Dirtbags, Miscreants, Undesirables and Low-Lifes pt1

Dirtbags, Miscreants, Undesirables and Low-Lifes pt1

 

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the invasion of “dirtbags”, “miscreants”, and “undesirables” in our community. I agree with a lot of this talk. I agree that this invasion has gotten out of hand. Every town can handle a few “dirtbags”, but they have overrun our small town.

This invasion has gone on far too long, and its high time we took decisive action to take back our community. These “people”, I use the term loosely here, wreck our environment, suck up our resources and tear at the very fabric of our society.

I also agree that we should do everything we can to drive these undesirables from our midst. We should make them feel unwelcome. We should insist that the Sheriff enforce every law that applies to them, punish them to the fullest extent of the law, and, if that’s not enough, we should pass draconian new laws that persecute them more directly.

I am in complete agreement with the sentiment I see expressed in our local papers, and hear around town. We should take back our community. We should drive “them” out of town. My only disagreement with the prevailing sentiment, is who exactly “them” are.

This week, part one of a two part series about “them”, the real “undesirables” and “miscreants” who suck the life out of our community. For part one, I offer this letter to the editor of The Independent, inspired by one of the letters I read there on this issue. A highly abridged version of this letter will appear in The Independent, but I thought you deserved to see it in its entirety.

Dear Editor,

I cheered and said “good riddance” the day I saw that Country Real Estate had closed their Garberville office. I had hoped that would be the last we would see or hear from George Rolff, so reading his repulsive letter in The Independent disgusted me doubly.

I am not writing to weigh in on the issue of people hanging around in Garberville and Redway. I know that the abundance of poor people around town creates a real challenge for the retail merchants in town. It really is a lot for them to deal with, and the marijuana growers in the hills should step up to the plate on this issue.

After all, kids all over America smoke Humboldt weed, listen to reggae music, and pretty soon, they start to believe in it. They say “goodbye” to Babylon, grow dreadlocks, and come here. They know that all of their money has been coming here for years, and they think that folks here have been using it to “make Babylon fall”, instead of blowing it on status symbols like oversized diesel trucks. They don’t realize that the marijuana industry is a bottomless pit of greed and indifference that wants to suck them dry.

One of arguments I hear the most, from the people who make their living from marijuana, yet oppose legalization, is that, in a legal environment, big corporations like JR Reynolds would take over the industry. RJ Reynolds spends billions of dollars funding cancer research, and medical facilities, and millions more on public art. They’ve learned that they can buy some respect, if they take some responsibility for the social problems they create. Folks around here might take a lesson from the tobacco giant when considering what facilities to include in that new community park they are all so proud of. We don’t really need another expensive “middle-class” status symbol for drug dealers around here.

But that’s not what pissed me off about George Rolff’s letter. What pissed me off about Geoge Rolff’s letter is that someone in the real estate industry had the nerve to complain about all of the poor people around town. If the marijuana industry is a bottomless pit, the real estate industry is the Grand Canyon of greed and indifference, as perfectly exemplified by Mr. Rolff’s attitude in his offensive letter.

While bankers orchestrated the housing bubble and the collapse of our economy, the real estate industry acted as their highly paid mercenary army. During those bubble years, people like George Rolff, Blake Lehman, and the rest of the real estate industry collected obscene commissions on inflated land prices. They made those deals that went bad. They appraised land at those ridiculously inflated prices. They turned housing into a luxury that only the rich could afford. They made millions of people homeless, and they got filthy rich doing it.

I saw George’s Harley, and his wife Melinda’s Mustang. They wanted everyone to know that they were doing well. Thanks to them, a lot of people in town aren’t doing very well. Personally, I find conspicuous consumption much more offensive than conspicuous poverty, and I find complaints about poor people, from people in the real estate industry particularly odious.

It is not a crime to be poor, but what the real estate industry did to our nation, our community, and our economy was a crime against the American people. It’s shameful for George Rolff to blame his victims, and to attempt to sweep them under the rug.

On The Money; Standard of Living

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

Standard of Living

 

People make a big deal about our “high standard of living”. Just last week local blogger Eric Kirk invoked the “high standard of living” in western Europe as evidence of the unrivaled superiority of the democratic system, as though democracy were an economic system rather than a political one, and completely ignoring the environmental impacts of the European lifestyle. Apparently, to Kirk, a high standard of living, regardless of how fleeting, or how high the price paid by the rest of the world, is the sole measure of success, but what do we mean by “standard of living”?

When was living standardized? Can’t we customize our lives individually? Do we have standardized tests to measure our standard of living? If so, how much do we “live to the test”, so to speak, just to artificially elevate the results? …and what do we mean by high? I know how high I have to be to reach my standard, but that’s a very personal thing. My partner Amy hardly smokes any pot at all. Does she have a lower standard of living than I do? If so, I think we’d all be better off with more people like Amy and fewer people like me, rather than the reverse.

