Illegally Homeless

There are always discussions (arguments?) about what a post-apocalyptic world would look like.  Granted a lot would depend on what scenario you believe will bring our current world order to an end.

But one of the more popular scenarios since at least the 1990s is an economic collapse.  It is the scenarios used in the very popular recent books by Rawles.  It appears to have been popularized in militia-survivalist circles by Mel Tappan, but was also commented in more mainstream circles by the late Larry Burkett who was a heavy influence of Dave Ramsey.

Since my preference is to look to see if we have current or historical information on a subject, rather than speculative scenario spinning.  An obvious analogy to what would happen when people have lost everything is to look at people who have lost everything already:  mainly the homeless.

While that would seem to be an excellent source for comparison, the only two fictional settings that I am aware of using this information is Nova’s American Apocalypse series, of which Gardener Summer was by far the best, although the first book in the series probably covered the most information on the homeless. Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse also started with some interesting observations on how the homeless/vagabonds are treated.  Both series did not stay with the theme for very long.

One of the problems with the modern homeless is that while some of them are refugees from a former life of greater affluence, most of those people find alternative places to stay.  They are tucked away in friends or relatives basements, or possibly even a little trailer in the back yard.  But they are not the visible homeless.

Most of the visible homeless are of a different nature.

Tales of Tent City
Ben Ehrenreich, The Nation, 3 June 2009

The Sacramento Bee first reported on the newest Tent City in December. Oprah Winfrey sent a correspondent in February. After that, said Tent City resident Danny Valadez, "It went like a cyclone," buzzing with journalists and new arrivals. Most reporters focused exclusively on the few Tent City residents whose predicaments could be linked directly to the economic collapse. "They were all looking for Henry Fonda [in The Grapes of Wrath]," laughs Paul Boden, director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project.

Anyone who has spent time with the long-term homeless knows that they are not the benighted Henry Fonda.  Of course, most of us are not either, but we like to kid ourselves that that is more like we would be.

Well the Occupy people have come along and done us a favor.  Granted their politics may not be our politics, but they are drawn from the blue collar and middle class for the most part.  Some of the problems they see in their temporarily unsheltered situation, are similar to what people might experience in an economic collapse.

Throw Them Out With the Trash

Barbara Ehrenreich, Tomgram, 23 October 2011 (hat tip: NC)

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?...

Of course, political protesters do not face the challenges of urban camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime. Public restrooms are sparse in American cities -- "as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist," travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest.

What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets -- not just peeing, but sitting, lying down, and sleeping. While the laws vary from city to city, one of the harshest is in Sarasota, Florida, which passed an ordinance in 2005 that makes it illegal to “engage in digging or earth-breaking activities” -- that is, to build a latrine -- cook, make a fire, or be asleep and “when awakened state that he or she has no other place to live.”

I actually worked occasionally in Manhattan a number of years ago, and let me assure you the problems of finding a bathroom, if your location did not have one, were intense.

So while there are a number of interesting survival strategies that the homeless use (stuffing crumbled newspapers into loose garments to act as insulation), one of their biggest problems is that they have no legal standing.  If you think the police can be a little rude and self righteous now, just let one of them think you are a homeless person and see the difference.  Of course the behavior of a lot of homeless people is far less than perfect, but at least a portion of them are unfortunate individuals who didn’t have any friends or families to fall back on when they ran into tough times.

And if our economy keeps sliding downhill, and people continue to run out of unemployment benefits, a lot more people who don’t normally fit into the pattern we think of as the “permanently homeless” are going to find themselves there.

So while I have not looked closely at the site, I did see an interesting homeless survival guide website.  Maybe preppers should work more on their homelessness skills, than bug out bags.

Sabbatai Zevi and the Jewish Millenniam!

The Judaism that most people are familiar with today is the rabbinical Judaism that is the dominant form today. Of course the temple worship and sacrificial form of the died with the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem after the Jewish uprising in .

However, another form of Judaism was very common well into the early modern period, and still has its practitioners today. This is the Kabala. The Kabala is an amorphous grouping of beliefs and is about as easily contained within a short summary as Protestant Christianity. In general, the Kabala stresses the mystic/individual relationship with God. Many of its forms appear to be heavily influenced by Platonic philosophy with an ordering of different spheres of reality, with a person working toward a spiritual journey closer to the route source of the divine. Some forms intermixed with Gnosticism (Christian and otherwise) and had a strong belief in secret knowledge and rituals that brought salvation (or equivalent) to the elect.

 

The reason this is of issue here, is because Sabbatai Zevi, the messiah we have in question here, came from a Sephardic tradition, and as the great scholar Roseanne Barr (LOL) has noted the Sephardic tradition is associated with the Kabala.

 

In the Zohar, one of the primary text of the Kabala, 1648 was a noted as the year of the long-awaited Jewish messiah. As the position of the Zohar, as a text of authority was not entirely clear at the time, and Jews do not have a single canonical authority to universally decide these issues, its teachings would be given differing weights by the rabbinical Jewish groups.

In additions, some Christian authors in the mid-17^th century set 1666 as the year of the Jewish Redemption and their return to Israel.

We will now go to our story of Sabbatai Zevi. Note that this summary is not the views of a follower, but of a skeptic.

Manual of Jewish history and literature

David Cassel, 1913

Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676)

Towards the end of the seventeenth century the life of the Jews in the East, which was generally spent quietly and uneventfully amongst Talmudical and Kabalistic studies, experienced a stir and movement, the tide of which flowed on until near our own times.

 

Sabbatai Zevi of Smyrna [Coast of Turkey, then a Greek City within the Ottoman Empire] was born in 1626. He was extraordinarily gifted, both in mind and body, and from an early age devoted all his energies to the mystic study of the Kabala. Gradually he became more and more ascetic in his daily life, and as early as 1648 he announced himself as the Messiah to his friends and followers. He was excommunicated by the rabbinate of Smyrna (to which his teacher Joseph Iskaffa belonged), and was compelled to leave the city in 1651.

After wandering hither and thither for some time, he found support and followers in Cairo [Egypt- but also within the Ottoman Empire at that Time]. While there he heard of and sent for a certain girl named Sarah, of Jewish descent, who had escaped a convent where she was being educated, and was leading a wandering king of life. A pseudo-prophet, Nathan of Gaza then announced that he had had visions in which Sabbatai had been proclaimed as the Messiah, and the messianic fervor to the credulous people soon rose to such a height that in Smyrna (whither Sabbatai had returned in triumph) the community turned against his opponent, the rabbi Aaron Lapapa, and compelled him to leave the city.

The belief in the so-called Messiah spread rapidly to the congregations of Asia Minor, Turkey, and Italy; in several places fanatical visionaries appeared , who proclaimed the approaching messianic age, and the voices of individual sober-minded men, such as Jacob Sasportas of Amsterdam, were lost in the crowd. Everywhere preparations were made for the journey to Palestine, which was to be once more in possession of the Jews.

In 1666 Abbatai, who received almost divine honors from his disciples, betook himself to Constantinople [now Istanbul; then the capital of the Ottoman Empire], but there he was taken prisoner and conveyed to the castle of Abydos on the Dardanelles. In spite of his imprisonment, however, the number of his followers continued to increase; the report of his miracle-working powers spread through Europe, and impressed even Christians. Sabbatai himself led a life of princely splendor in his so-called captivity, until the Turkish government became alarmed at the possible results of this fanaticism.

Sabbatai was set for to Constantinople, where he was introduced into the Sultan’s presence, became converted to Moslemism, under the name of Mehemed Effendi, and was appointed doorkeeper (Kapidschi Basha). A portion of his disciples followed his example and became Mahommedans. But only a small number of his followers were thus undeceived, Sabbatai even continued to preach in different places, and to appear sometimes as a Jew and sometimes as a Mahommedan.

At last he was exiled to Albania, and died there in solitude in 1676. In spite of this pitiable ending of the supposed Messiah, the fantastic belief in him lasted for a century after his death. Apostles of the new faith, such as Abraham Michael Cardoso (1622-1706) and Nehemiah Chija Chajon (1650-1738) wandered about from place to place, preached about the new Messiah, and managed here and there to obtain credence even with otherwise sensible men.

 

Note that he announces himself as the Messiah in 1648, and he goes to Constantinople in 1666. Both these dates show an admirable awareness of earlier prophetic writings by others. However, unlike the earlier Jewish Messiahs noted by Josephus, he was not willing to suffer torture and death. To his followers, this would be a little like John the Baptist deciding to make sacrifices to Caesar at the Roman Temple.

 

However, even with his changing religions he remained a very powerful force. He is the founder of the Sabbateans movement that lasted for two-hundred years within Judaism.

 

The Orthodox movement, though not Sabbateans, started shortly after his death, and today still is more accepting of the Zohar, and Kabalistic teachings.

Sabbatai Zevi (from Wikipedia)

Battle of the bands…tax version

Elites at the top continue to battle over how to apportion the wealth.    This type of activity has been going on a long time, but as countries have less-and-less of a surplus, they must dig deeper to get the taxes needed for day-to-day expenses.  Recordable entertainment has some problames (pirating), but none-the-less tends to scale easily to a global audience.  Thus top entertainers reap some the largest advantages of the global mass-information economy; and therefore are prime targets to be plucked.

Of course in a country with popular elections it is important to dress up the battling language in suitably populist language.  This is particularly successful against populist leaning musical groups.

U2's Glastonbury gig targeted by tax protesters

Simon Bowers, The Guardian Co. UK, 5 June 2011. Hat Tip NC.

"Bono claims to care about the developing world, but U2 greedily indulges in the very kind of tax avoidance which is crippling the poor nations of this world," said a spokesman for Art Uncut, a group with strong links to UK Uncut.

Campaigners also… to draw attention the impact of tax avoidance on Ireland's parlous public finances. "We will be showing the very real impact of U2's tax avoidance on hospitals and schools in Ireland. Anyone watching will be very much aware that Bono needs to pay up."

The band sparked a wave of criticism in 2006 by shifting parts of its business affairs from Ireland to the Netherlands in response to a cap on generous tax breaks for artists in the republic.

Wenzhou wishes only its trains crashed

I try not to chase too much news of the moment – too many others stay on top of that information to make a contribution here useful.   And it's a good thing, because even when I try, the posts get lost in the suffle.  This is from about a week ago.   Since not much new has happened, I guess I can unburry this post and run with it.

Wenzhou, China made news recently with the crash of two high speed trains that highlighted safety concerns.  By census as having 3 million people, and describe (per article below) as having 9 million, Wenzhou in less spectacular terms is an old Treaty Port that is known for its industry on demand.  Small private firms will make products on demand for oversees based companies.  In an economy where much of industry is still controlled by government owned companies, these numerous small firms are disproportionately important to China’s economy. However, they are said to create 80% of the countries new jobs, and their export capabilities have been critical to China being able to follow the ‘Asian-Tiger” model to success.

The success of the area brought a lot of hot money in.   As most of these businesses were not able to get lending through the State owned banks, they used the informal banking system to generate the cash flow needed to keep operations moving.

Obviously, the slow economy of both Japan and the United States, and increased competition from other Asian countries wanting to follow the Asian-Tiger” model can lead to a cash flow crises.  When liquidity collapses – when the tide goes out – we get to see who is bathing without a suit on.

But there is another aspect to the problems of Wenzhou.

Debt panic in China’s Wenzhou may auger wider woes

Elaine Kurtenbach, AP Business, 18 October 2011 via WRAL.com

Wenzhou's factory bosses are caught in a dire credit crunch. Pyramids of high-interest private lending are collapsing as companies whose profits are dwindling due to rising costs and weakening demand default on their debts. Dozens of tycoons have skipped town. The government has intervened, but many worry the stopgap measures will not prevent the problems from getting worse.

Mercedes, Cadillac and Toyota dealerships line the roads — attesting to the personal wealth that has left the city's nighttime sidewalks chockablock with parked cars and its streets choking with smog.

Vast chunks of the city are walled off for construction of luxury apartment complexes such as Noble Peninsula and Platinum Garden, while modern amenities such as a subway line are lacking.

Much of the estimated 500 billion yuan ($79 billion) in private borrowing in Wenzhou went not to manufacturing, but instead to potentially higher return investments in property or commodities — or to still more lending by the borrowers themselves.

Meanwhile, the government is slashing taxes and promising faster processing for export tax rebates…

The emergency measures, and a morale boosting visit by Premier Wen Jiabao and other top economic leaders, appear to have eased the recent panic…

But behind Wenzhou's woes lie a wider problem in China: many with capital to invest are no longer looking to manufacturing, when real estate, speculating in commodities such as Pu Er tea and high interest lending can offer much better returns.

The article notes that as many as 40% of the small manufacturers will either have to cut back production or go out of business.  On the plus side temporarily, the Chinese government is obviously willing to take measures to alleviate the cash flow portion of the problem.

Cash flow is a very real problem.  But insolvency is not cash flow.  If after you have sold your last widget, you have the ability to pay off all your debts, hopefully at a profit, than you are solvent.  Granted adding loans to the picture makes it a little trickier.  You have to project into the shutdown into the future.  The key is that you have the ability to shut down without being in debt.  That is why equity (rather than reserves) is considered so important.  If you put $100 million dollars of your own money into a company to float $200 million dollars of product onto the market, you can sell at a loss, and most likely the only person losing money is you.  However, if you but none of your own money in and  borrow 100% of the $100 million to float $200 million dollars of product, any lose at all is going result in your not being able to pay some of your bills. 

You can keep the game going for a long time so long as you have enough cash flow going to keep paying your current bills.  If you sell at a lose, but expand your sales at a greater rate then you are losing the money, you can keep going forever – or until sales drop.

When the Chinese business ran into trouble keeping up with their loan payments, the obvious choice was to jump into the speculative real estate market to make up the difference.  You jump to the bigger bubble – much like most of the United States jumped from a dot.com-telecom bubble to a residential real estate bubble of its own back in the naughts.

The Chinese, unlike the United States, decided to try and put the brakes on and pop the bubble before it became even more insanely larger than it is.  The hope is that you keep too much of the economy from becoming involved in a portion of the economy that is going to collapse.  These bubbles are very hard to stop, and in the case of China, they waited fairly late in the day to make the attempt.

Wenzhou - the pretty waterfront view



And just to show that if you wait a little longer, you will be given more ammunition:

Shanghai outlaws property discounting


Zarathustra, MacroBusiness, 27 October 2011 (ht: NC).

Chinese property developers have been in trouble for the best part of a year. Recently the penny dropped and many began cutting prices. Then guess what? People who already owned properties got cross and, in Shanghai, went to smash the showroom and sales office of a developer offering 30% discounts on flats.

But China is, after all, run by a Communist Party with a love of intervention and distorting the market with weird price controls from time to time. And yesterday Mingpao reported that the Shanghai government has banned China Overseas Land (688.HK) from cutting its prices by 30%. The regulator reportedly said that such a discount is “obviously violating the regulation”, and now any projects which are offering more than 20% discount should be re-filed to the regulators before sales.

So there you have it, property developers have been squeezed as volume dry up, and just as they finally face the reality to cut prices, the government helps to dry up the volume once more by banning price cutting so that they can’t sell as many as they would have wished. Socialism at its best.

Highlighted Text Note: This is to of course distinguish the Chinese Communists from the American Running Dog Capitalists who love of intervention and distorting the market with weird price controls from time to time. link

Book Review Round Up II: A Review

A review of the reviews to date: updated with the last eleven reviews added to the first Review Round up in August. The next section is scattered throughout, and the last two are posted as partial reviews very early on. Linked are the novel (usually at amazon), its author (sometimes), and a link to my review. The first reading is realism (Grittiness), the second is readability.

I did not have enough room to go back over the cozy question again. The post originated with an Excel file, so I may go over a deeper categorization later.

Realism had to exclude the cause of disaster, because some books that are very real and very gritty had fairly unlikely or nearly impossible disasters. Only when the very nature of the disaster caused unique problems within the book did I deduct for that. Speculative science fiction tends to be more interested in ideas than realism, so they are often relatively unrealistic. Beyond that, many of these books had a sense of whimsy or adventure, that may make for a good story, but tend make the reality of the situation fuzzy. For instance, Nova's Gardener Summer combined very well thought out economic collapse with an odd cowboy western mystique. If the novel has many little interesting vignettes as the hero wanders through a strangely altered landscape, you may have something of an interesting hero quest, but you don't have realty.

 

Note that the readability issue should not be taken to much to heart. Some types of books are easier to bring an excitement and energy level to than others. Flue pandemics make for a pretty fast paced immediacy. Slow collapse novels, or novels that go deeply into character preparations tend to be a little more difficult to keep moving. The "L" for literary in the type is to let you know that the book is well written, but not necessarily an easy read. There will not be a ton of action, and it likely will be very brooding.  Many of these novels are intended for a different audience than your typical action-based novel.

I did the numbering quickly to avoid too much circular cross-comparison. It is very possible I may have made a mistake somewhere. There have been no complaints to date, which I suspect implies more mystification than concurrence. 

