Socialist country in Europe whose streets paved with gold attract crowds from far and wide to come and partake of government (taxpayer) support: housing is impossible to find. Have been searching for 10 years and can't find open listings. Meanwhile, this section of the city has become a favored offloading zone for newcomers. The logical strategy of the government here is to provide them with free housing (which they manage to locate while we can't find a single opening) including enough bedrooms for the children. This comes with free health insurance, free public transport, a monthly stipend for each child, and a monthly paycheck for the parents. Meanwhile, the country's own college graduates and working people are struggling to keep up and living like rats with their kids stuffed into micro apartments. Listings never hit the market, they seem to be handed out to those who have been placed first in line. Maybe the sane California residents should come here: just don't admit you're from a functional country, because you won't be entitled to any helpful pearls being thrown and it is a hard journey.
Once 20 years ago I thought Costa Rica. Today, no place looks like a good fit except here. And in four years this place will look like the ruins of Rome.
Phoenix. I landed there a couple years ago for the first time expecting to find the grid horror that everyone complains about. No --- it was a dreamy blast from the past of a Southern California from the 80's.... same offramp designs, street signs, palm trees... Without the signs of massive decay and despair. For the moment anyway.
I could never feel comfortable living somewhere without natural water, though.
There are potential benefits to ruins. Extreme poverty and social unrest could potentially ward off investors and developers, who otherwise have been responsible for turning paradise into hell wherever they think they can make a shiny penny. From a historical preservation perspective therefore it could be good.
Water wars are just starting. I have some draft short stories on the Fall of Amerika. Resources will be huge. California is stupid, the political class stupid, De-Salinization can work, and can be done with miniscule environmental damage. After years of pondering how stupidity rises and fights to stay I am forced back to Alexander Pope. In the Dunciad he reminds us:
THE Mighty Mother, and her Son who brings[R. 2]
The Smithfield Muses[R. 3] to the ear of Kings,
I sing. Say you, her instruments the Great!
Call'd to this work by Dulness, Jove, and Fate[R. 4];
5
You by whose care, in vain decry'd and curst,
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first;
Yeah the thought arose immediately. Black Like Me, first published in 1961, is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin recounting his journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African-Americans lived under racial segregation. Griffin was a native of Mansfield, Texas, who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. He traveled for six weeks throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia to explore life from the other side of the color line. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.
Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book. When he started his project in 1959, race relations in America were particularly strained. The title of the book is taken from the last line of the Langston Hughes poem "Dream Variations".
In 1964, a film version of Black Like Me, starring James Whitmore, was produced.[1] A generation later, Robert Bonazzi published a biographical book about Griffin, these events, and his life: Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me (1997
You are 100% correct it is really bad and worsening by the hour. It is not just in the USA - it is everywhere across this planet right now. We have been taken over by aliens and they are all earthlings. We would perhaps be more fortunate to have been taken over by actual aliens? And yet many billions of us exist across the planet in comparison too far less of these earthly totalitarian aliens. They are entirely outnumbered by regular people. And the populations of other nations like us are attempting political solutions in their own lands. It is not working. We need to seek new alternatives or give up.
One person I read yesterday suggested simply that by giving our attention to the stinging insects of stupidity and fighting them we feed them energy and said more or less go your own way.
This can work to a point. By toil we buy privilege on the margins. By toil. Then in 2020 toil too was not enough. Mask, lockdown, injections FOR ALL, working people especially "C" suite to fast food maker destroyed our normalcy bias even in true believers. Everyone groks the levee failed but few think that the waters rising rapidly flood their life world. Salvation by injectiom.
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
When the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, Lord
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan
It's got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home
Oh well, oh well, oh well
Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down south
They got no work to do
If you're going down to Chicago
A-ah, a-ah, a-ah
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good
No, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good
I know the song very well thanks. I have used it to illustrate these times also. I am trying to be a realist and develop real ways of going forward. I keep running into more and more people who have seemingly given up (or those who keep engaging in useless rhetoric without action as you cite here) . Isn't giving up tantamount to giving in to the vaccines? Neither are reasonable neither serve any purpose.
To my mind - you probably recall in Berkeley La Pena Cultural Center. For 30 years I asked in SF why not here and house non profits above and a cultural space below.
So perhaps the way forward in community is to create a necessary space. Food, (healing food by the way-like Macrobiotics say as example), wellness worker spaces, a community space for performance or gatherings. A book shop. Creating therefore a hub that is a verb.
How can they even afford the 5m to every black person in San Francisco? Must be some serious rules in place to make sure that they don't send the whole country broke.
I have no idea where the money arises but this is not even all that is desired for REPENTANCE as California was not a slave state. Thus San Francisco -San Francisco's Board of Supervisors have signaled they're ready to right racist wrongs of the past — at least in spirit.
