Stephanie's pics

I have been spending a lot of time at Facebook lately, it's pretty social and fun. But here's a pic you might like.

Gordon Smith's latest radio ad makes me GAG

Why does Gordon Smith continue to run left of himself? He has absolutely NO REASON to have done this election after election. The last time he ran here he won like 70 to thirty percent.

So it seems to me that after you are pretty safely in office like Smith is, you would start to award the base that put you there time after time. I have voted for Smith three times now and what have I got for it? He continually goes on TV trashing Bush and doing a bunch of anti oil drilling and gay rights stuff when he DOESN'T NEED to.

Soeone needs to tell him and his campaign that his loyal supporters are getting seriously frustrated and are wondering why it is we have supported him for all of this NOTHING.

His latest ad talked about how he and Ron Wyden, the democratic senator here, have budied up to each other and that they virtually vote the same way. I GUARANTEE you that Wyden is NOT running similar ads. The reason? Because liberals will NEVER reward conservatives for acting liberal. They will ALWAYS vote for the more liberal guy anyway.

This is McCain's problem right now. All of these years of sticking it to conservatives are getting him NOTHING. All of those journalists that were do excited about him in the primary are turning around and stabbing him in the back, calling him "Bush OLD" and geriatric and all kinds of things.

Reaching across the aisle to a democrat is for the sole purpose of smacking republicans and conservatives need to learn that they need to SELL conservative ideology and not apologize for it. That works every time it's tried in this country, and why in the world Smith doesn't start running as a conservative now that he's in a position to do so is baffling and totally annoying. I am actually considering sitting his race out for the first time in my life. I have held my nose and voted for a lot of liberal republicans, but in Smith's case it is just gratuitous and inexcuseable.

Elena Uhing finally getting her 'visibility' in Forest Grove.

This is probably not the kind of visibility Elena Uhing was talking about when she said that adding subdivisions of teeny tiny houses on questionable lots during the heady days of the building boom would bring visibility to Forest Grove. But it is the kind of visibility that needs to happen. Residents of Forest Grove need to pay attention to what this woman has been trying to do to our town.

She has been trying to get in on the action of the euphoric builder boom to add to the money that the city has to spend. After all, they have designed the funding structure of the city as a giant pyramid scheme. The builders will come and get permission to build, give the city money, then the city spends it on CURRENT needs because they are in the hole, and then when the actual residents MOVE IN to those houses and they need utilities and other services and to educate their kids, they need to look around for more building to lure into town. So they have been getting desperate, and are approving projects like Gales Creek Terrace, which is a hundred or so comically small and tall (like Dr. Seuss) houses that NO ONE wants to live in. And now that the non-occupant investor interest is dried up, there is no one who wants them AT ALL.

I said all of this at a city council meeting, but people reacted to it like I was the crazy lady on the bus or something, becaue clearly they didn't want to hear anything that tarnished their greedly little plans. Two years ago Forest Grove city officials met with residents to discuss ammemdments to the city's comprehensive plan, which was among other goals written to protect areas around Gales' Creek from overdevelopment. This meeting was hilarious, because the tone of it was like
"We didn't really MEAN ALL THAT, did we, Forest Grove?"

Particularly, Elena Uhing, a City Councilor expressed the fact that they are decidedly pro-development, and that developers were welcome to come in while the getting was good, giving them permits to build anything they thought they could sell in postage-stamp sized lots. Doing so Uhing said would help Forest Grove become "more visible."

Uhing should have just said what she was thinking, she would have sounded more credible and less politician-y. Obviously officials here feel it is a good thing to grow the population of Forest Grove by turning it into a higher and higher proportion of commuters into Portland who in order to make it worth it to developers to build on steeply sloping land that is known to flood should live in teeny tiny houses with four foot square of back yard. But "more visible?" Do the RESIDENTS want to be more VISIBLE to ANYONE? I know that I don't. I moved to Forest Grove to have a little bit MORE back yard for the price, and less people packed in the radius around my house.

As for who would benefit by being more visible, it is clearly Uhing's own career, which likely lacks anything better to sell it. Because in a overwhelming 80 percent majority, this kind of housing was't the kind that the CURRENT residents of Forest Grove want--hence the meeting to tell us that we really don't want what we think we do. We really want to pack in tiny attached houses around Gales Creek with barely enough room in the street to turn around if you're a CAR much less a fire engine. But perhaps the residents could wait until JANUARY when the 100-yr flood plain is ALWAYS flooded, if need be.

