growing land. And when the railroad was done they all shared the same fate of abandonment.

Today towns and rural areas struggle to find purpose that will keep their dreams alive. If they do not have an income stream on which to levy taxes then they need people to move in and bring with them the incomes and saved capital they have. If the newcomers still spend their money at distant stores then the community is still without revenue to maintain their physical presence and institutional needs. Newcomers don't have that shared history that is essential for "community" to exist. Efforts to regentrify decayed urban neighborhoods often put the gentry in direct opposition to the folks who have endured a long history with the area. What the gentry wants is not what the locals need. Gentry want clean streets and amenities that will bring higher resale values and more gentry. Locals must endure higher real estate taxes and a general attitude that they are unwelcome in their neighborhoods when they cannot keep up with maintaining their properties in the face of rising standards.

Wilkinsburg, PA, is a town where a large portion of the population is African-American. There is a residual population of Caucasian home owners who lament the degraded conditions of the town as a cause for grief. However, for many of the African-American population, Wilkinsburg is a step up from the Hill District and Federal public housing project that is closer in to downtown Pittsburgh. Homeowners in Wilkinsburg do not really want higher home values because that would mean higher real estate taxes too. Few present owners seek to sell and make a quick profit there. They are more likely to turn over a house to relatives.

In this town, there are two shared histories. One is the story of a blue-collar mill workers town that is slowly decaying and cannot pay its operations costs for police and fire protection, street and traffic maintenance, etc. The other history is the migration from low income public housing to a place of ones own. Neither side of the history has the money or the will to make Wilkinsburg anything more than what it is.

A Reason to Exist

2011-07-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

Human settlements need a reason to exist. Unlike businesses and industry, people need both a functional reason and aesthetics to make a location worthy. Maybe it was a river landing or a placid flow area to run a ferry. Maybe it was the "head of navigation" where overland freight could then be floated down stream. A crossroads. A pass through the mountains. A gold mine or where there was energy to run the mill and transportation to move the goods. First was the energy and the transportation then the people came to fulfill the needs of the industry.

Every industry and every mode of transportation has its natural aging process that makes it more or less sustainable. Regions built canals to float freight across long and short distances. Most of those canals succumbed to the railroads as soon as the rails became operational. Each new system renders the last one obsolete.

Highways and trucks rendered the shortline railroad obsolete. When timber was plentiful and the coal mines flourished, a railroad ran a spur out to their location. But as the logging and mining operations became smaller in size at the outset of a new section, laying a new track was not a viable option. Rubber tires on dirt and gravel roads made more sense.

Industries moved leaving the human settlements behind. With a decimated income from labor, the towns dried up leaving only the most vulnerable people behind. Children left their families to follow work wherever it could be found.

"My own children will go, as soon as they grow, for there is nothing here now to hold them." North county Blues. Bob Dylan.

Today some American towns rely heavily on the Social Security checks, public assistance, and the pensions of aging residents. There is no industry there to create local wealth from commerce. All the money that does come into the town is spent externally in distant places. The grocery store is located 20 miles or more away and is operated by a national chain that sells items processed far away. All the money spent there leaves the community not to return. Gasoline and heating fuel is the same. A foreign supplier, international price speculators, regional distributors take away all the money spent on energy. Telecomm companies suck away another share. Doctors and pharmacies take more away from the community. While all these enterprises are essential to the people who live in the community, they do nothing for the sustainability of the community. As far as each of these enterprises is concerned, a person equals one person, no matter where he lives. He will eat as much, drink as much, heat his home as much and need the same pharmaceuticals. The place that the people consider home is not important to the businesses.

Without a natural means of producing local wealth by Mining, Manufacturing, Farming and Fishing the net worth of the community cannot increase and decreases a little more each day.

Human settlements must possess a reason to exist. Old reason may disappear and not have a replacement. Those settlements will eventually disappear. If a new reason to exist is found and cultivated then survival of the settlement may be maintained.

With all due respect to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, the mere desire to remain in their accustomed homes is not a reason to exist. If they have the capital to sustain their place, they can fund the continuation of that place. No one else will care nor be willing to pay for it.

Braddock, Pennsylvania is a town that is being allowed to die. It once was a vibrant steel mill town where the historic Edgar Thompson Steel Works is located. The steel operation was once the site of a bloody labor strike put down by Pinkerton Guards and is not a shell of industrial decay. There was a hospital there until 2010 when it too closed down. People still live there and a few low-end businesses like pawn shops and a bar or two remain. Entire buildings disappear on a regular basis as they become unsafe and are demolished. This is a town that has no reason to exist. And soon it won't. Its location has potential, but no one who is a part of the community will ever benefit from the massive influx of capital it will take to completely raze and replace everything that is not historic. The old community will cease to exist and a new one will be constructed when the price is right.

In 1989, Actress Kim Basinger put up $20 Million to buy the town of Braselton, GA. Her own financial status went sour and she sold her interest in the town to a developer in 1993. See Wikipedia: Braselton, GA, for details. The idea was to make a tourist destination and the town should flourish. It didn't. The developer still has not made a viable destination 20 years later.

There were the Main Streets grants in the 1990s that were supposed to revitalize small towns and economically depressed areas. The money was given to repave main street business strips, do sidewalk and streetscape improvements. The thought was that a capital investment in the infrastructure would make the place attractive again. They were wrong. If the main street had no reason to exist, the money failed to create one. Decay once again consumed the business district. Some towns did prosper as the result of the grant capital, but the landscape is littered with its failures.

A Sustainable Community

2011-07-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

The work that I do to earn the money to pay my bills and fund my retirement has taken a left turn into a different province. The work that I have been doing is so tightly related to the whole picture of American life that this new direction will circle back on all that has been accomplished by the company and people who work there. The new word is Sustainable.

Individual people have a sense of what sustainability is while businesses and power brokers do not. Built into the human psyche is that biological imperative to procreate. Each person feels a need to pass on his or her genes, ideals, morals and wealth to a next generation. Fathers want sons to carry forth the surname. Fathers start businesses with their name and add "Son" or "Sons" to it in the hopes of sustaining the hard won successes of the father. Boards of Directors will adopt and abandon any name which suits its goals to sell goods and services to make the profit it needs to satisfy the investors. Corporate businesses will hire and dispose any employee who they feel benefits the bottom line. For businesses the world is composed of lines that have a beginning and an end. They prefer it that way.

Consider the timber logging industry. They get legal access to a stand of trees, cut them all down and move along to a new stand of trees leaving the clear cut slopes to fend for themselves. It's a beginning, a middle and an end. No feeling of responsibility remains after the last tree is cut. After all there are more acres of trees to conquer.

Coal mining operations are the same. Dig coal, pile the tailings and move on. They sell the coal, bury the dead and discharge the injured. Coal matters. People don't. Coal is wealth. People are liabilities and expense. As long as there is a vein of coal to dig the mining companies can proceed in straight line along the seam. As long as there is another miner, old miners are put aside like a rusty drag line bucket.

We allowed industries to turn greenfields into brownfields and pull up stakes leaving the land to sit vacant and poisoned. Beverage containers typically track a linear path from manufacture to a landfill serving one portion to a customer.

These paradigms of consumption work only as long as there is an ample supply of materials and energy to make things and ample space to dump the trash afterward. This model of sustainability is depends on the idea of infinite supply and cheap processing. It depends on a society willing to allow a business to ignore the negative side of production – the waste products.

Through a much maligned Federal oversight and regulation, many industries have been required to restore their wastelands to pre-operations conditions. They have been required to do a better job of not mucking up the environment in the first place. Businesses respond reluctantly when they respond at all. They cite the increased cost of their goods and services to the consuming public as the reason to be allowed to pollute the air, water and land. Businesses are willing to pick up and move when they have fouled their sites. Settlements of people are not so inclined or mobile. They end up tolerating the non-sustainable practices of businesses.

My Learned Colleague: Mr. Beck

2011-04-18T19:21:00.000-07:00

The alleged pitfalls of the public education system in this country are nowhere more evident than in the person of Glenn Beck. While he and his cadre of like-minded opinionators pound away at the idea that Johnny can't read because his elementary school teacher is both deficient in teaching skills and paid too much, the painful truth is that many young people struggle with socio-economic challenges, parental neglect and legacy intellectual capacity limitations. They will face a lifetime of substandard conditions due to the insufficiency of that education. For them they have a reason for their lack of attainment. Such is not the case for Mr. Beck. His case is characterized by a willful ignorance and pride of buffoonery.

While I suppose he is capable of identifying various colors and counting to higher than 21 on his digits, I doubt that he can delve deeper into the hues so as to distinguish between the primary and the secondary colors. Similarly while he can recite the numbers by rote he seems to have never learned that in every equation there is an Equals Sign. The more complex relationships among factors escape him. The concept of major contributory factors and negligible ones is one of those relationships.

In his protected world of close walls and echoes, he can say anything that comes to mind and be assured that no one present will challenge him. He is the man in the sound-proof booth hearing nothing from the outside.

These attributes make it possible for the man to say that the fermenting of corn into Ethanol in the US is causing world hunger, will result in starvation, rampant hyper-inflation and food riots across the globe. He does seem to understand the connection between what he says and the practice of food hoarding and the buying of gold as a hedge against that hyper-inflation and the shortage of ground beef that is coming because the US make some Ethanol from corn. No so coincidentally several of his sponsors cater to the anxieties of Americans who listen to Mr. Beck.

In one of his broadcasts he pointed out the relative profit margins of Apple Computers and unnamed oil companies. Apple, he asserts makes 47.9% profit on an iPad, while oil companies make < 8%. Here is that first lack of deeper reasoning that escapes the man. Apple had an annual gross sales in 2010 of $18.50 bn. Exxon-Mobile had sales of $52.959 bn, Royal Dutch Shell was $35.34bn, ConocoPhillips was $19.75bn, BP Oil (is down but was) $25.12bn in 2009 and Chevron was $32.055bn. This makes a partial total, just for these oil companies, $168.17bn. This number is 9.1 times higher than Apple. At 7.9% (just less than 8% as touted) the profits are $13.3bn for the oil companies and at 47.9% for Apple the number is $8.86bn. The other 'order of magnitude' factor that Beck neglects is that no one NEEDS an iPad in order to go to work, go shopping or go to religious services.

The matter of corn prices figures prominently in his and everyone else's analysis of Ethanol production. The difference is his is simplistic to the point of non-relevance. The rising cost of corn in the markets is his reason that the US must drill for more domestic oil. There is a significant cost of corn production that is tied to the cost of diesel fuel, i.e. foreign oil suppliers, speculators and refineries. It required diesel fuel to plow, sow and reap a harvest. It requires diesel fuel to move the corn to market, mill it and make food products that are stocked on our shelves. The rising cost of oil is a major contributor to that cost of corn.

