MaxRedline

There Are Way Too Many Planners In This State

The time has come to start kicking them to the curb, because the state just isn't big enough for the planners and the rest of us. Case in point:

A Marion County planner once attempted to halt Willamette Valley Vineyards’ event business and close its catered kitchen, Bernau said. 

Idiocy. Wine tourism employs a lot of people, and the guests pump big bucks into Oregon's economy. Wine and food not only go together, they belong together. For one thing, pairing different foods with different wines provides guests a basis for comparison and for discovery otherwise unavailable to them. It also enhances safety - driving around on winding country roads with a few tastes of wine, absent a food component, seems like a recipe for trouble.

Moreover, vistors to winery events often drop significant amounts of cash into other local businesses, contributing to the local economy. Planners are an impediment to economic recovery.

Five Years Of Change

Las Vegas provides an excellent nutshell of what happened to housing in America as a result of the machinations of Barney Frank and his pals at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

In 2000, the city was on a path of robust growth. But in 2003, the age of “the 80-20” dawned, a scheme that allowed buyers to sign on for 80 per cent mortgages and get the other 20 wherever they could — banks didn’t care where. It was effectively a 100 per cent mortgage with zero down.

That changed everything.

Suddenly it became a right, not a privilege, for anyone to buy a house, says Fahrny’s business partner Suzie Marquardt — “whether they could pay back the loan or not.”

By 2004, people in Vegas were standing in line for days to put their name on a list to make an offer on a new house.

“Investors were buying up new houses and builders didn’t care who bought them. They just couldn’t build them fast enough,” Fahrny recalls.

Bidding wars broke out, people were offering tens of thousands of dollars over list prices, and agents were bringing “flowers and candy” trying to get sellers to take their offers.

Locals were getting daily mass mail-outs from banks. Flyers coaxed customers to refinance, take money out of their homes and buy a car, go on vacation, buy another house.

When the bust came, starting in 2008 - a mere five years after Barney and his buddies had ignited the firestorm, panicked banks went into foreclosure overdrive, desperately trying to recoup some of their bad loans. Even the largest stooped to tactics such as faking titles to speed the foreclosure process along, and with understandable - if not necessarily good - reason: 

“They basically had Excel spreadsheets of mortgages, and then started trading among themselves and there was no real record of where each mortgage went. So now we’re in this predicament. Who really owns what? We don’t really know.”

American anger was directed toward the banks, and while not entirely unjustified, it was certainly misplaced; the banks were merely following orders, and writing loans that prior to 2003 they would have declined. The anger, by rights, should have been largely directed at Democrats, who peddled the idea that, rather than being the American Dream, home ownership was a fundamental right.

It's surprising that so many fail to recognize that about Democrats: they're forever peddling non-existent "rights" even as they systematically seek to remove our liberty.

 

Blacks Flee Blues

Although they've been voting for progressives, liberals, or whatever the Democrats are calling themselves these days, the data are inarguable: blacks in America are voting with their feet, these days, and they're leaving "blue states" in droves. Are they racist? How can they leave the Progressive environments that their betters have established for them?

When whites leave failing blue cities and states, the pundits call this racism: all those white Californians fleeing Nancy Pelosi’s utopia for less ambitious jurisdictions where ordinary people can do things like get jobs and buy homes are clearly pathetic trailer trash hicks too dumb, too selfish and above all too racist to understand the gloriously multicultural blue beauty of California today.

Forget "Assisted Living"

If you make it to such an age, there's only one word to bear in mind: prison. Well, make that two words: federal prison. If you're old and lack assets or family, check fraud or counterfeiting may be your ticket to a better quality of life in a federal minimum-security prison than you'd receive in many assisted-care homes. Plus, it's essentially free. You get meals, health and dental care, access to exercise facilities, tv, libraries, and more. Don't do anything that'd get you sent to a state prison, however - assault rates there are more than double those in federal pens.

Too Big To Fail

Peter Rogoff, FTA head, was in town the other day to throw fed taxpayer dollars into the pot for the Portland/Milwaukie loot rail line, at which time he stated that opposition in Clackamas County can't halt it.

Clackamas County opponents have qualified a measure for the September Special Election ballot requiring a public vote on the county's $25 million share. Two light rail opponents have also made it onto the November ballot for two commission seats.