I have also learned a lot about myself through this process. I thought it was interesting speaking my mind when I was quite upset to people I care nothing about like builders from Hillsboro. These guys said things to me that were a bit like the hinted suggestion that I was crazy and thought the sky was falling. Mayor Kidd was plain RUDE and interrupted me with a contemptuous grin saying that what I was talking about had NOTHING to do with ANYTHING.

Well, they beat around the bush but I think that these people would have LIKED to say stuff like calling me Chicken Little. They laughed at my neighbor for bringing in global warming (then again, so did I). But they tried couching it in diplomatic terms. Of course NO ONE likes to hear things from anyone else that they DON'T WANT to hear, that's a tautology. But other than it didn't make pro-growth folks in Forest Grove happy, I can say in my defense that the sky WAS falling, or was it the sky-high building prices? But it all ended up in the long run to be dead on accurate.

Two years ago, I was the only person not only in my social circles but in the town of Forest Grove that was talking about the fact that the real estate market looked a lot like the Holland Tulip Bulb fiasco. During the heady days when people talked about home prices at BBQ's like they talked about stocks ten years ago, it was just NOT COOL to point out that it probably wouldn't last for ever. Saying things like that got you a blank stare and perhaps even pity that you weren't in on the take.

The thing about contrarian investors, (contrarian in the words of the builders who I think would have liked to have come out and called me CRAZY, because I was contrarian or different from what anyone else was saying) is that they end up being right--not always, but at least at the time that it is hardest to be right, when no one else is saying what you're saying.

Contrarian investors are the ones that don't end up doing things like being the last one into a market that doesn't have anyone else to buy what is being sold. At a "soothe the ruffled feathers of the neighbors" meeting with these builders/investors, they ended up describing me better than anyone to this date. They nailed the key to both my strengths in life and my weaknesses, my triumphs and my frustrations. I think this guy would have LIKED to have called me crazy, but instead one of them said "you say things that people DON'T SAY."

Yep, you're right builder dude. I do. In many ways and at many different times and situations. In fact I think the fact that my mind is a free spirit so to speak is why I am able to do things like compose music. Novel trains of thought are interesting to me and I dive right in. I am not ALWAYS right of course, in fact I am wrong A LOT. But it is really remarkable that I am not wrong more often given the fact that one of my goals is to say things in that guys words "that people don't say." I would rather risk saying things that are wrong most of the time than NEVER say anything different or unique or that makes somoene think in a unique way. I seem to nail that goal with a surprising little damage in terms of saying things that are out and out crazy. And that is TOTALLY HARD.

I try to have the goal that if I say something during church that it contains something that hasn't been said before. That is really hard. In fact the only people that do that are the crazy people. But nearly every time I comment in Sunday School someone comes up to me and says wow that's a totally amazing way to look at that. One guy said he had a special page in his planner for stuff I said during Sunday School. When I gave my talk on morality during RS one woman was scribbling every word down and asked me if I could come over and teach a fireside to the youth, which the bishop thought was best to extend to the whole ward. Not that I'm thrilled with that.

But at the time two years ago I managed to say to quite a few people that it wouldn't last. That not only could it stop, it could reverse. People gave me those blank stares like they are going to politely listen and then flush their memories of what I said. The reason that I knew that was not because I am particularly smart or remarkable. Sometimes I think that I offer analysis or thoughts that others don't but in this case all I did was not let things that were happening influence me the way they did everyone else. I also just reflected a bit on history. History indicates that the only time that one should invest in real estate is when you have a LONG LONG LONG LONG time horizon, and that no one should EVER do it to make short term money. The average for someone to simply recover their COSTS in the real estate market is five to seven years. And it was obvious that the said subdivision would be filled with investors rather than owner-occupants.

Now in the post subprime world, it simply wouldn't be possible, and I doubt that the project will go forward. In fact I might have saved my neighborhood by ranting on and on about things that other people don't say. Because especially people that have 20 percent down on 200K don't want to live in a house with two feet of yard all around their property.

But homes during the euphoria weren't just being treated as investments, they were being treated like ATMs. People were being encouraged to refinance again and again with questionable subprime loans because it would never end. Never mind the fact that when people tell you things like that you should run and go the other way. Never mind the fact that "widows and orphans" were entering no actually flooding into the market.