And we cannot forget the impacts of market demand. There are 1.3 billion Chinese and about 1.2 billion Indians all of who want a part of both oil production and the corn crop. Their businesses bid in the global market to get the portions they want. This has the effect of driving up the prices. Indians are not adverse to eating chicken and the Chinese have a new found taste for beef and automobiles. It takes about ten pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. If the world were truly in need of the corn to eat, we would eat it directly and not feed it to our livestock. Such inter-connections are a mystery to people like Mr. Beck who can only see one linear path from A to C through a B.

While the only thing that happens in a vacuum is a thought in the head of the person who boasts his lack of education as a virtue, the use of resources in a global market does not. If we need more corn or other ferment-able plant matter, we can plant more of it. We can put fallow acreage into production. We can use chemicals on non-food corn that will be burned in our engines. We can replace crop subsidies with purchasing the increased yields. And finally, we can change the crop to a different one anytime we need the corn to eat.

In our imperfect world we must use the forces of the market, controls of government, the technologies of our scientists, the persuasion of wise proponents, cooperation of numerous points of view and the compassion of influential people to make sure we all can eat, be sheltered, kept warm, obtain and maintain a level of comfort without sacrificing any segment of humanity. All these people and forces combine to produce a complex equation that definitely has in it an Equals Sign.

Government Shutdown Tuna!

2011-04-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

Congress has gone fishin’. Fishing for Tuna that is. Both parties hold fast to their ideologies while neither has a firm grip on the big picture or the realities of what needs to be done to resolve the imbalance of the budget. One party says cut the spending!! They are bolstered by the Tea Party faction yelling “Cut it! Or shut it!” The GOP legislators want about $61 billion in cuts while their fanatic backers want $100 Billion. The reality is that cutting the entire $100 Billion would do nothing to either balance the budget or curtail the necessity to raise the debt ceiling. Calls for shutting down the government elicit visceral responses from all factions in the grand debate. One might end the authorization to spend money for a few days or a week, but eventually there would be a resumption of the government activities. The only outcome would be the collateral damage that extends from the brief period of interruption. Much of what doesn’t get done during shutdown would have to be taken up after it is over.

The definition of what Tuna! is tells us that buying and selling without regard to consequences is what make something into Tuna! All sides of the budget issue are using the threats of government shutdowns to leverage their positions to extract the outcomes they seek. At risk are the people who depend on the spending that the government does. There are seniors who need medical services paid for by Medicare and Medicaid. There are children who need food and shelter. There are veterans who need their pensions for paying rent. All and all, a shutdown would pressure the legislators to come to an agreement while the American people sit and wait for funds and services that will come late. The long-term impacts of a shutdown can only be realized if the government stays shut down.

Like the Libertarian philosophy of governance, a government shutdown is not a sustainable scenario. The alleged budget bloat of one ideology is another person's dinner.

The Libertarian and Tea Party ideology can only be sustained for a short period of time. It is in that interval that the believer must derive ALL of his benefits before the system collapses into anarchy. Short term results may allow the Libertarian to keep his income for a year or two longer, but eventually the roads serving his property will need to be repaired. The Tea Party person may get a warm and fuzzy feeling from beating down the budget total and harassing GOP pansies who did not toe the party line in the budget fracas but soon there will be illiterate adults who were mere children when the budget was balanced at the expense of education funding. The health of seniors will not suddenly drop because the Medicare and Medicaid budget got slashed, but time will exact its toll on those people and if the ‘maintenance’ and ‘inspection’ are not regularly performed, people will fail. When they fail, they die sooner after being in poorer health.

The same principle applies to our physical infrastructure. Without bridge inspections and regular repair, some number of bridges will fall into the ravine. People may die in the fall. This will not happen during the days and hours of a government shutdown that has been orchestrated by the posturing and haggling of 536 elected men and women. It will happen as the days stretch into weeks and weeks into years that there is insufficient funding to maintain the essential elements of our society. The cutting of spending can only garner a few tens of billions for the tally sheet that says that some ‘good’ has been had. The larger issue is the increases in revenues that must be raised to meet our growing demand. The contentious $100 billion is only 2.78% of the $3.6 trillion 2010 budget. We have fallen so far behind in maintaining our essential systems that we might not be able to fix them. The bottom line is that we must balance our budget with a combination of better controlled spending and increased revenues. We can accept $100 billion in spending cuts if the people who actually have spare wealth would pony up the funds to not need to borrow any more.

Speaker Boehner and Harry Reid are verbally sparring over policy issues that are keeping the budget battle from being settled. At issue are the funding of Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Protection Administration. In the first theater of war, the issue is the money that goes to abortions. Conservatives do not want to allow women to choose whether to bear a child or not. To the woman it is a choice and to the Conservative it is murder. The woman may see the futility of having another mouth to feed. The conservative sees the sanctity of human life. The Conservatives position on this matter would not seem so hypocritical if they added a provision that every child born would be given sufficient food, clothing, shelter, love, education and medical care even if the parents could not afford to pay for all those thing with their 40 hours per week labor. The right to life equation has an Equals Sign in it. Not-aborted = Taxpayer funded childhood services or a child who is economically and nutritionally deprived due to no fault of its own.

The environment is the place in which we all live. We as a species do not like being told what is good and bad for us. For all this distaste, we do know that there are things we do that are not good, but we are fully willing to deny that relationship. We want to drive automobiles and use electricity, heat and air-condition our homes. These things by their nature pollute the environment in which we live and breathe. But instead of embracing a new paradigm of energy usage that will protect our biosphere, we follow the lead of businesses that prosper by our present energy usage patterns and attempt to shutdown the government agency that was created to protect us from that death. The EPA is the one watchdog that we are insisting that it stops barking instead of wondering why it is barking in the first place. Defunding the EPA will stop the barking but will not mitigate the danger the bark is heralding.

So the fearful few are yelling "shut it down!" lest we anger the gods of deficit and debt. Make no mistake about it, we need to make a systemic change in the way we go about funding our essential services but merely cutting them off only spites our faces. We can limit spending but eliminating the revenues first is a backwards approach that only serves to exacerbate the funding of those services. Cutting the funding serves to protect the wealth of the more wealthy people in the country and creates a perception that spending must be curtailed. It would be a far better plan to make the expenditures more efficient, less fraught with fraud and unnecessary goods and services.

Ruben Navarrette, Jr. of CNNs writing staff avers that government must learn to live within its means. This process is quite difficult when the income sources (tax revenues) are stripped away like the income of a laid-off worker who has a fixed expenditure portfolio that includes a mortgage, car payment, college tuition loan, health care costs, food, fuel and taxes to pay that cannot be shed by willing it to be gone. Add to that family budget a new child who must be fed and you see what the government is up against when they cannot keep pace with the demands of the American public. It is not government that is bloated and out of control, it is us. We are the people. We are the beneficiaries of government services. We have committed the sin of getting old and needing others to support us. How can we retire if the next generation is not will to pay our bills? The crushing burden of pensions and Medicare are the consequence of our longevity. So who among us is going to volunteer to live a shorter life in order to save the wealthy class on their taxes? The Twenty-five Percenters would like you to know that they encourage and fully support your sacrifices.

Post Script:
It is quite fortunate that the factions of Congress put together a plan at the eleventh hour on April 8, 2011 and averted the imminent government shutdown. While there were people who cheered for a shutdown and rallied to crash our system on ideological grounds, the damage that would have been done was far out of proportion to the goals they sought to attain. The savor of shutdown was in the mouths of millions of Americans and the politicians who were doing battle in the committee rooms of the US Capitol. The fever was palpable like the run up to the start of a war. They all knew that the outcome would be felt for many years hence even if the suspension of paychecks was only for a few days. The idea that our unifying governance is expendable and non-essential would a be a seed of thought in the minds of many. Without our social support systems, America would be no different than any Third-world country where there is no hope in the people to be able to have a better existence.

Dear Tea Party Members: (an open letter)

2011-04-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Tea Party Members:

This open letter has been written it the hopes that you will read it and come to understand that there is an Equals Sign in the formula that you promote as a solution to all the financial ills of this nation. Taxed Enough Already is a noteworthy sentiment and I support such a notion, too. The question that remains in my mind is just "who is taxed too much?" Who do you rally for?

Do you rally for yourselves? This would be an outstanding undertaking if it were truly for yourselves. While people in your numbers stand and announce their frustration with paying taxes and the influences of a bloated big government in their lives, the fact remains that the same bloated Federal government that you protest is the one who pays your Social Security and Medicare. I should protest people over 65 getting Social Security checks and Medicare coverage. The stopping of ALL of that would swiftly eliminate the deficit and melt away our national debt. But them my mother would need to move into my spare room.

While middleclass Tea Party activists protest government spending that leads to taxation, there is a group of people who really benefit from your fervor. You may save a thousand dollars on your taxes with lower rates, while there are other people who save millions of dollars because of those same rates. You and I created the environment in which they could make millions of dollars and now do not want to give up any of that wealth. If they and the businesses they own paid a fair share of the costs of our society, then everyone's tax rate would be lower.

Instead of looking to the pillars of our society for equitable participation in paying the bills you have turned on your neighbors. Keep in mind that the public sector employees in Wisconsin are taxed enough already too. They are in the same socio-economic level as most of the rank and file people who identify themselves as Tea Party members. Attacking them for what they have is counter-productive.

I attended Glenn Beck's rally back in 2010. This event drew tens of thousands of people who think of themselves as fiscal conservatives and overly burdened with the costs of our society. The age demographic was heavily representing people who were 60 and older. The next group was the 50 to 60 age group. There was a huge population of people with walkers, canes and electric scooters. They were the Medicare class and those who would soon be there. Forgetting that there is an Equals Sign in every formula is a fatal mistake. It is not the "bloated government" that pays out Social Security checks and Medicare. It is today's working people who pay into the fund that pays today's retirees. Without them and the jobs they do, there would be no SSI fund without general budget taxes to pay for it.

The real culprit in this nation's fiscal crises is not Unions, immigrants, or people who don't want to work. The real source of the crises is the numbers of people who have already retired and will be drawing private pensions, SSI and funds from their own 401(k)-type accounts. Following that number is the millions of working men and women who will be retiring in the next few years.

The problem cannot be foisted off on some THEY. We are our own problem. All of us together. We have to figure out how to pay for what is needed more so than how to pay for what we are now getting or giving. The cutting of government spending also cuts our ability to employ people. It was the loss of jobs that allegedly caused the states and local governments to not have enough money to operate. Cutting food programs equals hungry people.

You can't just tell someone to "get a job." There has to be a job to have and it needs to be a job that pays enough to not need all the support programs that the Taxed Enough Already people don't want to provide anymore. You Tea Party folks must work with the rest of America to design and implement a sustainable economic future. This sustainable future cannot be created only by reducing what we spend because doing that only lowers our collective standard of living.

We can have fewer public employees if you will accept longer line at the DMV, snow covered roads in the winter, potholes in the spring that remain until the middle of summer, not having enough police officers and fire fighters when you need them. We would not need public school teachers if we did not care about children learning to read so they grow up and get that high-paying job you want them to just go get.

We would not need school lunch programs if children had food enough to be healthy and alert. But they don't, unless we all make sure they do. Focusing on only the spending side of the budget equation is a Draconian approach to solving the imbalance.