Rogoff, however, believes many, if not most, Clackamas County residents want the line.

"Transit projects create jobs and provide needed transportation options, especially in these days of $4 a gallon gas," Rogoff said.

And were it a transit project, rather than a deveoper project, there would likely be no opposition. Nobody objects to more and better bus service, for example. They do object - and rightly so - to exorbitant waste of funds on the Portland Agenda. Studies clearly show that the Portland model, in which commuters are forced into downtown Portland, is fundamentally flawed.

As it happens, Broward County has one of the strongest transit systems among other mid-sized metro areas in the United States (population: 1 to 5 million).

So what's the key to Broward's success? That's the question at the heart of a report published online earlier this month in the journal Urban Studies. A Florida State research team led by urban planning scholar Gregory Thompson considered the history of Broward County transit and evaluated its performance on a number of metrics. What they found, in short, is further evidence in favor of multi-destination systems that get people from home to work rather than simply from home to downtown.

If that's what Portland, Metro, and Tri-Met adopted, they wouldn't have an uprising on their hands.

 

Hypocrisy Illustrated

Over in the little Michigan town of Walker, 65 high school seniors organized a mass bike-ride to school on the last day of their high school experience. And it was well-organized:

The senior students took part in the morning ride, which began at the Walker Fitness and Ice Center and ended at the high school. The students had police escorts and enjoyed donuts provided by Walker Mayor Rob VerHeulen, who rode in a police cruiser leading the group.

Parents lined the 3-mile route, taking pictures and cheering for their sons and daughters.

But upon arrival, the reception was beyond frosty: the Principal assembled them in the school auditorium, chewed them out, and suspended them all.

At a school board meeting that evening, a local DJ showed up with a brand new bicycle, donated by a local shop, which he presented to the board to give to the Principal, who was, oddly enough, absent from the festivities. With luck, one day she may learn how to safely ride.

Closer to home, the stink of hypocrisy emanating from Metro Oregon Zoo just reached overwhelming proportions. We mentioned previously that the place is grossly over-managed, by Oregon state standards. It's been a while since we looked over that way, but as far as we know, the trained professionals have yet to figure out how to get their new giraffe - which arrived about a month ago - to enter the barn. They may not know much about working with, and effectively managing, captive wild animals - but by golly, they're big on telling you all about saving the polar bears from "man-made global warming", the importance of recycling, and so much more. 

Forget the animals - it's all about image (and money).

Now the Oregonian's Joseph Rose (thankfully! Katy Muldoon seems incapble of writing anything more than regurgitated press releases and other fluff, which is why she's usually assigned there) writes that the Zoo's vaunted expert middle managers have concerns about repairing the Sunset Highway at a time when one of their elephants is "with calf". Oh, how very touching! Obviously, they Really Care™!

Repaving on highway 26 must be done with caution, if at all: 

When Oregon Zoo elephant curator Bob Lee heard of the Department of Transportation's plan to rev up the project in June, he raised a caution flag on Rose-Tu's behalf.

Elephants, Lee said, "are so tuned into the environment that they'll feel the vibrations in their feet and they have great hearing. We need to be careful."

The hypocrisy level is unbelievable, yet people buy into it.

Do you believe for one second that they'll halt the Zoo's summer concerts - held right on the elephants' doorstep - based upon some concern over loud drums and amplified bass and other vibrations? Of course not!

To paraphrase Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: They're Only In It For The Money.

Games

Barky's team has been deploying a more or less subliminal approach to messaging; pushing out a short ad here, another there. Despite the massive funding behind him, the approach to date has been concentrating on planting little mind bugs - kind of like in the old Star Trek series, wherein a scorpion-like critter crawls into somebody's ear (always one of those unfortunate guys in the red tunics) and takes him over.

Though they'll doubtless roll out the big guns later in the cycle, at the moment they're relying on a more or less scientific approach that's really taken off in the Lefty world of late: running small, targeted, and brief campaign ads and then attempting to assess the motivational impact (or lack thereof) among the target audiences. It's too bad they haven't developed actual mind control technology as yet, but there you have it; one must make do with what Won has.

