(Tacoma, WA) Seems an appropriate starting point for this week’s discussion of what we’re seeing on our Trip Round America to ponder where the country is going – longer term – and where we might find a slice of peace and quiet to relax in our twilight years.
Staying with friends in Gig Harbor (About $180 per night cheaper than a hotel) we’re reminded that the downturn in the economy has done marvels for low-end travel using groups like CouchSurfing, which matches up hosts with travelers. Travelers get a couch (or bed) and can contribute a few bucks, and people with empty bedrooms (or even a couch) can be visited by strange people from strange places. Quite an interesting option, one my son used to “do Europe” a couple of years back and it was really an adventure.
As I was up doing a “sight seeing” run at sun-up Sunday morning, I looked down on Puget Sound and remembered the one H U G E difference between the East Texas Outback and life in this region: Planning.
A couple of readers sent along notes this weekend that suggest in addition to all the notes on Peoplenomics this weekend, about how to go about finding the perfect “ever-aftering” place, I should look at what planning professionals have in mind.
One suggested the America2050 website, which according to their description page, is…and I quote:
“America 2050 is a national initiative to meet the infrastructure, economic development and environmental challenges of the nation as we prepare to add about 130 million additional Americans by the year 2050.”
OK, the planners are a planning, and nothing wrong with that.
But wait! Hmmm…might want to stop our discussion right there and think for a moment: Where are 130-million more people going to come from in the next 38-years? Did I miss something? I’m a boomer, and we’re not popping out new kids. And our kids – all of them – are not exactly going on personal population crusades. Something seems out of kilter.
Well, apparently I was right. I went looking for data: Where are these people going to come from?
Turns out that of that 130-million or so, a different group (no planning agenda) the folks at Pew Research have been looking at FuturePop, too. They mention a reality that deserves some serious consideration, even though it’s summertime, too damn early in the week, and you may not have power yet anyway, but here’s the deal anyway:
IF we take the Pew Research data (here ) and take the professional planner website (here) and look at the delta (130-117=13 mil) we find that real generic growth will only be in the vicinity of 13-million. That’s more like it.
IN fact, what emerges for the aware reader (or for the truly paranoid) is that we can see is that the Obama administration’s recent unveiling of a tolerance policy for illegal aliens is an artifact of a planning agenda which has, at its core, an “add more people here” component that accounts for 90% of the growth hype.
The ugly – and under-appreciated – factoid which has turned into the “Bur of the Week” under my saddle is that a coalition of interests: Planners, construction, marketers, and so forth, are deathly afraid of population stability. They are locked into a “grow or die” kind of mentality…and that’s why the Mexico border is such a critical item, like it or not.
Think about it: If we stop planning for more humans, then construction slows further. And when construction in general slows, corporate boards commit less to development, including new products and so on.
Once that happens, disposable incomes drop, savings fall, and the sh*t really hits the round rotating thingy and the deflationary depression we’ve been in since 2000 and which isn’t due to end until 2017 continues to get worse. It will anyway, of course, because that’s the nature of boom, bust, and unsound money, although that’s a larger discussion than this little nit.
So here’s why I’m starting the week slightly off-sweet: Planners don’t have gigs if there’s not more people. Not onesie-twosies – I mean whole populations coming in – several New York’s worth. Social security goes bust faster, contractors loose work, and income tax revenues fall, and on and on it all ripples, just like the flushing of the john when it swirls round and round.
But our job as thinking voters is to ask simple, logical questions. Here’s my nomination for the week: Is the tearing down of immigration barriers the right answer? Particularly if many of the people coming to America have an agenda that includes Reconquista and trying to repo parts of our country, plus have an agenda that runs smack in the face of the melting pot concept which got us this far and which has so far made the country great?
Imagine where we’d be if the Irish, or the Chinese, or any other groups which came here before in large numbers, had held to a kind of floating racial/nationalism and had demanded signage in Chinese or Gaelic. ESL for Italian immigrants?
I’m not opposed to increases in immigration if there is more open discussion about it. But what I am opposed to is immigration for purposes of financial exploitation. Might check with Blacks about how that one plays. On the other hand, I can wait for the folks in Canada to be forced by the self-appointed political correctness police into putting up road signs and government documents in Spanish and Chinese.
Let me know when China starts teaching ESL courses for American’s who sneak in to occupy those ghost cities.
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Growth is to business, what cocaine is to the cartel: Dangerous, addictive, and only highly profitable for those at the top. The rest? Sorry about that.
If America is going to come to her senses, it starts with a national consensus on what kind of immigration we want: 25% more people who haven’t bought in to the ground rules? Or should all immigration, including the visa-grabbers for the high tech industry to be held to the standard “No, you will get your workers from American workers, no importing if the unemployment rate here is over 4%. Period.”
The problem regular folks have is that immigration increases will drive demand, eventually move up real estate prices, and the whole rest of it. But we do have a chance to preserve a bit of America as it once was if we get honest about the role of immigration: Cocaine for government spendocrats and planners. Even good for people selling homes and so on. Remember, though, government spending that comes with this.
