Understanding SoHum’s “Local Economy”

In most of America, people understand that drug dealers destroy communities. Neighborhoods either band together to drive them out, or they fail to do so, and drug dealers take over, bringing violence, crime and poverty with them as they undermine community values, corrupt innocent youth, and drive property values down.

Here in SoHum, when the drug dealers arrived, both property, and community values had already hit rock bottom, and the youth they corrupted were largely their own. Today, after a couple generations of cultural inbreeding, our population now skews strongly towards the greedy, myopic, and ethically challenged, and have united around their shared willingness to exploit the injustice of cannabis prohibition, rather than stand against it.

For some, it has been a very profitable strategy, and now that they’ve become successful, they don’t like to be reminded that their success has come at the expense of millions of poor working people who could ill afford it. They don’t want to see how good people, who make very little money, have to live, in order to afford their medicine. And they especially don’t want to see the refugees of the War on Drugs, the ones who lost their jobs, lost their homes, and lost their way, and then show up here, hoping for some kind of break in the sleazy game that has already cost them so much of their lives.

Drug dealers create poverty all over the country, and then complain about all of the poor people around. Drug dealers just don’t care. Either they take drugs that suppress empathy, or they lack the faculty for it. Either way, they have intentionally chosen a path of personal gain at the expense of the larger community. They should not be trusted. They’ll say or do anything, so long as they believe it will benefit them.

At first glance, they seem like decent people, and they talk a good game. They spew platitudes like a squid spews ink, and for the same reason, to conceal their sucking tentacles and genuine sliminess. “Community blah blah blah, sustainable, blah blah blah, positivity, blah blah…” they say, but to them, “community” means: “me and my drug dealing friends,” “sustainable” means: “maintaining a high-consumption lifestyle, indefinitely” and “positivity” means: “no matter how gross and slimy we are, I can always find something nice to say about us.” That’s what “community values” means to SoHum’s dope yuppies.

Still, a lot of people rely on them. Merchants love them. Merchants love stupid people with too much money because they easily become infatuated with shiny objects, and purchase them. Non-profits love people with too much money, and a guilty conscience. Where would community non-profits be without the boundless guilt of rich liberals? So the dope yuppies take advantage of working people, the merchants take advantage of the dope yuppies, and the non-profits take advantage of everyone’s guilty conscience, and they call it “the local economy.”

Then they have the nerve to complain about all of the poverty they created, and wonder why no one wants to work for them. Oh, right, I want to work for one of our local merchants for $10-$15 bucks an hour, waiting on rude, obnoxious dope yuppies all day, just so I can spend half of my income on rent, if I’m lucky, and a quarter of it on overpriced cannabis that I need, just to cope with the stress. Fuck that! I’d rather shit and piss on your front step, and beg for beer money on the sidewalk all day.

Why not? Do SoHum’s dope yuppies want cannabis consumers to continue to pay ridiculously high prices for cannabis? You bet they do! They’re lobbying right now for a regulatory framework that preserves prohibition prices and requires more law enforcement activity than ever.

Will Humboldt’s merchants, landlords, bankers and real-estate agents do anything to make SoHum more livable, comfortable, or affordable for working people? Fuck no! They’ll squeeze every last dime out of everyone in town, and then complain that it was such a bother, and barely worth their time.

Will any of the non-profits, who have gladly accepted thousands upon thousands of hours of free labor, donated by people who lack adequate housing, ever launch a campaign to make housing affordable, and available to the people in this community who need it? I wouldn’t hold my breath. The non-profits around here are much more likely to buy up homes in the area, and build new structures, not to house people, but just to have a place to store all of the other crap they own. Besides, our local non-profits have more important things to do, like protecting endangered cannabis from salmon extinction, or looking out for some people’s civil rights, or providing subsidized entertainment for bored dope yuppies.

If you aren’t part of that dope yuppie/merchant/non-profit clusterfuck, they don’t even know you exist, except in the vaguest sense. By that I mean, they understand that all of their money and labor comes from somewhere, but they have no idea where. Together, they’re trapped in a death-spiral of greed, consumption and guilt that feeds on itself, while it sucks the life out of the the rest of the community.

The War on Drugs has ravaged this country, killing millions, and leaving millions more scarred for life, but here in SoHum, the War on Drugs is highly addictive, and too many people remain far too intoxicated by the money it brings in to recognize the damage it does right here in our own community.

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.

On The Money; The Sick Ideas Behind Healthy Humboldt

On The Money,

Economic Advice for the 99%;

The Sick Ideas Behind Healthy Humboldt

 

Listening to Dennis Huber’s Monday Morning Magazine show on KMUD last week, I heard the voice of a representative of Healthy Humboldt talking about the thrilling conclusion of the Humboldt County General Plan Update. While the endless acrimonious bickering on this issue highlights the complete failure of county government and private enterprise to address the county’s housing needs, or provide good stewardship for the resources and lands of Humboldt County, Healthy Humboldt’s cheerful proclamation that they advocate for “sustainability” particularly irked me.

