Up close look at the car and the tree, as a tow truck driver tried to figure out how to get to the car, without having to move the tree. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Last winter, December 2021, I was sleeping in this weird end of a parking lot in the Universal City area. For all of you not from L.A., that's right over the hill from Hollywood, next to the 101 freeway. I was by this little retaining wall, and only a few cars would come in each morning, although people would sometimes park at night to sleep or smoke dope. So I was out of sight of people driving by on the main road, Ventura Boulvard. Tweekers and crackheads walked by all night long, but that happens pretty much everywhere these days. For the most part, they left me alone.
It was December, so it was chilly, probably around 40 degrees (F) out, and I had my sleeping bag plus a blanket wrapped tight around me. That kept the wind out, mostly. When it was chilly, I didn't want to get out of my little "blanket burrito" for anything, unless I had to take a leak. I was fast asleep when I woke up to this incredibly loud crashing sound, like about ten 2X4's being cracked at once. I poked my head out of the blankets, and didn't see anything in the dark.
There were no big trees around me, like when I camped in the woods in North Carolina. I'd heard big branches crack then. So I couldn't figure out what it was. The freeway was close by, so there was always some background noise, as well. I just tucked myself back into my blankets, and fell back asleep. I didn't hear anything else unusual.
In the foreground you can see the trunk of the tree, broken off at ground level, and the top of the tree in front of the car. To the left, you can see two cars parked against the wall. I was sleeping right behind where that white car is sitting. Yeah... a bit close for comfort. But it's L.A., shit happens.
There were no screams, no sirens, no sounds of people nearby. So I crashed out for the rest of the night, and I woke up in the early light of the next day. I got up, leaned against the wall behind me, and got my bearings. As I sat there, a tow truck rolled into the parking lot, turned around, and backed up to a tree. Half awake, before my first Diet Coke, I suddenly thought, "Wait, that tree is not supposed to be in the parking lot." All I saw was this big green part of the tree, I couldn't even see the car.
Side view, close up.
The tree that got sheared off was maybe 11 to 12 inches in diameter, and about 20 feet high. The car must have been doing 70 or 80 miles an hour. It veered off course, bounced over a traffic island, broke off a street sign, bounced up a curb, and then sheared off a good size tree at the base. If the tree hadn't been there, it would have gone about 50 more feet, and smashed into the side of an SUV parked there. By the time the SUV driver picked up his vehicle, there was almost no sign anything had happened. He had no idea how close his car came to being demolished.
To snap this shot, I was standing on the traffic island the car bounced over. You can see the double pole street sign it clipped off, the 2nd and 3rd curbs it bounced up, and the bushes it went over, before getting to the tree it smashed into and broke off.
I don't know the details, but I have a crazy feeling the driver might have been drunk. Smell that, that's sarcasm. Whomever the drunk fuck was that crashed, they managed to do it without anyone calling the police. Without a doubt some police rolled by, but the car was in a place where people could drive by and not really notice what happened. Apparently the driver stumbled off, made it home somehow, and just called a tow truck to go pick the car up the next morning. They didn't get a DUI out of this, as far as I can tell, and didn't get seriously injured. I'm going to keep telling you in this blog, a lot of crazy shit happens on the streets. This was one of those, "Holy shit! How did that happen?" occurrences.
My basic thought on the 2020's is that pretty much everything is going to fall apart, and it's up to us to rebuild society fromthe streets up. So go create something cool.
This blog just hit its first 500 page views in six weeks. Thanks for checking it out. My last main blog, Steve Emig: The White Bear, racked up over 136,000 page views in about five years, so I have a long way to go to break my personal record. We'll find out where this blog goes together, since it kind of happens post by post. Thanks for checking it out. I'll try ot keep putting out something interesting on a regular basis.
I'm doing a workshop at a library today, to teach kids some techniques for drawing with Sharpies, and markers in general. Most of my work I do in my #sharpiescribblestyle, but that takes years to learn. So I'm going to guide the kids through drawing a cool doodle art picture today. Then I'll show them how I do my scribble style, if they want to try it at home. Once you learn to draw one thing that looks pretty cool as a kid, you realize, "Hey, I can draw!" Then you're more likely to keep drawing, and learn the basics, and maybe even get really good, over time.
About five years after I invented my Sharpie scribble style technique of shading with Sharpie markers, in 2005, I finally got around to looking up "Sharpie art" on the internet. It just never occurred to me to look it up before that. The coolest stuff at the time was the black & white work of Jessie Armand. I really liked his style, so I began playing around with "doodle art," as it's generally called. This one above, "Rise Above," which is both a Black Flag song, and a continuing necessity in my life, I drew in 2018, I think.
"The wave of change is about to break." I drew this on April 27, 2020. Can you remember back to the beginning of Covid, when we were told, "This will all be over in six weeks?" From my own reading and futurist/big picture thinking, I knew a big wave of change was headed our way. I didn't realize it was going to be tsunami, though.
Being homeless when Covid-19 hit American shores, everybody went into lockdown, and we were left on the streets, without many of the resources we depended on. It was tough, even as someone that had been in and out of homelessness for years. One continuous battle for homeless people these days is charging cell phones (and tablets of laptops for some). We need phones to apply for any government services, and lots of other reasons, but the only legal place to charge them was libraries and some fast food places. When Covid hit, those were closed. So homeless people learned where every open, outdoor outlet was, in their whole area. I drew most of these drawings below while sitting on a walk bridge that would normally take tourists from the Universal City train/bus station to the tram up the hill to Universal. There's a plug by each of the three elevators, for cleaning and maintenance people to use. With no tourists, us bums were allowed to use these to charge. It kept us pretty much out of sight, 20 feet above anyone driving below on Lankershim Boulevard.
"Corona virus" This one is from March 2020, I think.
To charge my laptop, which is how I do my blogging and social media work, I would sit in the hot sun for an hour and a half. Then I would take a bus or train to a spot where I could sit in a parking lot or on a sidewalk, and pick up some public wifi signal, in the shade when possible. That was my whole existence through two years of Covid in 2020 and 2021. Scounge up money to eat, go sit at a charge spot, then go to a wifi spot, blog, do my social media, sell some art when possible, And then do it all over again. Eat, charge, blog, repeat. For two years. These doodle art drawings were a by product of that time.
"We are all interconnected" 2020
Since I was spending so much time just sitting and charging, I started doing these doodle art drawings a lot of the time, while I was waiting fo rthe laptop to charge. These usually take me 4 to 6 hours each, and I only needed a sketch pad and one regular black Sharpie. My scribble style drawings take 40-45 hours each, and I need a whole bunch of stuff.
I first did some of these in 2011 or 2012. Then I did a bunch while homeless in Richmond, Virginia. There I started adding a few words to them, usually about something happening at the time. My doodle drawings became a sort of art journal. Since surviving the Covid-19 pandemic while living homeless was what was happening in 2020, that's what most of these refer too. I lost the notebooks with my Richmond drawings, when all my stuff was stolen by police (including all my paperwork, sleeping bag, and clothes I wasn't wearing). But I still have this one beat up notebook of my doodle drawings from 2020-2021.
No words on this one, just playing with different design ideas, 2020.
"The country is coming out of lockdown!" I drew this one on May 23, 2020. Yeah, a little early on that. It's hard to even remember when we thought everything would be back to normal by June... of 2020.