Amy is a smart attractive woman who takes care of herself, me, two cats, two snails, our home and a few non-psychoactive potted plants that I would never bother with. She takes no drugs, has no interest in mass media, the internet, or fashion. She cherishes her interactions with wild plants and animals, enjoys living close to the earth, and has learned to do so responsibly.

I, on the other hand, am a fat, bald, multi-drug addicted middle aged white guy who spends his time thinking unclean thoughts about Bratz dolls, playing with electronic children’s toys and filling web servers with pointless blog posts about it. I can’t wait to try those new “bath salts” I’ve been hearing so much about, and even though about 80% of my waking thoughts revolve around sex, I still find it easy to blather endlessly on subjects I know nothing about, and I expect everyone to listen. Clearly I exemplify a higher standard of living than does my partner Amy, but who would you rather spend your time around?

While raising our “standard of living” has opened a Pandora’s Box of previously unimaginable new opportunities for fat, bald, sex-obsessed, drug-addled white guys with huge egos, like myself and Eric Kirk to amuse ourselves, those gains have come at tremendous cost to bright, good-looking people who know how to live on this planet without fucking it up, like Amy.  In fact a rising standard of living is always marked by the extirpation of healthy good-looking people who had quietly lived, in the same place where their ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years, without depleting their resource base, and by the rise of fat, bald, white egomaniacs who shamelessly exploit everything, and for whom, sustainability is, at best, an abstract concept.

Fat, bald, white egomaniacs, around the world, all live pretty much the same way. We all want anything we see any other fat, bald, white guy with. We think its great to live in a world where every fat, bald, white guy gets to have anything that any other fat, bald white guy has, so long as he has enough money. That’s what we mean by “high standard of living”.

On the other hand, the people who inhabited this world before this new “high standard of living” all lived differently. They all developed cultures adapted to the peculiarities of the places they lived. Nothing about human culture was standardized, but all of it was sustainable.

In the “high standard of living” world of fat, bald, white sex-obsessed egomaniacs, we have building codes, a general plan, and college educated, taxpayer funded eggheads who are full of advice, but none of it is sustainable.

This is why we should value our “high standard of living” over the rich diversity of our human cultural heritage. For unless we exterminate what remains of human cultural diversity, exploit the Earth’s natural bounty, and sacrifice generations of our own progeny in the name of our “high standard of living” fat, bald, white egomaniacs with money will not be able to use economic extortion to compensate for being so sexually repulsive.

There’s a view of our “high standard of living” that’s On The Money.

Kirk to Enterprise, What Planet Are We On?

Kirk to Enterprise, What Planet Are We On?

I listened to Eric Kirk’s radio show, this past Thursday night at 7pm on KMUD. I read a facebook post in which Eric let us know that he had invited Andy Stunich to talk about his fears that our elected officials might commit economic suicide by government. 

As a financial advice columnist, (look for my column “On The Money; Financial Advice for the Working-Class” in the current issue of Fifth Estate Magazine) I like to entertain a diversity of opinion on economic issues, but I also tire quickly of listening to the same old conventional stupidity regurgitated and rehashed.

 

I know from listening to Eric’s show in the past, and from occasionally reading his blog, that he specializes in rehashing regurgitated stupidity, and Thursday night’s show found Eric practicing his specialty yet again. Why do you fill your head with this crap, Eric?

Every time I hear you on the radio, or visit your fetid little corner of cyberspace, I feel my soul being sucked into a vortex of empty rhetoric, going nowhere. Thursday night’s show provided a prime example.

 

This show reminded me that, while “people who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it”, people who study history don’t have a clue either. If, as Frank Zappa said, “Rock music journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read”,

then the study of history is people who write too much about people who talk too much for people who read too much. While there’s always more that you can learn about history, there’s only so much that you can learn from history, especially if, by “history” you mean the history of our culture, from about 10,000 years ago to the present.

 

In reality, the ones who learn the most from “history” are the ones most eager to repeat it. Hitler learned how to engineer a genocidal holocaust by studying American history. Since the primary concern of “history” is the rise and fall of megalomaniacs, megalomaniacs can learn a lot from “history”, but what the rest of us learn from “history” is how to think like a megalomaniac.

 

We think like megalomaniacs when we imagine that we could solve the problems of society if we were in charge. Imagining that we could solve the world’s problems if we were in charge leads to pointless, inane discussions like the one I heard on KMUD Thursday night; armchair megalomaniacs endlessly debating economic policy in the most abstract terms, completely removed from the reality of life on planet Earth.