Sincerely,
Tuna Blogger

Invest Versus Spend

2011-02-15T12:54:00.001-08:00

What bugs me more than anything else is the people who had the foresight and the funds to invest in a company that was an inexpensive long shot back in the day. Consider the people who had money enough to but what is now ExxonMobile when the stock price was in the $10 range. The current price of $83.00 yields $1.77 per share. With a large enough initial investment, that single stock could be funding several families' incomes. But my family was a late-comer and did not have the resources at the time to take advantage of the opportunities.

Some families had the opportunity to land bank lots of real estate back when land was still going for "a dollar an acre." That was then. Now that type of investment cannot happen. The opportunities that result in massive wealth are few and far between. One is better off lucky than good at discovering those opportunities.

On a larger economic scale, government action is supposed to provide the investments that will pay off in the future for those people who are not yet able to invest for themselves. We depend on the collective wisdom of the elected representatives to do the right thing. Toddlers and those children not yet conceived are the beneficiaries of our good and bad decisions. If we get it right, our children will be able to receive the dividends even if they do not thank us for our insights and financial contributions now that mature into what they will someday inherit. I, for one, would love to have been able to inherit 1000 acres of land outside the 1948 Pittsburgh environs that my father would have bought, if he could have. Some one else did and are very wealthy now.

If we get it wrong, our progeny will have to pay the price of our selfish intents, lack of insights, or lack of funds to invest. If we don't build and staff enough college classrooms, they will go without educations. If we don't now train enough doctors and nurses, it is they who will not be able to see a doctor when they need to. If we don't build entire infrastructures of utilities, roads, rails, and distribution systems, they will be without. We must be willing to spend our generation's money to do these things because they will need their generation's money for their current needs and their investments in the future of their children.

In the American economic system, the government doesn't own the resources. All of it is in private hands. The USDA estimates that 95% of all the land in private hands is owned by less than 3% of the population. That remaining 5% is mostly the small lots that all the suburban subdivisions are built upon. There are a few Federally owned land resources that are leased to business that derive a small revenue for the Treasury. Therefore, the only method of deriving revenues for the workings of the government and all of its obligations is taxes. Borrowing funds is only deferred taxation with interest.

We can leave unpaid debts or we can leave unaddressed needs to our children. It is up to this generation to make the correct decisions now.

Freedom of Consumption

2011-01-08T10:46:00.000-08:00

The world is changing and so is America. The many freedoms we cherish are deteriorating and may soon evaporate all together. Generally these freedoms will not stop with the stroke of a pen or the report of a rifle. They will however slip into obscurity one inch at a time as the forces of nature, human nature, economic marketplace realities, and the march of time all take a bite out of our big sweet cookie.

The political right whines about the potential loss of such Constitutional Rights as Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. They fret about the loss of unlimited possession of firearms, the right to do whatever they want on a parcel of land that they bought, whether a fetus is a person before it feels the light of day its head, and whether the union of two men or two women can be a marriage.

The political left does their whining about whether a person who does live and breathe has the right to eat, have shelter, protection from official repression. They fret about people being disenfranchised, marginalized and denied basic human needs such as medical care.

Each time one faction of the government attempts to remedy an inequity or injustice the other factions see it as a limit on freedoms, an attempt of the government to take over the country and rule by dictate. People who do have Health Insurance decry legislation that that tries to provide services to a larger subset of our population. They see those attempts as an expansion of government, an intrusion into their lives, and a possible limit on their own access to medical services. They want government out of their lives. On the other hand, almost no one decries the total domination of road building and maintenance by government who fund all such public works. The only time that anyone gets wrapped around the axle is when the funding source tries to alter the mix of what transportation projects receive funding. It appears that building another road constitutes a freedom of consumption, while supporting public transportation options is an intrusion and limit of those freedoms.

One must not forget that there are millions of people in the US, citizens and non-citizens alike, who do not or cannot drive an automobile. Road-only policies discriminate against those people and constrain their freedoms. Such policies misuse those people's tax dollars. Whether or not an individual pays a tax directly (real estate tax on their house) or indirectly (real estate tax paid through a landlord via the rent) it is all individual consumers who pay all the taxes. When their needs are compromised and marginalized and neglected, a fundamental inequity results. Their lack of access to what they pay for funds the ability of everyone else to get what they want at a lower price.

A simple example of this is when the Public Works Department builds a road without adding pedestrian walkways, the non-drivers receive a paucity of value even as the auto drivers get more roads on which to drive. Attempts to fund transportation and other non-automobile access is met with vocal resistance put up by the people who do own and drive automobiles. Their claims are that it is a waste of tax dollars to do anything other than provide them with lanes on which to drive and spaces on which to park their vehicles. Their freedom of consumption is threatened. So there you have it.

When there is plenty of money available, there is much less opposition to ideas that are not the mainstream and expedient. As resources become in short supply the larger majority population seeks to conserve the remaining amounts for themselves. They seek to protect their freedom to consume. Enter: the Health Insurance issue.

Before the health care reform legislation passed in 2010 we were estimating a physician near-future shortage of 40,000 doctors. That quantity was derived from a combination of a historic shortfall, our longer life expectancies, the population becoming progressively less healthy in general, physician retirement, curtailed income due to constrained payments for services, and fewer men and women choosing to enter the profession due to real and perceived legal and liability parameters. With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," HR 3590, in March 2010, 31 million additional people will have access to healthcare services. Our freedom of consumption is therein compromised.

The new estimate is 60,000 physicians. A bad situation only gets worse. With one physician for each cohort of 1550 patients, 20,000 doctors are needed for the newly covered 31 million people.

Employees who do get health insurance paid for by their employers do not like the idea that they will have to share their doctors and medical services access until that shortage is resolved. Medicare enrolled people do not like those prospects either. All of these covered people bristle at the idea that someone, anyone will tell them that they cannot have the MRI that they believe they should be given. Whether it is a government bureaucrat or an insurer's bureaucrat making a decision, the patients don't like limits placed on their freedom to consume medical services.

Our world is changing in natural ways that impacts all institutions and civilizations at some point in their existence. The idea that our economy can infinitely expand to accommodate all spending, borrowing and delivery of services is like believing in perpetual motion. To attempt to do so is the same as setting up a Ponzi Scheme where all the new members pay for the older members. Those arrangements always fail because there are not enough humans on earth to support all the higher tier members. The pyramid always collapses. When it does collapse there are winners and losers, there are survivors and casualties. The survivors bury the dead and try to pick up the pieces. How well they do this is dependent on how much they learn from the experience.

Sustainable Unemployment

2010-12-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

Everyone in this country seems to be under the influence of a major case of Denial. Fifteen million people are unemployed. The demographic "typical family of four" means that 60 million people are without a means of support. No job means no health care coverage. It is nonsensical to think that anyone facing long term unemployment will be able to cover the cost of COBRA extensions of their former employer policies.

It is equally nonsensical to think that these people will some how disappear. They will be lined up to get every job that is offered anywhere. Some people will have an easier time of being proximal to such a job when it is open. Although these people will not eat as much or as often, they will eat. They will be visiting the Food Pantries, applying for "Food Stamps" and otherwise obtaining something to eat for themselves and their dependents. All of these sources of food do cost money. TINSTAAFL. Taxpayers and charitable givers will pay the cost to feed these people.

As we do right now with hundreds of thousands of low-income people, emergency rooms will serve the needs of families and individuals who cannot pay the cost of a physician's attention. Taxpayers and everyone who sees a doctor, enters a hospital or needs a prescription will be paying the cost of those visits.

Just refusing to provide income for people who have been laid-off will not make them more willing to seek replacement employment or employment at a reduced income. First there needs to be jobs to have. They need to be in the location where people need jobs and those jobs must pay a "living wage." In this case, a living wage must be enough so that tax funded services are not needed. Rent subsidy, food subsidy and emergency room medical services must not be needed as the result of the limited employment or the wage is not a living one.

Every month over 100,000 new eager people enter the prospective workforce. They are graduating high school, college and trade schools with the hope and expectation that they too will have a place in this economy. That number extrapolates to 1.2 million jobs per year. First we have lost 12 million jobs during the recession, then we add 1.2 million every year due to our maturing children. This means that we need to generate 3.2 million jobs per year over the next five years in order to recover to the 2007 employment levels. Meanwhile these unemployment statistics need to eat.

People without income can hope and pray that their health remains good. They do have opportunities to share a dwelling at a higher occupancy than is traditional. They cannot, though, share food.

Republicans say "CUT SPENDING", "BALANCE THE BUDGET", "LOWER TAXES." Democrats say, "WE CAN'T CUT PEOPLE OFF", "WE CAN ONLY BALANCE THE BUDGET WITH HIGHER TAXES."

Denial leads us to believe that spending cuts will result in smaller government, lower taxes and less debt. Spending Cuts and smaller government are euphemisms for laying off more people. In almost every business enterprise, payroll is the single largest line item in the annual budget. If you don't spend money on education, teachers and administrators get laid-off and our children are less prepared to take over when their turn arrives. If you don't fund police and fire departments, people get laid-off, criminals go unstopped and houses burn. If you don't fund public transportation services, people get laid-off and others can't get to work.

If Medicare and Medicaid are not funded, people who are sick and injured do not get adequate treatment, they suffer as the result, and some die. If you want to talk about Death Panels in the health care legislation, all you have to do is look at who wants to limit spending on Medicare and Medicaid. We can all support less fraud and unnecessary procedures and treatments, but first we need to figure out how to tell the difference.

We have gotten ourselves into a real pickle. When we could have been solving our future budgetary shortfalls during the last 50 years, we preferred to stay in a state of denial and do little or nothing to avert this financial crisis. Now we are called upon to pay for yesterday, when we were young. Roy Clark fans might remember his song...

Every year that goes by without proactive action to resolve our failures makes them that much more difficult to manage. There is a mathematical "point of no return" that we may have already reached. War cinema is full of the tales of the bomber pilot who insists on finding his target even as the Navigator tell the pilot, "Capt'n even if we reach our target, we won't have enough fuel to get back to the landing field." Everyone gets a misty distant look it their eyes as they realize this is now a suicide mission. The Captain and his crew can make that call for themselves, but we resent our leaders making that decision for all of us, especially when they are siphoning our fuel so they can get home.

No matter what we do, there will be a massive lack of jobs for Americans to do for at least a decade and we need to figure out how we will address that dilemma. Other populations have mitigated their unemployment problems with waves of emigration to America. Is it time for Americans to do the emigration? Only the most highly educated will be welcome in those countries.

Euphemistic America

2010-11-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

Are You a Euphemism?

I heard the presumptive Speaker of the House, John Boehner, say that now that the GOP is in control of the House, "we will be listening to America." I wondered exactly what he meant by Americans. Did he mean all Americans or just some subset of the population.

Throughout the 2010 mid-term election campaign interval we were pounded with the idea that Americans were over-taxed, not listened-to, and angry at how the government was intruding into their lives, wasting their hard earned money on frivolous things. Oh, the Pork! Oy, the debt! Argh, the jobs that went overseas and the bankers who got a bailout!