Maybe I should have dressed as a minion for this one. Back in 2007 or so, funny signs worked a lot better than they do now. After the "Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness" in 2002-2014 or so, there are several times more visible homeless people, and people are sick of seeing us everywhere. I get that. Some people still give to panhandlers, just a smaller percentage of people. When you think about it, panhandling is really just crowdfunding survival, whatever survival entails at the time. #SEstreetlife
I had this idea in my head, but never bothered making the sign. Then I walked up to a ramp last year, and this four foot long piece of cardboard, with handholds built in, was sitting there. I had to try it. I held it for two or three groups of cars, and didn't get any money. I just wanted to say I flew this sign. A buck or two every 3-6 groups of cars is about normal these days. I memorized how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism in 6th grade, to intimidate other kids before the city spelling bee.
Just for the record, I won, 6th grade city champ for Willard, Ohio, 1977? But I cheated. It was actually a 50 word written test, held in the Willard Junior High library. I got 49 of the 50 words right. One of the words was "ancient," and it was on a sign nearby, touting the Dewey Decimal System. I would have missed it, and there would have been a three way tie for first, if the sign hadn't been there. Lesson: Winning a contest doesn't mean that much, there's usually cheating somewhere in the system, in pretty much everything.
I flew this sign back East, where we had to sign up and get a permit, and then could panhandle "legally." Panhandling is constitutionally protected free speech (as long as the Constitution holds up), but the location you stand can be trespassing, at times. The permits back east pretty much just kept black guys from flying signs, due to excessive criminal records. But few of them ever flew signs, anyhow.
Just think about it...
This one is good more for crazy looks than money. Sometimes you just have to entertain yourself while flying a sign.
This is what most people think, no matter what your situation really is. I've actually met two homeless guys in SoCal whose homes were flooded and destroyed in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. They came to Cali looking for work, and couldn't find any right away (2007-8). It doesn't matter, you walk out on a ramp with a sign, and most people just think, "lazy bum." #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Thief is the guy who partied with my "homeless roommate" Troy past night, after he passed out this morning, on Troy's little matress.
This is the same guy, digging through Troy's stuff, he grabbed everything he thought had any value, and walked off. He disappeared really quick after he rounded the corner, like he had a car waiting for him or something. The funny thing about public spaces is that it's 100% legal to shoot photos and video, and share them, even if the personin the photos happens to be an informant, undercover, or maybe even a federal agent. He didn't show any ID when I asked, so maybe he's just a thug.
Blogger's note- 6/28/2022- This guy never came back after I posted these photos (multiple places online and on social). If he was a local thug, he would have brought the posses back to beat the fuck out of us. The fact that he hasn't been back signals he was most likely sent ot harass us by someone at some level of power. I've been dealing with similar types of harassment for 20 years and 9 months now, fairly consistently. This is everyday life in my world. Just another day... on the streets.
Blogger's note- 6/292022- This guy rolled by two days ago looking out of the window of a large, black, TCP style SUV (Suburban? Expedition?) Last night we didn't see him for a day, then las tnight he rolled around the area on an undersized beach cruiser style bike, like he was looking for recyclables or something. Whatevs.
I can't tell you exactly what the late, great actress, Betty White would say about the Supreme Court's decision today. But the quote below is attributed to her.
"If men could get pregnant, abortions would be available at Jiffy Lube."
- Betty White
Roe V. Wade has been overturned. Now we watch as millions of women, and plenty of men, take to the streets.
I'm a middle aged, fat, ugly homeless guy who never has sex. So it would be easy to think I have no dog in this fight. But as a homeless guy, I'm already often treated like a second class citizen, and the intentional attack on civil liberties in the U.S. by the "Conservative Right" affects me, and everyone else. Just for the record, they're neither "conservative" or right, but that's another argument. What exactly do they conserve? Not tax dollars, not the environment, not natural resources, and definitely not the Constitution these days.
Anyhow, here are a few things to keep in mind now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned:
One- This decision by the Supreme Court of the U.S. is broadly unpopular. In a recent May CNN poll, 66% of of people asked did not want Roe completely overturned.
Two- Because of the unusual circumstances of how justices Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett were appointed ot the court, they could legitimately be impeached, and forced to leave the court. it's highly unlikely, but it is possible.
Three- There is nothing in the Constitution that says the U.S. Supreme Court has to have 9 justices. President Biden and Congress could expand the court to- say- 15 justices, allowing President Biden to appoint six new justices. Again, it's very unlikely, but it is possible, and it is completely legal.
Four- The number of times the "abortion" is mentioned in the Constitution is zero. The number of times "abortion" is mentioned by Jesus in the Bible is also zero. I've read the New Testament multiple times, Jesus didn't mention abortion. In fact, the Bible mentions fetuses in a handful of verses, but it's silent on abortion itself. See this essay for more depth on that.
Five- There are 9 Supreme Court Justices, 535 Senators and Congresspeople, and 167,500,000 women in the United States. If a large enough group of women, and men who support them, raise a ruckus (legally, of course), this decision can be overturned, overruled, or otherwise nullified. Not overnight, but it definitely can happen.
I hope this little post was helpful. If you're up to fight this decision, here's a video of the late Great Dissenter, The Notorious RBG, to remind you what one woman accomplished in her life in the legal world.
My Sharpie scribble style drawing of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, The Notorious RBG, one of the 20th and 21st centuries biggest fighter for women's rights.
This is Joe Brown, of Heresy Financial channel, picking apart President Joe Biden's inflation plan.
If you drive a car or ride a bus, you use gasoline, or natural gas, to create electricity for electric cars, or to power many buses. Both gasoline and natural gas have gone up a lot in pricein the last two years. Traveling on the streets is more expensive now, and so are most other things, and this blog is about not only my life on the streets, but also how to survive and thrive in the crazy decade of the 2020's. Joe Brown, with his Heresy Financial channel (above), gives some of the best overall analysis of today's economy that I've seen. If you want to understand today's rising prices, the video above is a great place to start.
OK, I'm sick of hearing numbskulls blaming President Biden for the current rising prices. The president, any U.S. president, by themselves, has very little to do with the economy. Working with Congress, they can pass laws and programs that affect the economy to some degree. But the federal Reserve (aka The Fed), really controls our money supply, and influences interest rates, which ripple through the rest of the economy.
You can blame Biden, if you want, for keeping Jay Powell as the head of The Fed (the Federal Reserve), who caused our current price inflation. The federal deficit (gap between money coming in from taxes and money spent by U.S. federal government), has gone up since the federal budget was balanced during the Bill Clinton presidency in 1999-2000. Democrat and Republican administrations have both spent more money than brought they brought in, over the 20 years since. The Covid-19 pandemic response caused the deficit to soar, first in 2020 under Trump, and now under Biden.
Nomi Prins was a quant, which means a super math geek, at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers in the 1980's and 1990's, and has been a financial journalist/author since about 2001. She is one of the smartest people around to explain the financial markets and the how economy works. This recent interview gives her the chance to explain what she sees happening in today's world with high inflation, falling stock markets, slowing real estate markets, and everything else going on.
These two videos are a heck of of lot of information to digest, particularly if you don't pay much attention to economic issues in general. But these are the best to current videos I've seen to understand what's going on, why prices are so high, and why we may need another huge bailout (which will cause more inflation in 2-3 years) at some time.
Everybody complains about rising gas prices, food prices, and other high prices. But very few people really want to learn the basics of how the economy actually works, and where things may go from here. If you're one of those few people, check out these videos. If not, keep whining as prices keep going up, loans get harder to get and more expensive, and real estate starts going down in the coming months.