Over on the Republican side, they're doing things more traditionally - they're testing messages in national focus groups. And as the New York Times notes, one of the great challenges is that, for some inexplicable reason, Barky remains well-liked by a substantial number of folks, even though they may be considering not voting for him this time around.

But traditional methods aren't as effective as they used to be:

Using actors is not a common tactic for political attack ads, which often rely on stern-sounding announcers to recite a series of damning facts or on testimonials from aggrieved citizens, like a recent series from the Obama campaign that questions Mr. Romney’s history as a private equity executive.

In this environment, such approaches tend to backfire with increasing frequency. So one thing facing Republicans here is that nobody likes to be told they were stupid: attacking Barky on his lack of ethics, for example, may be entirely accurate, but may stiffen the resolve of voters who fell for him last time. They took a different tack: Basketball.

They're Doing Something Right

It's not much, but at least the legislature got a toe in the door, cutting about 190 mostly mid-management jobs from the state trough. Unbelievably, the committee of budget writers who took this step consisted of two Democrats and a Republican. Bipartisanship occasionally works.

Naturally, Michael Jordan under whose term as head of Metro oversaw the sprouting of dozens of new mid-manager positions, is whining and crying. He loves his managers.

Michael Jordan, who serves as Gov. John Kitzhaber's chief operating officer and has oversight over the gamut of state agencies, said the plan follows the instructions laid down by the Legislature, but it undoubtedly will affect the level of state services.

"There aren't any of these cuts that go without any impact," Jordan said. "There are very few, if any, managers in state government that just manage. They carry a part of the general workload with them, too."

He may believe that, and if he does, he's a fool. If not, he's a liar. And say what you will about Jordan - he's not a dummy. Draw your own conclusions.

Being acquainted with a number of people who had to work under the exploding ranks of highly-compensated middle managers at Metro during the Jordan years, not one has reported a mid-manager actually working. They attend a lot of meetings, they hold a lot of meetings, they make up a lot of arbitrary rules - but they don't work.

The budget writers are on the right track.

As well, it appears that the folks in Portland City Hall have managed to pull off - however inadvertently - a major coup: traffic congestion dropped by 30% in 2011 when compared with 2010 levels. They'll doubtless claim that bicycles made all the difference, but that's actually a neglible component; the decrease was fueled by their tireless efforts to drive businesses away. The high price of gas, coupled with the lack of jobs, means that people are driving less because they have nowhere to go - and can't afford to drive without a job.

"We're experiencing a stop-and-go economy right now," Bak says. "The data indicate the country may be experiencing the jobless recovery economists warned of during the recession."

In some cases, the connection between job growth and increased congestion was clear. Cities that outpaced the national average of 1.5% growth in employment experienced some of the biggest increases in traffic congestion: Miami, 2.3% employment growth; Tampa, up 3%; and Houston, up 3.2%.

Cities that had big drops in congestion often were those that saw road construction slow considerably from 2010 to 2011 and those where gasoline prices were well above the national average at the peak in April 2011.

Indians Hit The Brakes On Obama's "Green" Schemes

The hypocrisy of the Left in pushing "green" energy has been extensively documented, both on this site and on countless others. Many discussions have been fielded regarding the Cuisinarts of the Air and their deadly effects on everything from endangered species of birds to pollinating bats, while others have centered upon the impacts of vast solar arrays upon habitat and ecological balance. None of which is of any importance in the Barky administration; they're even fighting green groups here in Oregon in an effort to build a Cuisinart farm on Steens Mountain so that all the power thus generated can be shipped off to California.

But now, they've encountered an obstacle that they can't dance around: they've done gone and ticked off the Indians.

The Feb. 27 letter from the chairman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes was pleading and tough. It asked President Obama to slow the federal government's "frantic pursuit" of massive solar energy projects in the Mojave Desert because of possible damage to Native American cultural resources.

The Obama administration didn't respond.

Well, you know what? These aren't any Elizabeth Warren Indians; these are the real deal. And for starters, they've put a halt to the $1 billion Genesis solar array under construction in the Mojave desert because it's tearing up sacred land. And how ticked off are they? Enough to bring all of Barky's fast-tracked subsidized "renewable" stuff to a screeching halt.