I think that both political parties listened to America but were focusing on different Americans. The GOP listened to what they define as an American. These are the folks who have it all and want to keep it. They must have everything they need because they do not feel that they should pay for anything else.

The GOPAmerican has an annual household income at least 3 to 5 times the poverty level. The income comes from a job because the money they have is in "hard earned dollars." The job comes with health insurance coverage for the family and has no upside limit, covers all pre-existing conditions and doesn't need psychiatric coverage because no one in a GOPAmerican family ever has a mental or behavioral challenge. The family house has a fixed rate mortgage and 50% free-equity. Every licensed driver in the GOPA household has access to a car or truck. Grand mother and granddad don't need that Social Security or Medicare because they saved enough over the last 30 years to have their private savings decimated three times and still have plenty to live on to a ripe old age.

If this sounds at all like you, then you are the Euphemism that Boehner and the GOP speak of. And he is going to listen to you.

Other Americans

There is another America that has Americans in it too. Those Americans have low income jobs. They work hard but need rent subsidy, food subsidy and emergency medical care at the ER because the job they have doesn’t include health insurance so that the employer can make good on the "lowest price guarantee." These Americans rent an apartment or house from someone who has a lot more money than they do. They might have one car but more likely a handful of transit passes. As we learned in the 2010 mid-term election, and as the result of a Supreme Court ruling, money has free speech. If you don't have enough money, you don't get heard.

Formerly GOPAmericans

People and whole families who used to be GOPA have found themselves speechless and unheard. They had jobs and health insurance, a mortgage and plenty of disposable credit. But due to their slackness and ineptitude, they find themselves looking in from outside at the patrons in the restaurant. They discover that the GOPA they counted as friends no longer want to associate with them. They have been shunned. Boehner will be listening to the GOPA not the Other Americans and former GOPA. He knows where the financial support will come from in the next election.

The mortgage will go unpaid when the jobless interval get to be too long. A GOPA bank will lose funds due to that slacker. A GOPA landlord will have to evict the deadbeats in order to preserve the right to do so and make room for someone else.

Business America

We all know that government doesn't create jobs, only private business does that. We have to make the environment conducive to business making money in order to have employment. This means fewer regulations, lower or no taxes, the ability to pay whatever wage the non-GOPA are willing to work for.

While business may create and supply jobs to America, many of them are directly funded by government money raised by taxation and borrowing. If we cut out all the government spending, who is going to pay for all that non-government employee government work?

The newly elected Republican House of Representatives will need to listen to more than just the Euphemistic America. If they forget about all the people who need food, shelter and medical services, the anger we allegedly saw in the 2010 election will be a lot more emphatic the next time. Hunger is motivational.

August 28, 2010 a Day That Will Live in Infamy

2010-08-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

My job takes me into DC just about every day where I can see the reality of people of all stripes working to earn a living and made a difference this great nation of ours. Some people work for private government contractors and others work directly for an Agency, Administration, Department or Bureau. It doesn't matter what the employer-employee relationship is, we all make this nation work. Some people may not be in the realm of 6-figure salaries with benefits but even the man or woman who cleans the offices, waters the sidewalk plantings, rings up office supplies at Staples, makes my noontime sandwich adds his/her indispensable services to the greater whole. They are what America is. Each man and woman is an honorable thread in the tapestry of American civilization.

Glen Beck is a man who believes that he holds the answer to America's troubles. The answer is God and an adherence to a 2000-year old text. Mr. Beck decided that it was necessary to stage a rally to honor the dead veterans of the latest American wars. He chose the honorable date of August 28 to coincide with the historic speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, 47 years earlier. But what has been lost in the hoopla and rhetoric of the pro-this and anti-that movements is that it also coincides with the long-planned and now implemented pullout of combat troops from Iraq.

What was billed as a non-political political rally on Constitution Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial to Restore Honor to our military personnel had the character of a free-for-all stand up and shout praise Christian revival tent meeting (without the tent.)

There was no continuity to the messages or the speakers who uttered their favorite catch-phrases and sound bytes. There was an air of pride-by-association to the entire event. For example, Ms. Sarah Palin, former Governor of Alaska, former V. Pres. Candidate, current Grizzly Mom and spokesmodel for the Tea Party activist gave a rousing speech that would not have left a dry eye at any VFW Local Hall. Tens of thousands of "Don't Tread On Me" mid-western anti-tax aficionados filled the grassy fields of Constitution Mall bringing with them the parochial rhetoric of Too Much Taxation. Never mind the fact that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have now cost Americans $1.07 Trillion that only their children, grandchildren "unto the third generation" will have to pay.

Glenn's rally was the Whitest rally DC has ever seen. Each speaker brought out his/her own constituency to add to the total. Sarah brought the 55 to 70 demographic. And they in turn brought their children. Glenn brought his young disenchanted Christian, God-driven radio listeners. Aveda King spoke on the Civil Rights connection and brought no one. The speakers wove their respective colors into the tapestry and produced a bland brown cloth that said nothing. Although left unsaid, the biggest item on the agenda was to link the disparate demographics into a Fiscally Conservative base for the next election. Networking was the goal.

Anti-tax Tea Party folks were to gain an understanding of chest-swelling pride of veterans (who by the way will be best honored by using tax dollars to treat their war injuries and pay their benefits.) Veterans and their families were to feel that we love them after all and won't shun them as we did after Vietnam. Not only does each soldier deserve a metal with a ribbon but so do their moms.

Immigrants in this country learned that they really are invited here by the words on the iconic Statue of Liberty. No matter how vocal we are that they wait their turn to break bread with White Americans our Honorable ideals will be restored and they too can become Conservatives like Lloyd Marcus.

Minorities in this country learned that one can easily lose the founding principles to an interloper if one fails to defend the 'intellectual property' that was theirs. Like Xerox and Kleenex, ones unique identity can be diluted by allowing usurpation to go unchallenged. This rally stole the thunder of the Civil Rights movement and the Dream that led it forward for nearly a half century.

Native Americans learned that their only hope is to turn to God and pray away their anger at having lost so much and received so little in return. Faith in God is the only hope they have in the face of extreme poverty, lack of resources, education and access to medical care. No fed-up taxpaying conservative American who attended the rally wants to fund such improvements that are long overdue.

In the run up to the Restore Honor rally the originators variously described its purpose as "to take back our country" and "to reclaim Civil Rights". As with all the rhetoric of the day, audacious battle cries were uttered without ever linking them with what the battle was against. Take back this country from what or whom? The statement itself presupposes that someone or something has taken the country away from its people. It suggests that there is a Them and an Us who are at odds with each other. The fervor would be more understandable if Ms. Palin were a Lakota Souix speaking on the still smoldering sentiments after having lost 99.9% of the land to foreign invaders.

"Reclaim Civil Rights"? The Rev. Al Sharpton or Jessie Jackson would be more believable as a person expounding the need to raise the level of equality after some erosion of the gains by Dr. King, Rosa Parks and all the other people who dedicated their lives to the cause of racial equality.

There were indeed hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall on August 28 listening to a concoction of speakers telling one story while representing a wholly different ideology and constituency. The only coherent message that was conveyed was that America has the potential to reclaim its honor if we work together to accomplish that goal. It seems that we DO need another Hero, we DO need to know the way home. And we DO need each other to get ourselves back on the highroad.

Sustainable Infrastructure

2010-05-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

There is a point where the resources to proceed forward are insufficient. There comes a time when too much has been taken on and proper attention is no longer possible. It is then that we have a Vulnerable Geometry that will lead to collapse unless a major sacrifice is accepted and a limited implosion is facilitated.

On a personal scale the example is a credit card account with a that the borrower uses excessively and creates a no-win situation. Let’s say the interest rate is a simple 10% annual interest. The account holder has an income of $25,000. If he charges $1,000 he will pay back an additional $100 in the year. If he pays only $8.33 a month he will never pay off the balance. If he charges $10,000 and pays $83.33 month he will never pay down the principle. Carrying that to the next decimal point, it is $100,000 and pay $833.33 per month. If he keeps on charging more and more eventually 100% of his income goes into paying the interest. On his income he owes Federal Income taxes, maybe state income taxes and all the other required taxes. Somewhere around the $200,000 level he reaches that point of no return. He must default, file bankruptcy, or get a better job.

Now one would argue that he could not get a $200,000 credit limit with a $25,000 income. The premise is that this was a person who was doing this poor money management. Governments do this all the time.

In the 1900s America set out on a development program to pave roads all across the continent. Prior to 1906 there had been no trans-continental automobile trips and there were no paved roads between major cities and towns. Travel was by walking, horse, train and riverboat. After that first crossing, the miles of paved roads grew almost geometrically as the number of motorists set out to see the country powered by the internal combustion engines set on four wheels.

The roads were built and the number of autos increased. Local funding paid for the pavement. Private toll roads sprung up to fill a need. Soon there was the National Highway system being built with Federal taxpayer dollars. As the number of lane miles increased so did the cost of building another lane mile. On top of that new construction cost was the cost of maintaining the lane miles already built.

Culverts and bridges do not last forever. Pavement surfaces although far smoother and uniform later on were far less durable that the early stone and fired clay brick pavements. We sacrificed the ease of placement and the smoothness of asphalt and concrete for the durable brick roads. In my home town of Pittsburgh there are orange and yellow brick streets that still carry large volumes of automobiles. This pavement is 60 to 80 years old and some even older than that. They are noisy, cause vibration and are less modern that the less durable surfaces that cover much of the original brick that remains as the base layer. The difference is these roads have not required resurfacing, ever.

Even as we continued to build more roads, more bridges, more dams and airports the cost of their eventual replacement has grown nearly geometrically. At some point in time there is a mathematical limit to how much infrastructure that 100% of the budget can maintain. Once that point is reached, either the quality of the existing infrastructure decreases or there are no funds to add any more. Some tradeoff must be exercised in order to maintain the level of comfort that we have grown to expect.

There is a juggling act where the performer spins a plate on a stick. The stick wiggles in a circular motion with the spinning plate perched on the tip. He must attend to the plate and the stick regularly in order to not allow the spin rate to slow down letting the plate fall. One plate is quite easy. He wants to impress the audience so he adds a second plate and stick. Both plates are easily attended to and the performance gets boring after a few minutes. We were impressed at first but our attention wanes. Now three plates would be more interesting. Four, five, six plates would be even more interesting. He sets up those plates and keeps going at the encouragement of the crowd. Ten, twelve, fourteen plates are now being spun on their sticks.

The dexterous performer has barely enough time to set up another plate and stick before he must run back to the first one to speed it up again. Soon with enough spinning plates in the air, he has zero time to allocate to setting up another plate. He is getting tired too. At some point he falters. If he tries to please the crowd with one more plate, the failure begins. A plate comes crashing down. He quickly replaces it and another plate crashes. Now he is in crises management. How many plates must he sacrifice in order to save the others and erect new ones to please the new audience members?

