Banking on a New Flint

Again I feel like I am floating on a puffy, white blanket of blissful isolation here in Salt Lake City after reading a recent New York Times piece about shrinking Flint, Michigan.flint

Despite the devastation that I know this process has been and will continue to wreak on the people of Flint and other cities like it, I can’t help but to hope for the future.

Maybe these desperate times will engage us Americans with the dynamic process of creating cities that are sustainable through thin times as well as thick.  I take a short look around at the carnage that was our economic system and it is evident to all the effects of planning only for success.  “My home will only continue to rise in value.”  “The markets will certainly trend ever upward.”  “Food and oil will always be cheep.”  “We must certainly continue to get stupider!”  Out of all of these, only the last one has been true.

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Last Redneck in the Woods

You’ve never really been outdoors until you’ve been blessed to hear the gentle and drunken midnight-laughter of a gaggle of rednecks in the woods.pabst

Now I realize that if you have spent much time in the wilderness then you have probably stumbled upon the remains of a redneck circle and might have been disgusted at what you saw.  Tell tale signs of a redneck circle may include such items (but not limited to) Pabst Blue Ribbon cans, spent shotgun shells, rifle casings, dried vomit and empty containers of assorted propellants.  But let’s not leap to judgment here.

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Venus Dreaming

venusprojectNow this is the stuff of my childhood dreams.  When my imagination was still unbounded and unfettered by the burdens of reality and the skepticism of age I dreamed of molding and forming society like play-dough.  The Venus Project, the brain child of Jacque Fresco, is doing just that.  This is the luxury of genius at its best.  Even at first glance I can recognize the science fiction novels I have read that have been influenced by this stuff.

But is all of this just modernist, Jean-Luc Picard type thinking that is already being supplanted by the post modern sense of relativist spirituality?

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