being your own fashion victim

Sorry for not being present much lately on FTA (especially on the weekends) but, well, something called and I answered.

When it becomes impossible to ignore the feeling that it’s time for some new rags, that’s my cue to start visiting the fabric stores or to find new ones. While updating some patterns, I redid the basic long-sleeved stretch top pattern and made it a little less, err, Amish: scoopier neckline, longer sleeves that are belled more, and a longer hem with a sort of scalloping effect, which is done by changing the differential feed on the serger.

What I do here is not home sewing per se; it’s more like home manufacture of clothing. Once the custom pattern is good to go, I can basically make many of whatever-it-is without needing to check the fit during construction or make last-minute changes. Here are the set of 8 tops made recently:

The one far to the left is unfortunately not showing correct color .. it’s a pale pink. All of them have basically the same fit, but with minor stylistic changes made during cutting. Stuff like this is perfect for mix ‘n’ match, which is how I usually dress. These go equally well with slacks, jeans, skirts, whatever.

Today would have been a nice quiet day EXCEPT I had run out of jeans zippers yesterday (not good when you were planning to stay in and sew) and decided to try a Joann’s Fabric store in the general area. Not only did they have the needed zippers, but they also had the right kind of elastic I wanted ~ which of course I promptly forgot to get, since the fabric selection was so distracting. Among many other interesting things, that store has duck canvas (a lightweight cousin of denim) in about 10 different colors .. one of which was a midrange pink. Whoop! Whoop! OMFG alert!

What followed can only be described as an extended episode of tunnel vision. I remember being at the cash register, then in the car, then back here, and all of a sudden it’s approximately dinnertime and the sun is now down and I’ve got a new one of these:

This is the adult-sized version of that little bag I made for a friend’s daughter. It’s essentially the same as the black one next to it, except the arrangement of the inner pockets is slightly different. Unfortunately it’s not the same as that pale pink denim I used before (only got half a yard of it left, cannot find it anywhere, so now it’s under lock and key) but it definitely qualifies as being a member of the pink family. It’s not exactly denim either (the weave is different) but most people won’t notice.

Hot damn. Next weekend I’ll be in Boston to go out with the BF and some of his friends (the occasion is a charity thing, the Greater Boston Brunch for Hunger) and I was thinking, what better to go with the black jeans I made yesterday, and a nice pink scoop-neck top, than a pink/black bag to match? This will be both casual enough (essential for the location) but also dressy enough to qualify as a non-accidental co-mingling of clothing and accessories.

Juki industrial sewing machine .. $800
gasoline burned going to the store and back .. $1
2 yards pink duck canvas .. $15
wearing unique stuff .. priceless

 

yet another “where did our country go?” post

(regular readers will please excuse this foray off the beaten path of what’s usually discussed here)

Someone on the HBB had left a link to a NYT article entitled “the safety net: living on nothing but food stamps” and I got to reading both the article and the several pages of reader comment following it.

A number of the comments were of the usual knee-jerk neo-conservative flavor, ie, impugning that people “live comfortably” on welfare or that they’ve got no encouragement to ever leave the generous beneficence of state/federal welfare programs. Other, similar comments along those lines stated that people are unemployed /because/ programs like this serve to help them, and that only by dismantling these programs will those people be induced to find jobs.

One commenter (#83, on page 4) nailed it rather precisely:

There but for the grace of God, go I.

And I’m a well-educated, professional, upper middle class, dual-income married childless white woman, with all of the privileges those modifiers can give me. I save 20% of my gross pay for retirement and emergencies. But if my partner or I were to lose our jobs, which is entirely possible and has been threatened in the past, we would eventually burn through our savings and be in the same position as these people profiled.”

/end quote

Another commenter (#95, also on page 4) came close to what I’d say if registered there:

It’s times like these that I am ashamed to be associated with humans.