I was walking along the trails on the Manchester district (south) side of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, when I saw this great blue heron in a tiny stream on the other side of the trail. Spring of 2019. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
This is one of the two best coyote photos I've managed to get with the old iPhone 5. Coyotes are hard to get pics of, without a really good zoom lense. I've seen them a few dozen times while homeless, starting in 2002 in Huntington Beach. This one was a weird looking coyote, it looked like it may have had some shepherd in it. It returned around dawn, after coming by in the wee hours of the morning. L.A. county, not far from Universal Studios area, 2021.
Because of past flooding issues, there are some gigantic flood walls next to the James River in Richmond, VA. For a while, I walked to a bus stop every morning, right by the Manchester Bridge. There's a cool lookout place on top of the wall there, and vultures sometimes congregate there in the mornings. Black vulture atop the retianing wall early one morning, spring 2019.
There are pigeons all over cities in the U.S. This one had a missing foot, so I nicknamed him Ahab. He (or she?) used to show up nearly every morning, at a bus bench, where I ate breakfast a lot. Studio City, CA, 2021.
A different coyote from the one above, but in the same area. Roaming and scavenging late at night, just over the hill from Hollywood. It may be hard ot believe, but there are at least a couple of mountain lions, bobcats, deer, and coyotes in the Santa Monica mountains, the big hills where the Hollywood sign, Beverly Hills, and many other upscale areas are located. The small mountain range is completely surrounded by urban areas, but some large mammals call it home. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
If you look close, there's a fence lizard, half on the concrete strip, below the bush. I saw this lizard while wandering around the Newport Beach art park, along Avocado Street, in Newport Beach. When I first landed back in Orange County, in the summer of 2019, I stayed in this area for a while. The art park, which included Bunnyhenge, is a cool place to wander around, and to take photos.
In addition to these creatures, I've see raccoons, opossums, skunks, mule deer, whitetail deer, a wild turkey, many coyotes, a bobcat, 3 mountain lions (maybe same one, three times), eastern box turtles, whiptail lizards, a nutria, a 7 to 8 foot python (released pet, most likely), gopher snakes, ospreys, bald eagles, a sphinx moth, great horned owls, a barn owl, burrowing owls, green herons, night herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, a southern pacific rattlesnake, a California thrasher (it's a bird, not Duane Peters, though I have seen him while I've been homeless, too), and many kinds of ducks and shorebirds.
Under Pressure. We've all been there, at some level. Classic song created when Queen and David Bowie worked together.
Why have I been homeless, in some form, for about 15 of the last 23 years? At first it was a few months, while I was learning to be a taxi driver. I got myself out of it when I had some good weeks in the taxi.
In 2001, about three weeks after the attacks of 9/11, my bank account was shut down, for no apparent reason. I went into the bank to deposit some money, thinkng I was about $4 overdrawn. I'd had the account at that bank for about 12 or 13 years at the time. I walked into the branch at Bolsa and Heil in Huntington Beach, and they wouldn't accept my deposit. Ultimately, the manager came out, and gave me a check for $18, and said I could no longer have an account at that bank. She seemed physically afraid of me, like someone had told her something bad about me. It was right after 9/11, and people were still pretty freaked out, in general. But I'd been in there dozens of times, there were never any issues. No reason for shutting down my account was given. I walked out of the bank confused.
Similar things have been going on, on a regular basis, for 20 1/2 years now. I have been under tremendous pressure, from some still unknown source, for over 20 years. I've been turned down for jobs I should have easily qualified for. When I tried some different small business ideas, I've had a guy in a suit (different guys, 3 or 4 different times) walk up and tell me that I was NOT going to be able to get that business idea going. That's a part of why I kept driving a taxi in 2003-2007, even though the industry was dying, even before Uber and Lyft came along.
I've had hundreds of encounters with uniformed law officers from 2002-2008, but only got one minor traffic ticket. I've had a lot of people, who appeared to be undercover officer or agents o fsome sort, ask me typical law enforcement type questions. That has happened hundreds of times. It was obvious that it wasn't local SoCal law enforcement calling the shots, but a much higher level of power, somewhere else, getting police to apply pressure.
In 2008, while panhandling in and obscure place in south Orange County, CA, an officer with over 20 years experience walked up to me on the off ramp. "Who are you?" he asked. "I've never seen them come down on anyone the way they're coming down on you." My reply was, "So there IS a THEM." He just nodded. We talked for a few minutes. No ticket, he just told me to leave the offramp that day. He walked off, and I grabbed my bags and walked to a bus stop. When I walked by where his patrol car had been parked, there was a$5 bill in the gutter. Police, as a rule, don't give money to panhandlers. Neither of us understood what was going on. But he confirmed something weird was happening in my life.
This type of intense, indirect pressure was used to force me out of Southern California, finally in 2008. My family flew me to North Carolina, where my parents and sister's family were living then. We were from Ohio, and moved west as my sister and I grew up, eventually living in San Jose, California when I moved out on my own. I had no connection to North Carolina, other than my family had moved there after I left their house. I moved into the spare bedroom of my parents' tiny apartment in the small town of Kernersville, NC.
I went into a near suicidal depression as soon as I got there. I couldn't get hired for even a simple cashier or menail job. I started blogging a couple of weeks later, and interacting with my old BMX freestyle friends online really helped me during that time. I worked one year as a taxi driver in Winston-Salem, living in my taxi the whole time. I quit when my dad was dying, after a stroke in 2012.
I was financially stuck in NC for about ten years. I finally escaped, landing in Richmond, Virginia in late 2018. A friend from California helped me get back to California in 2019, hoping I could help his new online business with my blogging and social media skills. That work didn't pan out, and I left and headed back out on the streets of SoCal. I've been scraping by with my Sharpie art, and then getting EBT when Covid hit.
A couple of posible reasons all this happened have come up. But no one has confirmed those to me directly, they're just rumors, as far as I'm concerned. Those don't really matter. The point is, this pressure is still happening, though not to the overt level it once was. But, I have no work history now, since I couldn't find work for so many years. I literally have nothing to put on a resume', to even try to get a job, except taxi driving 10-20 years ago, at companies that are now out of business. There is no job I could get now that would pay enough to simply rent a place to live here (or anywhere). My Sharpie art has kept my alive for six years, but is not enough to make a decent living at this point.
Somebody with some high level of political or social power, or some group, wanted me to live my life in a completely different way than I was living it. I don't know who, or what they really wanted me to do. This power structure, whomever it is, seems to be centered on the East Coast. It appears they thought I'd get to North Carolina, and then think, "Oh, my whole life has been shit, I need ot go to college." Instead, college didn't enter my mind. After not being able to make a decent living from 2001-2008, going into debt for a degree I didn't want in the first place was not even an option. Not going to college, and getting saddled with a ton of debt, is one of the smartest decisions I ever made. College is great for lots of people, but I always wanted to start my own business, and I don't need a degree to hire myself. Nothing I was interested in was degree dependent. Coming out of high school, I was thinking of going to college to become a wildlife biologist, but that was more of a default plan. I didn't have anywhere near enough money to go to college, and when BMX took off for me, college was out the window.
For over 20 years now, simply surviving was the best I could manage. No level of material or financial success was ever going to happen, that became apparent by late 2003 or 2004. We live in a world where things like this happen. A powerful group of people, can target someone for reasons only they know, and use their influence to destroy that person's life, if the person doesn't conform to their wishes. There's a ridiculous amount of douchebaggery going on in this world, particularly back East.
I'm smart, and hard working. But now my only hope of making a decent living again is creating my own job, my own small business, around my writing, artwork, and online skills. So that's what I continue to keep working towards, no matter what happens.