One of the builders during this meeting quoted an article from the Oregonian where it mentioned immigrants and single women being the latest entrants into the housing market. They said that they thought this indicated the market was healthy. Actually, I read between those lines and saw the doom that it spoke.

Did they know what this latest new category of buyers was called? Widows and orphans. The latest to enter the market were the ones that were previously not buyers, and that means that there were obvious signs that the last people to buy into the market had alread done so. For the rest of us, it meant that if all the people that are going to buy houses have already done so, THERE WAS OBVIOUSLY NO ONE LEFT TO SELL TO. This signals a market top.

I guess it is true that I say things that "people don't say." Is this a sign of being nutty? Probably in a way. Because no one likes this in someone else. The overwhelming majority of the time when someone says something that people don't like they attribute either stupidity or craziness. I think most people know they can't say I'm stupid, even the FG city council, most of whom haven't had more than high school education.

But the main reason the council probably HATED me, then and now, was that I would be and am the evidence for the fact that there WAS someone who WARNED them. Elena Uhing can NOT now say that there was no way that she could have seen that her plan to cash in on crazy (YES CRAZY) builder euphoria for political purposes was misguided and a clear plan for ruin, because there was a crazy lady in the audience who spelled it out for her. And I didn't even sound crazy either. I made a very cogent argument with powerpoint that made a lot of sense. That doesn't help when you are telling things people don't want to hear. They just don't listen. The crazy lady in the audience, (who was the only one who was willing to talk about the fact that the party was going to come to an end) ruined things for her and her plans to spend Forest Grove's future to gain something for her own political visibility.


"Being more visible," what Elena Uhing said she wanted for Forest Grove, would have come at a TERRIBLE price if she had been able to glut herself at the trough
completely. Let's look at what she really wanted for Forest Grove in order for it to become more visible (read, get more moeny from building fees so she could have doled it out around town to making people think that she was a miracle-working fairy godmother that in reality is just confiscating one person's money and sprinkling it around where it will get votes). She would have turned Forest Grove into this:

[I don't have a link anymore, basically it calls Gilbert a new ghost town]

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/nov/04/news/admn-ariz4

Here's quotes from it:

Residents of Cooley Station North awoke Monday to 493 signs of more trouble for their half-empty subdivision.

Process servers had blanketed the Trend Homes community in east Gilbert with foreclosure notices, targeting 493 vacant lots owned by a Scottsdale "land bank," which has fallen behind on its loan payments.

The pending foreclosures are among many recent indications that communities on the fringes of suburban sprawl are likely to face more hardship before economic trends shift in their favor. Residents worry about the ghost-town effects of the half-built subdivision on their falling home values and what might happen if a developer were to come in with a new approach.

Cooley Station homeowner Krista Anderson said those empty lots, now scheduled for auction in late August, represent the future of her neighborhood, southeast of Higley and Warner roads.

"We’re living in a subdivision that’s half-full," Anderson said. "My main concern is what’s going to happen to the subdivision."

The land bank that holds the lots is Taro Properties, and they are having difficulties in other developments as well:

Like many other land banks that had contracted with home builders during the real-estate boom, Taro was left with hundreds of vacant parcels.



"They ended up saddled with all these empty lots that nobody wanted," said Mesa real-estate analyst Zach Bowers of Ion Data.



According to the foreclosure notice, also known as a notice of trustee sale, Taro Properties defaulted on a $31.2 million mortgage agreement with Bank of America to finance the land purchase.



Bowers said the land bank faces foreclosure on three separate land holdings, two in Gilbert and the other in Phoenix, totaling 1,251 parcels and $75.3 million in mortgage loans.

This does not bode well for communities like Cooley Station:

The foreclosure notices were the latest reminder that all is not well at Cooley Station, where owners say they are increasingly concerned that Trend Homes has abandoned the development.



Construction activity ceased suddenly early this year, and more than a half-dozen unfinished homes stand in various stages of completion, sun-faded and coated with dust. Weeds have reclaimed many of the graded dirt lots.


"They haven’t done anything in months," Cooley Station resident Adam Hingley said.

Porter said Trend Homes was unable to finish the homes because, when it entered bankruptcy proceedings, its construction lender, Bank of America, stopped funding the projects.

I predicted that a lot of these things would start happening in overbuilt areas. Heck, I am even quoted in the Oregonian and have been on TELEVISION saying it, because I was the only person talking about it that they could find for a while.

