Solstice June 21, 2014

Ivory Tower film

Many young and some not-so-young folks in Salem are drowning in debt due to student loans.  We are greatly hobbling our future by loading young adults up with debt when they will spend their lives in an era of economic contraction rather than continuous growth.  Turns out the Ed bubble is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, bubbles of all.

 Review: Documentary "Ivory Tower" is a Sobering Look at the Cost of Higher Education 

(via Indie Wire)
 

"Ivory Tower" is compelling viewing, particularly if you feel close to the crisis. Authors, current and former students, faculty and business people share their thoughts on the state of the system, with some sobering statistics that punctuate the more personal moments. The film traces the evolution of higher education: from being something for the elite to a basic human right, and back again as costs continue to rise.

Six reasons why support for capital punishment is evaporating: Slate opinion [feedly]

Six reasons why support for capital punishment is evaporating: Slate opinion
http://read.feedly.com/html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oregonlive.com%2Fopinion%2Findex.ssf%2F2014%2F06%2Fsix_reasons_why_support_for_ca.html&theme=white&size=medium

Progressive Secretary letter on using eminent domain in foreclosure avoidance

http://action.progressivesecretary.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=10007

A model for Salem: Italian town sees sustainable efforts benefit community, economy

Italian town sees sustainable efforts benefit community, economy

Christian Science Monitor

An Italian small town began to transition toward becoming sustainable in food and energy 20 years ago to better its community and economy. Since then, 108 organic farms supply 98 percent of the town's produce, meat, and dairy. 

Original Article: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Bite/2014/0617/Italian-town-sees-sustainable-efforts-benefit-community-economy

I know where we could save $400-$800 million

Gosh, if we can't afford to maintain what we have already built, surely only fools or scoundrels would seek to lure Salem into spending hundreds of millions on a huge new bridge built over soils that will liquefy during a quake.

What the story blames on the Prius (declining gas tax revenue) is actually only the tip of the iceberg. Because we blew through all the easy, cheap oil (back in the 50s and 60s when it was funding all those massive building projects), now we can have all the oil we want . . . but only at prices we can't afford.  Those are also the prices that lead to even more drops in driving (recession and drops in driving because of unaffordability ), and even more drops in gas tax revenue.

The only solution is to stop building new completely, and reprogram the money into getting more value from the existing roads, which means preservation, elimination of studded tire use, and a massive increase in transit (more value per road mile, rather than getting less value from more road miles, which further drives up maintenance costs).

Bridge needs by decade(Photo: Legislative Fiscal Office)

By 2030, the state will need to put nearly $6 billion into replacing infrastructure, the audit found. By 2040, repairs and replacements will together cost nearly $7 billion.

Oregon does not have that kind of money for infrastructure projects.

The federal gas tax has not been raised since 1993, and average fuel economy has increased by 22 percent over the past decade. Congress has passed legislation to temporarily supplement that lost revenue, and Oregon has passed three bonding packages in 2001, 2003 and 2009. (The most recent package included an increase to Oregon's gas tax.)

Today, bonds make up 40 percent of ODOT's $1.9 billion budget and pay for dozens of projects, which has increased the department's workload at the same time it has been forced to cut staff.

The "Salem River Crossing" -- the F-35 of Highway Projects

http://digg.com/video/the-designer-of-the-f-15-explains-just-how-inanely-stupid-the-f-35-is?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email

This is insanely great -- Canadian media, naturally. The payoff of this profoundly awesome
10 minutes of straight talk is when he explains, in response to the interviewer's question about "well, what is it good at then?":

"Delivering money to Lockheed"

Just like the purpose of the Bridgasaurus Boondogglus is not about actually solving any problems, but is instead is about one thing: delivering money to the companies in the Salem Chamber of the 1%.

So instead of the smartest, fastest, lowest cost solution to the advertised problems with our auto dependency, it's intentionally the high cost, overbuilt kludge, designed for an ever hanging rationale for an ever changing audience, with only one real unswerving goal: hundreds of millions poured into concrete to promote even more sprawl to follow.

Absolutely Nothing: A Veteran’s Savage Indictment of the Iraq War | Americans Against the Tea Party

http://aattp.org/absolutely-nothing-a-veterans-savage-indictment-of-the-iraq-war/

WORD: Sam Smith nails it

Pocket paradigm

The problem with urban planners is two fold.

First, they work for the wrong people, the government, rather than for the citizens. As local governments have become more corrupt and more beholden to the interests of a small number of developers and other businesses, urban planning has inevitably come to reflect these perverse priorities.

Second, urban planners believe in sweeping physical solutions to social problems. The idea, Richard Sennett has written, goes back to the 1860s design for Paris by Baron Haussmann. Haussmann, Sennett suggests, bequeathed us the notion that we could alter social patterns by changing the physical landscape. This approach was not about urban amenities such as park benches and gas lighting or technological improvements such as indoor plumbing but about what G. K. Chesterton called the huge modern heresy of "altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul." -- Sam Smith

After the harvest - learning to leave the planet gracefully [feedly]

After the harvest - learning to leave the planet gracefully
http://read.feedly.com/html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.resilience.org%2Fstories%2F2014-06-14%2Fafter-the-harvest-learning-to-leave-the-planet-gracefully&theme=white&size=medium
---- 

Short excerpt, whole thing well worth reading

Mainstream environmental groups — in fact, mainstream groups of any kind — avoid these questions, but that doesn't mean people aren't struggling with those realities and assessments, typically alone or in small groups. Koplin saw no evidence that any society was ready to engage in the necessary discussions or consider the necessary changes, least of all the United States, which was not an easy conclusion for him to reach because he loved so deeply. All of his friends experienced that love with him, and watched him love the living world with a reverence that led one of those friends to describe him as a "nature mystic."

That's why Koplin thought our task was to leave the planet gracefully, because he loved us and loved the world that is our home. He loved people and planet in a way that made him yearn for a graceful, peaceful ending, much as one wishes for a graceful and peaceful ending for a person coming to the end of an individual life.

But Koplin also knew that such an elegant ending was unlikely, which is why he also told his closest friends: "I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief." Again, he was not a scripture-quoting fellow, but again the words of Jeremiah echo: "My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me." (Jeremiah 8:18)

Just as his comment about leaving the planet wasn't flippant, neither was his description of his grief. Koplin was not a demonstrative person emotionally, and many who knew him superficially might even say he could be standoffish and aloof. But that was because he felt deeply and was aware of how easily those feelings could overwhelm him. So, he was careful in public.

In another of our early morning coffee sessions, Koplin told me that he remembered the moment as a young person when he realized that every human being's brain worked the same way, which meant that every human being alive on the planet had the capacity to experience exactly the same range of emotions as he did. It was at that moment that the abstract idea of equality became real to him — we really are all the same, at the deepest and most basic level — and that the suffering of people everywhere became real, and overwhelming, to him. Koplin said that daily life was manageable because he had found ways to wall himself off from that realization, for to try to live with that awareness always present would be to court suicide.

As difficult as these feelings were for him, Koplin knew that our only real basis for hope comes in the embrace of this grief. Not an abstract hope that somehow, magically, everything will turn out OK, but the hope that we can speak honestly with others and form the small groups and communities that can foster the radical analysis of hierarchies and illegitimate authority, along with the traditional values of frugality and mutual obligation. This is what I call being a "plain radical," and Koplin was the most plainly radical person I have ever known.