Plates and sticks or bridges and roads, it is the same juggling act. We built our city and suburban landscapes on the premise that there would be increasing revenues to keep up the pace of construction. Somewhere along the line we forgot about the cost of maintenance. We neglected to include the inflation factors that have made a $1 million bridge cost $50 million to replace. Sometimes we wait one day too long to close the bridge and accept that the morning commute will be an hour longer.

This is where the Principle of Imminent Collapse exposes itself. Financial managers all know that “time is money.” They understand that when one is collecting interest on money lent that the longer the payback term is, the more money the lender will make. The delay of maintenance is money too. At some point in time, you have too much deteriorating infrastructure to ever repair or replace in the time you have remaining. The only remedy is to abandon some of the existing infrastructure and consolidate services and expenses.

My mother’s town recently turned off traffic signals and erected stop signs in their place. This saves electricity and maintenance crew time replacing light bulbs and fixing corroded wires. The City of Detroit has registered a plan to raze about 10,000 houses in city blocks where the vacancy rate is nearly (but not always completely) 100%. If they get past the social justice objections, they will have the opportunity to decrease police patrols, EMT and Fire Department staffing, maintain fewer miles of pavement. They will have fewer miles of water mains, gas pipes, sewers and utility poles to service. In short, the city doesn’t have the money to maintain everything that remains, so they will be forcing people to relocate. It is far better to do a controlled implosion than to allow the Principle of Imminent Collapse to create its own New Equilibrium.

Wilkinsburg, PA and Detroit are in the vanguard of what will be transpiring in a “town near you” some time soon. What was once affordable and manageable when energy costs were low, when labor costs were low and when we were building a nation for a booming population will not necessarily be possible in the coming decades. It may not be long before rural hardwired telephone service is abandoned in favor of wireless cell tower service. The telephone companies have already abandoned the last of the original party lines in favor of the private lines that were possible while telecom revenues were much higher. In many rural areas the only way they got electricity was through the rural electric cooperatives that kept the costs low enough for the electric generation companies to deliver the power.

The world is different in this 21^st century. What worked for us before won’t necessarily continue to work as we move forward. What worked for 3 billion planetary citizen doesn’t work for 7 billion and certainly won’t be any better with 8 to 10 billion. We need to start now to determine what will work and what will not because the future is arriving every day.

Swirl Theory

2010-04-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

Swirl Theory

Ever wonder why it is that you never heard of something and then suddenly you hear and see several references to that very thing in the next few days? Do you ever not see an old friend for years and when someone mentions him/her you cross paths in the oddest location? Have you watched a movie and be impressed by an actor/actress who you never heard of and the next movie or two later, there he/she is again? Well there is Swirl Theory to explain what is going on. Also see The Principle of Imminent Collapse.

The cause and effect relationship applies to events that are in direct proximity to each other. When one billiard ball strikes another the striking ball changes direction and speed. It imparts direction and speed to the target ball and it rolls away from its original position or changes its speed and direction if it too was already in motion. Sir Isaac Newton described this relationship with the equation Force=Mass times Acceleration (F=Ma) . This relationship between the two billiard balls is wholly predictable and replicable. What is less apparent is that two objects can pass near to each other and exhibit a cause and effect relationship.

This lesser obvious relationship is also wholly measurable and understood by physicists as a Gravitational, Electrical, or Magnetic interaction defined by the equation: F=c(M1 x M2/d2) . You don’t need to understand the mathematics but simply, there is a force between any two objects that acts at a distance and is smaller the further away the two object are.

Even lesser known and understood is how events that take place in similar places at similar times can shape each other and manifest divergent outcomes. How GEM (gravitational, electric, magnetic) forces act across a distance is conceptualized by considering a field of force that act with a uniform effect until something comes along and disturbs the uniformity. Picture a tightly stretched trampoline. It is essentially a flat uniform surface. If you put a small glass marble on it the marble will sit there and wait until something comes along to disturb the uniformity of the trampoline surface. Now carefully place a bowling ball anywhere on the stretched surface. Two things will happen. The bowling ball will migrate to the middle of the trampoline because it deflected the surface downward due to gravity. The second thing that will happen is the small marble will roll toward the bowling ball and stick to it. The marble is only following the bent surface of the trampoline created by the bowling ball.

Two magnets will attract each other across the distance between them. A positive and negative electrical charge will do the same.

All around us are these GEM fields that are constantly interacting with each other. There is an inter-relationship between these three types of force fields. Each force acts in its own characteristic manner on objects that are within its reach. Mathematically it can be shown that every two particle of matter exert a G force on ever other particle in the Universe, no matter how small that forge might be. Every electron and proton impacts every other one in the Universe. Again the same for every magnetism source.

Just as trillions of trillions of electrons create an electro-magnetic field that surrounds us, everything and everyone around each of us creates a field of possibilities any of which could be the next effect to a cause. All the mass in the Universe is moving around in a semi-random way that while it may appear chaotic and random, it is in fact governed by those two equations stated earlier and a couple more that are too complicated for this discussion. Although we can’t see it, our bodies are acting and reacting in the same manner as the marble on the trampoline or an electron floating in space. Our bodies are composed of mass that has gravity, contains iron that is magnetic and is electrically active and actually has an electrical field emanating from it, although it is quite weak. From a cosmic point of view, our bodies are indistinguishable from the air around us and the Earth beneath our feet. Indeed, we are composed of the air around us and the Earth beneath our feet. It is just that the matter of our bodies is more highly patterned than is the dirt and the gas of the air.

Our human bodies are highly patterned fields of energy that are far from uniform and which are deformed, deflected and warped by everything around us. The spinning of a magnet in an electrical field will induce electricity in wires that are around it. The moving magnet creates swirls and eddies in the previously uniform electrical field. Those swirls and eddies form currents that move by wave motion. The magnet doesn’t have to go anywhere to be felt because the magnetism flows toward or away from the magnet on a wave in the field.

To understand wave movement just drop a pebble in a pond. The circular ripples are a wave of energy that moves through the water without the water going anywhere. Two pebbles dropped in the pond will make two sets of circular waves that meet and interact with each other. If one wave is at a high point and the other at its low point, the result will be calm water at that location. If both are at their high or low points, the result will be a place in the water where the level is twice as high or twice as low. Many thousands of pebbles will make a highly chaotic-looking water surface, but each set of circular waves are independent of each other.

The events of our lives act in a similar fashion. Events travel on wave fronts that propagate away from the point where they originate. These event-waves interact with other event-waves to create that which we see around us. They are subject to the same forces that shape the movement of other types of waves. The strength of the force between events and event-waves can also be described by the GEM equation: F=c(M1 x M2/d2). This equation demonstrates that there is a force between events that is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. In simple terms, the force diminished greatly as the distance increases. The ‘distance ‘ parameter has two dimensions, one of space and the other of time. Therefore, two events may occur on the same spot but 4 decades apart in time but still have an impact on each other. Yes, an event can have an impact on the other even though the one is in the past.

Such retro-active effects are not readily seen and understood, but there is an explanation based in the wave nature of events. Instead of dropping two pebbles in a pond change that to a deep water stream. The surface is relatively smooth so you can see the ripples clearly. The stream water is moving left to right past you on the bank. The pebble that is dropped into the moving water downstream of your position creates ripples that travel upstream toward you. From your point of view the ripples are coming out of the past toward you. A pebble dropped in the water up stream of your position makes ripples that move faster than the flow of the stream and come at you out of the future. This example would be more obvious if it were tiny floating boats that cause the ripples. On one hand, you would see the ripples arriving before the boat floats by, on the other you would see the ripples of the boat that was dropped in down stream where you could not see it. These two boats create waves of energy that interact with each other, one from the past and one from the future.

Flow in a stream is rarely uniform and consistent. There are currents in the fluid that may not be obvious to an observer who is standing on the bank enjoying the beauty of the stream and how the sky and the horizon reflect on the placid surface. Big currents will warp the surface. Rocks on the stream bed divert the water as will variations along the banks. The water constitutes a field of energy that acts both on other parts of itself and on the stream banks and bottom. Waves travel in this turbulent field and are shaped and reshaped by the flow and the other waves in the field.

Two bits of floating detritus can enter a river miles apart, days, weeks or months apart on the calendar and end up in the same backwater location trapped behind a log or washed up on the bank just above the pool elevation. Each bit will have traveled a different path from a different starting point only to end its journey having met in that same still water location. One cannot assure that the tossing of two and only two objects will end in their meeting in the same still water, but with the tossing of thousands of objects there will be a propensity for them to eventually arrive there. The swirling turbulence is not random in nature but has an guiding impact on events.

The lives of human beings are likewise guided and channeled by the flow of events in which they exist. Event-waves travel within other event-waves and combine with them to create that which we see as our times and our histories. The swirls sweep us in similar directions that carry us to common locations. Those swirls also carry others to their locations and sometimes into ours.

Marketing designers strive to create event-waves that predictably place their ‘products’ in the still waters where many people will interact with them and spend their money to continue that interaction.

Artistic performers work to get themselves seen and heard so that later more people will see them and hear them and they will become famous and wealthy in their pursuits.

Entrepreneurs strive to discover or create the Next Big Thing. They try to figure out where that next still water is that is the endpoint for all the turbulent movement that makes predictions difficult. Some people seem to know how the currents move and where they will carry the bits that are moving in those currents.

Personal event-waves

Every person is a point source for the propagation of event-waves. We do not see these waves but perceive only the portion of them that intersect with ourselves or our own event-waves. This is why we can be so wrong in our interpretation of the nature of a person. It is also why we can believe that what someone has done was good and that exact same action is considered bad by someone else. The event-wave that hits us and resulted in a favorable outcome might actually kill someone else. Indeed, the favorable outcome might have required that death. Consider how many suspected serial-murder cases go forever unsolved because the killing stopped. The killer may have been himself killed in an unrelated event. Maybe an automobile collision. Undoubtedly, there are people alive today who would have been the serial-killer’s victim if he had not died in the collision.

On just the opposite side of that previous example there is the tragic outcome. “There is a killer on the road, his brain is squirming like a toad, if you give this man a ride, sweet Emily will die…” (as sung by Jim Morrison) describes that intersection of event-waves. We usually only think about the intersection of the killer and the victim and not about the cloud of potential events and outcomes that constitute the event-waves that ultimately intersect. The swirl of event-waves brings all the victims to the killer (or the killer to all the victims) and scatters everyone else away to relative safety, at least from that killer. One person might be pushed away from the killer by the energy of his event-wave front only to be destroyed in another tragic event.

The driver in an automobile speeding along the highway with a faulty tire may make it home today, but he/she is moving along with an event-wave that could manifest itself in tragic consequences at any moment. Today he arrives home safely. Tomorrow a truck driver who has not slept enough to be driving this particular highway at this particular time will swerve in front of the car with the faulty tire. The driver swerves and misses a collision, but the tire ruptures and the car spins out of control and collides with the minivan with the soccer team…

Mom and the kids set out as usual that morning as they always do on Saturdays in the summer. The car driver normally relaxes on Saturday mornings, but his employer asked him to work on this Saturday. Had the truck driver stopped to sleep and be rested, he would have still been 400 miles away from the tragedy that unfolded on that Saturday morning when the major event-waves intersected. To be fair here, if any of the three drivers had started out a minute sooner or later, driven a mile per hour faster or slower, this outcome of the event-waves would have been completely different.