Its a miracle I'm still alive, actually several small miracles. I should not have survived the last 20 years, including a serious suicide attempt in 2015, in North Carolina. Coming back from that, I devited myself to doing my own creative work. At this point, it's all or nothing. Either I make a living doing my own creative work, or a die as a homeless guy doing my own creative work. I've lost way too much of my life dealing with other people's bullshit.
I'll keep trying to live my own life, and create a legitimate business around my art and writing, as long as I live. I'll never know all of my own story, that's how weird things have been. I don't care. I'm just trying to move on now, and forge a good life in today's weird, fast changing world. "Let's go create some shit!" is my personal motto now. That's what I do every day. I wake up on the streets, and then create something. A blog post. A drawing. A funny meme. A collection of photos online. Something. I may be fat and have no bike these days, but I'm still a BMXer at heart. Get knocked down, cuss a little, get back up, and keep trying. That's what BMX taught me.
Onward.
So now you can look at my memes, my Sharpie drawings online, my 1,500+ blog posts, and decide if I'm dellusional, or maybe there is actually some shady stuff going on in this world. Your call.
Blogger's note- 6/21/2022- According to my analytics, only two people have looked at this post. Yet I wound up getting questioned by a psychologist at McDonald's yesterday, for two hours or so. After commenting to people nearby about subjects I might respond to, he eventually walked up and commented on the Sharpie drawing I was working on. Nice enough guy, but just wanted to know all kinds of personal stuff about me. This happened in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles, where I live. Even crazier, he claimed to have gone to the same, not very well known university as my sister, brother-in-law, and niece. A college 2,479 miles away. Wow, now there's an amazing coincidence. It's a weird world. Like I said above, a lot of weird shit happens in my life.
Also, just ot clarify, uniformed police have had almost no verbal contact with me since I left California in November 2008. But hundreds of people have come into my life and asked that types of questions police and other forms of law enforcement, usually ask, from asking about potential criminal activity, to just wanting to know my thoughts on a specific subject. I'm talking about conversations that seem intentionally planned and directed, not just random conversations with people I meet. I probably had 15,000 or so conversations as a taxi driver, a tiny fraction of those, are the ones I'm talking about, as well as many since then. OK, I've said my piece about this, I'll try to move on with my life...
Above, someone doesn't like art, or at least street art. Obey poster in The Valley, 2021. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos. Below, a job offer? Hmmmmm. Sticker on a highly stickered taco stand in Costa Mesa in 2019.
Above, this so reminds me of high school in Boise in the 80's. Her name is Becky (seen on another sticker of her), and she's drinking out of the paper bag, Generation X style. On a sign in the Universal City area, 2020. Below, wider shot of that sign.
mAbove, homeless amputee veteran on his power chair, charging his cell phone at one of the Red Line train platforms during the Covid shutdowns. I was there charging my devices as well. At that particular spot, we often had to hang out while people smoked meth or crack on the bench, while we were charging. Most or all of these charging outlets have since been plated over, making it much harder for homeless people to charge their phones. This particular spot, in Hollywood, was used by dozens of people every day.
Heroin addict sleeping standing up at a bus stop. I was sitting there eating my breakfast, as I often did at the time. This guy wavered back and forth, mostly asleep, without falling over, for at least 20 minutes. I had to ask other homeless people how tis happened, later on. They told me that heroin addicts sometimes can literally fall asleep standing up, and somehow not fall over. 2021. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Andy Anderson is my favorite skater to watch these days, and he skates the Venice (Sunset?) curbs with Wee Man (aka Jason Acuna) and friends.
Disclaimer: Warning, this blog post includes shameless namedropping by a fat homeless guy who lives a couple miles from Hollywood. I'm not cool now, and never was, so a repeatedly blog about famous people I met or knew back in the day to entertain other losers.
This blog is called "street life," and the streets I was referring to wasn't supposed to be Wall Street and Manhattan's financial district. But I'm a futurist/economics geek, as well as an ugly, homeless blogger/artist/whatever. With all the Fed action and financial craziness lately, that's what the last few posts were about. So here's a fun street skating video to get back to the actual streets.
Like a lot of people in the BMX/skate world's, I first saw Wee Man in the original Big Brother video, Shit (NSFW or pretty much anywhere) in 1996. He's painted blue at 7:41 and 40:30. I had drifted away from the BMX world, but was still riding daily, and would roll by one of the rider houses (H.B. House or Isthmus House) now and then, and that's probably where I saw it. Having been roommates with Chris Moeller in the early 90's, who saw himself as kind of the Steve Rocco of BMX, we were reading Big Brother magazine (also NSFW or anywhere else) right from the start.
Like most people, the first time I actually remember seeing Wee Man was the Oompa Loompa skating clip, which I thought was in one of the Big Brother videos, but it was actually in the Jackass TV show, which makes it around 2000. I also remember a shot of him tied to a pole, like a dead deer or something, being carried around L.A., that must have been in Jackass as well. From then on, we was part of the Jackass posse, as the TV show got canceled after two seasons and then turned into movies.
In 2003, after a couple really sketchy years in and out of homelessness, I got my driver's license again, and went back to driving a taxi full time, which is 7 days a week in the cab world. I was about 210 pounds, not to fat to skate a bit, and I had a skateboard in my cab for a while, since I was living in it (again). Now and then, when business was slow, I'd stop by the little Huntington Beach High skatepark, which had a curb a little banks I could skate.
One time I was there when Wee Man rolled up to skate. I can't say I met him, because I didn't talk to him, but there were only a few of us there, and I did my little kickturns, board slides to fakie on the curb, and my big trick, shove-it to manual over the little pyramid. Wee Man was ollying the six foot long pyramid top, and getting like chest high to himself. I think he was sliding the flat rail and ledges, too. But the ollies are what stick out in my mind.
He can skate. Not good for a little person, dwarf, or whatever you want to call him. I mean he's a solid fucking skateboarder. I kept thinking, "How can that little fucker ollie so high?" So that's as close as I've ever come to meeting him.
Coming from the BMX freestyle world of the 1980's, I knew Spike Jonze, because he got hired for my old job as FREESTYLIN'. Like everyone in BMX in the late 80's, I knew Spike from both riding and shooting photos at contests through those years. I met Jett Tremaine at one of John Paul Rogers' Loser Thanksgivings, in '98 or '99, where we were tramp skating. Tramp skating is doing tricks on skateboard decks (no trucks or wheels) on the trampoline. I managed 720 shove-its, and Jeff was doing solid method airs. So that's my only connections to the Big Brother/Jackass posse. They went off to make everyone laugh by damn near killing themselves for comedy in TV and movies, and I drove drunks home as a homeless taxi driver in the 2000's.
As for Andy Anderson, I just dig his skating. I met Rodney Mullen two days after I moved to Redondo Beach in 1986, and did a little mini-interview with him in FREESTYLIN' (December 1986 issue). Then I moved to Huntington Beach to work for the AFA, and spent my weekends at the H.B. Pier, doing BMX tricks for the crowds, and hanging with freestyle skaters Pierre Andre' (Senizergues), Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and later, Darryl Grogan. Being a well known spot, and at the beach, street skaters (like Ed Templeton and Mark Gonzales) came by regularly as well. Though BMX was my thing, I skated a little, and I worked at Vision's video company, so I met most of the skateboarders of that era at some point.
Andy Anderson does a lot of technical, freestyle-ish stuff, but can go big on street, shred transitions, and is original as well. Plus he's a Canadian, so he's just got the chill vibe as well. He's just a great skateboarder to watch skate. So this is a great half hour long video of the famous "Natas curbs" in Venice, then some parks, more curbs, and some street in downtown L.A. Great video of just skateboarding as fun, everyday stuff.