I know they mean well, and I understand their reasoning: If we encourage people to live closer together, and closer to jobs, services, and public transportation, we can lower Humboldt County’s carbon footprint. However, a lower carbon footprint does not equal sustainability, not even close. The county goes to great lengths to prohibit sustainable housing, and even greater lengths to encourage resource exploitation and consumption. Healthy Humboldt wouldn’t dare suggest the county operate in any other way.

So, whether you’re an egghead ecofascist, a greedy fuck-all real-estate developer or a blood-sucking dope yuppie, you’ve got your head up your ass when it comes to sustainability in Humboldt County. The same goes for the bureaucracies in Eureka who issue permits and enforce the reams of pointless and arcane regulations the county has already adopted. These people have already made an unholy mess of Humboldt County, and this GPU won’t change that one bit.

Face it, as a culture, we have no idea how to live on this planet sustainably. Most of our building codes and housing standards were established in the post WWII boom years, the period of the greatest increase in American consumption, and before the concept of a finite planet ever crept into the American psyche. Today, building codes still largely reflect the values and attitudes of that bygone era.

The whole point of building codes was not to make homes “safer” or whatever, but to make them cost more, use more stuff, keep more people busy, and waste more water, energy, space and resources. In other words, building codes were established to spur growth in the economy. The entire regulatory system was designed to make housing less sustainable, and it has been fantastically successful. They gave us suburban sprawl, gridlock, and homelessness. They’ve made homes so expensive that most people can no longer afford one.

As a result, people have become slaves to their homes, if they haven’t already lost everything to their home, through foreclosure. They’ve successfully turned “home”, which should be a place of comfort, security, and sanctuary, into a source of stress, anxiety and endless toil. This is a remarkable achievement, even if it is not exactly something to be proud of.

We should acknowledge the county government, land developers, the construction industry, real-estate agents, appraisers, bankers and mortgage brokers for their role in generating an enormous amount of unnecessary economic activity by making life suck for so many people. They really deserve more than a token of our appreciation.

If you are homeless, facing foreclosure, struggling to make payments on an underwater mortgage or throwing your money away on rent in an overpriced housing market, you should know that it’s not by accident. Some people believe that it is more important for them to make more money, that it is for you to have a place to live, and those are the people bickering over the Humboldt GPU.

No, no one at the table at the GPU wants to see hillsides dotted with cabins, shacks, yurts and teepees. No one involved with the GPU wants to return to the days of out-houses and pit latrines, but that’s what sustainability looks like. That’s what home should look like, simple, tidy, and homemade. That is what the Humboldt County General Plan exists to prohibit; sensible homes built by hand, from local materials by the people who intend to live in them. Instead, the county employs a small army of personnel to insure that everyone in Humboldt County, lives up to their unrealistic expectations born in an era of unrestrained, bewilderingly wasteful consumption.

They all want housing costs to continue to rise because they all want more money for themselves, more money for their land, more money for their existing homes, more expensive new homes, more grants for Healthy Humboldt and more revenue for Humboldt County bureaucrats. They don’t care whether or not you have a home, or what kind of torture you endure to keep it.

Everyone involved in this seemingly endless saga with the GPU deserves your contempt, as does the GPU itself. You deserve a home, and not one that you have to spend half of your waking hours at work to afford. There’s a view of the Humboldt GPU that’s on the money.

Schools, School Buses and SoHum

Schools, School Buses, and SoHum

 

On “Thank Jah its Friday” today on KMUD, Solar Dan offered an interesting solution to the current transportation problem facing the SoHum Unified School District.

For those of you who don’t live in SoHum, you probably don’t know that this very rural school district, covering an area about the size of Rhode Island, relies, or at least relied on, a one million dollar annual state subsidy to provide school bus service to the 700 or so school age students who live here in SoHum.

Last week the school board was informed that this subsidy had been cut from the state budget. So, the school district will run out of money for bus service in February. Lay off notices went out to all school bus drivers and other transport personnel just a few days ago. Starting next month, parents will be responsible for getting their kids to and from school.

My initial response was HURRAY!!! I know a lot of people like schools, and some folks even send their kids there, but I don’t care. I hate schools. I hate school buses, and I really don’t care much for school children.

I went to school. I know what goes on there. I also went to school in a rural district and spent over two hours a day in school buses getting there and back. I don’t wish that on anyone.

Even though I’ve been out of school for thirty years or so, the wounds I suffered there still pain me today. I learned to hate school early. By second grade, I had had enough. I couldn’t take it any more, and I was driven to commit an act of terrorism against a school bus.