When someone lounging at home – with their computer riding on a superfast ‘Net connection, a warm meal and (hopefully) an income – can whine about “freeloaders” and “incompetent leeches” it makes me wish I had the power to have them switch places with the millions of unfortunates who struggle to SURVIVE.

Perhaps all of the charter members of the Non-Empathy Party should shed their creature comforts and spend a night in a homeless shelter. Only then would these insensitive buffoons realize there’s a reality outside of their incredibly narrowly-defined realities.

Should all of the society matrons and other muckety-mucks distribute their funds to truly worthy causes instead of funding “conservancies” and “foundations?” How many jets can the Gordon Gekkos surf behind?

Stop carping about how the “little people” are raining on your parade and accept your taxes – as my family’s $200K+ income does – is used for some good in this world.

/end quote

Commenter #29, on page 2, answered some of the previous commenters who complained about all their tax money going to “freeloaders” and “bums”:

$200,000,000,000 + = Wall St bonuses in 2009 (Source NYT article)

$313,000,000,000 = The Federal Social Safety Net including food assistance, the refundable portion of the earned-income and child tax credits, which assist low- and moderate-income working families through the tax code; programs that provide cash payments to eligible individuals or households, including Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or disabled poor, unemployment insurance; various forms of in-kind assistance for low-income families and individuals, including school meals, low-income housing assistance, child-care assistance, assistance in meeting home energy bills; and various other programs such as those that aid abused and neglected children. (Source CBPP.org)

Don’t you just love the US? Wall St wrecks the economy and gets bonuses equal to 2/3rds the cost of providing a safety net for its victims ..

/end quote

Commenter #30 said the same in fewer words:

Oh no, another opportunity to the self-righteous to rant about kids getting milk and eggs while supporting billions of $$$ for foreign wars, bank bailouts, etc ..

/end quote

Our country was formerly known for its compassion and generosity. Let the present stand as a warning sign to what happens when we lose basic compassion for each other. Given that the basic societal unit of humanity is the community, one can only hope we get our priorities straight, and quickly.

 

speculation about faster collapse

In another thread we got to talking about fast collapse here in the UPL and what forms it might take and what its drivers and triggers might be.

This is in the context of a fast collapse being loosely defined as one that takes place so quickly and so systematically (ie, spread over large areas or the whole nation) that the PTB are essentially unable to put on enough band-aids in enough places to assuage all the hurt. A “medium collapse” (toss me a bone, please, we need a term for this family of scenarios) would be one that means the PTB must make triage choices about what to save and what to let go. A “slow collapse” would be be one that’s slow enough and/or localized enough (ie, restricted to a limited area or number of areas or a specific demographic, etc) that the PTB’s standard powers of “extend & pretend” and propaganda can be brought upon it to minimize the damage.

The forms these collapses take are the end results we see; the drivers are the catalysts already in place but waiting to be set in motion; and the triggers are the things that set them off. There may well be sequences of triggers, catalysts that feed on each other, and forms that beget new forms. Let me offer a few examples of single-stage forms:

A financial-system example of a fast-collapse trigger might be the accidental, artificial or engineered shutdown of the VISA, Mastercard and Amex networks, as well as the ATM networks too – or whatever runs these systems, I don’t know anything about how it works. The catalyst, already well established, is that most UPL’ers do not maintain cash piggybanks at home, don’t keep money in plain old savings accounts, and use their plastic (be it debit or credit) for nearly all their purchases. The form of the collapse would be the end result of hundreds of millions of us being unable to buy food, fuel our vehicles, get to work, etc.

A resource-crunch example of a slow collapse form is hunger here in the UPL. As noted elsewhere, the PTB have very thoughtfully sidestepped the whole negative-PR issue of soup kitchens and bread lines by issuing debit-card forms of what were formerly called Food Stamps. This is a good example of the use of the PTB’s powers to put a band-aid over a select demographic over a very wide area – e.g., the whole nation. The problem may be hidden from the sight of cameras, but it is very real, very bad, and only getting worse as our farcical form of BAU continues to be propped up. One in eight people in this country is in line at the virtual soup kitchen via the food stamps program, and the line is growing every month. In this example, the catalyst is our industrialized each-person-in-his/her-own-Matrix-slot society (which is failing for many reasons we’re already familiar with) and the trigger is individuals & families falling on hard times.

A climate example of a slow collapse form was what happened to New Orleans after the kiss of Katrina and then Rita. The PTB’s very successful propaganda, in this regard, was to paint the residents of the poor parts of NOLA (ie, the ones that were allowed to flood, the ones that haven’t had services restored, the ones where corporate RE predators are even now clearing so that they can build some casino or Disney there) as criminals, thugs, and never-do-wells, as evidenced by their bad grammar, bad hygiene, bad behavior and criminal undertakings once exported to other cities. That the criminals of NOLA were a distinct minority within the larger group of poor people (not representative of the behavior of the majority of displaced New Orleanians), is a distinction that the PTB successfully hid from public view. Naturally, the rich, pretty and tourist-y areas of New Orleans got an entirely different form of treatment, especially if the property owners happened to be white. Go check out “When the Levees Broke” if you get a chance.

OK, enough examples, back to fast collapses. As anyone with more than a couple working brain cells will quickly surmise, the trick here is to be aware of what hidden catalysts lurk under the skin off BAU normalcy here in the United Parking Lot of America, what other catalysts that may beget, and what triggers may set them off.

Likewise, anyone with intelligence will realize that to make our society less vulnerable to collapse, we might want to look systematically at these possible components o’ collapses and remove some or redesign them or make changes so that they’re rendered less harmful. Here is where you’ll see something very interesting about the UPL when compared (relatively, not absolutely, please note) to the way things are done in other nations: what our PTB does here is focus on band-aids and PR and marketing-droid speak .. and what the PTB of certain other nations do indicates that they’re either smarter, or more aware of things, or more committed to long-term stability than are the PTB of the UPL. (no surprises there .. what we called “we welcome the poor and hungry yearning to be free”, etc, other nations saw as an opportunity to export their criminals, their own yeast people and their never-do-wells)

A minor example of this UPL-vs-others difference might be the means for evacuating the nation’s largest city or cities. In Europe, for example, the public-transit systems are good enough to, say, empty out Paris in something like 12 hours if necessary. This is not to say that such an operation wouldn’t be accompanied by a great deal of pushing and shouting, and people making hard/fast choices about what to take and what to leave for the invaders (not naming names here!) .. and this to say that these systems are already so well-used by a much larger portion of the French population than is, say, Amtrak used by people here.

Another example is socialized healthcare which is otherwise the norm throughout the civilized portions of the industrialized world. I hardly need to explain the benefits of comprehensive preventative medicine, or the benefits of people not becoming destitute simply because they needed expensive medical care. Surely a nation that can afford as many aircraft carriers, fighter jets, military bases, bailouts-to-the-richest-people, etc, as ours does can afford to extend a public-option healthcare program to its entire citizenry. The PTB here simply don’t /want/ to. They prefer to put pressure on labor via immigration, with the end result that people work themselves too hard, ignore their health issues due to cost concerns, and are replaced by other “units” when they keel over at their jobs or become destitute or unable to work.

The potential fast-collapse catalysts here in the UPL appear to be many. As noted above, there is the trend toward cashlessness that will leave many people empty-handed when the system starts glitching – either accidentally or deliberately. One cannot help but think that it would be an excellent way for the PTB to clamp down hard and keep most people trapped at home. How many people keep 2+ weeks of food at home, or 4 weeks worth of spending money on hand, or tanked-up vehicles capable of doing a month or more of regular driving needs before needing fuel?

Arranged from fastest to slowest, here are what seem to be likely candidates for fast-collapse catalysts. No doubt there are many that others can fill in here .. I’m not claiming to be on top of this stuff by any stretch of the imagination.

* The credit card and ATM networks suffering outages – almost immediate effects.