This is one of four videos, by my favorite financial YouTubers, that I watched yesterday, after The Fed hiked interest rates 3/4%. While the whole video is interesting (if you're into financial stuff), one thing really caught my ear. He says in this video that MBS (Mortgage Backed Securities) went "no bid" last weekend, and the mainstream media isn't talking about it, because nobody's quite sure what to make of it.
I found this article this morning, by "Tyler Durden," but naming the longtime bond broker whose thoughts are shared. This goes way into the nuts and bolts of bond trading, over my head, but basically, last weekend NOBODY wanted to buy the Mortgage Backed Securities offered up, because of all the uncertainty in the financial world. The broker in the article goes into why this is one of the 5 moments in a 40+ year career that really stands out. That's not good. This is the first info I've found on this issue, and I'm not sure what it all means, but it's a sign things will get a lot crazier pretty quick, from the sounds of it.
Here's a Yahoo Finance report on The Fed's interest rate decision, to raise the Fed Funds interest rate 3/4% or 75 basis points, which was announced about an hour and a half ago, as I write this.
What does that mean to you, an average American working person? Interest rates elsewhere also go up, ripples, in a sense, from The Fed's decision. The average 30 year fixed mortgage rate has gone from around 3% at the beginning of 2022, to 6.1% - 6.2% now. The Fed also signaled that it plans to raise interest rates at least another 1.75% by the end of 2022. That means the 30 year fixed mortgage rates should go up to at least 7.85% to 8%, by Christmas time. The Fed keeps having to do more to combat inflation than it expects, so that 30 year fixed rate could wind up 8% to 10% by the end of this year.
Debt of all kinds just got a lot more expensive, for businesses, all levels of governments, and individual people. That means mortgages, student loans, auto loans, credit card debt, and everything else will charge you quite a bit more, in interest, in future months and years. The plus side is that you should get a little bit more interest on savings, CD's, and interest bearing investments. But if you get less than 8.6% interest, you're still losing buying power overall.
The official reason The Fed raised rates is to slow down inflation, which they want to see drop from May's CPI rate of 8.6% officially, to 2%, or slightly under 2%. The Fed originally was planning to raise rates y .5% today, but the latest inflation number was higher than expected last week. That gave them reason to consider either a .75% rise, or a 1% rise, at this meeting. The Fed has put themselves in a no win situation at this point. And they caused this high inflation in the first point, by excessive new money creation in 2022-2021, but they won't admit it. Anyhow, if they did a .5% rate hike, it would look like they were cowing to Wall Street, which they've done for years, until the last couple of months.
The .75% hike, the highest since 1994, was the safe bet for them, higher than initially expected, signaling they are actually trying to combat inflation. Since that possibility of a 3/4% rate hike led to the last several day's stock market losses, Wall Street will celebrate today, and perhaps a few days, with a small rally. That's kind of a "Whew, glad it wasn't worse" move. Inflation may very well come in higher next month, and perhaps a month or two after that. If The Fed did a full 1% rate hike today, it would signal that they are really trying to slow down inflation quickly, but stocks would have dropped more, and we would move quicker towards a serious recession. I think a serious recession is inevitable at this point, but the "experts" are still arguing that point. Remember we never officially know we're in a recession until its over, in most cases.
For you, average working person, all your adjustable rate debt will now become more expensive. Future debt you take on in coming months, and probably will be more expensive. The real estate market will continue to slow down, and stocks will, in my opinion, continue trending down, overall all summer. Interest on savings will go up, but not much. If you get paid 1% interest on savings now, you are still losing 7.6 cents, per year, on every dollar in buying power. If you try to refinance any kind of debt, interest rates will be significantly higher, and it will be harder to qualify, in general. This interest rate rise will slow down the economy overall, driving us harder towards another recession (we might be in it already). A new wave of layoffs has begun, and there will be plenty more. The less debt you have, the better shape you're in, generally speaking, for the next 2-3 years. We are going to start seeing a bunch of bankruptcies, and probably one or more very large businesses, going bankrupt in 2022.
So that's where we're at, right now, as of June 15th, 2022. This blog is just getting going, and a big part of it will be looking at ways to survive, and hopefully even thrive, in the crazy decade of the 2020's. Much more to come. Thanks for reading.
If you feel like this guy above when your credit cart rates jumps 3/4% in one day, you're not alone... Get up, cuss a little, dust yourself off, and keep going. Unknown rider at Boozer Jam 2022, Sheep Hills, Costa Mesa, California. #steveemigphotos, #SEstreetlife
BTW, in 1994, the last time there was a .75% rate hike, Orange County, California went bankrupt. But that's a crazy story, and it was a long time in the making.
I drew this Grey Trash alien about the same time I made some stock market predictions for 2022. You can read that post here. #greytrash, #sharpiescribblestyle, #SEstreetlife
Financially, 2022 and 2023 should be the sketchiest years of this decade. As I wrote, in the linked blog post, we are heading into the second recessionary wave of this decade, Spring 2020 was the first. The Fed tossed out about $6 trillion in "helicopter money" in 2020 and 2021, after Covid hit, making us all feel hood rich for a while, and spend a ton of money on stupid shit. They did this mostly to bail out the banking system, corporate America, and hundreds of struggling small towns and mid-sized cities, but average Americans got a bit of it, too.
In the rest of 2022, we pay the price for all that newly created money. The most obvious price we're all paying is rising prices, inflation. All that new money created this inflation. It wasn't Trump or Biden, it was The Fed who created it. The stock market is plummeting again today, in a much needed crash from ludicrous stock values. Inflation is still rising, according to last Friday's numbers. Inflation is still getting higher, officially 8.6% a year now, though gas prices, real estate prices, and many food prices have risen much more than that. Prices on food and many consumer items will keep increasing this year, generally speaking. Gas prices should back off a bit by mid to late summer, but stay ridiculous, much higher and they were a year ago. The real estate market is turning, but it turns slow, like a huge ship. Prices for homes, in most places, should be falling by fall or winter 2022. This may not be a total collapse in most places, but a decent correction in prices, at least. Millennials are about to learn how stupid real estate FOMO can be. There will be a lot of homeowners underwater on their mortgages a year from now. Not near as many as in 2008-2009, but quite a few.
Interest rates will keep rising for a few months. The Fed has started raising interest rates, to try and calm down inflation, which it let get completely out of control. The 10 year U.S. T-bill is a good gauge of interest rates. It was 1.66% at the beginning of 2022, and is 3.15% today. More important to working people, the 30 year fixed mortgage rate national average was 3.56% in January, and is about 6.10% today. The last time 30 year fixed mortgage rates were this high was around Thanksgiving time, 2008, 13 1/2 years ago. And The Fed will raise interest rates at least 1/2% this week, and will keep raising them in coming months. What this means is that you can afford less house right now, and a lot less by the end of 2022, as rates go higher.
By the end of 2022, 30 year fixed interest rates will be 6 1/2% to 8%, at least, and 9% to 10% would not surprise me. I'm fucking serious. Simply put, it is going to get a lot harder to get loans, and you will pay a lot more interest if you do qualify for one. The Fed will have to do another bail out next year, at some point, and lower rates a little, but mortgage rates won't get back down to where they were last year.
The Spring of 2020 was actually an acute, deep but quick, financial depression. What we're headed into right now is more like 2008 in the Great Recession, and the long stagnant double dip recession of the early 1990's, put together. Debt is going to be the killer for most people, businesses, and governments. Most people who are actually paying their student loans now, will stop paying them, out of necessity. That will be a hit to colleges and universities' bottom lines. More important, mortgage, consumer, and auto loan debt will get harder to pay, especially for people who get laid off from their jobs.
For people who own rental real estate though, where your renters pay off the mortgage, debt will be awesome, as long as you have solid renters. High inflation means your renters are paying down the rental property mortgages in dollars that are worth less every month. This will be a great period for savvy real estate investors with solid renters. Of course, eventually, real estate prices will rise again, though it may be years down the line.
The layoffs have already started, and we'll see a lot more of those coming, as well. Like I said, this is the 2nd recessionary wave of the 2020's, and it will be a long, slow sticky one. From my point of view, as a geek on futurist thinking and economics, this is what I like to do. Not give people bad news, but give all of you a heads up on what's coming, so you can make better decisions for your own life.
If you want to listen to the blues after reading this, may I suggest this video of Popa Chubby, live at Daryl's House. This is what I was listening to while writing this blog post. Epic blues show.
If you don't think a homeless guy can shed any light on the economy, here are a few of my other blog posts from the past couple of years.
As we all know, there's a lot of ugliness on the streets of any city. But that's not all there is. There's beauty out there as well. We see what we look at. As humans we get into habits of avoidance, we look past the things that don't seem to matter to us, or the unfamiliar, and focus on the same things, over and over. Part of my job as a writer, artist, and photographer, like every creative person, is to take time see the things most other people miss, and point those things out. These are a few of the beautiful photos I've taken while homeless, over the last four years. Above, spring buds of a tree, backlit by the sun, and juxtaposed against a shaded hillside. On the side of a shopping center, Studio City, CA, 2021. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Stop and smell the cow pies. Seriously, stop and smell the piles of cow shit, horse shit, and dog shit you wander by in daily life. Why? Because then you'll appreciate the roses. No one will have to remind you to stop and smell them. Or take a photo. Backlit white rose at the Universal City bus station in Studio City, CA, Spring 2021.
In the Spring of 2019, while homeless in Richmond, Virginia, I was walking to a bus stop in the Shockhoe Bottom district, an area downtown, on the banks of the mighty James River. This area has huge concrete walls to keep out major floods, and the highways and railroads there are built high off the ground. This gives the area below a really industrial, old fashioned, almost steampunk feel to it. As I walked to the Pulse bus stop there, with the roads and train tracks above, I saw this small tree budding. The pink buds, backlit by the sun at dawn, with this crazy urban landscape around it, stopped me in my tracks. I decided to take a photo, and pulled my little iPhone 5 out. After snapping 3 or 4 pics, I looked around, and just began wandering around, shooting photos of anything that looked cool in that area. I wound up doing that for over an hour, as the sun rose up form the eastern horizon. I got 20 or 30 cool photos out of that morning's wandering. This beautiful image led to many others, which I'll publish on this blog, in time.
This photo was also shot in the Spring of 2019 in Richmond. While living under a huge bridge, on the edge of the James River, I walked up by the Manchester Bridge every morning, and caught a bus to a McDonald's most every morning. There's a Mickey D's in that area, but it's swamped with other bums, which meant getting to use the bathroom was always a dice roll. So I took a bus to the sketchy Midlothian District, a few miles away. After breakfast there, and some morning blogging or drawing, I'd go back across the street, and up a bit, to a bus stop by a big empty lot. Across the street from the lot, was a strip club, nearby were two or three of the sketchiest motels around, all with hot and cold running crackheads. It's not a part of town most people want to spend much time in. Standing at the bus stop, in one of shadiest parts of the city, I saw another small tree budding. I snapped four photos of these buds, at different focus points, from wide to tight. Beauty in one of the ugliest parts of the city. It's there, somewhere. Sometimes you have to go looking for it, sometimes you just turn your head, and there it is.
This one is a shot of dusk on Ventura Boulevard, in Studio City, looking west from the Laurel Canyon road area. The palm trees stretch to the sky, moments after the sun dropped behind the Santa Monica mountains. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.
This is Alvin Toffler in 2007, promoting his last book, Revolutionary Wealth. In his 1980 book, The Third Wave, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote of our transition into an "knowledge based society," away from the industrial based society we have been in for 300-400 years. He proposed the idea that we were in transition out of the Industrial Age, into what we now commonly call the Information Age. That was a new idea in 1980. His later books, including Revolutionary Wealth in 2007, expanded on and refined this idea of us being in a major period of change, into a new kind of civilization. Alvin Toffler died in 2016, but much of what he wrote about is still playing out.
Toffler's Third Wave idea is one of the ultra long term trends playing out now, that led me to believe that this decade, the 2020's, will be one of the craziest decades in human history, and the most chaotic decade in modern history. There are several other long term cycles and trends playing out, in economics and socially, which also seem to be reaching major inflection points in the coming years.
I finally figured out that I'm an amateur futurist, and I've been watching some of these trends for as long as 30 years, As we moved through the 2010's, I saw that several long term trends that seemed to be merging, all leading to major changes in the next 10 to 15 years. Being a futurist/economics geek, I believed we were heading for a major recession, quite possible a full great depression, beginning around 2018-2020. But some of these other trends and cycles pointed to other kinds of social change as well.
This post is to list and briefly explain the ultra long term trends and cycles that are playing out, and why I believe there will be an incredible level of overall change in society from 2020 to 2030,in particular. Here we go.
The Business Cycle- On average, the U.S. goes into a recession every 4 to 7 years, this video gives a quick, simple, explanation of business cycles. Heading into 2020, the last recession was The Great Recession of 2007-2009. So we were already past the 7 year mark, which meant we were due for a recession at any time. This is because the Federal Reserve had been creating a lot more new money, and putting it into the economy, in spurts, during the 2010's. That kept us from falling into a typical recession, and extended the business cycle. Using this very mainstream idea alone, we were due for a "typical recession" in 2020. What we got in 2020 was far more intense than a typical recession. That's because there is a lot more going on right now than "business as usual." Some of these other trends and cycles will help explain why.
The Tofflers' Third Wave- First of all, Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi, worked as an intellectual team, but he actually wrote the books. The thinking belongs to both of them. I think a huge advantage of their futurist thinking was that they not only looked at new technology and trends emerging, but also asked, "How will average working people respond to, and use this new technology?" There are a lot of nuances to Toffler's Third Wave concept. But the core idea is that we are leaving the industrial-based society, and moving into an information-based society. In our current terminology, we are leaving the Industrial Age, and moving into the Information Age. This is a huge change for everyone, like moving from tribal hunter-gatherer societies into the Agricultural Age, or from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age.
The things to remember is that in huge transitions like this, everyday life changes for every single person. In addition, these changes takes decades, maybe even centuries, to fully move form one age to another. Born in 1966, I was born into a world where nearly everyone worked in small local factories. Those factories made nearly all of our physical goods here in the United States. We had one phone line per house, and usually two phones plugged into the wall. There were no personal computers. We had three channels on TV, and most adults read actual newspapers every morning. We went to malls to buy most of our goods, from clothes, to tools, to appliances, at big department stores, like Sears or J.C. Penney's. Simply put, Sears was the way to shop in the Industrial Age, Amazon is how most people shop in the Information Age. That type of change is happening all through society, with some things moving faster than others.
The Big Freakin' Transition- The Big Freakin' Transition is my personal name for the transition we are now in, between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. We are not fully in either age, but in a long transition period in between. This is just my extension of the Tofflers' Third Wave concept, extended into today's world. The Tofflers believed this transition period began about 1956, the first year there were more "white collar" office workers in the U.S. than "blue collar' factory workers. This period of change began super slow. A little change here, a little one there. As time progressed, one change built upon another, and the pace of change got faster and faster. Generation X kids, like me, were the last generation born into the functioning Industrial Age. Since then, we have the Millennials, Gen Z, and post Gen Z little kids now, all born into the late transition period/early Information Age years, and who grew up digital natives. For these people, now roughly babies up to about age 40, digital technology, hyper-connected communications, and continual change in society itself, are normal. They don't know what it's like to live in a slow paced, stable society with very little change.