 

What do I mean by “armchair megalomaniacs”? Like I said, “history” is the story of the rise and fall of megalomaniacs. Historians endlessly examine the strategies, policies, and operational models of every megalomaniac that conquered and enslaved enough people to make the news, since written records began. On the other hand, “history” tells us almost nothing about the first three million years of the human experience, or about the thousands of tribal cultures, which survived for tens of thousands of years, until they were conquered, enslaved and annihilated by a megalomaniac and his minions.

 

Hence, American “history” begins with the “Discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus, and tends to gloss over the genocide, the slavery, the wholesale slaughter, the economic oppression and the environmental degradation, to instead focus on “The Constitution” the founding fascists, and “Democracy”. People who read too much of that crap start to believe that only megalomaniacs matter in life.

 

They start to speculate about how “history” might have gone differently if the megalomaniacs had made different decisions. For instance, they ask themselves, “What would have happened if Hitler decided not to attack Russia?” That’s what I mean by “armchair megalomaniacs”; people who aren’t particularly charismatic, or psychotically driven themselves, but like to imagine what they would do if they were Hitler, or Stalin, or Churchill, or Kennedy. As if fantasizing about being Hitler weren’t sick enough, “armchair megalomaniacs” also like to fantasize about ruling the contemporary world too.

 

“Armchair megalomaniacs” refer to their vast knowledge of “history” and “economics” (another crock of shit), and try to imagine what a megalomaniac could do to solve the world’s problems, and what kind of megalomaniac they’d like to see do it. Soon, they have pretty good idea of just what kind of megalomaniac we need in charge, and usually, its someone pretty much like them.

 

The problem with this whole line of thinking, is that “ruling the world” has been an unmitigated disaster right from the beginning, and its not getting any better. Megalomaniacs have done a terrible job of managing the Earth. The idea that we can solve the problems caused by unchecked megalomania, by putting a megalomaniac more like us in charge, is the founding fallacy of democracy, and it leads to pointless , arcane discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, like we heard Thursday night. In the case of last night’s show, the dancing angel was “the economy”.

 

Didn’t Eric and his guest seem to know a lot about “the economy”. They talked about “the economy” like it was a sick friend, in desperate need of immediate attention. Neither of them seemed to have a clue about the state of the global ecosystem, or the scale of environmental devastation resultant from economic activity, let alone the incredible sacrifices we all make in our quality of life, just to support unbridled profit-taking by the insatiably greedy, nor did any of that seem to matter much to them.

 

In the eyes of our “armchair megalomaniacs” Eric and his guest, the real problem we face is not the dying oceans, the melting ice-caps and the destabilization of the Earth’s climate, it’s not the growing underclass of people denied access to the basic resources of survival, and cast aside like garbage while the opulent use their economic power and influence to exploit the rest of us. No, the real problem, is that their sick friend, “the economy” might stop growing.

 

What is “the economy” anyway? “The economy” doesn’t measure the quality of people’s lives, only how much money they spend. “The economy” doesn’t measure the wealth of the planet, it only tells us how much money we got for what we stole from mother Earth, and how much we spent trying to clean up our mess. “The economy” measures how fast we liquidate the planet and our lives. “The economy” tells us how much we got paid to sacrifice our children’s future. “The economy” is a measure of how much of our lives and our birthright will be sacrificed to keep megalomania alive and well.

 

Ultimately, “the economy” is nothing but an extremely abstract set of statistics that could hardly be more difficult to gather, and couldn’t be less relevant to our day to day lives. The only reason they gather statistics on “the economy” and promote its unbridled growth, is to help megalomaniacs exploit the rest of us.

When you look at it that way, you realize that “the economy” is not your friend. The economy is an out-of-control monster ruining more of our planet, and our lives, every day. The last thing any of us really want, is for “the economy” to grow any larger. We want “the economy” off our backs.

If we survive this century, as a species, it will only be because we dramatically reduced our economic activity. Yet, as if “the economy” hasn’t already consumed enough of the world’s resources, and, as if “the economy” doesn’t already consume enough of our lives, Eric Kirk used the community airwaves to present to us, Andy Stunich’s dire warning that our current crop of megalomaniacs might slow the growth of “the economy” by spending money we don’t have on the popular programs that only exist, not unlike “the economy” itself, to serve the interests, and insure the stability of, their own regime.

 

This is like being trapped in a car with no brakes, driven by a rabid monkey at 100mph on the Pacific Coast Highway, and being warned that we might not have enough gas to keep accelerating. Running out of gas would be a blessing, but we’re not running out of gas, we’ve gone over a cliff, so the amount of gas in the tank only matters in determining how big of a fireball it will make when we crash. It’s time to stop looking at the gas gauge, turn off that idiot on the radio, and look out the window.

