Job application article

With pink slips looming gives me a perfect opportunity to expand this concept that I came up with far too little dedication.

Submisssion:

The financial cuts and layoffs at the Sacramento Bee have been nothing new: two rounds of buyouts during 2008 led to a 20% decrease in the workforce and looking at the 5 year stock trend for The McClatchy Company, parent company of the Bee, resembles a double black diamond slope I rode in Breckenridge a couple of years back. Closing the year 2004 with a share value of about 70 dollars, you might want to forgo you Coinstar visit and partake in the 2-shares-for-a-dollar deal going on now at your local stock market. While some may voice their ignorant shock over such a predicament, this is extremely predictable given the means by which such industries receive their funding. The business of advertising is just as fascinating as its consumption. The print and television industries have become almost entirely reliant on advertising to fund their way of life: about 50% of magazine revenue, 80% of newspaper, and 100% of television come from advertising. Increasing costs for materials, labor, and resources has lead companies to a mild epiphany, whether it is just the monetary figures or they finally understand that advertising is a waste of capital. Cutting their advertising budgets is a very PR friendly way of pleasing the stockholders without contributing to unemployment. But now the lonely newspaper company, a fixture in local lore, is pale at the sight of their financial life support coming to a flat line. Reliance on a source of capital with very little proven tangible effects has placed them on their knees, with no bailout hymns to sing.

Sometimes I hate my mother

WHAT WILL W. DO AFTER LEAVING OFFICE?

Begin his 2010 Campaign to reverse the recent decision ridding Bush of his monument in San Francisco: The George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

http://presidentialmemorial.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/yes-on-r.pdf

Reprint: April 2007 ... Nothing Changed

(preface: you listen to enough lyric-less music and avoid social interaction for a period of time and the words just come out in one big burst of emotion)

The issue of sustainability is the ability to create an environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable region, based on increased use of local, renewable resource. But who gives a fuck? Who is willing to sacrifice in a way where change needs to be made in every aspect of life (from turning off lights when not in use to driving as little as possible to spare our breathing air from the massive amounts of carbon it's receiving)?

Fuck everyone else, I work hard for my personal belongings. I slave over 8 hours of harassment from rude, overpaid, pretentious customers to earn the right to drive my car, cool my living space, and drink my Florida orange juice. Fuck peak oil. Fuck global warming. Fuck environmental crises.

Turn the flood plains into housing communities because then I can buy my big house with my big lawn. And then pave over that farm down the 4 lane road because then I can have my Safeway with a Starbucks to get my food and coffee. And then they can build my Walmart so I can get everything for my new house for really low prices, always. And once that goes up, the Gap will come in next door so I can buy fashionable outfits every 3 months and be able to afford it. Everything will only be a ten minute drive away, How convenient!

Now even though gas prices are rising, we can tap the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and we can lessen our dependency on foreign oil. And I know some of my stuff has harmful waste attributed to it's production, but we can just dump somewhere far away and then it won't bother me. And I know they spray chemicals on my food while it grows, but these tomatoes are so red and juicy and I eat them and I'm just fine!

...........................................................................................................

But now they say were going to run out of oil, something called peak oil, where production is in a terminal decline? That Alaskan oil reserves ran out 7 years after being tapped? That the chemicals my 2 year-old daughter has been eating from those tomatoes have caused her to develop leukemia? That the toxic waste from those landfills way way far away have leeched into my drinking water so i only can have bottled water to drink? That Safeway and Starbucks and the Gap have completely taken over their respective industries so that I don't have a choice anymore in the products that I want and the prices I have to pay for them? That gas prices have tripled in ten years and now my suburb has turned into a ghetto for since I can't afford to drive anywhere, no one wants to live far away from work?

Well at least all of that won't happen in my generation....or has it already?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I needs to become we. What is the individual worth when he/she consistently contributes to the demise of others?

Mine needs to become ours. What good is MY "beautiful" living space when it is surrounded by abandonment and theft?