Now the tribes, joined by others in the desert, are not merely asking the Obama administration to go slow because of potential harm. They are demanding it. Backed by the legally powerful Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Indians say Genesis and the transmission line corridor are proof of damage to sacred lands. They are readying court challenges that could alter solar and wind energy projects across the desert.

This is one of the big problems that Barky and his boys have: they don't understand "renewable energy" and they don't care; all they're interested in doing is handing millions to cronies - the environment be damned, endangered species be damned...but now the damned Indians are stepping in, and there's not a damned thing he can do about it. If they actually understood the concepts, they wouldn't be tearing up our public lands to build gigantic farms far removed from the actual points of distribution.

If they did anything more than pay lip service to "green and sustainable", like perhaps some research, they'd realize a couple of things: (1) solar and wind will never, ever, under any circumstances, account for more than 3 to 5% of electrical energy sources. (2) Generating sites should be as close to distribution points as possible. This means that you mount your Cuisinarts and solar arrays on top of buildings in downtown Portland, The Dalles, Burns, or wherever. You don't stick them on Steens Mountain or in the Mojave. Barky, do you even have a clue as to how many people live in Harney County? No? Then STFU.

Anybody with half a brain would stop subsidizing the Cuisinart and solar developers, and look into in-line hydro generation. That, friends, is actually "green" - and proven technology. Unfortunately, you can't point to it like you can a wind or solar farm and get your picture taken of yourself wearing a hard-hat and pointing at something.

No, in-line just ain't sexy. So they don't care. Look: pretty much every town has a water system. In a place like Portland, it's mostly gravity-fed. So since water's going to be flowing through the pipes anyway, doesn't it make sense to install small turbines in those pipes to generate electricity? There's the problem: it makes too much sense.

Genocidal Eco-Fascism

As has been mentioned before, the "green" religion is all about control - and eventually, population reduction. All the bad people will die, and the green shall inherit the earth.

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

Unlike most greenies, he's honest about it. He believes that an entity such as the UN should undertake population reduction by means of nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons. It's necessary to Save The Planet™. Naturally, he's been unwilling to go first. That's for the little people to do; it's necessary for them to die. Much like Paul Ehrlich, who cautioned in the 1960's that the human "Population Bomb" was about to detonate, greenies to this day preach doom and gloom.

The latest entry comes from (of course) a "study" by World Wildlife Fund:

Humans will need two Earths to support our lifestyles by 2030 because we are draining the world’s resources so quickly, a new report has warned.

Produced by the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London, the Global Footprint Network and the European Space Agency, the 2012 Living Planet Report measures humans’ ecological footprint on the planet.

At the moment, the picture is bleak, according to Jim Leape, Director General of WWF International, with resources being drained 50 per cent faster than they can be replenished.

He said: “We’re all familiar with the stories of what we’re doing to Planet Earth, the ways in which we’re changing the climate, depleting the world’s fisheries, destroying the world’s forests. …

“The report tells us that we’re already using the earth’s resources 50 per cent faster than it can be replenished, and that, if we don’t change our ways, by 2030 we will need two planets to support us.”

It's interesting how they keep moving the goal-posts: in 1970, we were told that by the year 2000, our planet would be encased in glacial ice, clear to the equator. By the mid-1980's it was clear that that wasn't going to happen, so they switched to a new fear: global warming. Since the early 1990's, we've been inundated with "studies" and other propaganda warning of famine, flood, rising sea levels (as much as 20 feet by 2020), loss of polar ice-caps, polar bears drowned to extinction, and more.

Now, the ice-caps are still there. There are more polar bears than at any time in history. So it was time to change the narrative again: now, the bogeyman is "climate change".

But throughout all of these iterations, one thing has remained constant:

It's All Your Fault.

You must be stopped, for the good of all. That whole "Life, liberty, and the pusuit of happiness" thing? Forget about it - it's just a piece of paper scribbled on by a bunch of unenlightened slave-holders.

We'll run out of oil any second now, as the "Peak Oil" crowds have been telling us for the past half-century.

Now the brain-trust at WWF assures us that a mere eighteen years from now, we'll require two earths. Carrying capacity, and all you see. You don't? Well then you'll just have to trust them on it. You'll have to change your ways, or else! Or else what? Face it, greenies - your track record sucks, and a lot of folks have had about enough of your blathering.