Budget cuts don’t affect morality police…

Forgive me (asked for with as much sincerity as William Carlos Williams in “This is just to say.“)

I can’t resist.

Budget cuts hit Vancouver, Wash. parks, shuttering bathrooms and closing gates (discovered with a friend on Monday), but the morality police are, at least in theory, out in force. Pics from Marine Park.

-Christy

No potty for you...

Define lewd...

The social & economic reshaping to come, according to James Howard Kunstler

Great interview in the Oct. issue of The Sun Magazine with author James Howard Kunstler (his blog: Clusterfuck Nation). Kunstler believes the economic collapse didn’t have a mortgage crisis at its gelatinous core, but rather it was petroleum based. As in an unsustainable way of economic life. Oh, and stop trying to go back to that way of life, he says. An excerpt follows. Partial interview in The Sun here (for the full monty, you’ll have to spring $4.95 for copy — or crouch over it at your favorite book store.)

-Christy

The peak-oil problem means that we can no longer expect to run an economy based on never-ending growth, which means ultimately that we can’t service our debts at any level — personal, corporate, governmental. We’re comprehensively broke. …

The commercial-real-estate sector, which accessorizes the suburban-development pattern by providing strip malls and big-box stores near suburban neighborhoods, is now imploding, as well. Unfortunately in the last several decades we’ve gotten rid of our manufacturing economy and replaced it, not with a postindustrial economy or an information economy or any of these other bullshit economies we think we created, but with a suburban-sprawl-building economy. We built more suburban tract houses, more strip malls, more highways, and more chain stores. That system has now entered a state of terminal decline.

Tough times

My story about One Life, a nonprofit that harvests and plants crops to help feed Clark County residents who have turned to emergency food assistance boxes, is in today’s Columbian. (Beautiful vid by Troy Wayrynen, which accompanies it, too.)

Stats that came in too late to get into the story: Some 28,000 of  Clark County’s estimated 127,208 families sought emergency food assistance in fiscal year 2009, which ended in June, according to the Washington (state) Department of Commerce. Clark County saw a 12 percent increase in emergency food assistance over 2008 figures; statewide, demand is up 15 percent with some 1.45 million of Washington’s 6.5 million residents seeking food assistance in 2009. On average, a family sought help five times in the last year.

-Christy

End-of-life care, a must-read

Some numbers that astound, culled from “The Case For Killing Granny,” in the just-released Sept. 21 issue of Newsweek:

• 50 percent — the amount health care costs have risen within the last decade (a dear — healthy — friend tells me his self-insured premiums have charged ahead 67 percent this year alone. )
• $66.8 billion — the amount Medicare spends annually on critically-ill patients, which is about 1/3 of the cash Medicare outlays for patients each year.
• 30 percent — the amount that Americans are over-treated by their physicians each year. (In part as a defensive-medicine move, which can tack on 2 percent to an overall medical bill.)
• 17 percent of the Gross Domestic Product — what Americans spend on health-care. (At present expansion rates, that’s projected to become 1/5 of spending in a decade; Europeans spend about 10 percent of their GDP on health care.)
• 70 percent — The number of people who wish to die at home; half of Americans, however, end their lives in a hospital.