Apocalypse...on the near horizon

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the world bled from the eyesockets today as the global economy continues to hemorrhage cash.

Um, this uncontrolled bloodletting is showing up throughout the economy, especially at the edges of the safety net

Costa Mesa formed a homeless task force last spring and came up with a "carrot and stick approach," said Muriel Ullman, the city's housing consultant. The city hopes to build more affordable housing using federal grant money and county resources and has hired a mental health worker to connect with the chronically homeless. It has also partnered with local churches to set up a storage facility where the homeless can keep their belongings to avoid having them confiscated, Ullman said.

But Costa Mesa has also passed a slate of new ordinances, including bans on parking a bike anywhere but on a city bike rack, smoking in the park and sleeping in the park after dark, she said. The city also spent $60,000 to tear down a gazebo that attracted large numbers of homeless people, asked churches to stop soup kitchens there and hired two rangers to patrol the park.

The mayor last week stoked anger by calling soup kitchens nuisances and asking the city to investigate some decades-old charities there. Critics say that Costa Mesa is "just trying to get rid of our homeless, but what we're trying to do is help those who want help and if somebody doesn't want help — and they have refused help on numerous occasions — we want the courts to deal with them," Ullman said.

Communities throughout the sun-belt have stepped up enforcement of vagrancy and other laws in efforts to keep the homeless at bay.

Because…if you’re gonna be forced to live ‘outside’ you’d best be doing it where it’s warm (ish)

Which is not to say that homelessness is primarily a southern phenomenon, it is not. There are plenty of homeless who call the frigid north home.

Hell, I was watching Alaska State Troopers on National Geographic (a subsidiary of NewsCorp…sadly) and they were, er, complaining about the homeless population.

So it’s NOT ‘isolated’ and it’s not, er, minimal or by any means ‘temporary’.

What is causing large numbers of citizens into the streets good citizen?

I know the answer…and so do you.

And if you’re not a brain-fried conservo-whacko then you know the growing homeless problem is a symptom of the Global Race to the bottom.

Which is driven by…(can you give me an Amen?) Global Capitalism!

You heard the Mittster, those people (certainly the homeless) think they’re ‘entitled’ to live indoors and eat regularly (fucking moochers!) They believe society owes them a job that pays them a wage they can live on! (How fucking totally ridiculous is that? How would people like Mitt be able to afford homes around the world and the staff to run them if he actually had to pay people LIVING WAGES?)

Now, if that isn’t bad enough…let’s take a moment to acquaint ourselves with the ‘future’ of space exploitation (oops) exploration

The company's unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky right on time, putting SpaceX on track to reach the space station Wednesday. The complex was soaring southwest of Tasmania when the Falcon took flight.

Officials declared the launch a success. In more good news, a piece of space junk was no longer threatening the station, and NASA could focus entirely on the delivery mission. NASA is counting on private business to restock the space station, now that the shuttles have retired to museums. The space agency has a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX for 12 resupply missions.

Especially exciting for NASA is the fact that the Dragon will return twice as much cargo as it took up, including a stockpile of astronauts' blood and urine samples. The samples — nearly 500 of them — have been stashed in freezers since Atlantis made the last shuttle flight in July 2011.

The Dragon will spend close to three weeks at the space station before being released and parachuting into the Pacific at the end of October. By then, the space station should be back up to a full crew of six.

one point six BILLION buys an awful lot of cookies, don't ya think?

And then the fucking freemarket Republicans have the fucking blazing BALLS to complain about 'the deficit'!

Um, geez louise, who foots the tab for this little captive audience?

One guess and it ain’t Santa Claus, it’s You and me!

Not only did the >One Percent abandon the shuttle program but they are going to abandon NASA itself in favor of what, 5 guys in the desert with a fucking laptop?

You already know why there isn’t a ‘moonbase’

It's because the fucking greedheads couldn’t figure out how to line their pockets from the hostile environments offered by ‘near space’!

Once we figure out how to visit other solar systems (quicker than a lifetime of space travel or spending the next century in suspended animation) all of those twinkling lights up there become ‘Real Estate’…with all that entails.

Which should freak you out a little considering the cluster fuck it’s become here on earth!

The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain – and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare.

Unlike the U.S. federal government, most states and cities have constitutions that prevent them from running budget deficits. This means that when they cut property taxes, they either must borrow from the wealthy, or cut back employment and public services.

For many years they borrowed, paying tax-exempt interest to wealthy bondholders. But carrying charges on these have mounted to a point where they now look risky as the economy sinks into debt deflation. Cities are defaulting from California to Alabama. They cannot reverse course and restore taxes on property owners without causing more mortgage defaults and abandonments. Something has to give – so cities are scaling back public spending, downsizing their school systems and police forces, and selling off their assets to pay bondholders.

Um, because of this {ahem} bullshit there won’t be a Real Estate Market in the future. In fact it was shit like this back when private ownership of property first became ‘lawful’ (it wasn’t always so kiddos…) that put a significant damper on Real Estate for centuries.

Worse, this whole scheme of using property taxes to fund municipal functions, it’s that sort of thing that blew up in their faces.

Which is to point out that NONE of this is ‘NEW’.

The shame of it all is that they keep on pulling it…and they keep getting away with it!

What cha gonna do good citizen?

Seriously…what ARE YOU gonna do?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner