How lyin’ smilin’ Romney destroyed thousands of jobs and lives and stole his millions from common people…

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From ROMNEY ECONOMICS

“I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. … The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.” –Marc B. Walpow, former managing partner at Bain Capital

With Dade Behring, Mitt Romney and his investors took over a healthy company and loaded it with debt. Rather than sell the company, they then had Dade take out even more loans to buy out their shares, driving the company into bankruptcy. Nearly 3,000 workers lost their jobs, while Romney and his partners made more than $250 million in profit.

Kansas City’s GST Steel was a successful company that had been making steel rods for 105 years when Mitt Romney and his partners took control in 1993. They cut corners and extracted profit from the business at every turn, placing it deeply in debt. When the company eventually declared bankruptcy, workers were denied their full pensions and health insurance, and the federal government was forced to step in and bail out the pension fund.

In the late 1980s, Mitt Romney and his partners bought up hundreds of successful small clothing stores and combined them to form Stage Stores. Romney and his team loaded up the company with debt, and then, when the company was at its height, sold nearly all their shares at an enormous profit. In less than three years, the stock had collapsed and Stage was forced to declare bankruptcy.
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Why Such A Lack of Common Sense About Dogs?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I can’t believe what I am seeing in dog food advertisements. Good old Rover is shown licking people on the face, once even licking a child on the lips. This is so disgustingly unhygienic to me that I have to wonder if there is something going on here I don’t know about. Doesn’t the present generation of pet owners understand where else that dog might have been licking moments earlier? Do I have to spell it out?

We all used to know that dogs carry parasites that can be transmitted to humans. By parasites I mean worms. Yes I know that the well-cared for pet dog is routinely wormed and medicated just like children are, but you don’t want any dog licking your child on the lips. The risk is too great. If you don’t believe me, read any straightforward discussion of animal hygiene and note how widespread is the problem of humans getting worms from pets, especially dogs.

I am constantly amazed at people who get so distraught over the idea of using composted dog manure for garden fertilizer but who think it is just so cute when cuddly little Bow-Wow drools all over them. I think the problem traces directly to the lack of experience in husbandry that our present culture suffers from. You can deify or humanize pets if you wish and provide them with luxuries even lots of humans can’t afford, (and then complain about paying taxes to help people on welfare) but in the end, an animal is an animal and it does not think like a human. Dogs have been known to pick up a baby and shake it to death in innocent play.

Don Sanderson: A Madness…

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Don and Becky

From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”  – Robert F. Kennedy, 1966

Like a Viking berserker, we swing our clubs wildly, determinedly destroying our natural Earth, wracking extinctions beyond the worst recognized to this point, killing the ocean, disrupting the climate, exhausting vital resources, and spreading human poverty and cruelty into every corner without, it appears, a dollop of guilt. This strikes me as symptomatic of madness. So, I went digging for verification beginning with a definition of “mad”, which I summarize from Miriam-Webster:

1 disordered in mind : Crazy, Insane

2 a : completely unrestrained by reason and judgment : utterly foolish : Senseless b : incapable of being explained, interpreted, or accounted for : Illogical

3 carried away by intense anger : Enraged, Furious  b : keenly displeased : Angry, Irked

4 carried away by enthusiasm, infatuation, or desire

5 intensely excited, distraught, or frantic

6 marked by intense and often chaotic activity : Wild, Furious

To which, I compared that for “Sane”:

1 : mentally sound : possessing a rational mind : having the mental faculties in such condition as to anticipate and judge of the effect of one’s actions

2 : proceeding from a sound mind : being without delusions or prejudice

60 Million Cancers From Nuclear Weapons Radiation…

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From ALEXANDER HIGGINS

‘We are living through the worst public health scandal in history’ — 60 million developed cancer from nuclear weapons tests and government data backs it up.

In the videos here, acclaimed nuclear industry scientist Dr. Chris Busby says we are living in the worst public health scandal in history proclaiming that 60 million people have developed cancer from radioactive fallout due to nuclear weapons tests.

Busby will surely be attacked for his statements by nuclear apologists but the truth be told the US government’s own data goes a long way toward substantiating Busby’s claims.

To be precise, Busby claims 60 million cancers due to the radiation fallout from nuclear weapons test while US government data shows a slightly lower number of cancers – about 40 million cancers – due to background radiation in the United States. At the same time that same government data shows  132.76 million will get cancer in the United States and nearly 70 million of those people will die.

What is in dispute here is the margin of error between the governments 40 million cancers due to radiation versus Busby’s research showing 60 million and I am inclined to accept Busby’s research over the government’s which is clearly influences by the nuclear industry along with lobbyists from other special interests groups.

But what the government won’t admit is that the so-called “background radiation” is largely the result of nuclear weapons tests and those levels

Making the Internet Safe for Anarchy…

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From DMITRY ORLOV
cluborlov

As the electric grid goes down people will cease to be docile and become seriously angry.

Suppose you wanted to achieve some significant political effect; say, prevent or stop an unjust war. You could organize gigantic demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets, shouting slogans and waving anti-war banners. You could write angry editorials in newspapers and on blogs denouncing the falseness of the casus belli. You could write and phone and email your elected and unelected representatives, asking them to put a stop to it, and they would respond that they will of course try, and by the way could you please make a campaign contribution? You could also seethe and steam and lose sleep and appetite over the disgusting thing your country is about to do or is already doing. Would that stop the war? Alas, no. How many people protested the war in Iraq? And what did that achieve? Precisely nothing.

You see, the slogan “speak truth to power” has certain limitations. The trouble with this slogan is that it ignores the fact that power will not listen and the fact that the people already know the truth and even make jokes about it. Those in power may appear to be persuaded or dissuaded, but only if it is to their advantage to do so. They will also sometimes choose to co-opt, and then quietly subvert, popular movements, in order to legitimize themselves in the eyes of those who would otherwise oppose them. But, in general, they cannot be shifted from pursuing a course they see as advantageous by mere rhetoric from those outside their ranks. Some weaker regimes may be sensitive to embarrassment, provided the criticisms are voiced by high-profile individuals in internationally recognized positions of authority, but these same criticisms backfire

Women are better than men…

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From ROGER EBERT

Women are nicer than men. There are exceptions. Most people of both sexes are probably fairly nice, given the nature of their upbringing and opportunities. But in terms of their lifelong natures, women are kinder, more empathetic, more generous. And the sooner more of them take positions of power, the better our chances as a species.

This occurred to me while watching a forthcoming movie named “Where Do We Go Now?” It could have occurred during dozens or hundreds of movies. It’s set in a tiny village in Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims have lived peacefully side-by-side for generations. Now the local men have become worked up by strife they see on TV, and have decided that even in their village, without any provocation, they need to start hating and fighting each other.

The women are tired of burying their sons and husbands. They conspire to distract the men from their foolish chest-beating. They stage fake miracles. They sneak hashish into their diets. In a bold masterstroke, they import a troupe of exotic Ukrainian dancers who are touring Lebanon.

Enough about the movie, except for this simple mind experiment: Can you imagine a movie in which Muslim and Christian women start fighting with religion as their excuse, and the men band together to import go-go boys? Not easily. The gender roles in the film seem to go without saying.

I’ve been noticing news items lately about how women are gaining in many ways. They now represent a majority of U.S. college students, and 60% of all graduate students. Their income levels are rising, although they still don’t have parity with men. They are far less involved in violent crimes, and crime of all sorts. They are safer drivers. A child in a single-parent home is likely to be better off if the parent is a women. In the U.S. the odds are that 80% of the single parents will be women; having given birth, they stick around to raise children, while men are more likely to be missing.

Are the Elite in Control or Are We in a Driverless Car?

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From JOHN MICHAEL GREER

The Descent into Stasis

Last weeks’ post attempted, with the help of the ancient Greek philosopher Polybius, to trace out the trajectory that democracies—and in particular the United States—tend to follow across time. The pattern that Polybius outlined, and that American politics has cycled through three times so far in the course of its history, begins with most of the nation’s political power concentrated in a single person, and follows the diffusion of power to the point that the entire political system settles into a gridlock only a massive crisis can break. Just now, according to that model, we are in the stage of gridlock, and thus of maximum diffusion of power.

Now of course this interpretation flies in the face of the standard narrative that surrounds power in America today. Both sides of the political spectrum these days like to insist that too much power is in the hands of the other side, at least when the other side is in the White House or has a majority in Congress. The further from the mainstream you go, the more strident the voices you’ll hear insisting that some small group or other has seized absolute power over the US political system and is running things for their own advantage. The identity of the small group in question varies wildly—it’s hard to think of anyone who hasn’t been accused, at some point in the last half century or so, of being the secret elite that runs everything—but the theory that some small group or other has all the power that everybody else seems to lack is accepted nearly everywhere. Whether it’s Occupy Wall Street talking about the nefarious 1%, or the Tea Party talking about the equally nefarious liberal elite, the conviction that power has been concentrated in the wrong hands is ubiquitous in today’s America.

It’s an appealing notion, especially if you want to find somebody to blame for the current state of affairs in this country, and of course hunting for scapegoats is a popular sport whenever times are hard. Still, I’d like to suggest

Gina Covina: Laughing Frog Farm News…

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From GINA COVINA
Laughing Frog Farm
Laytonville

Days in the 80s, nights above 40. we may after all be heading into that rare season with an early start. If so, we’re ready for those mythical July tomatoes. Just about all our summer crops are planted out, most in the ground a month earlier than ever. I’m still ready to cover everything in a freeze, but I’m beginning to think that may not be necessary.

Once in the ground the plants face new dangers, chief among them – so far this year – gophers. What about our newest hoop house, the one with a hardware-cloth liner for its raised bed, with seams carefully wired together and edges turned to climb the sides? Oh yeah, the “gopher-proof” one. Last week I found a potato plant pulled most of the way underground in that armored bed, only its wilted top showing. A line of dino kale along one side has lost half its number, unnoticed at first because the plants disappear so completely, leaving no trace but a small hole. So much for my vision of the dino kale as a row of miniature palm trees in the hoop house landscape. Not to mention so much for gopher-proofing. (My theory: the young apprentice rodent-hunter cats, playing with a gopher caught outside the hoop house, casually toss it up over the hay bale side, as it squeaks “No, anywhere but there, don’t throw me into that gopherless realm of the most delectable roots.”)

The bonus in all this planting is the simultaneous harvest of winter crops to make room. The glorious nettle plants made the newest 10’ x 10’ compost pile more than a foot taller (nettles make for a fine-textured mineral-rich compost). Kale, spinach, and chard supply us with daily green smoothies, greens for friends and neighbors, and popular chicken feed. Yellow dock and dandelion roots (not purposefully grown as winter crops but encouraged around the edges of the gardens

My drop-out homesteading story…

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From RAN PRIEUR
reddit

Ran’s been posting a lot about dropping out recently, so I thought I’d share my own story. I’ve actually been wanting to write something about this for a while, but I have been having trouble organizing my thoughts around what exactly I want to say. As such, this may be a bit long winded and disorganized, but hopefully it’s useful to some on the dropout path.

I won’t go into details about how I got interested in breaking free from the dominant system. I guess I was fortunate enough to read the right things and think critically about my life. In the course of a few years, my whole outlook on life was radically transformed, and there was no going back. Since then, I’ve been working to break free from the oppression of the dominant system.

About a year and a half ago, My wife and I moved to Bellingham, Washington, to a rental house a few miles outside of the city to start our homesteading journey. Our lot was a couple acres, with fruit trees and a grass area around 4000 square feet that we could turn into a garden. When I do something, I tend to go all out, so I decided to have a huge garden that used nearly the whole 4000 square foot area. I was working from home, so I was able to take lots of breaks during the day to work in the garden.

At first, the work was fun. Being outside and using simple tools. Planting and watching things grow. Harvesting and eating the freshest most delicious vegetables I have ever had. And then, it just got old and tiring. Harvesting pounds and pounds of veggies every day. Washing, sorting, freezing, drying, fermenting, cooking. It just became so much work, and I stopped enjoying it for the most part. Not to mention the isolation. We had moved without having jobs in town. Jobs are the main social network for people out of school, so this turned out to make things very difficult. We made a big effort to go to events and meet people

Todd Walton: Laughing

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“Humor is just another defense against the universe.” Mel Brooks

Once upon a time, so many years ago it might have been another lifetime, I got two kittens, a boy and girl, and after much thought and research named them Boy and Girl. Boy was an orange tabby, Girl was a gray tabby, and in the hallowed tradition of kittens, they played and slept and mewed and ate and clawed things and were wonderfully cute.

When they were about four months old, Boy and Girl played a particular game that made me laugh until I cried. No matter how many times I watched them play this game, I laughed until I cried. Sometimes other people would watch with me as the kittens played this particular game, and some of these people laughed, too, and a few of them even laughed until they cried; but there were other people who watched the game and did not laugh at all, which was amazing to me, and troubling. Here is the game the kittens played.

A heavy brown ceramic vase about fourteen-inches high, round at the bottom and narrowing somewhat at the top, stood on a brick terrace. Girl would chase Boy onto the terrace and Boy would jump into the vase. Girl would sit next to the vase, listening to Boy inside, and when Boy would pop his head up out of the vase, Girl would leap up and try to catch him, and Boy would drop back down into the vase. Then Girl would stand on her hind legs and reach into the vase with her forepaws and Boy would shoot his paws up to fight Girl’s paws, or Boy might leap out of the vase and the chase would resume. Or Girl would be inside the vase with Boy outside and the vase would tip over in the midst of their roughhousing and out would spill Girl.

Why were their antics so hilarious to me?

Will Parrish: Wine Country’s Dr. Sociopath

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair’s 1923 book The Goose Step: A Study of American Education, some of the greatest sociopaths in this country’s history have affixed their names to university buildings in an effort to burnish their reputations.

Sonoma State University provides a perfect illustration. One of the individuals most criminally culpable for the predatory banking practices that led to the 2008 economic meltdown, former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, donated $12 million to help construct a new music venue on campus. The main concert hall, adjoining lawn, and commons performance venues are now named after Mr. Weill and Mrs. Weill, whose name is Joan.

SSU will go even further in the effort to plaster over Philanthropist-Cum-Banking Crook Weill’s reputation this Saturday when, as part of the university’s annual commencement ceremony, SSU President Ruben Armiñana will bestow him with an honorary doctorate. In other words, a public university is giving an advanced degree to someone on the basis of their making hundreds of millions of dollars engineering mega-scams that have immiserated millions of people around the world, and who subsequently gave a relatively small portion of the loot to one program of the university, which has suffered massive budgets cuts largely due to the political and economic aftermath of same said mega-scams.

Weill’s honorary degree has rightfully aroused strong opposition in Sonoma County, including from many people associated with the Occupy groups in Santa Rosa and Petaluma. They are conducting a protest of the commencement activities. More info is at http://shameonssu.org/ .

One of the questions worth pondering in all this, however

James Lee: My Response to Movie ‘Thrive’ Review…

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From JAMES LEE
Boonville

[Jamie responds to this post that appeared here yesterday which included my headline and intro... -DS]

Though I have a lot of respect for Rob Hopkins and Dave Smith it pisses me off when we, who do our own deep research, who think our own independent thoughts, who think critically, who come to our own conclusions, who work tirelessly to be the change we must see, get labeled a (pick one or more) libertarian, egalitarian, liberal, conservative, tea party hack, red, blue or ‘jerk’ because of our independently derived beliefs that there really is an Agenda to deceive, control and depopulate the many.

It is accepted fact by many that Nikola Tesla did discover, and was able to create, ‘Free Energy’ in 1905…and then had his lab and his life destroyed by the Robber Baron J.P. Morgan (see J.P. Morgan Bank of today) because the powerful elite at the time would not be able to make money on ‘free’.

It is also fact that our school books teach that Thomas Edison discovered electricity when it is actually the alternating current we use today was of sole the design of Mr. Telsa. In gruesome capitalist fashion, Mr. Edison used to torture and willingly killed puppies and other small animals at World’s Fair’s using Telsa’s AC to discredit him. He also maneuvered to have the first electric chair in prison use AC to show the world how ‘dangerous’ it was.

One should also re-search the work of Eugene Mallove, former MIT Chief Science Writer, who was murdered after he was ridden out of MIT and founded the publication “Infinite Energy” in 1995.

Why the Movie ‘Thrive’ is Just Another Crock of Libertarian Bullshit…

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From ROB HOPKINS
Transition Culture

[This silly magical-thinking propaganda garbage pisses me off because these smooth smirking self-aggrandizing jerks so dishonestly and deliberately prey on those who care... -DS]

What do you do when you are the heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and you have spent years surrounding yourself with new agey thinking and conspiracy theories? You make a film like ‘Thrive‘, the latest conspiracy theory movie that is popping up all over the place.  I’ve lost count of the number of people who have asked me “have you seen ‘Thrive’?” Well I have now, and, to be frank, it’s dangerous tosh which deserves little other than our derision. It is also a very useful opportunity to look at a worldview which, according to Georgia Kelly writing at Huffington Post, masks “a reactionary, libertarian political agenda that stands in jarring contrast with the soothing tone of the presentation”.

Visually the film is like some kind of Star Trek fan movie crossed with a National Geographic wildlife film, and is largely built around Gamble’s own years of ‘research’ into the question of what it is that “stops life on earth from thriving”. A reasonable question to ask, but his approach can hardly be called ‘research’ due to the low standards he accepts as ‘evidence’ and his all-round lack of critical analysis. His research, such as it is, is cherry-picked to deepen and support his established worldview, rather than the worldview being built from a careful analysis of the evidence. As we’ll see, this is a dangerous foundation.

So here’s the film’s argument in a nutshell. Humanity is killing itself and the world around it because free energy sources are being deliberately kept from us, cures for cancer are being kept from us, all because we are controlled by an invisible elite who want to create a ‘new world order’

Here’s Where We Are — The Oil Journey…

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From RICHARD HEINBERG
Post Carbon Institute Museletter

This month’s newsletter comes in 2 parts. The first part is what I hope you will find a useful and timely FAQ on current issues. It is the culmination of my experience from Q&A sessions during recent lecture tours. It is also a key part of the support kit for budding presenters out there who want to make use of Post Carbon Institute’s new customizable presentation “YOU ARE HERE: The Oil Journey”*. Part 2 is a new essay on gasoline—what it is, and what it means to us.

Top 11 FAQs for “Oil Journey” Presenters

I’ve been giving lectures on Peak Oil for over a decade now, and always look forward to the question period after the main show. It’s an opportunity to interact with the audience, and to see where my presentation may need tweaking or where my thinking may be shallow or incorrect.

Now Post Carbon Institute is offering a tool to help others who wish to give presentations about our global sustainability crisis—a beautiful PowerPoint called “YOU ARE HERE: The Oil Journey,” featuring a script and images that are geared to general audience with little prior understanding of the issue. Presenters of “YOU ARE HERE” are likely to be bombarded with a lot of the same questions I’ve heard over the years, so I thought it might be helpful if I compiled some of those. Other presenters may have answers to these questions different from mine, and that’s of course fair; consider these to be mere examples, suggestions, or conversation openers.

Here are the top 11, along with brief sample replies and some resources for further reading.

1. But what about natural gas? I’ve heard we had a 100 year supply. Can’t we use natural gas

You Probably Don’t ‘Have Time’ for this Maurice Sendak Interview…

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From SIERRA VOICES

Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” interviewed Maurice Sendak four times over several decades, the first time in the mid-1980s and most recently several months ago. Her show yesterday was a compilation of all those interviews, a full hour dedicated to Sendak.

Radio is not so fashionable these days, and most of us don’t “have time” to listen to interviews, but I have to say this is the finest work Terry Gross has ever done. You get a real sense of Sendak’s tortured and in the end joyful and completely realized life as an artist and as a human being.

In one of the interviews, Sendak explains to Gross why he stopped doing book signings for children, and why he stopped visiting kids in their classrooms: he realized that he had become one of those frightening and problematic adults that many of his monsters were meant to depict!

One little boy who had been standing in line with his copy of “Where The Wild Things Are” — upon being pushed forward by his father for Sendak’s signature — defiantly and bravely screamed “Don’t crap-up my book!!!”

Sendak loved this kid, and took the father aside to plead mercy for him.

In the course of these four interviews over the years, he developed a trust in Terry Gross and clearly a fondness for her. In the last interview several months ago, Sendak — who had always been obsessed with death (in a good Buddhist way, it seems to me, although he was actually a secular jew and a dedicated atheist) — in the last interview he told Terry “I’ll cry my way to the grave,” and a little later, “I’m not afraid of death” and a little after that “I’ll probably die before you, which is good because I won’t have to cry over you.”

The Real Hunger Games…

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From DANGEROUS MINDS

The REAL hunger games have begun in the Capitol: This week the House is voting on $36 billion in cuts to nutrition assistance, or SNAP, which would kick 2 million people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps), reduce benefits for 44 million more, and drop 280,000 low-income kids from school lunch.

Visit Half in Ten to learn more—and how you can stop the Capitol from winning.

An Austerity Backlash: From Sen. Bernie Sanders’s website…

France handed the presidency on Sunday to François Hollande, who declared that “austerity can no longer be inevitable.”  In Greece, Germany and Italy, parliamentary and local elections Sunday were seen as setbacks for austerity measures. Sen. Bernie Sanders saw a lesson for the United States in the European elections.

“In the United States and around the world, the middle class is in steep decline while the wealthy and large corporations are doing phenomenally well. The message sent by voters in France and other European countries, which I believe will be echoed here in the United States, is that the wealthy and large corporations are going to have to experience some austerity also and that that burden cannot solely fall on working families.

In the United States, where corporate profits are soaring and the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing wider, we must end corporate tax loopholes and start making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. At the same time, we must protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Austerity, yes, but for millionaires and billionaires, not the working families of this country.”
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Peak Stupid…

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From SHARON ASTYK
Casaubon’s Book

Finally, we’ve discovered the cause of all our problems….

Isn’t it obvious? We gave women the right to vote. As Raw Story reports:

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a tea party activist that’s appeared several times on Fox News, and founder of an organization where Sean Hannity serves as an advisory board member, said in a sermon recently published to YouTube that America’s greatest mistake was allowing women the right to vote, adding that back in “the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them.”

I’m completely on Patterson’s side, in fact, I’m sure he agrees with me that the real problems began when we extended the franchise to anyone other than white male landowners over 21. I can see a new movement to cast off the vote arising for the glory of our nation – women, poor folk, non-white folk joining together to reclaim their lost legacy – marital rape, domestic violence, slavery, illiteracy, being 3/5ths of a human being, lacking legal personhood and disenfranchisement. Me, I’m going to work on the law that says my husband can beat me as long as it is with a stick no thicker than his wrist – bring that one back, baby!

I keep hoping that we have achieved peak stupid, but I fear not so far….this might be close, though.
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Book Review: Blue Nights — Joan Didion

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From JOHN BANVILLE
NYT

Somewhere in his published diaries the playwright Alan Bennett observes that when misfortune befalls a writer the effect of it is in a small but significant measure ameliorated by the fact that the experience, no matter how dire, can be turned into material, into something to write about. Thus Joan Didion, after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack on Dec. 30, 2003, made out of her bereavement a remarkable book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which became an international success, speaking directly as it must have not only to those who themselves had been recently bereaved, but to hundreds of thousands of readers wishing to know what it feels like to lose a loved one, and how they might themselves prepare for the inevitable losses that life sooner or later will cause us all to suffer.

Now Didion has written a companion piece to that book. “Blue Nights” is an account of the death, in 2005, of her and Dunne’s adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, and more specifically, of Didion’s struggle, as a mother and a writer, to cope with this second assault upon her emotional and, indeed, physical resources. The new book, no less than its predecessor, is honest, unflinching, necessarily solipsistic and, in the way of these things, self-lacerating: Did she do her duty by her daughter, did she nurture her, protect her, care for her, as a mother should? Did she, in a word, love her enough? These are the kinds of questions a survivor — the relict, as the old word has it — will put to herself, cannot avoid putting to herself; questions all the more terrible in that there is no possibility of finding an answer to them. As Didion says, “What is lost is already behind the locked doors.”

Throughout her career, in her novels and especially in her journalism, Didion has been a connoisseur of catastrophe. Early on she forged — ambiguous word — a style for dealing with the world’s dreads and disasters, a style that has been much admired and much imitated. Her tone, measured yet distraught, is that of a witness who has journeyed, consciously if not willingly, to the heart of private and, more momentously, public horror in order to bring us back the bad news.

Book Review: Some Assembly Required — Anne Lamott

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From ALICE EVANS
OregonLive

As an about-to-be first-time grandmother myself, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Anne Lamott’s latest book, knowing I’d be treated to some great laughs delivered with warmth and authenticity by a quirky holy woman who likes to share her wild journey with the rest of us. I was not disappointed.

In her usual reverent but irreverent way, Lamott describes the trials, triumphs and joys of becoming a grandmother. This journal-style memoir includes interviews and emails from new father Sam Lamott, the 20-year-old son she raised alone as a single mother. Many of you may remember that Lamott wrote a rollicking memoir about the first year of Sam’s life, “Operating Instructions,” which became a best-seller in 1993.

Written in much the same tone, “Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son” includes descriptions of grandson Jax that possess a slapstick quality.

But there’s frequently a self-deprecating bite to this humor, a reminder of where Lamott has been: “Jax drinks from his bottle like a wino with a bottle of Night Train. His tongue lolls out when he gets a good hit, and then he starts sucking fiercely again. According to Sam, he’s saying, ‘All I need is one more slug of that, baby. Just to take the edge off.’”

Lamott never seems reticent to admit her own struggles with alcohol and drugs. Sober now for two-and-a-half decades, she still has to work at it, and humor is one of her great tools. But so is faith. A kind of leftist radical born-again Christian, Lamott shares her faith in such a matter-of-fact way that really, I want to kiss her for it. She shows us how she lives in community, how she works at building and keeping the support of her tribal circle of friends, family, priests, advisers and church brethren. She freely expresses her

Book Review: Imagine — How Creativity Works — Jonah Lehrer

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From MICHAEL S. ROTH
Washington Post

Not many writers can make plausible links among musicians Bob Dylan, Yo-Yo Ma and David Byrne, animators at Pixar, neuroscientists at MIT, an amateur bartender in New York, entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Israeli army reservists. Not many reporters do research about an expert surfer who has Asperger’s, information theorists, industrial psychologists and artists. But Jonah Lehrer is such a writer-reporter, who weaves compelling and surprising connections based on detailed investigation and deep understanding. He says that working memory is an essential tool of the imagination, and his book is an excellent example of how a dynamic storehouse of captivating information feeds creative thinking and writing.

Lehrer begins with the story of a pop-culture breakthrough, the artistic reinvigoration that Dylan experienced when he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan was finishing a grueling tour schedule that had left him increasingly dissatisfied with making music. He decided to leave behind the madness of celebrity culture and the repetitive demands of pop performance. But once he was ensconced in Woodstock, N.Y., once he decided to stop trying to write songs, the great song came: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song,” he said. “It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Lehrer adds, “Once the ghost arrived, all Dylan wanted to do was get out of the way.”

Many of the stories that Lehrer recounts in the first few chapters stress the benefits of paying attention to internal mental processes that seem to come from out of the blue. We can learn to pay attention to our daydreams, to the thoughts or fantasies that seem nonsensical. Sometimes this attention must be very light, so that the stream of ideas and emotions flows, as when Ma feels his way into a new piece of music. Sometimes the attention must be very great, as when W.H. Auden (assisted by Benzedrine) focused on getting the words in a poem exactly right.

Eight tips for reading with a toddler…

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From DEBORAH J. STEWART
TeachPreschool.org

One of my favorite ways to spend time with my grandson is sitting down to read with him and my grandson truly loves the reading experience…

Reading with my grandson has given me the opportunity to observe and participate in the toddler reading experience. Based upon my own personal observations, I thought I would share with you a few helpful tips I have discovered about reading with a toddler…

Read with a toddler tip #1: Choose quality board books

The books that we currently read with my 12 month old grandson are almost all books that come in the form of a board book.  After reading the book at least one time through, my grandson likes to have me read the book again only this time, he wants to turn the pages himself. Because my grandson is still building the necessary fine motor control to grasp objects, the thicker pages of a board book make it much easier for my grandson to grab a hold of each page..

Read with a toddler tip #2: Get the board book “read-ready”

One thing I do to help my grandson turn the pages of a board book is to get the board book “read-ready.” If the board book is new or barely used, it can be stiff and difficult to keep each page in the open position. To help with this, I open each page of the book and bend it backwards to try and stretch out the binding just a little bit. Bending back the pages help them to stay open rather than quickly snapping back closed every time my grandson lets go of a page… Complete article here.
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Kellogg’s Kashi Targeted as Web Food Fighting Escalates…

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From STEPHANIE ARMOUR
Bloomberg

Kellogg’s Kashi natural cereal uses some genetically modified ingredients. That was enough to convince an organic grocer in Portsmouth, Rhode Island to pull the brand from his store’s shelves.

Then, a photo of a sign displayed on one of the empty shelves explaining what had happened quickly went viral, lighting up the Web. Kellogg Co. (K)’s Kashi unit responded last week with a video on Facebook (FB) defending its use of the ingredients. By then, however, the noise level was rising, with some online groups threatening a boycott.

April 4 (Bloomberg) — Iowa Governor Terry Branstad talks about finely textured beef called “pink slime” by critics. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness with Margaret Brennan.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Ground-beef sales, including trimmings, fell 11 percent to 37.7 million pounds in March. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

It was just the latest skirmish in an escalating Internet- based uprising. Facebook, Twitter and petition sites like Change.org have birthed a brand of consumer activism that lets people rally supporters under a common cause at breakneck speed. The tactic has caught on in a big way, taking on one company after another, putting practices under a spotlight: bug extracts at Starbucks Corp. (SBUX), livestock antibiotics at Cargill Inc. and the treatment of animals by McDonald’s Corp. (MCD)

“It used to be the most power you had was writing your congressman” and waiting, said Amanda Hitt, director of

Why Is Mainstream Media Now Ignoring Occupy Wall Street?

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From THERESA RILEY
BillMoyers.com

Was last week’s OWS May Day action successful? If the goal was regaining mainstream media’s attention after a winter hibernation, the answer is a pretty solid no. As Natasha Lennard, Salon‘s Occupy blogger, noted this morning, the lack of stories about Tuesday’s general strike indicates that “the mainstream media’s interest in Occupy Wall Street has waned. It’s a shame because, as a new report indicates, Occupy has been central to driving media stories about income inequality in America.”

That report, compiled by reporter John Knefel for FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), analyzed mainstream media’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests and the issues of income inequality and corporate greed over the past six months. According to the research, the heaviest media coverage occurred in October 2011 — then slowed over the winter and nosedived in February.

“As mentions of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ or ‘Occupy movement’ waned

Bikes are oil hungry beasts…

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From ANDREW McKAY
Transition Voice

Bicycles came to us with the Age of Oil. Can we keep them once the oil is gone?

I am a keen cyclist. When I lived in Vancouver last year I would cycle the four miles to and from work six days a week during the warmer months. Unfortunately my job here back in New Zealand doesn’t allow for cycling (I spend weeks out at sea on fishing boats) but I still try to get out on my bike as much as possible. Cycling has many advantages over other forms of transport: it’s free exercise, it’s fun, in many cases it’s faster (I could easily beat the bus over my bike commute) and it’s environmentally friendly.

But hang on. Just how environ-mentally friendly is cycling and just how feasible is it in a post-peak world?

It is true that once you buy a bicycle, the day-to-day maintenance is negligible aside from a few subtle tweaks here and there. Fuel costs depend on how and what you decide to eat. But in terms of construction bicycles aren’t quite as green as they first look and it’s certain that at some point in the future modern bicycle production will cease to exist. Steel-alloy frames and rims, rubber tires and tubes, steel wires for brake and gear cables and all the other components are mass produced in factories that consume a huge amount of energy.

Another environmental concern is, where do good bikes go to die?

Rubber tires eventually wear out and are impossible to recycle without huge energy inputs. More than likely they end up in landfills where there is risk of slowly leaching heavy metals and other pollutants into the groundwater. There are no natural organisms that can decompose vulcanized rubber and so it takes centuries for tires to break down due to physical processes. Steel components break down much faster with oxidation but can also leach toxins into the environment.

Environmental concerns aside, where did the modern bicycle come from and where is it heading?

The People’s Bishop

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From CHRIS HEDGES
Truthdig

Retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard was arrested in Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza in New York City on Tuesday night as he participated in the May 1 Occupy demonstrations. He and 15 other military veterans were taken into custody after they linked arms to hold the plaza against a police attempt to clear it. There were protesters behind them who, perhaps because of confusion, perhaps because of miscommunication or perhaps they were unwilling to risk arrest, melted into the urban landscape. But those in the thin line from Veterans for Peace, of which the bishop is a member, stood their ground. They were handcuffed, herded into a paddy wagon and taken to jail.

It was Packard’s second arrest as part of the Occupy protests. Last Dec. 17 he was arrested when he leapt over a fence in his flowing bishop’s robe to spearhead an attempt to occupy a vacant lot owned by Trinity Church in lower Manhattan. The December action by the Occupy movement was a response to the New York City Police Department’s storming and eradication of the encampment in Zuccotti Park. Packard will appear in court in June to face the trespassing charge that resulted. Now, because of this second arrest, he faces the possibility of three months in jail.

Packard’s moral and intellectual courage stands in stark contrast with the timidity of nearly all clergy and congregants in all of our major religious institutions. Religious leaders, in churches, synagogues and mosques, at best voice pious and empty platitudes about justice or carry out nominal acts of charity aimed at those bearing the weight of resistance in the streets. And Packard’s arrests serve as a reminder of the price that we—especially those who claim to be informed by the message of the Christian Gospel—must be willing to pay to defy the destruction visited on us all by the corporate state. He is one of the few clergy members who dare to bear a genuine Christian witness in an age that cries out in anguish for moral guidance.

Last Message to the Ecotopians: Survival is a Team Sport…

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[This document was found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012) after his death.]

To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony and mutual support — a world of sustainability, stability, and confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?

I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.

But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend

Will Parrish: Big Wine’s Hired Gun…

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

Artesa of Sonoma, a subsidiary of Spanish wine giant Codorniu, has a public image crisis on its hands, and on a scale few wine companies have ever encountered. Last year, the company received a spate of national media coverage concerning its plan to carry out the largest forest-to-vineyard conversion project in California history, on a 324-acre parcel named “Fairfax” just outside of Annapolis, on the northern Sonoma Coast.

The coverage included stories from the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, North Bay Bohemian, and of course several here in the AVA. Most of the stories focused dually on Artesa’s project and that of Premier Pacific Vineyard, which has proposed to clear roughly 1,800 acres of redwoods for wine-grapes on the ridgetops and bluffs of its nearby 20,000 acre “Preservation Ranch” property. Rarely has any North Coast wine industry entity received so much negative attention, this being an industry that carefully identifies itself with the trope of enlightened small farmers in bucolic settings living in harmony with the land.

Yet, i’s easy to see why the “Fairfax” project has raised international alarm. The project would involve clear-cutting mostly second-growth redwood forest across roughly 154 acres of the total 173 acre project site. After chainsawing the trees, the Artesa crews would cleave the redwood and Doug-fir stumps and roots

Todd Walton: Sources of Wonder

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.” Blaise Pascal

Marcia and I watched the movie Source Code last night and I loved it. I very rarely watch American movies and almost never watch films containing more than a suggestion of violence, and this movie was made by Americans and is full of violence; yet I did not feel I was watching a violent movie, nor did the film seem remotely American. I will not spoil the show by telling you the plot, but I will say that for me Source Code beautifully and skillfully explicates the Buddhist notion of karma and how through our actions and intentions we create our future.

I was thinking about Source Code this morning while walking on Big River Beach, amazed by how vivid everything looked and felt to me, as if the movie had somehow altered my perceptions. And then I realized I was in a state of wonder, that my personal cares and woes were no longer holding sway as they so often do these days, and I was inseparable from the wind and the roaring of the waves and the ravens gliding through the air and the sand underfoot. I was only there, it seemed, because all these other things were enlivening me, and in their absence I would disappear.

When I got home from the beach, I sat down at the piano and played with such ease and fluidity I was in heaven, and I knew the movie was working in me

If we had a better story could we tell the truth?…

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Violet green swallow playing with a feather; photo by Chris Maynard

From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World

Recently, to my surprise, it’s become more acceptable to tell the grim truth about our civilization. Still not acceptable, mind you, but every once in a while when I do, I’ll notice someone nodding at me, giving me a sad smile, a quiet signal of comprehension and appreciation.

Tree swallows in aerial acrobatics; photo by Richard Seaman

There are three (very large) groups to whom one cannot usefully or comfortably (or sometimes even safely) tell these truths:

1. The incredulous: Those who either know so little or haven’t had the opportunity to think about what they know, that they find the idea of collapse preposterous, unimaginable, and/or unthinkable.
2. The hopeful: Those who believe that collapse is not inevitable or can be significantly mitigated, or believe that even if it is inevitable and can’t be significantly mitigated, we should try anyway.
3. The deniers:

Resisting Financial Feudalism…

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From CHARLES HUGH SMITH
oftwominds

It’s comforting to think “I can’t do anything to resist the Central State and its financial Plutocracy,” but it’s not true. There are many of acts of resistance you can pursue in your daily life; here are 12 perfectly legal ones.

That we are powerless is one of the key social control myths constantly promoted by the Status Quo. What better way to keep the serfs passive than to reinforce a belief in their powerlessness against the expansive Central State and its financial feudalism?

But we are not powerless. Our complicity gives the aristocracy its power. Remove our complicity and the aristocracy falls.

The pathway of dissent is to resist financial feudalism and its enforcer, the expansive Central State. Here are twelve paths of resistance any adult can legally pursue in the course of their daily lives:

1. Support the decentralized, non-market economy. The core ideology of consumerism and financialization is that non-market assets and experiences have no status or financial value. This includes social capital, meals with friends, projects done cooperatively with friends, home gardens and thousands of other decentralized activities that cannot be financialized into centralized market transactions. Identity and social status

The illustrated history of you being screwed by people like Mitt Romney…

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From DAVID WALDMAN FOLLOW
Daily Kos

Source: TPMDC

Quick and dirty, folks. Basically, the upper line represents the value of your work. The lower line represents what you got paid for it. The empty space in between—the difference between what your work was worth and how much you got for it—represents the money the executives skimmed off the top and kept for themselves.

How did they do it? In part, by so destroying the notion of job security that workers increasingly felt lucky just to be able to live paycheck to paycheck.

But let me switch gears for a second here. Imagine if this chart showed the gross income of the wealthiest 1 percent in the top line, but their income after taxes on the lower line.

“What’s our incentive to keep working hard?” we’d be hearing. “We’re gonna go Galt!”

But that’s not what it is. It’s a chart about working people getting screwed. And as you know, if workers start talking about withholding labor, they’re “thugs.” God forbid mid- and low-level corporate administrative workers say such a thing. That’s actually flat out illegal.

No, seriously. It’s illegal. How do you think we got that rule? One guess.

On Being a Worthy Heir of the Agrarian Contrarians…

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From JASON PETERS
Front Porch Republic

There arrived in yesterday’s mail an attractive book, new from Chelsea Green, titled A Sanctuary of Trees. A hand-written note from the director of communications, addressed to me, said “Gene asked me to send you a copy of his latest book.”

“Gene” is Gene Logsdon, a name well-known, I expect, to many denizens of the Front Porch. Gene belongs to that fraternity of older agrarian contrarians that includes, among others, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, David Kline, and the late Maury Telleen.

Gene Logsdon: the Contrary Farmer. His many books include The Contrary Farmer, Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, Homesteading: How to Find New Independence on the Land, The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (reviewed here by yours truly), You Can Go Home Again, and three works of fiction: The Lords of Folly, The Last of the Husbandmen, and Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food, which I hear great things about but haven’t read yet.

I had just enough time between mind-numbing meetings yesterday afternoon to leaf through A Sanctuary of Trees. The early pages have a good bit to say about Logsdon’s early mis-education: a preparatory school for boys who were seminary-bound

Gina Covina: Is anything gained by starting vegetables early?

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Apples and pears are blooming – here’s Pink Pearl apple

From GINA COVINA
Laughing Frog Farm
Laytonville

Is anything gained by starting vegetables early? Lucinda set up an experiment to answer this question some forty years ago. She planted seeds of various vegetables at one-week intervals, and charted their performance and yields over the entire season. Results across the board: no advantage in starting early.

“So does that mean you’ve never since tried to get a jump on the season?” I ask her.

“Well, no,” she admits.

I too find premature planting irresistible in spite of all past experience. Last year our sweet peppers, started in early April and transplanted to the hoop house in early May, just sat there dumbfounded in the cold, unable to grow at all. Finally we replaced most of them in early June with younger more vigorous starts that had never known the chill of April. Did we start the peppers later this year? Yes, but only by a week. And I’m moving them to the hoop house tomorrow, when night temperatures rise into the 40s for at least a few days.

We’ve planted out forty tomatoes (half the total), and Lin direct-seeded half the Dark Star zucchini a few days ago. Its sprouts emerged yesterday – that’s a month earlier than I’ve ever planted squash here. We’ll see how Dark Star lives up to its reputation as cold-tolerant.

Rosalind Peterson: Call To Action — Navy Warfare Testing Threatens Marine Mammals and Habitats

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From ROSALIND PETERSON
Agriculture Defense Coalition 5/1/12
Redwood Valley

U.S. NAVY’S TWELVE 5-YEAR WARFARE TESTING PROGRAMS & THE INCREASING & ONGOING THREAT TO THE GULF OF MEXICO, ATLANTIC & PACIFIC OCEANS

HELP SAVE OUR MARINE MAMMALS & THEIR OCEAN HABITAT TODAY!

A CALL TO TAKE ACTION

USA TODAY revealed bad news for our oceans when they published a news story titled:  “Navy Plans Could Affect More Marine Mammals” on August 5, 2010 [1].  According to USA Today news article, backed up by federal documents from the U.S. Navy and NOAA:   “…The Navy plans to increase ocean warfare exercises, conduct more sonar tests and expand coastal training…activities that could injure hundreds of thousands of marine mammals or disturb their habitats…”

What do your Elected Officials Know

In a letter to NOAA, dated June 19, 2009, several U.S. Senators, including U.S. Senator Feinstein and U.S. Congressman Henry Waxman, stated:  “…In many regions, the Navy plans to increase the number of its exercises or expand the areas in which they may occur, and virtually every coastal state will be affected. Some exercises may occur in the nation’s most biologically sensitive marine habitats, including National Marine Sanctuaries and breeding habitat for the endangered North Atlantic right whale. In all, the Navy anticipates more than 2.3 million takes (significant disruptions in marine mammal foraging, breeding, and other essential behaviors) per year, or 11.7 million takes over the course of a five-year permit…” [2]

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

The NOAA Definition of “Take”:  “Defined under the MMPA (Marine Mammal Protection Act), as “harass, hunt, capture, kill or collect, or attempt to harass, hunt, capture, kill or collect.”  Defined under the ESA (Endangered Species Act) as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct…”[3]

Gene Logsdon: Writing “A Sanctuary of Trees”

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Writing books is a precarious business. I’ve been foolish enough to do it now about 28 times and I never know what is going to happen. I expected to get scolded for my novels (too irreverent about religion) and for titling a non-fiction book “Holy Shit.” But oddly enough, most readers seemed amused, as I had hoped, rather than irritated in these cases.  Much to my surprise church ministers who responded were especially positive in reaction to my criticisms of institutional religion. Obviously there is a great upheaval bubbling up right below the surface of traditional religious sects of all kinds. A professor of theology and stalwart defender of Christianity at one of our leading universities, after reading my irreverent novel, “Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food,” which he says he enjoyed, now calls me, not altogether jokingly, “one of the good atheists.”  In return I call him “one of the good Christians.”  We get along wonderfully. This is precisely the kind of relationship that I think is becoming more the norm.  You must remember how bad things used to be. When I was a Catholic kid seventy years ago, we were told it was a sin to go to a Protestant church service. Although there is still much conflict between various religious groups, and between religion and non-religion, more and more I see a joining of hands to get to the real work of keeping our civilization plodding along.

So I wrote “A Sanctuary of Trees” and even in such an uncontroversial book (I thought), I am getting scolded more than from previous books. My underlying intention in everything I write is to try to show, in what I hope to be a humorously wry way, the direct connections between agriculture and urban culture as human activity plays itself out in history. In the first part of “A Sanctuary of Trees,” I conjoined silviculture with my early years in a Catholic seminary studying for the priesthood. What I learned from the forests surrounding the several seminary locations I attended influenced me more than what I was hearing in the classroom. What I learned in both places led me eventually to choose the forest and leave the seminary.

Now I am being taken to task for rejecting my “call from God.” I am surprised since I thought this was a minor part of the book. But that’s okay because it is another indication to me of how closely culture and agriculture can be linked

Vote Today and Every Day…

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From THE OCCUPIED WALL STREET JOURNAL

Today, May 1, thousands will take to the streets in a celebration of solidarity with workers, immigrants, students, retirees and unemployed people across the world. Occupied Media has journalists on the ground live-tweeting to occupiedmedia.us. The site will be updated by the minute with information on events as they unfold. If you’re not in the streets, check the site frequently for live coverage and frequent updates.

Live Coverage: A Day Without the 99% here and here

To be clear, no one associated with Occupy Wall Street advocates or calls for violence and condemns any criminal activities beyond General Assembly approved direct action civil disobedience techniques. Violent activities will be denounced as the work of Agent Provocateurs…

A deep democratic moment, something most of us have never seen and scarcely imagined, turned a small park near Wall Street into the center of a global storm. Everybody knows the deck is stacked. But it turns out not everybody is willing to put up with it.

Without asking permission, hundreds converged on the financial district to stop the machine. People convened open assemblies to think out loud together. Kitchens were built and volunteers served hundreds of thousands of meals. Books were borrowed and lent at The People’s Library with no need for a card. Nobody did it for money. Occupy Wall Street changed not just what we think is realistic, but what is actually possible.

Then the 1% hit back. “If you want to get arrested, we’ll accommodate you,” is how Mayor Bloomberg announced that the very act of challenging Wall Street would be treated as a crime. “Nobody can hear you when everybody’s yelling and screaming and pushing and shoving.” Funny stuff.

In school, we were taught that we are free to speak and free to assemble. Now we’re told we have “First Amendment Rights Areas” located inside steel barricades. Over the last eight months, nearly 7,000 have been arrested and occupations in dozens of cities have been systematically evicted.

Rosa Luxemburg said, “those who do not move cannot feel their chains.” We moved and we felt them. There’s an old saying: water beats rock. Put another way: you can’t evict an idea whose time has come.

It was never about a park. It’s about power.

Moving your money into credit unions takes power away from banks. Planting a garden in the city takes power from agribusiness. Mutual aid takes power from a culture of greed. Democracy is not simply speaking truth to power. It’s something we do, that we can’t ask for. Something like a rebellion.

The idea is simple and yet it seems far off, like a dream. But this is not a dream. And it’s not far off.

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Chomsky: May Day

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From NOAM CHOMSKY
Zuccotti Park Press

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called “Law Day” — a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

If you’re a serious revolutionary, then you are not looking for an autocratic revolution, but a popular one which will move towards freedom and democracy. That can take place only if a mass of the population is implementing it, carrying it out, and solving problems. They’re not going to undertake that commitment, understandably, unless they have discovered for themselves that there are limits to reform.

A sensible revolutionary will try to push reform to the limits, for two good reasons. First, because the reforms can be valuable in themselves. People should have an eight-hour day rather than a twelve-hour day. And in general, we should want to act in accord with decent ethical values.

Secondly, on strategic grounds, you have to show that there are limits to reform. Perhaps sometimes the system will accommodate to needed reforms. If so, well and good. But if it won’t, then new questions arise. Perhaps that is a moment when resistance is necessary, steps to overcome the barriers to justified changes. Perhaps the time has come to resort to coercive measures in defense of rights and justice, a form of self-defense. Unless the general population recognizes such measures to be a form of self-defense, they’re not going to take part in them, at least they shouldn’t.

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.

May Day started here, but then became an international day in support of American workers who were being subjected to brutal violence and judicial punishment.

Today, the struggle continues to celebrate May Day not as a “law day” as defined by political leaders, but as a day whose meaning is decided by the people, a day rooted in organizing and working for a better future for the whole of society.
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Beyond the free market

To shape a fairer economy, we must reclaim the language of freedom.

From SALON

The 2012 presidential campaign is shaping up into a clash of economic visions. In response to the escalating GOP criticisms of his fiscal policies, Barack Obama has recently dialed up his own rhetoric, defending programs from financial reform to the auto bailout and the stimulus, and castigating conservatives for their “you’re-on-your-own” economics. In this conservative vision, markets are seen as the best guarantors of freedom, and the most effective means of organizing society.  State interference is deemed corrupt, ineffective and a threat to personal freedom. This framework has driven successive conservative attacks on financial reform, workers’ rights and efforts to expand the social safety net.

Why are we striking?…

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…or to put it another way – what’s wrong with the world?

From ADBUSTERS

Of course, most of us know what’s wrong with the world. We know about the poverty, war, violence and disease. We’re conscious of the injustice, but not fully conscious of it, because frankly, we have enough to worry about in our own lives. As such, we’ve come to accept these injustices as simple facts of life – prepackaged side effects of the human condition, as natural and intertwined with our existence as water to a stream, beyond our capacity to effect in any significant way. This collective sense of powerlessness and default apathy is why we’re striking.

Our growing sense of isolation and disconnection, whether from ourselves, from those next door to us, or from those producing our food and products halfway across the globe, is why we’re striking. Our forced support of perpetual war waged for and by the 1% – whether explicitly with speech, or implicitly with inaction and tax dollars – without ever paying mind to the true causes and motives behind it, is why we’re striking. Our failure uptil now to connect the dots and realize that the benefits of a cheap iPod, lovely as it may be, would be far outweighed by the benefits of a truly just world free of exploitation, is why we’re striking.

The fact that most of us are too busy being exploited to realize we’re being exploited – too busy greasing the cogs of our economic system to notice how the fruits of our labor never fail to float up and out of our reach – is why we’re striking, as is the fact that most aren’t able to do anything about this exploitation even when we do notice it. While some of us are lucky enough to have jobs and careers that give real meaning to our lives, allowing us to take full advantage of our talents and fulfill our destiny, most of us have jobs devoid of meaning and dignity, yet full of the feeling that we are fulfilling someone else’s destiny. Our recognition that the ruling class’s seat at the top of the pyramid is prepared and propped up by the working class is why we’re striking. Our knowledge that it’s actually the CEO who is the most dependent among us, and that the ones truly indispensable to our society are not bankers, lobbyists and politicians, but workers, teachers and engineers, is why we’re striking.

Indeed, the fact that we have an economic system which functions in the same manner as a virus is why we’re striking. Just as a virus’s only reason for existence is to expand, without regard or awareness of the effect of its expansion on its host body, our economic system pursues its infinite expansion without regard or awareness of its effect on human welfare or the environment. Though the earth is finite, it is sustainable, so we reject, in the words of Michael Nagler, “the inherent contradiction of an economy based on indefinitely increasing wants – instead of on human needs that the planet has ample resources to fulfill.”

We’re striking because we also reject the notion that selfishness must be the driving force in our world. We believe, contrary to propaganda, that most people in our world are not selfish, and would rather work together than constantly compete against each other. We believe that the only people who really care about things like power, corporate monopolies and global dominance only make up, say, 1% of the population, making it seem only logical that we should have an economic system which reflects the values of the 99%

Why men should read more fiction…

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From BRETT & KATE McKAY
The Art of Manliness

[...] Whatever the reason, cognitive studies are beginning to show that men might be short-shrifting themselves by avoiding the fiction section in the bookstore and library.  Today we make the case for why you need to put down those business books every once in awhile and pick up a copy of  Hemingway.

Why Men Should Read More Fiction

In the past decade, several cognitive scientists have turned their attention to how fiction affects our minds. Leading this research is cognitive psychologist and fiction writer, Dr. Keith Oatley. Dr. Oatley and other researchers from around the globe have discovered that fiction not only activates, but also improves the cognitive functions that allow us to thrive socially.

Dr. Oatley argues in his book Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction that fiction is primarily about “selves in a social world,” and that fiction’s main subject is “what people are up to with each other.” Just as your understanding of history and finance is improved by reading lots of books on those subjects, reading fiction improves your understanding of social relationships–your thinking about what other people are thinking. In fact, Dr. Oatley calls fiction a simulation for the social world that allows you to experience (at least vicariously) a variety of social circumstances with different kinds of people than you might encounter in your actual day-to-day life…

Unfortunately, men have gotten the short end of the evolutionary stick when it comes to our ability to socialize. Studies show that male brains are generally wired for dealing with stuff, while female brains are generally wired for dealing with people. This may explain why women often prefer fiction over non-fiction: their brains are already wired to want to read

The most successful, happiest people on the planet in twenty years will be living in resilient communities…

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From JOHN ROBB
Resilient Communities

Last week, I did a short, but intense interview with the author Jon Evans for the popular technology e-zine TechCrunch. The section of the interview on the necessity of networked resilient communities is a great place to start today’s letter.

Networked resilient communities is the topic where I spend most of my time.

Why? There are two globally systemic threats we can’t solve. Finance and the environment. Both systems are deeply broken and they are going to do considerable damage to all of us over the next decades. The only way to get ready for that is to build networked resilient communities. Resilient Communities efficiently produce most (not all) of the food, energy, water, and products we use daily. These communities 1) reduce our vulnerabilities to the future’s inevitable disruptions (disruptions that will damage/impoverish those that don’t transition to local production), 2) reduce complexity to a human scale, and 3) improve the quality of our lives.

Since these communities network with the global system economically and socially, they don’t lose any of the complexity/value we enjoy in the current intellectual environment.  My bet, and it is the reason I started the resilient community newsletter, is that the most successful, happiest people on the planet in twenty years will be living in resilient communities.

That last phrase worth discussing today.  The statement that the most successful, happiest people on the planet will be living in resilient communities.

Resilience or BUST!

The problem in a nutshell…

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From DAVID ATKINS
Hullabaloo

A local progressive activist and friend pointed me to an amazing section from Thomas Frank’s recent book Pity the Billionaire. It’s a succinct description of Democratic ideological malaise, laid out in no-holds-barred prose for which Thomas Frank is so justifiably famous, and it tells the tale of what has happened to much of the institutional “left” as well as anything I’ve seen:

Terminal niceness…

The problem is larger than Obama; it is a consequence of grander changes in the party’s most-favored group of constituents. No one has described the new breed of Democrat better than … Barack Obama. “Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means – law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists,” reminisced the future president in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope:

As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. … They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital.

“I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met,” Obama confesses a few paragraphs later. So he has. And so has his party. Today’s Democrats have their eyes on people who believe, per Obama’s description, “in the free market” almost as piously as do Tea Partiers.

Class language, on the other hand, feels strange to the new Dems; off limits. Instead, the party’s guiding geniuses like to think of their organization

H.L. Menken was right…

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From WASHINGTON’S BLOG

“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.” - H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken was a renowned newspaper columnist for the Baltimore Sun from 1906 until 1948. His biting sarcasm seems to fit perfectly in today’s world. His acerbic satirical writings on government, democracy, politicians and the ignorant masses are as true today as they were then. I believe the reason his words hit home is because he was writing during the last Unraveling and Crisis periods in America. The similarities cannot be denied.

There are no journalists of his stature working in the mainstream media today. His acerbic wit is nowhere to be found among the lightweight shills that parrot their corporate masters’ propaganda on a daily basis and unquestioningly report the fabrications spewed by our government. Mencken’s skepticism of all institutions is an unknown quality in the vapid world of present day journalism. The Roaring Twenties of decadence, financial crisis caused by loose Fed monetary policies, stock market crash, Depression, colossal government redistribution of wealth, and ultimately a World War, all occurred during his prime writing years.

I know people want to believe that the world only progresses, but they are wrong. The cycles of history reveal that people do not change, just the circumstances change. How Americans react to the undulations of history depends upon their age and generational position. We are currently in a Crisis period when practical, truth telling realists like Mencken are most useful and necessary. Mencken captured the essence of American politics and a disconnected populace 80 years ago. Even though many people today feel the average American is less intelligent, more materialistic, and less informed than ever before, it was just as true in 1930 based on Mencken’s assessment:

“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men.

Community Funding, Not Crowd Funding…

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From JOHN ROBB
Resilient Communities

[Crowdfunding is another scam to remove money from our own local communities with no localized oversight or involvement... simply grabbing the funds of the distant naive. We need to develop progressive, Mondragon-style democratically-controlled Credit Unions in our own local communities... -DS]

[...] The good news is that is now easier to raise money for small to medium sized projects than it was in the past.

Why is it easier?

Two recent developments:   Kickstarter and the JOBS Act.

• Kickstarter is a Web site that makes it easier for people and companies to get funding for their projects.  Recently, the site gained critical mass and some projects, from a computer game to an iPhone accessory, raised millions of dollars in funding.
• The JOBS Act is a new US law that makes it legal for small companies to “go public” without all of the pesky SEC and accounting paperwork that makes going public so tough and expensive.  So, it’s now possible for companies to sell shares of stock (equity) directly to the public in small amounts.

These developments are great news for those of us building resilient communities. Why? It opens up new options for getting resilient infrastructure built and resilient businesses launched.  Unfortunately, this new freedom will come at a cost.

Avoid Crowdfunding

The bad news is that this funding method is going to be terribly abused by the same broken financial system that gave us the financial meltdown of 2008. Here’s what I mean.

You can see the problem already in the term the press is using to describe this new funding activity.  They are calling it “crowdfunding.”  This name conjures up an image of a nameless faceless mob of people, ready to throw money

The Gates of Hell…

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From GUY McPHERSON
Transition Voice

In a letter to Ernest de Chabrol dated 9 June 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

Nearly two hundred years later, de Tocqueville has been vindicated not only as a superb social critic but also as a forecaster.

High anxiety

Knowing nothing about de Tocqueville, the ten-year-old son of a friend put his own spin on recent history: “Mom, I think people value Father Time more than they value Mother Earth.”

His words sting me like freezing rain, squeezing tears from the corners of my eyes. There’s nothing new there for me, except the perspective of youth: I often weep when I think about the hellishly overheated world we’re leaving him and his young friends. We’re destroying this world in large part because we care more about chasing fiat currency than we care about the living planet and its occupants.

Although it seems unlikely they met, de Tocqueville was writing during the time of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. As if he, too, could see the future, Kierkegaard was plagued with anxiety. However, Kierkegaard didn’t call anxiety a plague. As he pointed out, anxiety is fundamental to our sense of humanity.

Although I’m tempted to discard Kierkegaard’s every thought based simply on his ludicrous leap of faith, I can’t convince myself to disagree with him about anxiety. His writings about anxiety resonate with me as strongly as anything I’ve read by Lao Tzu, Arthur Schopenhauer, or Aldo Leopold.

It’s small wonder I’ve slept so poorly since August of 1979, when I reached a vague

GMOs and pesticides are in almost everything, including “natural” cereals…

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From NATURAL NEWS
Thanks to Ron Epstein

Three facts you need to know about GMOs before you read the explosive test results below

Before you view the Cornucopia’s test results below, there are three important things you need to know about GMOs:

#1) There is GE contamination in almost everything. Even “non-GMO” food products almost always contain trace levels of GMOs (often between .01% and 0.5%). A test for the mere presence of GMOs is not considered conclusive. What’s important is thelevelof GMOs in a particular food item. Some of the “natural” items tested by the Cornucopia Institute showed GMO contamination levels between 28 and 100 %, which means the key ingredients in those cereals are most definitely genetically engineered from the source (and it’s not just a chance contamination from some other nearby field).

#2) All GMO tests are merely a “snapshot” that can change over time. Foods that test free of GMOs today may contain higher levels tomorrow due to supply line errors, contamination, supply source changes, and so on. At the same time, foods that test at high levels of GMOs today may test at lower levels in the future or even for different batches from the same manufacturer. Sometimes manufacturers are lied to by their suppliers. Some manufacturers test for GMOs in every batch, but others take a “don’t ask don’t tell” approach where they don’t test because they’d rather not know.

#3) Products may be “enrolled” in the Non-GMO Project and still contain GMOs before they are “verified.” The Non-GMO Project has two designations for products. There are products which are “enrolled” which means they are “on the path” to becoming free of GMOs but may not have achieved it yet. Thus, it is true that products “enrolled” in the

Todd Walton: My Father

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

When my father died five years ago, my siblings and I did not hold a memorial service in his honor. We were each of us so wounded by our father’s incessant criticism and disapproval of us that his death unleashed our long suppressed anger toward him, and being so angry we could not see our way to put on a show of loving memories. But now I wish to speak of his goodness and the gifts he gave me. I wish to propitiate his ghost, something my father would have scoffed at, and to communicate my gratitude for his presence in my life.

When my sisters and brother and I were little kids, my father told us the most wonderful bedtime stories, and sometimes we would be the characters in those stories, which was especially thrilling to me. Imagine being a character in a story! My father would just make up the stories without the help of a book, and my brother and sisters and I marveled that he could do that. I am certain that my fascination with stories and story telling began with listening to my father invent those magical stories for us.

My father taught me how to plant trees when I was six-years-old, and we planted many trees together over the years—fruit trees, redwoods, birches, and pines. He would show me where to dig the hole, and I would dig as big and deep a hole as I could. Then he would deepen and widen the hole considerably; and I would admire how strong he was and how easily the ground yielded to him. Then we would refill the hole halfway with a mixture of peat moss and compost and soil. I remember we stirred this mixture in the hole with our bare hands, and then we would place the baby tree atop this mixture and fill in the hole. With the leftover soil, we would construct a circular basin around the tree and I would fetch the hose to fill this basin with water

Angry Breakfast Eggs…

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From ELISSA ALTMAN
Poor Man’s Feast

She has never slept, for as long as I can remember.

First, there was the hair, which, when I was very small, was very tall; these were the days of teasing, and to keep her updo in place, she climbed into bed every night next to my father with three feet of toilet paper wrapped around her head, a six inch tail of Charmin hanging off the pillow, blowing in the air-conditioned breeze like a Coppertone banner dragged behind a beach plane. She lay there stiffly all night, immobile and exhausted, and sat up the next morning, her hair perfect.

Eventually, it was just plain pique that kept her awake — the constant working of herself into a lather over imaginary transgressions, while my father and I and the world around her, ever the transgressors, slept soundly. When the black and white numbers on her bedside clock flipped over to 6:30 a.m. and the alarm went off, she swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood up, already furious and seething.

And then she made eggs.

A lot of eggs.

At first, when things were still good and happy, they were soft boiled, and sat in the broad end of our porcelain egg cups, their tips sliced away so that my father and I — perched side by side at the breakfast counter half an hour before he dropped me off at the school bus stop on his way to the subway — could dunk untoasted fingers of Pepperidge Farm Diet White into the runny yolk. As my parents’ marriage wore on and she grew angrier, the eggs were medium boiled, their firm yolks like thick golden velvet, with spots of remaining tenderness just barely discernible.

When I turned fourteen, my mother began hard boiling our eggs; she’d put them in a small pot filled with a shallow inch or two of water,

OccupySF Storms Wells Fargo Shareholders Meeting…

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From OccupySF

On 24 April 2012, a broad coalition of clergy and labor groups joined with Occupy SF to cut short the Wells Fargo Bank annual shareholders meeting. While Wells executives illegally barred many shareholders from the meeting, several protesters made their way into the building’s lobby and helped block the way to the meeting.

Wells Fargo was forced to cut their meeting short and for the first time, took no questions.
~
Occupy, Unions, 99% Power Converge On GE Shareholders Meeting in Detroit

View from inside the GE shareholders meeting

Thousands of protesters have descended on the General Electric shareholders meeting in Detroit for the second day, including members of Occupy Detroit, unions, and activists from 99% Power, a new coalition of labor, immigrant, and community groups. On Tuesday, protestors successfully disrupted GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s speech to demand GE pay the over $26 billion in back taxes they owed. Today, as protesters massed outside, large numbers of shareholders sympathetic to Occupy chanted ¨pay your fair share¨ inside the meeting itself.  This upswing in action can mean only one thing: May Day is coming.
~~

How to Power an Entire Neighborhood with Solar Energy…

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From JOHN ROBB
Resilient Communities

How do you help a community transition from passive consumers of energy into active producers?

One way to accomplish this is to start a neighborhood solar co-op.

That’s just what the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Washington DC did. How did they do it?

• A neighborhood couple did the all of the work required to successfully install solar panels on their home. Naturally, they wanted to share the benefits of that research with the community.  So, they formed a co-op and rallied the neighborhood (signs, fliers, etc.)
• They then interacted with people in the neighborhood to understand what their objectives were and whether solar could help them. One good tip: they did a survey that got people to look at the kWh they use and think about potential savings.
• The group grew to 350 families, the installs began, and the group was able to lobby the local government for an increase in incentives.  The success of this group spawned solar co-ops in eight other neighborhoods across the DC area.

So, why is a co-op necessary?

It’s simple.  The biggest stumbling block to purchasing a solar system is navigating the government incentives that make it affordable.  Here’s an example from the Washington DC area (incentives are all over the map):

• A 3 kW solar panel system costs ~ $20,628 installed.
• The DC incentive is - $6,426
• The Federal Tax Credit is roughly - $6,188
• The final step is forward sell your renewable energy credits for five years - $5,552

Gene Logsdon: It Pays To Stay Home

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

One of the unsung advantages of being in love with a garden or a farm is that the lover doesn’t mind staying home and by doing so, saving gobs of money. In fact most of us land lovers much prefer to stay home. A back forty even as small as an acre can be an exciting, fascinating adventure into the farthest reaches of the earth. The great entomologist, Jean Henri Fabre, spent much of his life making amazing discoveries about bugs on the few brushy acres behind his house and writing about them. With 30 acres, I never want for a changing world to travel through, a journey not far in miles but almost infinite in terms of material wonders and splendors deep down into the earth and high up into the ever-changing beauty of the sky.