The larger aspect of Swirl Theory is that in the larger field of energy that is acted upon by hundreds of millions of individual event-waves creates conditions where people and events are swept in the same direction. The combined wave peak that manifests when many waves constructively add together makes a huge wave front that carries many people to the same destination. Impending events like a war or Woodstock push and pull people to specific location by the thousands for either a horrific end or “three days of love and music.” Each man and woman, boy and girl who trekked the distance to Woodstock in the Summer if ’69 made a singular decision that was far from independent of everyone else. The combined event-wave grew larger as fewer days remained until the opening act. People were swept into the current and swirls that deposited them on the farm in the rain and in the mud. And like the oceanic tsunami, this combined event-wave took on a life of its own pulling everyone along even against better judgment (if there had been any) to be swept up and deposited at the concert or be waylaid on the way, never to actually get there.

Sometimes the combined event-wave is clearly visible as in the run-up to an election, or the Super Bowl game. Other times the combined event-wave goes unnoticed or ignored until it splashed on the shore as with the ’65 race riot in Watts, and the August 1992 Los Angeles riot. It was not the beating of Rodney King or the acquittal of the four officers that caused the 1992 riot, it was years of dissatisfaction, inequality, subjugation and lack of financial resources in the African-American groups and the perception that everyone else has more and is taking it from them. Individual people living is South Central LA could see their poverty, see the brutal suppression enacted upon themselves, see that the Korean-American culture dominated the small retail market located in the African-American neighborhoods. Wealthy customers would not object to Koreans running the 7-11, hiring their friends and family, and take the profits out of the neighborhood. But the poor customers see it and yet another way to keep them down – no jobs, and a drain of the money that IS in the neighborhood. It was a mini-scale version of globalization, right there in their faces. They rebelled. Burned and looted the neighborhoods. Targeted the Korean communities.

This event-wave combination that creates huge wave amplitudes was seen before. It has been seen since. It will be seen again. As long as the underlying causes are not remedied but only suppressed, there will be future eruptions of violence and destruction. Individual people will be swept in the same direction to the same destiny.

Even when the light of reason fails and fires burn in the cities, good people get caught up in the swirl and accomplish great fetes. The lone man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 199? Was unlikely to have planned such a stand. He did what he felt he must do.

Reginald Denny was a white truck driver who was dragged from his truck and beaten by a mob of African-Americans while a news station helicopter televised it from overhead. He was rescued by an unarmed, African American civilian named Bobby Green Jr. who rushed to the scene and drove Denny to the hospital. Green was swept up in the national events and has returned to relative obscurity since. He never would have said, “if I see an white man being assaulted by a mob during a race riot, I will jump in and save him.” He just did it.

Fidel Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was pulled from his truck and beaten by a mob that included the same assailant, Damian Williams, who had earlier beaten Mr. Denny. Rev. Bennie Newton, an African-American minister, prevented others from beating Lopez by placing himself between Lopez and his attackers and shouting "Kill him and you have to kill me, too". Both he and Bobby Green Jr. risked their lives to save someone who was being swept along in the turbulent swirling events of those few days.

The national televising of the events did spark additional yet smaller riots in other cities, but it also alerted people to the turmoil and allowed them to take positive actions.

Damian Williams, a single person created an event-wave around himself whose ripples are still being felt these 18 years later. They will ripple for many years to come. Rodney King in his fear of being returned to prison on parole violations, sparked a riot that left 35 people dead. His resistance to arrest was fueled by that fear. The resultant police actions were deemed excessive by a civil rights jury after a criminal case jury decided it was not excessive.

In every case, the affects of the event-waves combine in ways that increase the height (amplitude) of the wave or in ways the cancel the amplitude. Consider the biblical admonition to turn the other cheek, or the phrase that discretion is the better part of valor. When insulted a man can strike back or can “consider the source” and walk away. If he walks away his and the other event-waves meet in such a way that one at the highpoint meet the other at the low point resulting in no fight, no injury, no collateral damage. But if he strikes back because he has already taken enough crap from the transgressor, or from any number of other people, the results can be huge. Blood feuds have been fought by families, clans, tribes, nations, and even religions where one transgression follows another in revanchist folly. These battles can last for generations. Each new generation is swept into the stream and the swirl carries them to the same place. Gang turf wars have event-waves too that draws in young members who are so unprepared to swim in the flow that the flow carries them far downstream and into that place where the detritus all collects.

On a more happy note, two solitary people can live their lives in the absence of each other not knowing of the existence of the other. The events of their lives and the world around them each add an increment of wave energy to the churning swirling events of their days and bring them together in a small eddy where they remain long enough together to meet and get to know each other. In there they form a new pattern of event-wave that contains the two of them. Then they can re-enter the stream and flow along as one.

Why We Need Taxes

2010-02-20T15:25:00.000-08:00

Recall that the first working title of my book It's All Tuna! was The Economy Doesn't Care. One comment I received was, "so what's new about that?" While the market doesn't care, fortunately there are people who do. Furthermore, some of those people stake their futures on holding high office so that they can try to do something about caring. I pose one question back to you:

Where would we (and I mean all of us collectively) be today had we not spent deficit-ly and raised taxes to pay for our programs?

If we had not allowed hundreds of thousands of Americans to borrow their house equity to pay for college educations, home remodeling, flat screen TVs, retirement village units, etc. we would have not enjoyed the lifestyle we have come to expect for the past 50 years. I peg the interval at 50 years because it was after the 1960s that the spiral of wage increases, inflation and cost of living bloomed large. What seemed like a bright beautiful sunrise skyline turned out to be the mushroom cloud of imminent collapse on the sunset horizon.

Pre-WWII, the world was in an isolationist economic mode. America was still an agrarian society. Recall that in the Great World War, canons were pulled by horses and our bombers were bi-planes. We still had Milk Wagons and Ice Delivery and we had only about 123 million people. By 1940, there were about 132 million people. It is not surprising to me to drive into a small town in any state and see 50 to 100 or more names of young men from that town who died in either of those world wars.

In those days, families were the economic unit that drove all larger macro-economic activity. Three generations of related people resided in one dwelling that had been built to accommodate that family dynamic. Houses were homes and remained in the family for many generations. People actually owned those houses and were not beholden to an investor or bank. But in the spirit of the market place, two people living as cheaply as one is a sacrilege. One married couple plus children per household became the norm. Grandmom and granddad stayed on the old homestead when the kids relocated to the big city in search of a wage or salary. One had to travel light and be strong and lean in order to make that trek and not be slowed down by elder-parents. The dominant image from the Grapes of Wrath is the WHOLE family, from sick-old-granpap to pregnant wife with a babe-in-arms broken down on the side of the road with EVERYTHING they could carry tied on the side of the old farm truck. Houses became investment units and their value measured in dollars not bedrooms and hearths.

We moved away from that style of living where a strong back and a determined attitude put food on the table year after year. We moved into a world where strong backs and determined attitudes built railroads and skyscrapers for the marketplace to do its business of deriving secondary wealth from the labors of farmers, miners and factory workers. The market made it possible for humans to derive a living without having to flex a muscle or assemble a machine. Now I say that in the better sense of the practice. After all we did not need 123 million people to bend their backs planting and harvesting food and textile crops.

Today, we do not need for 330 million people to bend their backs to earn their dinner. The 59 million people who are 65 or older are not in the workforce, but need shelter and food. Yes, some of them still are working out of necessity because for them there is no other way to eat. Take a look through the Lens of Reality. Lens: Today due to the economic recession we have an additional 7 million unemployed people in this country who have been added to the 6 million longer term unemployed people. Reality: the rest of us are doing quite well aren't we? We go to work, we buy our food, we fuel our cars, we watch our Superbowls, we pay our taxes, we drink our beer, we complain about paying for those who have not, we worry about mounting debt (only because we fear that the lenders will stop lending.) This last parenthetical is the ONLY justification for fiscal restraint that I have heard ANYONE raise during the heated debates on the size of Big Government.

Big Government is Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and the interest on debt. To reduce spending on these entitlements we have to decide who will be sacrificed for the fiscal restraint. Some one has to decide who will be allowed to eat. Some one has to decide whose child will be turned away from the hospital because mom and dad don't have the money to pay the bills that will be issued. At the same time that these four line items of the Federal budget are growing out of control and remain unfunded they are also the four most urgent and essential items in our lives. Longer life expectancies are the primary cause of our imminent fiscal collapse. We want to live longer and live better, but we do not have an economic model which will allow that to happen without a mortgage that will some day need to be paid. What we have come to think of as mere comfort and necessity, is in actuality a luxury we never could afford on our ability to earn income. For us to live better than "the average" someone else must live below it. Hence we in America are less than 5% of the world population but consume about 25% of the energy production. Ask yourself this:

Am I willing to live completely within my means for my entire life?

This statement requires that you only consume one share of the resources which are equally shared among everyone on the planet. It means no consumer credit, or mortgages; you must save up to buy everything. It means that you will fund your own retirement. It means paying all your own medical bills or be denied care. It means that you buy no life insurance and if some cripples you in a car collision, you can only take everything that person has and no more. While you could leave wealth to your children, you cannot borrow against their future. My guess is that your answer is NO.

I know that my answer is NO.

We have and need taxes because we need the food, shelter, clothes and medical goods and services that the money will buy. The only reason we have a chronic National Debt is that we have chosen to defer paying our bills so that we can use future income and our future generations to pay the bills. There are legitimate reasons for borrowing now and making our children and grand-children pay the bill. Those reasons are supposed to be OUR responsible investment in the future. THEIR future. If we build a Billion Dollar highway now, it is supposed to be a benefit to our children too, so we issue bonds and get them to pay off the debt. We are responsible for constructing a sufficiently large health care delivery system with enough doctors and staff to be able to provide the necessary care. If we don't invest in training enough competent doctors and nurses, there will not be enough of them for our descendants. The actions of our Administrations has bled our investment funds to pay for non-productive pursuits such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the tax cuts that have hamstrung our ability to pay our bills.

Today, there is no way to reduce the debt without tax revenues. As our ability to borrow grows thin, our economy will grind to a halt when the music stops and we are the country left standing without a chair.

3052: Population

2010-01-31T19:14:00.000-08:00

Throughout human history, the biological imperative to reproduce ones genes in the bodies of children has been the norm. During the first decade of the 21^st century in the US, the fertility rate has been 2.1 children per woman. The birth rate is 18.14/1000 population and the death rate is 8.27/1000 population. That leaves 9.87 more births than deaths. Just on current population growth, we would add about 3 million people per year. Over a thousand years, that could add 3 billion people to the USA alone.