Review Roundup			Type	Disaster	Real	Read
Survivors	John Wesley Rawles	ReviewSv	AP	EC	4	4
REAMDE	Neal Stephenson	ReviewRMDE	NoA	-	5	5
Salvation City	Sigrid Nunez	ReviewSC	AP, L	D	3	4
Salvage	Robert Edric	ReviewSl	AP, L	GW,EC	6	3
Apocalypse Law	John Grit	ReviewAL	AP	D	7	7
Oil Dusk	John Cape, Laura Buckner	ReviewOD	AP	PO, EC	6	6
Afterlight	Alex Scarrow	ReviewAL	PA	PO, NP	7	7
End of The Age	Ervin Sim	ReviewEOA	PO, SF	G	3	3
Yellowcake Spring	Guy Salvidge	ReviewYC	AP	GW, EC	6	6
I Sniper	Stephen Hunter	ReviewIS	NoA	-	6	7
Soft Apocalypse	Will McIntosh	ReviewSA	AP, SF	B, PO, EC, GW	5	6
Prelude	Kurt Cobb	ReviewP	NoA	-	5	5
The World Ends at Hickory Hollow	Ardath Mayhar	ReviewWEHH	AP	N	5	5
Ship Breaker	Paolo Bacigalupi	ReviewSB	C, SF, YA	PO, GW, B	4	6
Red Queen	Honey Brown	ReviewRQ	AP	D	7	7
Things We Didn't See Coming	Steven Amsterdam	ReviewTWDSC	AP, L	EC, D	6	7
The Windup Girl	Paolo Bacigalupi	ReviewWUG	C, SF	PO, GW, B	4	7
Kingdom of Four Rivers	Guy Salvidges'	ReviewKFR	C, SF	GW, PO, NP	4	6
Far North	Marcel Theroux	ReviewFN	PA	GW	5	6
The Road	Cormac McCarthy	ReviewTR	PA	PD	6	6
Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office	Nathan Poell	ReviewPADLO	AP, PA	W	5	5
The Profession	Stephen Pressfield	ReviewTP	NoA	-	7	6
Operation Serf	Chris Sullins	ReviewOS	AP, M	EC, NP	7	4
Into The Forest	Jean Hegland	ReviewITF	AP, L	EC	7	5
Witch of Hebron	James Howard Kunstler	ReviewTWOH	AP	PO, GW	5	4
Random Acts of Senseless Violence	Jack Womack	ReviewRQ	AP, L	EC	5	4
Crossing the Blue	Holly Jean Buck	ReviewCTB	AP	GW	5	5
The Fall of Eden	Richard Michaels	ReviewFOE	AP	N	7	2
Last Light	Alex Scarrow	ReviewLL	AP	PO, NP	7	7
The Unit	Terry DeHart	ReviewTU	AP	N,E	6	4
The Things That Keep Us Here	Carla Buckley	ReviewTTTKUH	AP	D	7	6
The Burning Hills	Louis L’Amour	ReviewRQ	NoA	-	6	5
Emergency	Neil Strauss	ReviewE	NoA	-	-	6
Patriots	John Wesley Rawles	ReviewP	AP, M	EC	7	4
This World We Live In	Susan Pfeffer	ReviewTWWLI	AP, YA	M, V	6	5
The Dead and Gone	Susan Pfeffer	ReviewTDAG	AP, YA	M, V	7	6
Life As We Knew It	Susan Pfeffer	ReviewLAWKI	AP, YA	M, V	7	6
Long Voyage Back	Luke Rhinehart	ReviewTLVB	AP	N	7	5
Three Mokes East East	Philip Revene	ReviewTME	C	EC	5	5
Greybeard	Brian Aldiss	ReviewGB	PA, SF	W	4	3
No Blade of Grass	John Christopher	ReviewNBOG	AP	PD	5	5
Reviewed Earlier
A Distant Crossing	Thomas Park	ReviewADC	AP	EC, NP	5	4
New Coastal Times	Donna Callea	ReviewNCT	AP	GW	5	5
Raggedy Edge	Michael S. Turnlund	ReviewRE	AP	EC, NP	5	3
Gardener Summer	Nova	ReviewGS	AP	EC	6	5
Good News	Edward Abbey	ReviewGN	PA	GW	3	4
The Jakarta Pandemic.	Steven Konkoly	ReviewTJP	AP	D	7	6
The Noah Countdown	B.T. (Brooks) Post	ReviewTNCD	AP	EC, GW, NP	6	5
But Not for Long	Michelle Widgen	ReviewBNFL	AP, L	PO, GW	7	7
Partial Reviews
Memoirs of a Survivor	Doris Lessing	ReviewTMOAS	AP, L	EC	5	4
One Second After	William R. Forstchen.	ReviewOSA	AP	E	6	4

Type:	AP = Apocalypse in Progress
	PO = Post Apocalypse
	C = Collapsed- The agency of collapse is mostly past
	M= Militia Element
	SF= Elements advanced enough to be unfamiliar to us today
	L= Literary (think low on action, lots of talking)
	YA= Young Adult NoA= Not Apocalyptic
Disaster	N= Nuclear
	E= EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse)
	D= Pandemic Disease
	PD= Plant Disease
	B= Biotechnology
	PO= Peak Oil
	NP= Nefarious plotters trying to bring the world down
	EC= Economic Collapse (other than peak oil)
	NN= Nanotechnology
	V= Volcano
	M= Meteor or Comet strike
	GW= Global Warming
	W= Weird Science G= God or supernatural forces
Real	Realistic in tone - is it trying to portray an expected future.
	7 = yes this will happen 4= barely possible1 = strong elements of fantasy
	In most cases, where the effect is not ongoing, I am not factoring in unlikely disaster types.
Read	Readability = is it a fun or at least easy book to read.
	7 = classic4= somewhat enjoyable 1= challenging; literary works often tend toward the challenging.
	Note that you will enjoy a "4" if it is your type of book, but probably hate it if not.