Staying home has to be one of the most unpopular ideas in America where the whole culture embraces faraway travel as essential to happiness. Many of us don’t really have homes that can provide as much enjoyment as travel promises. Rather than spending our money to acquire such a property, we are taught to buy such enjoyment with far away travel. Perhaps what we need is proper publicity. To advertise traveling at home, a documentary could open with unbelievable close-ups of ants herding and milking aphids on an apple tree, a raccoon destroying a bluebird house, a hawk dive-bombing a mouse, a flint arrowhead sticking out of a creek-side cliff. Then a roll of drums and a voice sonorously introduces the docudrama:  “Today we are going where no explorer has gone before— YOUR BACK FORTY.”

Also, in earlier times, a home could not electronically provide all the connections with the outer world that now make travel almost obsolete. You can visit just about everything now in your living room.

Wendell Berry: It All Turns On Affection

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From NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
Awards & Honors: 2012 Jefferson Lecturer

“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” [Margaret] said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)¹

One night in the winter of 1907, at what we have always called “the home place” in Henry County, Kentucky, my father, then six years old, sat with his older brother and listened as their parents spoke of the uses they would have for the money from their 1906 tobacco crop. The crop was to be sold at auction in Louisville on the next day. They would have been sitting in the light of a kerosene lamp, close to the stove, warming themselves before bedtime. They were not wealthy people. I believe that the debt on their farm was not fully paid, there would have been interest to pay, there would have been other debts. The depression of the 1890s would have left them burdened. Perhaps, after the income from the crop had paid their obligations, there would be some money that they could spend as they chose. At around two o’clock the next morning, my father was wakened by a horse’s shod hooves on the stones of the driveway. His father was leaving to catch the train to see the crop sold.

He came home that evening, as my father later would put it, “without a dime.” After the crop had paid its transportation to market and the commission on its sale, there was nothing left. Thus began my father’s lifelong advocacy, later my brother’s and my own, and now my daughter’s and my son’s, for small farmers and for land-conserving economies.

#

The economic hardship of my family and of many others, a century ago, was caused by

Toxic Cleaners Hall of Shame

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From ENVIRONMENTAL WORKING GROUP
Thanks to Ron Epstein

“Chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer.”
“Will burn skin and eyes.”
“Will penetrate skin and attack underlying tissues and bone.”
“Suspected of damaging the unborn child.”

You’d expect to see these warnings on a barrel of hazardous waste. In fact, they’re in the fine print of labels of everyday household cleaners or on their websites and obscure technical disclosures.

In a ground-breaking initiative to uncover the truth about toxic chemicals in common household products, the Environmental Working Group has unearthed compelling evidence that hundreds of cleaners, even some of those hyped as “green” or “natural,” can inflict serious harm on unwary users. Many present severe risks to children who may ingest or spill them or breathe their fumes.

Greenwashing

Cleaners labeled “safe,” “non-toxic” and “green” can contain hazardous ingredients. There should be a law against bogus claims, but there isn’t. Some companies are willing to bend the truth – because they can.

Simple Green Concentrated All-Purpose Cleaner

It’s labeled “non-toxic” and “biodegradable.” It contains:

• 2-butoxyethanol, a solvent absorbed through the skin that damages red blood cells and irritates eyes;
• A secret blend

Walmart goes down…

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From MECA WAWONA

To all of you that worked relentlessly on stopping the expansion — especially Steve, Pinky, Jeffrey, Alan, Mary Anne, Ron, Annie, Peter, Linda S, Linda G, Maria and many others of you — Thank You Thank You Thank You!

[And thanks to the community-supported Ukiah Planning Commission majority vote... and to the community-supported Ukiah City Council, whose obvious majority vote against Walmart if they appealed was the reason they didn't appeal. When small-town democracy works as it should, it's a beautiful thing to behold. -DS]

How do they dance on the air like that?
~

From UDJ

By 5 p.m. Monday, neither Walmart nor anyone else filed an appeal of the Ukiah Planning Commission’s denial of a proposed expansion for its store on Airport Park Boulevard. “We have decided not to appeal the Ukiah Planning Commission’s decision to deny the site plan application for expansion of our Ukiah Walmart store,” wrote spokeswoman Delia Garcia via e-mail…. On April 11, the commission voted 4 to 1 to deny a 47,621-square-foot expansion of the store. The members said they did not believe the larger store would bring in a significant enough amount of new revenue, such as increased sales tax dollars, to justify the increased traffic dangers as well as potential store closures, job losses and increased demand on the Ukiah Police Department…
~~

Joel Salatin responds to New York Times’ ‘Myth of Sustainable Meat’

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From JOEL SALATIN
Polyface Farms

The recent editorial by James McWilliams, titled “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book, and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

Let’s go point by point. First, that grass-grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed ones. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we’ll all perish. I assume he’s figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments.

As for his notion that it takes too much land to grass-finish, his figures of 10 acres per animal are assuming the current normal mismanagement of pastures.

Some Optimistic Visions of the World After the Oil Runs Out…

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From IO9
Excerpts.

[...] But what are the optimistic scenarios for a post-peak oil future? We went looking, and here’s what we found.

For starters, let’s get one thing out of the way. This article doesn’t include any science fiction stories where somebody discovers a miraculous new energy source (called Unobtanium, perhaps) that solves all our problems. That’s a huge genre, and a list of stories about a fictional energy source could be its own complete genre. We’re also not including any stories, like Star Trek or much of Doctor Who, in which the future is shown to be awesome but no mention is made of what happened after the oil ran out. (Plus on Star Trek, the near-term future is not awesome at all.)

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Fictional Stories:

Futurama:
In the episode “Bendin’ in the Wind,” it’s mentioned that all the petroleum reserves ran out by 2038. Says Leela, “Gas was an environmental disaster, anyway. Now we use alternative fuels. [Like] whale oil.” So Fry has to run his Volkswagen Bus on a can of whale oil instead…

Retrieved from the Future by John Seymour
This book is set in the early decades of the 21st century. Although the world’s oil supply is in decline, the final straw comes when a jihad destroys all the Middle Eastern oil wells. The story focuses on a community in the United Kingdom that refuses to stay shut up in their homes while waiting for the military to bring them food. They farm, develop a new political system, fight off the army, and create a feudal society. The main body of the book is the story of how the world got to the epilogue, which is where the real hope for the future seems to be. The main characters describe how everyone is better off than before

The Future Is Unknown, But We Know the Unsustainable Will Implode…

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From CHARLES HUGH SMITH
oftwominds

[Smith advocates a non-violent revolution... DS]

There are no apolitical “personal choice” acts; there are only profoundly political acts of resistance or complicity.

I don’t how the future will unfold, not just because I’m an idiot but because it’s unknowable. Though we cannot know the future, we do know two very important things: 1) that which is unsustainable will implode, and 2) the present Status Quo is unsustainable.

That ultimately leaves us with a single question: what are we going to do about it? In my view, it’s not important that we agree on solutions–agreement would in fact be a catastrophe, for dissent and decentralization are the essential characteristics of any sustainable “solution.” What is important is that we realize the future boils down to a simple choice: do we passively comply with the Status Quo feudalism or do we resist? In my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation I summarize this thusly: There are no apolitical “personal choice” acts; there are only profoundly political acts of resistance or complicity.

The roots of this line of thinking go back to 1969 when at the age of 16 I discovered Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? (print). This book inspired my goal of becoming a writer, and it’s easy to understand why: Sartre’s central argument is that among the arts only prose has the power to change our lives. Amazon.com reviewer Riccardo Pelizzo summarized this concept brilliantly: “The function of a committed writer is to reveal the world so that every reader loses her innocence and assumes all her responsibilities in front of it.”

These excerpts give you a flavor of What Is Literature?:

“The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick

Transition: Ted Trainer and the Simpler Way…

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From SAMUEL ALEXANDER
Simplicity Institute

1. Introduction

For several decades Ted Trainer has been developing and refining an important theory of societal change, which he calls The Simpler Way (Trainer, 1985; Trainer, 1995; Trainer, 2010a). His essential premise is that overconsumption in the most developed regions of the world is the root cause of our global predicament, and upon this premise he argues that a necessary part of any transition to a sustainable and just world involves those who are overconsuming accepting far more materially ‘simple’ lifestyles. That is the radical implication of our global predicament which most people, including most environmentalists, seem unwilling to acknowledge or accept, but which Trainer does not shy away from and, indeed, which he follows through to its logical conclusion.

The Simpler Way is not about deprivation or sacrifice, however; it is about embracing what is sufficient to live well and creating social and economic systems on that basis. This essay presents an overview of Trainer’s position, drawing mainly on the most complete expression of it in his latest book, The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World (Trainer, 2010a), an analysis which is supplemented by some of his more recent essays (Trainer, 2010b; Trainer, 2011).

My review is designed in part to bring more attention to a theorist whose work has been greatly underappreciated, so the review is more expository than critical. But in places my analysis seeks to raise questions about Trainer’s position, and develop it where possible, in the hope of advancing the debate and deepening our understanding of the important issues under consideration. I begin by outlining the various elements of The Simpler Way and proceed to unpack them in more detail.

2. Outline of The Simpler Way

The premise of Trainer’s position, as noted, is that a necessary part of any transition to a sustainable and just world involves those who are overconsuming accepting far more materially ‘simple’ lifestyles. Given the extent of ecological overshoot (Global Footprint Network, 2012), Trainer argues that there is no way to sufficiently decouple current economic activity from ecological impact in the time available, which necessitates moving away from high impact, Western-style consumer lifestyles without delay.

Norman Solomon: All we really have left is faith in the potential of democracy…

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From digby

Following up on David’s post… about the primaries, I thought I would ask you to watch this video by Norman Solomon, running for congress in California in the seat Lynn Woolsey vacated. If you want to know the theory that Blue America and other groups doing progressive electoral activism are working from, Norman spells it out better than anyone…

Glenn Greenwald had this to say about Norman:

The long-time anti-war activist, co-founder of the great media criticism group FAIR, and author of “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” – a critique of America’s decades of militarism and the role which its media plays in perpetuating it — is about as close to a perfect Congressional candidate as it gets. He’s written 11 other books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death”: the title speaks for itself. He’s running in the heavily Democratic California district being vacated by the retiring Rep. Lynn Woolsey. A newly released poll from an independent Democratic pollster shows him with a serious chance to win (there is an open primary in June, and the top two candidates, regardless of party affiliation, will then face each other in a November run-off).
In 2002 and 2003, Solomon led three trips to Iraq to try to avert the war (trips that included former and current members of Congress), and was one of the most widely featured media voices during that period opposing the attack on moral, legal and prudential grounds. Though he was an Obama delegate to the 2008 DNC convention, here’s what he told us about President Obama’s civil liberties record, including the Awlaki assassination and the President’s signing of the indefinite detention bill (NDAA):

The Koch Brothers are the Poster Boys for the 1%…

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From ROLLING STONE

If the Koch brothers didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them. They’re the plutocrats from central casting – oil-and-gas billionaires ready to buy any congressman, fund any lie, fight any law, bust any union, despoil any landscape, or shirk any (tax) burden to push their free-market religion and pump up their profits.