I would realy like to know what Elena Uhing could argue would be good about this. Leaving Forest Grove holding the bag when the housing market dried up would leave it with uncompleted subdivisons (that no one really wanted to live in anyway because they were so small as to practically not be habitable) that when they can't sell, along with the rest of the upside down mortgages that foreclosed, paper the neighborhoods with utility shut-off notices that warmly invive meth labs and "coyote drops," where the foreclosure notices are a vacancy notice to illegal immigrants who need a place to stay.

There are people in these news stories who are doing the honorable thing and trying to hold onto properties where they are "upside down" (they owe more than their house is worth) only to see their neighbors' weeds grow into their yards and have the INS raid the house accross the street and bag about thirty or fourty of them living in one house. Must be an erie experience to see studs and building tape on one side of you and the great grandmother of your neighbor on the other side tending a flock of chickens like in the old country.

Not only is Elena Uhing hoping to get as many builders' fees as possible to add to her own political visibility and hand it out to needy schools and government programs she is also a proponent of bringing the Max line out to Forest Grove.

She thinks that this will be good for residents == how?

Well, for one thing, it SOUNDS good, so most people are NOT going to be like the Crazy Lady in the back who actually expects her to defend her positions that sound and feel good.

If the Max Line comes to Forest Grove, is it REALLY going to encourage people to go west with their business? Absolutely NOT. Why would they come out to Grove to patronize the one or two businesses we have down town that haven't gone under because of the over-grown city government that is like a parasite now bigger than its host?

A Max Line out to Forest Grove is going to encourage two things, in addition to being a blight to the parts of town that the line runs through: 1. Forest Grove residents are going to go EAST with their business increasingly often, and people are going to find it easier to go further West with their RESIDENCE, making Forest Grove even more of a bedroom community that has no business infastructure to support people actually living and doing business here. People will spend eight or nine hours in Forest Grove to sleep here and do more and more of their business in town.

Also, it is going to become more and more easy for drugs and homelessness to come further West. Right now Forest Grove is virgin territory to a lot of the Meth Lab/prostitution/heroin/crack dealing etc. because such business tends to follow the Max lines. Yes it's true, the people who do drugs and prostitution are often not to be troubled with getting a bus transfer, meaning that the suburbs beyond the Max line are left alone.

Elena Uhing wants the builders' fees for these teeny tiny houses (the building of which is fueled by real estate speculation, not because people actually want to live in these houses) but Forest Grove residents OVERWHELMINGLY don't want the ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES of building like crazy.

The first subdivisions to go belly up have been these crazy speculation-driven projects where the characteristics like land size are more and more extreme as to not be popular housing choices. The majority of the owners have been investors and speculators and not owner-occupants. It is much easier for those types of owners who are not actually living in their homes to walk away and be foreclosed on than those who actually live in their homes (because they have to live somewhere). It will also fuel the proportion of renters in the community, which is bad for many things including crime and real estate values.

Now don't get me wrong, I think it is a TERRIBLE thing to do for homeowners to walk away from mortgages. In my opinion, if you sign the loan, it means that you intend to make the payments. These homowners and investors wouldn't have shared the profits if they had been on the winning side, so they shouldn't expect to share the downside. But it is certainly much easier, and therefore the bigger risk, for a bunch of builder mutual funds or REITS or whatever to decide to walk away than actual homeowners, making the projects like this, where most of the owners are second and third home owners, most likely to be dumped in this kind of a market.

Am I crazy? Well, I don't know. Crazy in these cases is really being uncouth and willing to be blunt, where I really don't see the reason not to in a city council meeting where you have ten minutes maybe less if the mayor thinks you're off topic. But also, it is very hard for crazy people to actually be RIGHT about stuff like this, and make cogent arguments that the majority of sane people understand they just didn't think of. I was definitely NOT crazy when I was ranting and raving about the consequences of the busted housing bubble for Forest Grove and the blindness of the Forest Grove City Council. I was probably a bit intense about it. But this was a really terrible thing that the city was about to do to my neighborhood. Meth labs and coyote drops a block away are really not something I feel an obligation to be calm about.

I think it was interesting that the only councilor that didn't want to vote for the "Crazy" problem-riddled Gales Creek Terrace, which I nicknamed "Floods, Fires and Crammin'" wasn't even willing to vote "NO." Rather than be a Maverick on the outskirts of opinion, he chose to be absent. Guttless wonder. All of the rest of them, plus Mayor Kidd, put his name on these tiny postage stamp-sized blights to the landscape, except for one who wasn't wanting to so distinguish himself. I really don't know, because if it had become so obvious like it has now that the bubble has burst and there ARE severe consequences in the housing sector, I think that he might have been present.