Their problem needs to become our problem.

We all have ideas, solutions to the problems that are going to become blatantly evident in the very near future, but we never discuss them, nor do we collaborate to create change. They just reside within us, taking up space, conjuring dust.

But maybe I'm wrong; just blowing smoke out of my ass, begging for attention in the MySpace realm of pointless blogging and absolute need for social contact of any form...

...but then again?

"the world has turned, and left me here."

Do you want to hear something real?

then turn off every electronic device that surrounds you...and listen.

We didn't start the fire....

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/28/wildfires/index.html

A headline news piece that I'm sure will be tattooed over television screens at seven o'clock eastern standard time this evening. But the crisis with this situation lies not with natural ignition (assuming is was not human caused, although the theory would still hold up) of an area which threatens the lives of many people, but why in the world people would reside in a place which naturally burns.

The town of Sierra Madre, California lies at the base of Mount Wilson, about 20 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. On the edge of the Angeles National forest, 1000 people working or living in the area have been displaced by this raging beast of nature. But the reality of the situation is another example of human beings placing themselves within harms way of natural cyclic occurrences. Like many other cities formed from the urban sprawl and the subsequent white flight of the residents of Los Angeles, people are now living in places where natural "disasters" are frequent.

Lets be very honest with ourselves: these are not disasters. If you live in the city of Sacramento, California, you must understand that you are in a flood plain of two different rivers. If you live in San Francisco, you must understand that you live on the fault line of two tectonic plates and they are constantly moving and friction is caused. We have settled in places where natural cycles of the earth are a threat to the way we currently live. Now there are very few places, if any, where one could be considered completely safe from natural threats to human life. But there are places where the likelihood of "disaster" is much greater than others, and places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Orleans are on the top of that list for this country.

We can already see a reaction to this type of environment if we look at the city of Venice in Italy. Venice was poorly planned and the city was built in a marshland that could not sustain the weight of human housing. Along with other problems such as odor and high costs of maintenance, people are now leaving the city for good and the possibility that the area will be completely abandoned is fairly probable.

This leads to the most prevalent and controversial discussion of similar decision that will need to be made about one of the cities within our border: the previously mentioned city of New Orleans. As many of us now know, New Orleans exists between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain, and is kept dry by failing levees which were unfortunately breached during the summer of 2005. But the reality is that the city is below the sea levels of these two bodies of water, and it is sinking.

As my friend Jon is laboring with blood, sweat and tears (read his account http://notafirefly.blogspot.com/) to try and aid in the rebuilding process, the question becomes whether or not is reasonable to rebuild an area that is going to be hit by "disaster" again. There is not a question of if, but rather one of when.

Is rebuilding New Orleans an example of restoring a historic city which hundreds of thousands call home or a reconstruction of dominos set to topple by the hands of the natural surroundings in which the city was built?

" We gotta be prepared in this day and age, we gotta
be prepared for whatever comes the fuck at us." ~Immortal Technique

Shouting in a crowded room

Food crisis, health crisis, environmental crisis, economic crisis, political crisis.

A short shuffle through any on-line or print news source will no doubt reveal one of these phrases within the multiples of diet plans and American Idol losers. This country has lost one of the pillars upon which it was founded crumble: stability. Job security is a joke, buying a home is delaying an inevitable foreclosure, and even those retirement funds, whether from the governmental taxes you've paid all of your life or the one that an ever-rising stock market promises, is unstable as a Cincinnati Bengal criminal record.


We no longer have the ability to rely on either the economic system that dominates American society or the government that is run by it. We can no longer trust the industries which advertise their control over society while overusing and polluting the environment which we require to live. We can no longer go haphazardly through the day with the illusory concept that our current behaviors are sustainable and atrocities and against humanity do not exist. We are ceasing to evolve as citizens and living longer as ignoramuses.


Actions cannot begin until consciousness is achieved. "I, the person" must become "We, the people". This is me shouting in a crowded room and there is a major fire that you can see but are not aware of.