In a unanimous vote on Tuesday, the 11 members accepted a draft plan of more than 100 reparations recommendations for the city's eligible Black residents. Those proposals include a whopping one-time payment of $5 million to each adult and a complete clearing of personal debt — including credit cards, taxes and student loans. Black residents would also be able to collect an annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years and buy homes within the city limits for $1.
The move by the board was largely procedural – an intermediate step in a much longer process. It does not bind the city to any of the ideas presented in the 60-page proposal by the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, which in 2020 was tasked with addressing "the institutional, City sanctioned harm that has been inflicted upon African American communities."
"We are not here today to say what recommendations we will be supporting or moving forward with. There is still much work that needs to be done," the bill's sponsor, Shamann Walton, stipulated before the vote during the 7 1/2-hour meeting.
Crazy stuff. Imagine being locked out of SF's housing market due to prices and your neighbor gets given a house for a $1, credit cards & student loans wiped clean and 5m in to the bargain. I'm sure they'll be equanimous about that.
The old adage "Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad." San Francisco had no slaves. California allegedly had a handful working gold diggings.
Any day. Maybe Monday. Boomtown Rats come to mind. "I Don't Like Mondays" is a song by Irish new wave group the Boomtown Rats about the 1979 Cleveland Elementary School shooting in San Diego. It was released in 1979 as the lead single from their third album, The Fine Art of Surfacing. The song was a number-one single in the UK Singles Chart for four weeks during the summer of 1979.
I remember the song but didn't ever listen to the lyrics so didn't know that about the school shooting. thought it was just the usual Monday-morning-itis.
Socialist country in Europe whose streets paved with gold attract crowds from far and wide to come and partake of government (taxpayer) support: housing is impossible to find. Have been searching for 10 years and can't find open listings. Meanwhile, this section of the city has become a favored offloading zone for newcomers. The logical strategy of the government here is to provide them with free housing (which they manage to locate while we can't find a single opening) including enough bedrooms for the children. This comes with free health insurance, free public transport, a monthly stipend for each child, and a monthly paycheck for the parents. Meanwhile, the country's own college graduates and working people are struggling to keep up and living like rats with their kids stuffed into micro apartments. Listings never hit the market, they seem to be handed out to those who have been placed first in line. Maybe the sane California residents should come here: just don't admit you're from a functional country, because you won't be entitled to any helpful pearls being thrown and it is a hard journey.
Once 20 years ago I thought Costa Rica. Today, no place looks like a good fit except here. And in four years this place will look like the ruins of Rome.
Phoenix. I landed there a couple years ago for the first time expecting to find the grid horror that everyone complains about. No --- it was a dreamy blast from the past of a Southern California from the 80's.... same offramp designs, street signs, palm trees... Without the signs of massive decay and despair. For the moment anyway.
I could never feel comfortable living somewhere without natural water, though.
There are potential benefits to ruins. Extreme poverty and social unrest could potentially ward off investors and developers, who otherwise have been responsible for turning paradise into hell wherever they think they can make a shiny penny. From a historical preservation perspective therefore it could be good.
Yes who gets the Colorado River water in the event of a breakdown. Even LA takes some of that.
Water wars are just starting. I have some draft short stories on the Fall of Amerika. Resources will be huge. California is stupid, the political class stupid, De-Salinization can work, and can be done with miniscule environmental damage. After years of pondering how stupidity rises and fights to stay I am forced back to Alexander Pope. In the Dunciad he reminds us:
THE Mighty Mother, and her Son who brings[R. 2]
The Smithfield Muses[R. 3] to the ear of Kings,
I sing. Say you, her instruments the Great!
Call'd to this work by Dulness, Jove, and Fate[R. 4];
5
You by whose care, in vain decry'd and curst,
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first;
Say how the Goddess bade Britannia sleep,
And pour'd her Spirit o'er the land and deep.
In eldest time, e'er mortals writ or read,
10
E'er Pallas issu'd from the Thund'rer's head,
Dulness o'er all possess'd her ancient right,
Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night[R. 5]:
Fate in their dotage this fair Ideot gave,
Gross as her fire, and as her mother grave,
15
Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind[R. 6],
She rul'd, in native Anarchy, the mind.[R. 7]
Still her old Empire to restore[R. 8] she tries,
For, born a Goddess, Dulness never dies.
Wasn't Paul Kantner from Jefferson Airplane ultimately disappointed re Costa Rica?
Time for you to bite the bullet and identify as black.
Yeah the thought arose immediately. Black Like Me, first published in 1961, is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin recounting his journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African-Americans lived under racial segregation. Griffin was a native of Mansfield, Texas, who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. He traveled for six weeks throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia to explore life from the other side of the color line. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.
Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book. When he started his project in 1959, race relations in America were particularly strained. The title of the book is taken from the last line of the Langston Hughes poem "Dream Variations".
In 1964, a film version of Black Like Me, starring James Whitmore, was produced.[1] A generation later, Robert Bonazzi published a biographical book about Griffin, these events, and his life: Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me (1997
You are 100% correct it is really bad and worsening by the hour. It is not just in the USA - it is everywhere across this planet right now. We have been taken over by aliens and they are all earthlings. We would perhaps be more fortunate to have been taken over by actual aliens? And yet many billions of us exist across the planet in comparison too far less of these earthly totalitarian aliens. They are entirely outnumbered by regular people. And the populations of other nations like us are attempting political solutions in their own lands. It is not working. We need to seek new alternatives or give up.
One person I read yesterday suggested simply that by giving our attention to the stinging insects of stupidity and fighting them we feed them energy and said more or less go your own way.
This can work to a point. By toil we buy privilege on the margins. By toil. Then in 2020 toil too was not enough. Mask, lockdown, injections FOR ALL, working people especially "C" suite to fast food maker destroyed our normalcy bias even in true believers. Everyone groks the levee failed but few think that the waters rising rapidly flood their life world. Salvation by injectiom.
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
When the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, Lord
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan
It's got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home
Oh well, oh well, oh well
Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down south
They got no work to do
If you're going down to Chicago
A-ah, a-ah, a-ah
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good
No, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move, ooh
I know the song very well thanks. I have used it to illustrate these times also. I am trying to be a realist and develop real ways of going forward. I keep running into more and more people who have seemingly given up (or those who keep engaging in useless rhetoric without action as you cite here) . Isn't giving up tantamount to giving in to the vaccines? Neither are reasonable neither serve any purpose.
To my mind - you probably recall in Berkeley La Pena Cultural Center. For 30 years I asked in SF why not here and house non profits above and a cultural space below.
So perhaps the way forward in community is to create a necessary space. Food, (healing food by the way-like Macrobiotics say as example), wellness worker spaces, a community space for performance or gatherings. A book shop. Creating therefore a hub that is a verb.
How can they even afford the 5m to every black person in San Francisco? Must be some serious rules in place to make sure that they don't send the whole country broke.
I have no idea where the money arises but this is not even all that is desired for REPENTANCE as California was not a slave state. Thus San Francisco -San Francisco's Board of Supervisors have signaled they're ready to right racist wrongs of the past — at least in spirit.
In a unanimous vote on Tuesday, the 11 members accepted a draft plan of more than 100 reparations recommendations for the city's eligible Black residents. Those proposals include a whopping one-time payment of $5 million to each adult and a complete clearing of personal debt — including credit cards, taxes and student loans. Black residents would also be able to collect an annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years and buy homes within the city limits for $1.
The move by the board was largely procedural – an intermediate step in a much longer process. It does not bind the city to any of the ideas presented in the 60-page proposal by the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, which in 2020 was tasked with addressing "the institutional, City sanctioned harm that has been inflicted upon African American communities."
"We are not here today to say what recommendations we will be supporting or moving forward with. There is still much work that needs to be done," the bill's sponsor, Shamann Walton, stipulated before the vote during the 7 1/2-hour meeting.
Crazy stuff. Imagine being locked out of SF's housing market due to prices and your neighbor gets given a house for a $1, credit cards & student loans wiped clean and 5m in to the bargain. I'm sure they'll be equanimous about that.
The old adage "Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad." San Francisco had no slaves. California allegedly had a handful working gold diggings.
Can just print some more, thus
inflation will fix it and it will probably never be paid anyway.
Aim to upset anyone with a working brain.
One has no defense against any and all of the crazy.
The levee is gonna burst pretty soon.
Any day. Maybe Monday. Boomtown Rats come to mind. "I Don't Like Mondays" is a song by Irish new wave group the Boomtown Rats about the 1979 Cleveland Elementary School shooting in San Diego. It was released in 1979 as the lead single from their third album, The Fine Art of Surfacing. The song was a number-one single in the UK Singles Chart for four weeks during the summer of 1979.
I remember the song but didn't ever listen to the lyrics so didn't know that about the school shooting. thought it was just the usual Monday-morning-itis.
Ah. Verse 1. 1979.
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody's gonna go to school today
She's gonna make them stay at home
And daddy doesn't understand it
He always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reasons 'cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?
Oh oh oh
You gave me an earworm all afternoon as I was weeding the garden.
It's a rat trap
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-03-17/silicon-valley-banks-collapse-proves-us-obvious-decline