My thinking at the moment (subject to change) is that countries work a lot like groceries: “Keep sealed to preserve freshness. ”
We’ve got a public policy that flies in the face of good sense, but being wrapped up as necessary to lots of sectors, the odds of fighting it are about like saying no to the auto and bank bailouts. Won’t help, but at le6ast we’ll have made an effort to stem the flow.
Monday at the WuJo
I have to put on my best John Watson hat – who chronicled the adventures of Sherlock Holmes - this morning to report a case relayed to me a trauma doctor on Sunday, here in the Seattle area, which is certainly in the books for WuJo.
A number of years ago, when he was a trauma doc in training in Eastern Washington, the local ambulance/medic provider got a call that a woman had overdosed on a combination of several year’s worth of pills she’d accumulated, and had washed it down with some booze.
The medical types first on scene checked the woman out, and since the initial report of her condition was delayed by an hour, they weren’t in any particular hurry to bring the body to the local hospital for the coroner to look at. Just leisurely driving to the hospital.
Well, on the way, the medical person in the back, having heard about “thumping on person’s chest” decide “Why not? The woman is dead anyway…” and let’s off with a mighty thump and tah-dah: a faint response on the heart monitor.
So the team speeds up, code red, all the way to the hospital, where the doc in the case was working. He checks her out, and after trying to “tube” her, but has no luck, gets a tracheotomy going after an hour. But he was skeptical the whole time since the there was only an occasional indication of a heart electrical activity – normal when dead, and everyone present, including a state patrolman, agreed the eyes were fixed and open, body hard, blood pooling, only an occasional electrical pulse – every several minutes and that’s not out of “normal” – since dying hearts do that.
The doc gets the tracheotomy in, but no respiration or anything like that, so the whole medical team including several doctors, says “Gone…” and the woman is wheeled to a holding room to wait for the coroner to show up to comple6te official documents.
Key thing is that when they “called it” (agreeing among the ER/trauma team) that the woman was dead, we’re now about 2 1/2 hours into the patient’s “dead” experience.
Doctor goes home and about 3 /12 hours later gets a call from the hospital from a tech, who says “Doc! You gotta come back here, I think I heard something!”
So the doc goes back to hospital, checks out the woman, now almost 7-hours dead and finds [again] no signs of life, body stiffened, eyes open and fixed, no pulse. And then, just as the doc was going to turn to the tech and explain how rigor mortis will sometimes cause muscles to tighten, the woman involved suddenly sits up on the gurney and says (barely with the tracheotomy going) “I told you I wanted to die!” and falls back down again onto the gurney.
Needless to say, in comes the crash cart, woman is helicoptered to Spokane, and lives, but not after a stay on a psych ward for a month or so.
But this is impossible, you see, since in only a few minutes, the woman should have lost all mental function, and should never has “come back” after 4-5 minutes, maybe 7 minutes if she had drown in near frozen waters. But seven hours? No way…
A few days after the initial incident, one of the attending docs in Spokane, where the woman had been flown, called the trauma doc who told me the story. “What was on the toxicology panel?” he was asking.
After reading back the numbers, which were so far past what would support life, that the Spokane doc simply said “Liar!” and hung up on the trauma doc.
And the capper to all this? After hearing the woman had gone to a psych ward – he thought because ICU was full, or some reason like that – imagine his shock in a couple of months when the woman called him on the phone and said:
“Hi…remember me? I just wanted to say thank you. While I was dead, I had a conversation with the lord, and I won’t be doing that again…”
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The doctor involved is a serious fellow. He knows what “the books” say should have gone on here, but his claim to me over BBQ here in western Washington Sunday afternoon was sincere and not there was not the slightest twinge of “story-telling” detected…and I’m pretty good at catching such things.
A number of possibilities here, all of them way off the margins of convention, but I met the doc involved Sunday and for him, it’s a case of serious WuJo that today, years later, he still has no explanation for. All the “conventional explanations” don’t fit and because of a prior condition, which I won’t go into because of patient confidentiality laws, there is no chance of “swapped patient” or any explanation like that.
Was it some particular combination of the pharmaceuticals the woman had been collecting for years? Some kind of quirk of time/space, or providence? We didn’t get into the speculation, but just a discussion of the data, what the woman said when she “sat up” with the tracheotomy tube in, and then collapsed back down again…and what she later said…
I’ve collected enough wujo stories that this one stands out, having been told to me face-to-face by the attending trauma doc who still recalls the case with crystal clarity.
Dead, Redead, Redux
As long as we’re in this part of wujo, here’s another one to try on for size:
Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine died over the weekend. But wait! Several readers have written in telling me “He was already dead! This is another one of those time-slips you write about!”
Not that our readers are alone on their, either. The Dead/Re-Dead discussion is popping up elsewhere on the net. Example here.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Abe Vigoda is still alive…at least on today’s timeline…
More tomorrow morning here at the same old place when we’ll again take on that slippery thing called: Reality: Some assembly required.
Write when you break even…
George Ure (email comments to george@ure.net)
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This morning we’ll focus on how that trading system I developed a while back performed this week, which as it turns out was surprisingly well in one of the most difficult markets imaginable. But before we lay out the details, let’s start with a smattering of data points, realizing that there are many “balls in the air” this weekend, starting with what will happen next week in the EU mess…
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