As the youngest of a team of conspirators at my school bus stop, all of us disillusioned by school, we spent our time together at the bus stop, talking about how we could sabotage the bus, as to prevent it from making it to school. As we stood there, in the crisp morning air waiting for the inevitable arrival of that giant banana slug that would swallow us whole, grunt, groan and lurch about for another hour and a half, and eventually spit us out, nauseous and desperate to pee, at school, we would dream up elaborate schemes to disable the school bus.

Most of these plans involved technology, knowledge,and financial resources that we, as school children, lacked. But, finally, we arrived at a plan that was within our, quite limited, realm of the possible. We figured that we could put nails on the roadway, that might penetrate the tread of the school bus tire, causing a flat tire. That would leave the bus stranded by the side of the road. At last, we had a real workable plan.

The next day, I deliberately left the house by the side door, rather than the front, which led me past my father’s workbench. I knew that an open box of nails sat on top of it. I stealthily grabbed a handful of nails as I passed, and shoved them in my coat pocket. When I got to the bus stop, I showed them to my friends, and said, “Here’s just what we need!”

That’s when I first noticed my friend’s real ambivalence about actually carrying out the sabotage we had planned. They weren’t serious about it. For them, this had all been idle talk to pass a few minutes, but I hated school. I wanted to sabotage the bus, for real. I wanted that bus to be stuck by the side of the road with a flat tire, and I wanted to be late, maybe even an hour or two late for school as a result. I wanted it bad. I hated school. Did I say that before?

We had a plan. I had the tools right in the palm of my hands. I wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip by. I convinced them to go through with it. We scattered a few nails on the road, but didn’t think they would go through the tire if they were laying on their side. So, we stood one of the nails up on its head, with a few pebbles to stabilize it, right where we thought the bus tire would hit it.

My heart pounded as the bus approached, but I kept my cool. The oldest boy in our terrorist cell, however, watched the bus hit the nail, and made a gleeful display as it happened. That tipped-off the driver, so forget about the “not getting caught” part.

As it turned out, the bus didn’t get a flat tire, and we arrived at school, right on time. Later that day, however, I received a note to report to the Principle’s office. The older boys all fingered me, the second grader, as the mastermind. I played dumb and young, which, at 8yrs old, I did pretty convincingly. We had come up with that plan together. We all had a part in doing it, but the nails matched the ones on my dad’s workbench, so they had physical evidence against me.

I don’t remember the punishment. Getting caught was bad enough. Finding out that most people are just talk, and won’t do anything unless you push them, coupled with the knowledge that my friends had ratted me out, and that our plan had completely failed, affected me deeply. As a result, I still hate school buses, and school children, and most of all, I still hate schools.

Schools are prisons for children, and taxpayer-subsidized daycare for the selfish, irresponsible half-wits who have the nerve to reproduce in the face of global ecosystem collapse. …And why is this country overrun with greedy morons who reproduce like rabbits, gladly send their kids to prison, and have no idea how to live sustainably on this planet? Public schools, that’s why.

Kids aren’t born that stupid. It takes years of expensive, daily instruction to crush a child’s natural curiosity and intelligence. Public schools don’t produce intelligent, thoughtful and creative minds, they transform them into mindless consumers of pap.

So don’t whine to me about your school bus problem. On the other hand, if you wanted to put those buses to good use, take Dan Glaser’s suggestion, and create a rural SoHum bus system for everybody.

I’d sure appreciate a bus that would pick me up at the county road and drop me off in Redway or Myers Flat. I wouldn’t even complain about all the fucking rugrats on board. Wouldn’t that be progressive, environmental and cool? A rural bus system that anyone could ride would go a long way to making SoHum into the kind of hip, forward thinking and conscious community that we are so fond of pretending to be.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could catch a bus in Whitethorn, or Alder Point, or Ettersburg, or Blocksburg, that would drop you in Redway? Think of what it would mean for our carbon footprint, as a community. Think of how much better life in SoHum would be.

Think of how much easier a rural bus system would make life for a lot of the older people who live in the hills but no longer see well enough to drive safely, or for you, when your truck breaks down, or your kids want to visit friends across the watershed, or when gas prices go through the roof, or when you can no longer afford to cruise all over the countryside in your F350.

It would certainly increase the ridership on the current county bus system. People who took the bus in from the hills would use the local bus to go between Redway and G,ville, and could take the inter-city bus all the way up to Eureka. The rural bus system would really make public transportation viable in SoHum. If I have to drive my truck into Redway, there’s no way I’m taking the bus to Garberville. And, if it means I have to leave my truck, unattended, in Redway all day, I’m sure not taking the bus to Eureka. But, if I could catch a bus into Redway, I’d use them a lot.

So, lets prove that public schools haven’t completely lobotomized us as a community, and do something truly progressive and intelligent for a change. Lets turn this crisis into an opportunity to do something that actually serves the community’s needs and makes a real step forward towards reigning in our carbon footprint and moving towards a sustainable future.