I personally think the 2020's will be the most chaotic decade of The Big Freakin' Transition, because we were due for a major economic downturn heading into them. Sure enough, the 2020 downturn happened, with Covid-19 sending us into lockdown, dramtically amplifying all kinds of change in daily life that was already happening. The actual economic crisis began with the Repo Market Crisis in the banking system in September of 2019. The Federal Reserve had to start pumping what was then considered huge amounts of new money ($20 billion every 2 to 4 days, at first) into the economy. This "liquidity" helped keep the banking system in the U.S. functioning. But it also led to rises in asset prices, particularly in the stock market, at first. Six months later, As the Covid-19 pandemic reached crisis mode in the U.S., the CDC pushed for lockdowns to slow the virus spread, and that was a crippling blow to an already shaky economy. This led to a level of new money creation unseen in U.S. history, which definitely helped on many levels, but ultimately warped the financial markets, natural check and balances in markets, and led to the high inflation we are experiencing now (June 2022).
I think this decade, which I dubbed the "Tumultuous 2020's" in early 2020, will be a time of change on top of change on top of change, at nearly every level, I don't see these as the "End Times," which get predicted every few years. I see it more like hitting a long section of really rough rapids while rafting down a river. There are a lot of bad things that could happen, but it we hang on, and deal with crises reasonably intelligently, we should come out the other side OK. But it will be a much different society when we do.
We already have a lot of the actual technology of the Information Age, such as the internet, smart phones/devices, and levels of human to human communication, and ginormous databases, never seen in human history. But our businesses, organizations, and society as a whole, need to catch up with all the changes these new technologies have created, and new opportunities, lifestyles, businesses, industries, and social norms, they make possible. Because there is so much change that needs to happen to many businesses, industries, organizations, and governments, during the Big Freakin' Transition, I knew that the 2020 downturn would have to be much more intense, and much longer, than a typical 6-18 month recession.
Change. And then even more change. The Tumultuous 2020's, are the decade of continuous change, pretty much everywhere you look. Hang on!
The 30/60 year economic depression cycle- This is a largely discredited idea by mainstream business and economic people. You know, the people losing their asses in the stock market today. As I write this (June 10, 2022), the Dow is down 880 points, and the Nasdaq is down 414 points, and the S&P 500 is down 117 points. The "experts" didn't see this coming, and they're taking soem big losses at the moment. Days like this are when some of these long term trends suddenly make more sense to a lot of people. Most traders and speculators think short term, seconds, minutes, hours, days. Old, experienced investors like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger think long term. Those two were both alive in The Great Depression, and were old enough to remember how people lived coming out of it. They do lots of research, find companies they believe in, and look for great bargains on days like today.
Anyhow, there are a small number of people who believe that there are 30 year and 60 year cycles in the economy (here's economis Ravi Batra's 1985 book * about these cycles). I first heard of this idea in The Great Depression of 1990*, by economist Ravi Batra. In that book he made the case that we have a depression every 30 or 60 years, and if it skips the 30 year mark, we're much more likely to have a great depression at the 60 year mark. We had The Great Depression in the 1930's, following the 1929 stock market crash, as we all know. There was no depression in 1960, and Batra expected a great depression in 1990. We didn't have that depression, but we did have a long double dip recession, and six stagnant years economically. Most of what he predicted, which I read in late December of 1989, did actually happen. It just didn't happen to the degree and depth Batra expected it to. Here is another reference to the 30 year cycles, focusing on interest rates. I saw one YouTube video on this idea, claiming this trend extended back to the 1600's here in the U.S..
The Long Term Debt Cycle- Here's acclaimed investor, Ray Dalio, briefly explaining The Debt Cycle, really well, in 12 minutes. This is not one of the trends I've been watching for years. But it dovetails well with the 30/60 year trends that Ravi Batra wrote about, which I have been watching since 1990. I first heard of Ray Dalio and the debt cycle in the last couple of years. It's another long term look at economics, which most "experts" don't believe in. That's why the experts get paid to talk on TV, and not paid to actually invest money. Thinking like this is partly why Dalio is an actual legendary, successful investor.
Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle- P.R. Sarkar- This is another concept Ravi Batra shared in his 1989 book, The Great Depression of 1990. P. R. Sarkar was a serious, but weird, thinker and character in India, in the mid-20th century. His concept of the Law of Social Cycle is almost completely unknown to American intellectuals, and was published in his book Human Society Vol. 2. I've never been able to get ahold of that book, so I know it only from Batra's writings.
The basic idea is that there are four basic mentalities in any society, The Intellectuals, The Acquisitors, The Laborers, and the Warriors. Every person belongs to one of these groups, depending on how they earn a living. A person can move from one group to another, by changing their lifestyle, by living a different type of life.
In this theory, each mentality dominates a particular society for a period of time, shaping all aspects of that society. Most parents want their kids to grow up to belong to the dominate mentality, even though they don't realize it. These eras, with one dominate mentality, can last for decades, or hundreds of years. When there is change from one mentality to another, is a chaotic, crazy period of time. Revolutions and wars, and other chaos can mark these transitions. The crazy thing is that these mentalities dominate society in a certain order: Intellectuals, Acquisitors, Laborers, and Warriors.
Ravi Batra, being of Indian descent (India the country, not what is now called Native American), researched this idea, looking at several societies in history, and decided it made sense to him. Then he looked at the United States, and concluded we have been in the Acquisitor Age (buisnesspeople's age) since colonial times. As that age nears the end, corruption in business and government becomes increasingly pervasive and widespread, and the living standard for average working people declines.
Eventually this leads to worker revolts, a populist movement among the Laborers, the largest group by population. The workers rise up, and eventually toss out the corrupt business people. At this point, either the society collapses (or is invaded by a neighbor), or the Warrior mentality (soldiers, police, fire fighters, professional athletes, activist leaders, etc.), the people who make their living with courage and physical abilities, rise to power. The Laborers have the numbers, but people who actually lead, generally fall into one of the other mentalities, so the Laborers don't get a full age of their own. The transition out of the Acquisitor Age is called the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, as the worker revolts occur. Guess where we are in this timeline? Yep, we are in the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, 11 years into it, by my reckoning.
Watching much of Batra's other thinking play out in the early and mid-1990's, I began to put more faith in the Law of Social Cycles. On one hand, as a longtime BMX freestyler, and BMX/skateboard industry guy for a while, I came to believe this theory helps explain the rise of action sports. It explains why sports like surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, BMX, wakeboarding, and others were born and/or grew exponentially in recent decades. These, I believe, are a new aspect of the Warrior mentality growing in society, over the last several decades. I think it also explains the rise of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighting, as well. I came to those conclusions in the mid to late 1990's. I did a lot of research during that period on what the word "warrior" meant in many traditions. I believe there are many different types of people who use great courage, not just the people Sarkar included, listed above.
Since Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle seemed to actually be playing out, slowly, I looked to what that said about our future. Around 1997 or 1998, I realized that it meant the U.S. would have some major populist uprising, the Laborer part of the Acquisitor cum Labor Age, somewhere in the future. I went on with my life, and kept an eye out for something that looked like a legitimate populist uprising. It took over a decade, but in 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protest came along. Within two or three weeks, it spread like wildfire nationwide and worldwide, with several hundred small encampments in major cities.