The concept of individual liberties and freedoms of choice is not likely to stand in the face of the realities of population growth even at the lowest levels. Today we support motherhood and childhood of millions of low or no wage households. This condition exists due to the lack of education that is linked with a job that pays enough to support the family. It is the result of indiscriminant sexual activity that results in a child that cannot be supported by the mother alone when the father is absent for any number of reasons. It is also the result of families that started out financially stable and was marginalized by a shift in the labor market that made local employment relocate elsewhere or completely evaporate as when the house building market slows down and construction workers have nothing to build, or when the automotive industry over builds its inventory with models that are no longer suited to the cost of liquid fuel. Many of the reasons for society having to support mothers and children are out of the hands of the mothers and fathers themselves. Out of the hands that is unless you consider the freedom to have sex and pleasure without considering the ramifications to society. Rarely does one put those considerations on the checklist of what to do to get ready for a hot date.

China has tried the authoritarian approach to population control. It is the one family-one child rule. It is difficult enough to get people to follow such a rule, and even more difficult to implement a remedy when the law is violated. Forced abortions and forced adoptions have split the country along moral lines. In the western provinces of China along the border with Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan there is an ethnic group of Muslims who live in the controlled territory of China but more closely align with the Muslims across the official and disputed territory Arunachal Pradesh to the base of the Himalayas. They seek separation from the godless Beijing government and alignment with the Islamic government partly citing the curbs on population growth which include abortions.

The next thousand years will certainly bring with it some widespread culling of the population of the earth by either natural biological, geologic/climatic, or man-made vectors. The more desirable approach is to allow the natural processes to do their job of controlling populations. Even though in the US we are faced with the retirement of the Baby Boom generation, those born in the years 1946 to 1964, and who started reaching 60 years of age in 2006, that too will pass. By 2030 the vanguard will be in excess of 85 or will be dead. By 2050, the last of the Baby Boomers will be 85+ or dead, too. After that the population will be on a downward trend and we will have to have learned a lesson about what to do to maintain a sustainable environment. Until now in 2008, we have not had to consider that part of the equation. We could just keep expanding.

3052: Education

2010-01-31T19:09:00.000-08:00

3052: Education

My real perch above the City of Baltimore exists at the highpoint of UMBC. From there I can see the Key Bridge and the treetops of scattered trees that appear to be a forest from that distance and elevation. The campus is laid out inside a perimeter roadway that confines most of the buildings and most of the several thousand parking spaces. In 3052 that campus will certainly be gone. Even if it remains a center of information, they will not be hosting 20-something students who drive their cars to the primarily commuter campus.

The need for higher education will be greatly diminished as canned information is available in your pocket. History will be ill relevant as formula becomes more basis of next steps. Even today, the history of 1972 is as ancient to students as WWI and WWII was to my generation. Many years after I last left the academic landscape, and I continue to learn, I find that much of what was taught as fact was more precisely defined as opinions and observations of the author(s) of the text books. In the 1970s for instance, we were never exposed to the pre-texts for war that governments used to either stay out of or dive heartily into armed conflict. If you look in the correct places you can find a reason to wage war on just about anyone. With the circa 2004, Bush Doctrine that asserts that America has the right kill anyone who appears to threaten our security, one can attack preemptively for the flimsiest of justifications.

Fact and figures seem to be the more important part of education. Computers can provide that function at a fraction of the cost of a formal higher education. Computers and information portals alleviate the need to read, write, do arithmetic. And who ever needed that biology class, chemistry class or physics class anyway? Trigonometry and calculus are only useful if you plan to attend college. In the Third Millennium AD all that information will be firmly archived in massive data storage centers accessible by personal devices if and when the need arises.

There will still need to be a form of primary education. Children will still need to know that numbers, colors and letters exist and what they represent. We will need to teach them how to think not what to think. This will require a huge change in the education paradigm. A few children will need to be groomed as the thinkers and planners, inventors and builders of new things. The rest will need to be taught things that will keep them happy and ease their anxieties.

While the world has become more global, it turns out that there are a few billions more candidates for higher education than the USA has to offer. Our mere 300 million people is but a 5% share of the 6 billion people on the planet today. In that distant future the population could be 10 to 12 billion, if we do not apply what we already know about human energy usage and waste disposal. Not everyone can attend or needs to attend university to get an education that will result in more income earning potential. As civilization becomes more standardized there is a lesser need for the creative thinking that is performed by the top few of the world’s greatest academics.

High school level education needs to address the needs of the trades: electricians, plumbers and carpenters. And the services: landscapers, nursing care technicians, machine oilers. And even then, the construction techniques of a thousand years hence will be nothing like what we do today. These processes will be more formulated too. Not a lot of need for creative or artistic solutions.

The primary and elementary level education will serve to identify who among the masses of students will be the thinkers and leaders of the next generation. The rest will learn how to live in a world where their labor and brain power is not needed.

The Principle of Imminent Collapse asserts that no matter how bad things look, we will end up with a New Equilibrium not Extinction.

Publish Post

Apocalypse 3052 (first written: Sept 14, 2008)

2010-01-29T17:05:00.000-08:00

Apocalypse 3052

I did not recognize the landscape laid out before my eyes as I stood on the Catonsville highlands overlooking the City of Baltimore. A millennium of change had brought about the alteration of the outline and configuration of the Inner Harbor. The port was much deeper and extensive with sleek wind-driven cargo ships that slipped in and out of the docks. Gone was the Key Bridge that once framed the opening of the port. Gone were the ribbons of expressway that strapped the city and bound it in its history. My dream left a melancholy hole in my core as I realized that Mankind had indeed survived into the Year 3052.

When I awakened I lay still for a few minutes pondering the panorama that was now fading, its fine details blurring into the soft focus like a summer in the 1960s decade that remains more as an oral history of facts and fictions than as a real remembrance of things accomplished and lessons learned. I had that hollow empty sensation that comes when I think about the prospects of the one-way journey into a new land that immigrants made prior to the earliest days of the 20^th century before going back home was impractical if not impossible. One left, never to be seen or heard from again by they who remained, nor to see or hear them again. It is the same with moving into the future. One becomes lost to the now present never to return.

My Sunday morning became filled with the conjuring of what the world would be like after a thousand years change. I had to remind myself that I could not characterize the passage of time as ‘progress’ because that would be presumptive. More than likely there will have been cycles of progress and deterioration that resulted in a net improvement or net deterioration. There will have been changes to religion, social structure, race relations, medical practice, energy demands and supply, transportation, education, music, poetry and morals. Just what those changes would be certainly is a pure conjecture.

But nonetheless I postulated such developments using a few known initial parameters and propensities of the human animal. Some of those developments follow in the postings here.

The Wall, yes that one.

2009-05-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

In 1982, Bob passed through Washington, DC, on his way home from the Worlds Fair Expo in Knoxville, Tennessee. The trip was very long and Linda, his wife, was engrossed in a magazine she picked up at one of the many fuel stops along the way. There was this trench being dug near the Lincoln Memorial. Bob drove passed and continued to look at the great architecture of the nation's Capitol. The significance of that excavation would not be realized until some time later.

As far as war memorials go the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has no physical stature that looms above. It has no complex intricate sculptural detail. But it has the stealth of a cat, and the punch of a heavyweight champion.

Bob was in DC on business in June of '86. He realized the construction seen years before was the memorial and had seen much discussion of the merits and criticisms of its design. From his hotel room adjacent to the Capitol Building he began his trek to the memorial. In his wheelchair, he set forth alone across the Capitol city. Block after block he pressed onward toward the compelling silent call. The stone building crept passed as push after push on the chrome rims turned wheels into motion. The Jefferson Memorial peered skyward and played on the horizon behind official buildings where the mechanisms of war and peace, poverty and wealth, happiness and misery are planned and set into motion by the force of human will. It was a will much like the force which propelled Bob against friction and gravity toward the granite wall.

The Washington Monument stood poised and pointing toward the Heavens as Bob rounded the corner. Its full length and immensity became apparent as Bob huffed and puffed his way, push after push on the asphalt path up to the base. He stretched his neck looking upward to the pinnacle. How huge it was and how puny it is depending on ones perspective.

From there the course was down hill to the Lincoln Memorial but the going became more difficult as the distance shortened between Bob and The Wall.

He jumped a curb and rolled toward the Reflecting Pool. The path was level but hardly flat. The bumps jarred the wheelchair as Bob hurried along the path then up a small grade at the far end and a right turn. There. Dogged weary faced soldiers stood frozen in time and space gazing at a memory which refused to fade.

Bob paused at the top of the walk to take in the essence of the wall and realize the power that it commands. With so much blood and so many human souls consumed for its creation, the black granite emanates a life of its own composed of the lives that prompted its creation.

Slowly Bob made his way to the bottom of the path. He felt himself sinking into the depths of the grave as the wall grew taller and the names stood out further and further as they became more numerous.

Milton, Crosby, Holt, Ramsey. As he descended the path the oncoming people silently stepped aside to let him pass. Not a word was spoken. They had their own thoughts and their own words for each other. Not even a "good day" was said to Bob as he wheeled by. He began to feel the coldness that so many veterans told about.

One very good feature to the memorial is that although one travels to the depths of despair and desolation as they approach the vertex, after passing it, the path is uphill and the names become less numerous as the far end is reached. One is at least left with hope that these are the very last war dead for this country. But there is so much spare space in Washington for war memorials.

The list of dead sits at both ends and reads like a telephone directory or a college yearbook. Bob flipped the pages to "SPR" then back to "SLA" finally to "SMI." Smith. Smith, Robert A., Smith, Robert B. There were so many Robert Smith's lost in Vietnam.

14E-17 seemed the most likely, but it was so hard to remember and be sure.

Bob left the walkway and went to sit on a bench overlooking the wall from one end. He passed the lectern where the list lay under glass. While seeking his friend his only thoughts were "this book is too damned long." He sat on the empty bench and looked at the wall and the people who stood before it. He could imagine the people who stood behind it.

A Vietnamese man, about 40, sat next to Bob. He said, "you remember me, Jim?" Bob looked at him, surprised. "You remember me, don't you," he repeated. Bob shook his head no. "You must, you were in my village. You and the others. You remember, Jim."

"I'm not Jim," said Bob. "I've never been in your village."

"But you helped me when the shelling came," he said in his broken English.

"No."

"I remember you, Jim."

"No."

"I own a grocery store here, now."

"I'm glad to hear that."

"My wife, she helps, and the son."

"I'm glad, but I'm not Jim."

"Sure, you'll remember. You just think hard, You'll remember."

Bob said, "I hope you're happy here now." Then he got ready to transfer back to his wheelchair.

"When did you get wounded," he said.

"I'm sorry, I have to go now." He backed away before turning to leave.

"I came here to thank them."

Bob began to leave. "It's been good to talk to you."

"Goodbye, Jim. I hope to see you again real soon."

Bob left feeling quite strange to have been mistaken for a man who might have been killed, or might have been captured and tortured, or might have come home to be ignored and never thanked. Bob knew that at least one man and family thought that the men who fought did some good. He rolled away feeling sad and confused. The road back was another two miles. Two miles never seemed so easy as when compared to the road that so many men traveled to their ends or back.