 

What planet do these guys live on, anyway? Obviously Eric Kirk and his guest speak to us from a world inhabited by armchair megalomaniacs, who subsist on a diet of corporate exploitation and reside in a jungle of empty rhetoric. Please Scotty, beam them back.

 

So Long, Old People

Sometimes Old People Just Suck

 

This letter appears in this weeks edition (8-9-2011) of our local weekly newspaper. I wrote it in response to a letter by Loreen Eliason, who used her letter to complain about homeless people in Garberville.

Dear Editor,

I thought wisdom came with age. Isn’t that why we call old people “elders” and respect them, even though they don’t do much but suck up social-security and medicare dollars.

They’re supposed to be smart, right? At least smart enough to retire before the economy collapsed, smart enough to buy homes before the housing bubble and smart enough to take jobs back when they paid enough to afford one. They were smart enough to arrive before ravenous locusts destroyed the environment and wrecked the economy.

Actually, they bear some resemblance to those ravenous locusts of the Populux age. I refer of course to the people who lived at the pinnacle of American post-war hyper-consumption. Yeah, today’s old people look just like those ravenous locusts, only older, fatter and crankier. The people who drove 25 ft long cars, dripping with chrome,

put redwood decks on their above ground pools,

and filled our landfills with every imaginable consumer product, also gave us global warming, nuclear waste, smog, and the most insanely unsustainable lifestyle in the history of humanity.

They also profited from the housing bubble, sold out the unions and take advantage of cheap labor by shopping at Wal-Mart and hiring day laborers. They skimmed the cream and then sucked up the foam too.

They should write a book titled “How to screw your planet and your progeny for the next ten generations” That’s some serious wisdom there. No one in the history of humanity has ever been so qualified to write that book, and no one in the future will ever have the opportunity again, thanks to them. If we ever find a new planet to pillage, we’ll need that book. Until then, maybe we don’t need to hear so much from them.

At least that’s how I felt after reading the words of Loreen Eliason in The Independent last week. This woman has the nerve to complain about how young people are ruining this town for her granddaughter, that young people don’t deserve a place to use the restroom and should be driven out of town. She calls them “homeless by choice.” Thanks to the aforementioned locusts, young people today don’t have the same choices they once did.

No longer do we have blue-collar jobs that pay decent wages. No longer do home prices reflect local wages. No longer can we say “fill er up” at the gas station for under $10. No longer can poor hippies afford to buy land here. We live in a different world.

While she admits “sure I did drugs back in the day, and I still love my cocktails” she condemns young people for doing the same. Was there a particular day when drug use was OK? Does that make it OK to condemn anyone who uses drugs on a different day? Her generation went shirtless, back when they were skinny, every bit as much as young kids today, and crotchety old drunk ladies complained then too. Some things never change

These kids got a raw deal, and it gets rawer every day. Until you old people are ready to sell your homes for something like what you paid for them, you can expect to see lots of homeless people around, and I wouldn’t count on them dressing for you. They don’t owe you anything, and if I were you, I wouldn’t give them any more good reasons to resent you.

The Economics of Shit in SoHum

The Economics of Shit in SoHum

 

I found myself thinking about the recent controversy around the port a-pottie at the Veterans Park in Garberville, while stuck, at Dazey’s Garden Center, behind a 20 something kid who was getting 60 bags of chicken manure packed into his late model SUV (60 bags of chicken shit: $300, the aroma that lingers for the life of the vehicle: priceless). This prompted me to look at the problem economically.

 

People around here spend a lot of money on shit. A 5 gallon bucket of bat guano sells for over $80 retail, and and we import it, by the semi-truck load, almost daily. There’s serious money in manure around here. So, if SoHum gardeners spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on shit, why is it so hard to find a place to take a dump around here?

 

We have at least a dozen locations in SoHum to buy shit, but no place you can deposit it without spending money there. We should have pay toilets. That is, toilets that pay you by the pound for your poop. All of the garden shops should have them, at least. Do you think we would have a problem with shit in inappropriate places, if we provided receptacles, and paid people what it was worth?

 

With fuel prices rising, the cost of importing tons of manure rises as well, making our homegrown (and homelessgrown) shit, that much more valuable. Can we afford not to take advantage this resource? In the competitive, and highly dynamic, marijuana industry, the high cost of importing manure into our rugged and remote community, puts SoHum at a competitive disadvantage, compared to more traditional agricultural areas. We desperately need this resource right now! If SoHum hopes to remain competitive in the marijuana industry, and we want our community to remain prosperous, we need to take steps immediately.

 

Yes, its time we face the fact that the economic survival of our community hangs in the balance. Unless we provide the facilities to collect this valuable natural resource, it will be wasted, and our community’s economic future will be left in the shitter.