That movement gave us the terms "The 1%" and "The 99%," now part of our popular lexicon. It wasn't the movement itself, so much as the speed with which it caught on, that told me that was the beginning of the true populist uprising. It was quickly quashed by the powers at be, in a few weeks. But all those emboldened people went back to their lives, as activists.
Then, in 2015, came the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign cycle. It began, though it's hard to remember now, with Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush. Two political empire families, three former U.S. presidents among them, and Jeb with $100 million political "war chest" at the beginning. Few Americans were really excited about either candidate. Then came Bernie Sanders on the Left, and Donald Trump on the Right, both populist candidates, and both pulling millions away from the traditional, candidates. I saw that as another rising wave of the populist movement. Everyday working Americans were sick of the status quo. Later still, the Blue Wave in the 2018 election was another populist wave, a reaction to Trump's far right push. In my opinion, the populist movement in the U.S. is still rising, and we have have several more years of strong populist sentiment, until life actually gets better for the majority of everyday, working Americans.
And now we have economic hardship with inflation, after surviving an actual economic depression in 2020 (Yes, a Depression, by official definition, 10% or greater GDP drop), and a 100 year pandemic. Now inflation is hitting Americans, another big blow. There's more to come.
The Globalist Agenda (aka The New World Order)- What was originally considered conspiracy talk in the early 1990's, the "New World Order," is now out in the open as The Globalists, and the globalist agenda. What do this network of world financial, political, and business elites want? All we have to do to find out now is watch their YouTube videos, like this one, The Great Reset. This video is straight from the World Economic Forum itself, the elites who meet in Davos, Switzerland every year. They want what all so-called "elites" throughout history have wanted, total control.
Not surprisingly, this Orwellian propaganda video didn't go over well. As people looked into what The Great Reset actually meant, it sparked more flames in the worldwide populist movements. What are the actual billions of people in the world, the populists, rising up against? This, The Globalist Agenda. These "elites" have been changing laws and consolidating power for at least 75-80 years. They are the ones who HAVE BEEN running the world for decades. They control the central banks (like The Fed here in the U.S.), that created our current high inflation. The multitude of crises they refer to in that second video all happened while they were in control. Their actions led to the lower standards of living for most of the people on the planet. That led to the populist movements here in the U.S., and most other developed nations. Here's the good news. The Globalist Agenda is an Industrial Age plan. We are moving into the Information Age. It's already falling apart and failing. This agenda will continue to collapse... in the 2020's.
Global warming/Climate change- Fires here in California, floods in other areas, regular earthquakes due to fracking in Oklahoma, drought, melting glaciers and ice caps, rising sea levels for island nations, more powerful hurricanes and typhoons. Yeah, the climate is changing. We need to take a variety of actions to continue living as "civilized" humans here on planet Earth. But first we need to survive the economic chaos of the next few years. There are volumes of opinions on climate change, so I won't go into depth on it here. But it's another huge issue reaching crisis points in many areas already, and many more in coming years and decades.
These trends and cycles, some of which I have been watching for over 30 years now, led me to believe that we are in for an economic downturn that will at least feel like a great depression, to most people (by 2027 or so). And, this economic downturn will speed up the already fast rate of change, from the remaining Industrial Age institutions and industries, into Information Age replacements, or entirely new institutions and industries. Like I have been saying for 3-4 years now. The 2020's are the greatest period of MASSIVE CHANGE in modern history. That's why I refer to this decade as The Tumultuous 2020's. It's not the "End Times," but it's an end of many things, and a beginning of many others. We're humans, we have trouble with change. But we're getting better at it.
The "crazy" stuff: Prophecies and the weird predictions of the early 21st century by several other traditions
The Age of Aquarius- If you're a late Baby Boomer or old Gen Xer, like me, you remember this song, from the musical Hair. Recorded by The Fifth Dimension in 1969, it was a hippie anthem and got a ton of airplay in subsequent years. Whatever you think of hippies, the 1960's counter culture/drug filled revolution, and musicals, the Age of Aquarius is a real thing. As you may remember from science class, the Earth wobbles on its axis, and the full cycle of this wobble takes a little under 26,000 years. This is called precession. Because of this wobble, the stars appear in different places during this super long cycle, also called a Great Year. During this cycle, we go through each of the Zodiac signs, each era lasting about 2,150 years. We are somewhere near the transition point from Pisces into Aquarius. This video goes into the technical aspects of this, with some of the lore and beliefs about each age, as well.
Remember the Mayan calendar, year 2012 "apocalypse" hype? That, too, was the end of a baktun, a Mayan "long year" based on the precession. Their tradition 500 or more years ago, saw our time as a big transition point in society. Very simply, an imaginary line in space crossed another imaginary line in space, marking the end of the Mayan's way of calculating the "Great Year" of the precession. That's what happened in 2012.
The Zodiac goes back to the earliest days of civilization, like ancient Sumer, maybe longer. Those who are into astrology in a serious way, believe that civilization goes through different stages as we move through the long cycle of the precession. This short video gives an intelligent look at how that may be affecting movies and literature today, why we have vampire, witches, wizards, zombies, and the like in so many books and movies. If you want to get really into depth on the Age of Aquarius, this video is a talk based on the readings of Edgar Cayce, the most documented psychic in history. He lived in the late 19th and early 20th century, and went into trances to give readings on health and many other subjects. His readings say we entered the Aquarian Age in the 1940's or 1950's. Many of Cayce's 14,000 documented readings made references to big changes, and a major transition point in society in the coming years, which would be the late 20th century and beyond.
No matter what you think of astrology or New Age ideas, my point here is that this tradition, which goes back at least 7,000 years, believes we are in a big transition period right now. At its core is the precession, a known, scientifically proven phenomenon. This tradition has nothing directly to do with economic cycles, debt cycles, interest rates, politics and things like that. So completely outside the economic world, there are other traditions and belief systems, based on the stars and other things, that also have predicted a major transition period for human society.
St. Malachy and the 112 pope prophecy-The story goes, the Irish Catholic bishop Malachy, later cannonized as a saint, had a vision in the year 1139. He wrote down a list of 112 pope of the Catholic church. These were written down in short, cryptic, Latin phrases. This video goes into the prophecy was first published in 1595, and some people think it was written in that era. Who knows. In any case, the current pope, Pope Francis, is the 112th pope since the list was reportedly written. So Pope Francis is the last pope as seen in the vision by St. Malachy. What happens after Pope Francis? Nobody knows. I'm not Catholic, I grew up Lutheran. But this is another ancient prophecy that looks to this era in time as another transition, in some way. Will something major happen to the Vatican and the Catholic church in our time? Will there be a big transition in Catholicism? Or will things just go on as usual? Only time will tell.
The Great Pyramid of Giza- If you really want to go way "out there," here's a really weird story. There's a tradition that the Great Pyramid of Giza has, encoded in its design, a physical representation of the stages of human evolution here on Earth. Yeah, that sounds crazy, I know. But the fact that is exists, and was built 4,500 years ago is also crazy. This lecture by John van Auken, Edgar Cayce expert, goes into, and explains this idea. I don't care if you think this is garbage or not. It's waaaaay out there, even by today's crazy standards, I realize that. But, this tradition says that we are now in a major transition period in human society, and we will reach a major inflection point in 2038. My point, for this blog post, is that here is yet another tradition that sees us as being in a major transition phase for human society itself. It it based on Edgar Cayce's readings, which were in the early 20th century, 80 to 100 years ago.
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