* The liquid-motor-fuels distribution system suffering glitches – problems would start occurring within days.

* Vast and fast declines in honeybee populations, leading to crop yields dropping madly. (Oh, and thanks Monsanto et al for a most unwelcome demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences .. seriously, have any of you got even a smidgen of a hint of a glimmer of a clue? And do you still think the Europeans are “backward” for refusing to countenance your genetically-modified ecosystem poisons?) Not sure how much food is “in the pipe” in our systems here, or how equitably it isn’t distributed, or how the distribution would be prioritized during a true crunch. They say there is only 3~4 days worth of food in the delivery system at any time (thanks JIT proponents ~ not!).

* Our nation’s finances being so-poorly managed and with such short-term-only thinking as to plunge the country into the next greater depression, as is happening now. (Thanks to everyone who’s championed “financial innovation” and “enlightened self-interest” of course!)

You will note please that out of simple necessity I’m skipping the Black Swan events upon which many a collapse novel has been based ~ like Los Angeles and DC getting nuked (though I wouldn’t complain too much about the latter target, as long as the fallout harms no one else, our friends in Canada included and as long as only politicians are affected), Captain Tripps putting in an appearance, the arrival of hellishly-advanced aliens (pun intended) a la “Independence Day”, a 3-day plunge into the next ice age a la “Day After Tomorrow”, and so on. This is exactly where we must distinguish between things we have caused ourselves or things we can actually do something about, on the one hand, and on the other hand things we did not cause and things we cannot do anything about.

Thoughts please? The above list of fast-collapse catalysts is way too short. I’m sure the regular readers have got their own to contribute. Please note the scope of this discussion has got nothing to do with the likelihood of fast collapse happening or not, it’s moron about “how it could happen” if the triggers all go a certain way. We can discuss fast/medium/slow likelihoods some other time please.

The effects of the named catalysts should be obvious enough. In the case of the CC/ATM system crashes, we can expect grocery-store and gas-station looting within days if not hours. In the case of the collapse of our nation’s food-delivery systems, we can expect grocery-store looting in under a week, and certain starvation to follow within weeks of the event .. and the likelihood is of course rather high that not-so-civil unrest will be part of the picture.

If I may go out on a limb here .. this is really just speculation on a potential kind of early endgame maneuver for the ending of the stage of present forms of BAU, but it seems to me that if the PTB wanted to shut down the bulk of the yeast-people petri dishes while achieving a minimum of destruction of corporate and institutional property (again, I’m skipping the Black Swans) they would do it in fairly quick stages in a specific order, with the consumer motor fuels going first (gotta keep that yeasty anger trapped at home!), the food delivery systems next, the CC/ATM systems next, and lastly the power grids.

By the time the effect of the first two of those steps sets in, most people will have exhausted (pun intended) the fuel in their vehicles and whatever food supplies they have or can get .. and without food, people get very dopey & lethargic & unable to do much harm except to themselves perhaps. Keeping the lights/TV on and the cash flowing will fool enough people into thinking that the reinstatement of normalcy is just around the corner. Some will no doubt go out to buy large-screen televisions to console themselves and “feel good”.

Going out a little further on the same limb (if you’ll indulge my coincidence theories) it’s rather interesting that here in the UPL, things are almost designed and set up so that the abovementioned four catalysts (transportation, food, money, electricity) are in place and ready to be centrally manipulated .. especially the relocation of so much of the population living out of walking distance from the basic necessities of life. How interesting (and how coincidental) it is that other nations don’t do it that same way. Dmitri Orlov has got a wonderful book out, Reinventing Collapse, which touches on some of these structural differences between the old USSR and the present UPL. As badly as it was managed, the old USSR nonetheless had a great deal of not-centrally-managed buffering built into the system; as micromanaged for just-in-time profiteering as ours is, there is almost no buffering anywhere in the system. It’s most intriguing.

Thoughts please? (many sincere thanks to Patz & Doom for suggesting a thread on the topic of fast collapse)