Who is it that is going to save us from terrible ideas like this when the actual stewards and guardians of our community are the ones who are busy counting the fees they get for selling our town, parcel by parcel up the river to disaster. The only only person willing or able to see the writing on the wall is a crazy lady who no one wants to associate with because apparently it isn't cool to be different even if you are the only one right. In this boom of building euphoria no one was willing to even be the voice of caution.

Socially and politically, being on the right side when it is often MUCH too fun to be wrong (a lot more friends can be made by telling people that their good times will never end and they only need to own a house for six months before they can retire off the profit than warning the town that what they are doing will encourage the Portland meth dealers and coyote droppers to move next door) gets about as many people in your camp as a deserted Phoenix-area ghost town subdivision.

I suppose I could console myself that eventually things came around to being obvious that I was right and Elena Uhing was wrong. I hope she finally gets her "visibility" for it. Because Forest Grove needs to do what it can to cancel any more projects like this whatever stage in development they are in. And we need to have a pretty good memory about who it was that wanted us to head toward the disaster that other communities are facing. Uhing should not be able to escape close association with plans that are coming to fruition in areas around the country and turning them into scary, crime-infested vacant ghost towns.

As for me, I am probably a bit like the subdivisions I warned against. A bit dusty, a few cobwebs here and there, and a bit lonely, because I don't do much with my time or attentions that gets me a lot of popularity. And I am a bit disorganized so my house gets its share of papering of notices to discontinue the garbage service, etc. Because my mind is absolutely CHOC full of different things. So it is true that I am really bad at doing things that make me look normal and makes my life populated with all kinds of supporters. That has a lot of bad consequences for me. It is lonely, because even the people that agree with me aren't willing to stand firm.

My theory on why McCain chose Palin

McCain couldn't afford to choose a man because of his age. Anyone that he stood next to would have made him look like it was their dad instead of the head of the ticket. Can you imagine him next to Romney in all the campaign stops? Choosing a woman was the only way to make himself look like top dog.

Communism = Genocide, revamped.

Wrote this up proper. This should get some interesting responses.

http://www.helium.com/knowledge/189833-relationship-between-leftist-politics-and-genocide

Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, and the Existential Crisis

There are probably a total of three people who will appreciate this, Slade and I being two of them, but here is my analysis of themes common to Ingmar and Allen, and in Bergman's case, Puh LEASE. There are really so many times in a person's life a person should really need to flog themselves because over the inability to continue belief in religion. YES BERGMAN LEFT HIS FAITH, BUT HE COULDN'T LEAVE IT ALONE. Sound familiar?

At least Allen's approach is a bit more light-hearted.

I don't know, I have always thought that the people who get realy excited about Niesche-type nihilism because it sounds OH SO INTELLECTUAL to criticize a large religious or philosophical movement always in the end have to answer the question: if real knowledge is deconstructing other knowledge, then doesn't that apply to YOUR drivel also?


http://www.helium.com/items/1205189-ingmar-bergman-the-seventh-seal-woody-allen-movies-cinema-crimes-and-misdemeanors

Liberalism = Genocide

I am actually not sure why this JUST occurred to me, but I find it very fascinating that there are a bunch of people that think leftist politics are good in terms of human rights, because the track record is horrifyingly opposite. Absolutely every time that communism or its daughters or sisters have been tried has led to the theory that the common good justifies just about any possible atrocity imaginable.

How is this relevant in terms of the current home for communists (I.E. environmentalists)? Anyone who is actually a non-thinking sheep enough to think that what is really going on here is that these people care about the PLANET. Because the second sentence out of their mouths is always related to some fantasy about how there might be a blessed UTOPIA if HUMAN BEINGS ARE REMOVED FROM THE PLANET. This manifested itself as zero population growth in the sixties, the last instantiation of the attempt at communist genocide, and it is no different now. There are people who are delighted to think that perhaps one day this planet will be free from the traces of human beings, their parts or passions, and THAT EQUALS GENOCIDE OF THE HUMAN RACE.

Why people seem to be STUPID enough to want to give power to central governments to commit the kinds of unspeakable atrocities in the history of communism or its relatives, I will never understand, but it seems to be a lesson that is impossible to teach except with human misery.