As he rolled back along the walk parallel to Constitution Avenue, Bob came upon a small booth surrounded with state flags. A solitary man stood behind the counter upon which was affixed the message "MIAs You can do something." To the right of the words stared the sweaty black face of a soldier still MIA. The stark contrast of his white eyes punctuated the moment as Bob first saw the face, the face that well could have been Smitty. But Smitty was a casualty. 14E-17 bore the name. But with so much confusion and bureaucratic SNAFU, the possibilities were there. Those eyes shot a twinge of pain through Bob's head and caused a muscle to spasm in the back of his neck. It grew to a full fledge shudder that raced down his back and into his numb legs all the way to his feet where it disbursed into his all but forgotten toes. There it remained a tingle for quite some time as smaller waves if chill raised the hairs on the sides and back of his head and fled downward to join the fading sensations in his paralyzed legs.

The man behind the counter just looked at Bob. As Bob paused the man said, "How are you, Sir.?"

Bob replied, "Better today, thank you." He was still quite chilled from the experience. He could not think of anything more to say so he quickly pivoted and departed on his course hotel-ward. The man said, "take care."

Soon that booth, the man and that photograph were in the distance behind. Bob could still see that face as clearly as ever as he rolled around the great eclipse by the Whitehouse.

Not many things emotionally overtook Bob. Even the death of a family member or a friend usually doesn't cause much grief, if it happens in the normal course of life. Even a car crash fatality seems commonplace in life with 50,000 of them a year. It is difficult to realize that the numbers of names on the granite wall also represent the number of people killed every year on the highway. Or that represents the number of men killed in just four days in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania over a century ago. They represent only a fraction of the total Vietnamese dead of the same period.

Dying for a good cause is a glorious noble sacrifice. Bob never has been able to set definitely in his mind whether Vietnam was a noble cause or not. In retrospect, The Wall could have its mirror in one that names the men who served in Vietnam and have committed suicide since returning home. That wall would be taller and longer and the book heavier.

When Did It All Change?

2008-12-14T13:22:00.000-08:00

When Did It All Change? posted: Dec 14, 2008

This question is posted across several blogs because it applies to all the subjects of those blogs. It's All Tuna begs the answer to when did everything become Tuna and why? The Principle of Imminent Collapse has presented many examples of the principle in action, but why is it that we repeatedly fail to do anything about it? Is THAT another of the characteristics of the PIC? And the Vulnerable Geometry is only vulnerable because we construct it that way. Why?

This post seeks to elicit examples of when it all began and what evidence, albeit in retrospect, can be seen that has led us from the Before to the Now. An example of this question and answer is thus: People driving on the road today are so rude, ignorant and aggressive that they endanger everyone around them and sometimes commit murder over simple things. When did this start and what caused it to happen?

With that in mind, what is the answer to these:

When and why did it become more important to make a profit than to make a product or service that made life better for people?
When and why has sex replaced love? Songs in the 1950s and earlier were all about love and relationships. The 1960s saw some transition. The 1970s and on it is sheer sex and show.
We used to see starving children and mobilize efforts to save Biafrans. Rock stars sang and did benefit concerts. We had Farm Aid. We had Feed the Children. Now we hardly even know the place called Darfur. What has happened?
If the answers were simple, we would have solved our problems already. But identifying the causes and the time line is an essential step in getting to that goal.
Vulnerable Geometry at Blogspot

Sustainable Geometry at Blogspot

It's All Tuna! at Blogspot

Principle of Imminent Collapse at Blogspot

www.itsalltuna-blog.com

www.ThePIC-Blog.com

Sustainable Consumerism

2008-11-15T20:03:00.000-08:00

The global economy has been sinking into a quagmire allegedly created by the magnitude of crappy mortgages that turned into foreclosures in the seminal year of 2008. Everything seemed to be going along reasonably well until something happened. People went to work and earned their paychecks. Mothers shopped for groceries and toted the children from one after school activity to another. Consumers bought new cars, flatscreen TVs, cell-phones and iStuff. Cable and satellite content delivery utilities put every conceivable sports event on screens in millions of American homes. Beer and a multitude of fried potato and corn products ran aplenty. Tens of millions of Americans earned a paycheck, received a pension payment, got a public assistance check of one kind or another, and dutifully spent all of it on the consumables, commodities and utilities and medical bills. All seemed right with the world.

But lurking just beneath the surface was a condition so insidious that it would bring down the global economy in a way that the most diabolical arch-villain criminal mind could not even imagine. On top of that, it was not especially dastardly in its character. One could not point to the evil doers and single them out for punishment.

The unsustainable geometry was that there isn't enough income in this country to buy all the stuff that needs to be bought in order to keep everyone employed. The situation becomes even worse as more and ore jobs migrate to less developed countries to allow their people to earn the living that they need. They can make the products but not afford to buy them. Therefore, they are not the consumers that we are.

In order to pay for all that stuff, we needed to borrow against our most valuable assets: our houses. As our real buying power from earnings fell over the last decade or so, we supplemented it with the easy credit that the financial sector was so eager to provide at 6% to 18.99% compounded interest. The system had no option other than to implode. It could not be sustained nor could it expand indefinitely.

Sustainable Populations

2008-11-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

Like many students in the 1960's, my perspectives of the global picture was shaped in part by Paul Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb, and its dire predictions of the near term consequences of not forcibly constraining world populations. While the premises and conclusions of his work were overly "enthusiastic" and did not bring about the demise of any civilization anywhere in the world in the 40 years since their publication, the conditions that he wrote about have been notched up to a higher level of potential failure.

Ehrlich's error was in not being able to predict technological advances which would make it possible for food production to increase at a rate greater than the rate of population growth. On the other hand, he also did not account for the aging of the populations that [then] currently produced all of the Manufactured, Mined and Farmed production of the world. Population economists have not been able to devise a projection method that accurately predicts population sizes over any long period of time. One can use simple curve-fitting to show what will probably happen over a few years, but economic, environmental, and political factors act to influence the actual growth rates in was that cannot, as yet, be modeled. Cohort-component methods look at the age and gender composition of the population in sub-areas to "better" predict the population growth, with only marginal improvements in the accuracy of the predictions.

Whether or not we can make long-term projections of population size with a high degree of confidence, we can look into the near future and see what is going to happen to the composition of our population barring any massive events or social and cultural changes that might occur.

While this planet may be able to sustain a population of 8 to 10 billion of us, the question is should it be burdened with such a load. Although the damage we inflict on this planet may not look pretty, the earth has no eyes to see it. We are the ones with eyes and a consciousness to appreciate beauty and offer scorn at the damage we are doing. Our survivability is not predicated on a beautiful landscape, but it does depend on us not creating collateral toxicity that will lead to our demise. Surely, whatever we do in the next few decades there will be humans inhabiting this planet in some level of what we loosely refer to as civilization. There may be 7 or 8 billion of us or maybe only 3 or 4. It is up to us. It is our decision to make whether we exist in a comfortable world or the one Paul Ehrlich refers to as the battery-chicken world.

There is a finite quantity of fuel in the ground for us to exploit. Burning as much of it as we have to date has resulted in the environmental damage we have already seen. That damage was not just an event-based occurrence, it is a process that continues to react and continued to produce the damage. Even if we all stopped putting any carbon into the atmosphere, the degradation may not stop, because there is a multitude of natural sources of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that result in climate alterations. Lake Lyos in Cameroon spews CO2 into the atmosphere via a man-made effervescent vent for the built-up CO2 gases in the lake water. We are not adding any CO2 to the air there that wouldn’t end up there due to periodic gas eruptions. Anhydrite deposits along the continental shelves all around the planet erratically and intermittently erupt massive quantities of methane. Other volcanoes erupt CO2 and other noxious gases. Forest fires and the clearing of rainforest plots of land all add to the greenhouse gas load of the atmosphere. Even though humans are not the sole perpetrators of carbon loading of the air, we are the only ones who can do anything about it.

It is up to us to first decide what we want the future to be, then we have to develop strategies that will move us in that direction. It is up to us to develop a Sustainable Geometry that includes all the equations and all the variables. We may only be able to address a few of them at a time, but we can use what we already know to begin the plan and start moving toward the solution.

Solar and wind power will not be a dominant source of energy in the next ten years, or even 20. But we can start now to get a few percentages on the total and by the time a new technology surfaces to take it place, we will have accomplished something.

Curitiba, Brazil made a commitment to public transportation as the dominant mode for trips to work. They started in the late 1960s and build up their systems with then existing vehicles and new ideas of how to deploy transportation. As new vehicle types and urban landscapes were built, they included the mass transportation modes as the primary one. Today, they have a 60% share of trip to work on their bus and rail systems.

In the US, we do not need to invent the most efficient wind turbine or the most efficient photo-voltaic solar panels before putting one in on the grid. We can use what we have until someone invents a better one.

The future has an annoying habit of arriving too early. We are far from being ready to embrace the new geometry that will force us to comply. Either we shape a more sustainable future or nature will shape a more sustainable population of man. Again from the mind of Paul Ehrlich, the stabilization of population size will come from either a controlled birth rate or a higher death rate. More than likely it will be a combination of the two. Since I am moving along the age-cohort chart along with the rest of us, I would rather see a reductions in births rather than an increase in deaths.

Suburban Sprawl

2008-10-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

I know we have beaten this one down more times than Mohammad Ali did of his opponents in the boxing ring. The truth remains that the low density development that we produce is a disproportionately high consumer of resources just in the building.

The amount of asphalt that is laid to pave a street that give access to every lot is 3 to 20 times as high as in an urban landscape where there are zero-lot line structures and medium ride condominiums. More miles of water mains, and concrete sewer pipes are necessary. It costs every utility more to build the service lines to the low density subdivisions.

This extra-ordinary amount of resources doesn't ever consider the higher fuel consumption for commuters, shoppers and service delivery such as the USPS and FedEX. While one might wish to neglect these costs, and negative impacts, each incremental part totals the aggregate amount of pollutant loading in all the segments of the environment.

Complete Streets

2008-10-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

It is not my intention to duplicate the multitude of material already on the Web on this topic. The concept is not new but the emphasis on it is. The need to design our streets and roadways to accommodate more than just the motorists and trucks will carry us through this century. Even though the cost of gasoline has dropped recently, this can only be a temporary event. Global demand increases and the likelihood of "Peak Oil" production make that a certainty.

Meanwhile we need to make sure that we do not continue to put all our transportation eggs in the same basket lest we lose them all in one collision with economic reality.

I will have more to say on Complete Streets in this blog.

A Sustainable Geometry

2008-10-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

Among the other specific topics that write about is this one about rebuilding our civilization with a new geometry for land use, transportation, social services, finance, manufacturing, energy production and use, and governance.

We have the convergent conditions of a new millennium, accelerating climate change, the collapse of our global banking and finance systems, and a worldwide population that is fast approaching 7 billion people.

What we have done in the past will not sustain in the future. That which we have employed up to now has not necessarily been bad, but in light of current events and processes, we cannot permit ourselves the delusion that we need not change.