But no need to invent – Charles and David Koch are the real deal. Over the past 30-some years, they’ve poured more than 100 million dollars into a sprawling network of foundations, think tanks, front groups, advocacy organizations, lobbyists and GOP lawmakers, all to the glory of their hard-core libertarian agenda. They don’t oppose big government so much as government – taxes, environmental protections, safety-net programs, public education: the whole bit. (By all accounts, the Kochs are true believers; they really buy that road-to-serfdom stuff about the the holiness of free markets. Still, you can’t help but notice how neatly their philosophy lines up with their business interests.) They like to think of elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script,” and themselves as supplying “the themes and words for the scripts.“ Imagine Karl Rove’s strategic cunning, crossed with Ron Paul’s screw-the-poor ideology, and hooked up to Warren Buffett’s checking account, and you’re halfway there.

For years, the brothers shunned the spotlight. David Koch used to joke that the family business, the Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries – with annual profits estimated at $100 billion, it’s the second-biggest private firm in America – was “the largest company you’ve never heard of.” But when Barack Obama became president, the Kochs, like a lot of right-wingers, flipped out. They threw their weight behind a stealth campaign to turn back the president’s “socialist” agenda: They were early backers, some say puppet masters, of the Tea Party movement, and when the tea-infused GOP retook the House

Argentina Claims National Oil Sovereignty — Why Not The U.S.?

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Protestors in Buenos Aires’ sign: “We’re going for everything.”

[A nation's resources are part of the commons and the income from them should all go to the nation's citizens. U.S. oil should be nationalized, which would, among other things, help remove the Koch brothers and the other thieving, anti-democratic greedheads from buying off our political process. -DS]

[Kirchner] accused Repsol of provoking an energy crisis by exporting too much of Argentina’s oil and failing to invest locally even as it paid huge dividends abroad.

The business world is reacting with horror to news that Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has made a decision to take control of her nation’s oil resources, by taking a 51% controlling stake in the country’s largest oil company YPF. As she reasonably argues, these resources belong to the people of Argentina, and she defies the right of Spanish oil corporation Repsol to profit from the patrimony of her country.

This is another positive challenge to the neoliberal world order which we too often take for granted. YPF was a state-controlled company for 70 years, before Argentina was forced to sell it in the 1990s in order to pay off its foreign debts. Reclaiming it seems a natural part of the progression of the Latin American countries towards a new economic model that is neither capitalism nor communism but something new. While the new model will accept markets operating for the social benefit, it claims the need to exercise political control over key sectors, of which energy is surely the most significant.

From the perpsective of a bioregional economy, the desire that resources should belong to land, and that the people who live in that land should claim ownership of them seems natural. How else can people act in a responsible way towards their local environment? How else can we have a sense of economic, social and political justice?

The Argentinian move comes

Transition: Seed Swap Ukiah Farmers Market Today Saturday 4/21/12 9:30am

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Seed Swap in the Ozarks

Seed Swap 
Saturday 4/21/12
9:30am – Noon

Ukiah Farmers Market
Alex Thomas Plaza/School Street

Bring seeds in labeled envelopes
Vegetables, natives, flowers, herbs

Leave seeds at Mulligan Books beforehand
if you cannot attend…

Transition Ukiah Valley is part of an
international localization movement
to build community resilience

~

 
From CAROLE BRODSKY
Ukiah Daily Journal

Peggy Backup, Scott Miller and partner Trudy Morgan sit at the couple’s kitchen table, eating dried pears gleaned from a local orchard and sorting seeds into small, labeled paper envelopes.

The trio and other members of Transition Ukiah Valley are preparing for a seed exchange event taking place Saturday, April 21 at the Ukiah Farmers Market.

The Transition Ukiah Valley group began meeting in 2011. The group is part of a worldwide transition movement that started in the United Kingdom in 2005 to address issues they believe are impacting local communities as the effects of climate change, skyrocketing oil prices

Will Parrish: Albion! The History

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah

In the introduction to his 1965 book The Making of the English Working Class, English social historian E.P. Thompson described his motivation as being to rescue “from the enormous condescension of posterity” the “lower orders” of people in 18th and 19th century Britain who resisted the brutal emergence of industrial society. In this famous phrase, Thompson was referring to the patronizing treatment oppressed groups of people receive from propagandists for the ruling class, whose main goal in writing history is inevitably to trumpet the virtues of the present order.

A group of Northern California historians, some of whom once studied under Thompson at Warwick University in the UK, set out eight years ago to recover, for the benefit of posterity, a non-patronizing history of Northern California’s communal movements. The culmination of that effort, which originated with a series of conferences at UC Berkeley and on the Mendocino Coast in 2004, is an excellent new book titled West of Eden: Communes and Utopias in Northern California, published last month by Oakland-based PM Press.

“Condescension?” It would be hard to think of a category of people who are more universally treated with disdain than the communards of the ’60s and ’70s. According to the dominant view, thousands of rural “hippies” fled to the country, selfishly seeking refuge from the roiling social conflicts of the time, having little contact with the outside world from that point on. These rustic enclaves were quickly overrun by deadbeats, loafers, and crazies, who bathed only infrequently and commonly became perma-fried on account of too many bad acid trips. Or, at best, the communes were naïve, destined to be short-lived experiments

Todd Walton: Big Data

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.” Albert Einstein

A wintry April day—rain, cold, our two woodstoves hard at work translating matter into energy so we may carry on in comfort. Yesterday we celebrated the idea of spring, if not the reality, with the delivery of four cords of firewood from Frank’s Firewood of Boonville, so now several days of stacking wood are upon us. I am graduating from my seventh Mendocino winter, and Frank’s fantastic firewood has kept me snug and warm through every one of them. Thank you, Frank!

Yesterday also brought an email from a friend with the subject heading Data Plague, with a link to an article from the New York Times about Big Data, a hot topic in the world of computer science and technology. Big Data is the incomprehensibly large amount of raw data piling up from all electronic activities that leave digital traces, including scientific research and social media. For instance, every minute of every day some forty-eight hours of video are uploaded to YouTube: the equivalent of eight years of content each day.

According to the Big Data article, many people in government and academia and private industry are interested in mining this rapidly growing data universe, and President Obama has earmarked 200 million dollars for his Big Data Research and Development Initiative. And just last month the National Science Foundation awarded 10 million dollars to Berkeley’s A.M.P. Expedition, which stands for “algorithms machines people,” a team of U.C. Berkeley professors and graduate students working to advance Big Data analysis.

Gene Logsdon: Gardening In The Nude (or New Use For Rhubarb)

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer
[Repost]

One of the greatest mysteries of life for me is society’s ambivalence about the naked human body. People line up by the hundreds every day to get a look at Michelangelo’s anatomically-correct statue of David. But if a real live David were to stand naked beside that statue, the sex police would haul him away, even in Italy where nude statues are as common as pizza.

I once did a lot of “research” into the subject of outdoor nudity. Research for a writer means I “asked around.” What gives here, anyway?

You’d be amazed. Actually most of you would not be amazed because what I found out was that most people, given their druthers, would not wear clothes in their back yards or even front yards, if they could get away with it, at least not when the weather is nice. People I asked drew the line only at going beyond the home environment unclothed or where the environment inclined excessively to poison ivy and mosquitoes. One person put it this way: “If everyone took their clothes off while they mowed the lawn, in twenty minutes no one would take a second look. If the nude person was as ugly as I am, no one would take a first look.”

I have a hunch that there are plenty of backyard swimming pools whose waters reflect bare backsides more than they do swimsuits. For sure what passes for a swimsuit in many of them would make a typical thong look kind of klutzy. But people also expressed a yen, if they trusted that I was not going to name names, for gardening in the nude. In fact the practice has been sanctified into folk tradition, at least in the Ozarks. According to folklorist Vance Randolph, writing in the 1930s and 40s, the spring planting ritual in the hills involved a sort of celebratory session of love making

Top 10 Ways Walmart Fails on Sustainability…

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From INSTITUTE FOR LOCAL SELF-RELIANCE

What’s Missing From Walmart’s Global Responsibility Report

In response to Walmart’s release of its Global Responsibility Report, Food & Water Watch and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) have published the Top 10 Ways Walmart Fails on Sustainability. Since 2005, the country’s largest retailer has been making splashy announcements and issuing slick reports to highlight its environmental and social responsibility efforts. Food & Water Watch and ILSR contend that Walmart fails to live up to its promises and continues to ignore the fundamental problems with its business model that harm the environment, undermine healthy food choices, and exacerbate poverty.

“No amount of greenwash can conceal the fact that Walmart perpetuates an industrialized food system that diminishes our natural resources, causes excessive pollution, and forces smaller farmers and companies to get big or get out of business,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.

“Once again, Walmart is using sustainability as a marketing tool to improve its public image and propel its growth —  even as it continues to pave over critical habitat, increase its greenhouse gas emissions, and flood the market with shoddy products that go from factory to landfill in record time,” said Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher at ILSR.

Top 10 Ways Walmart Fails on Sustainability is based on ILSR’s report Walmart’s Greenwash: How the company’s much-publicized sustainability campaign falls short, while its relentless growth devastates the environment and Food & Water Watch’s report Why Walmart Can’t Fix the Food System.

Download Top 10 Ways Walmart Fails on Sustainability.

Katniss Everdeen: Local(ist) Hero

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From BACK PORCH REPUBLIC

On the Local Economy and The Hunger Games

The comments presented forthwith do not necessarily represent the opinions of the author, nor any reasonable human being. On the other hand, inspired by this meisterwerk (subtitle: “A Critique of Pure Treason”), this essay may be a product of a voice of some generation at some point whose collective tongue cannot be extracted from its collective cheek. The author also posts here with less silly (but still somewhat silly) thoughts.

The world of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games could be cited as the frightening result of Tocquevillian democratic despotism. The Capitol, bent only on rapid materialism and consumption, is lulled into abandoning their mores and is oblivious to questions of the morality of pitting 24 adolescents against each other in a fight to the death as long as they are entertained. Katniss and Peeta, the flawed heroes of our tale, are bent on bucking the system, refusing to be a “pawn in their Games” and eventually becoming the symbols of resistance for the impoverished Districts who have become artificially dependent on the Capitol’s kindness for their very existence. Besides their growing role as reluctant leaders in the resistance against the evil President Snow, Peeta and especially Katniss show fierce loyalty to their home, District 12. In this essay, I will examine how themes of localism pervade Collins’ kid lit series and the “total economy” of Panem is a means of destroying the local character of the Districts.

In the oft-cited Federalist No. 10, James Madison outlines the causes and discontents of faction in the newly forming union of the United States. A faction, Madison writes, is “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest

4 Things Grosser Than Pink Slime…

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From TOM PHILPOTT
Mother Jones

The specter of “pink slime”—pureed, defatted, and ammonia-laced slaughterhouse scraps—has caused quite the uproar over the past six weeks. (The latest: Propublica has a great explainer on pink slime and other filler products.) The current fixation on pink slime may well lead to the demise of the product; already, supermarket and fast-food chains and school cafeterias are opting to stop adding the stuff into their burger mixes. The company’s maker, Beef Products International, has had to temporarily shut down three of its four plants in response to collapsing demand, which doesn’t augur well for the company’s long-term health.

But I’m wondering if focusing on the ew-gross aspects of “lean, finely textured beef” (as the industry calls it) doesn’t miss the bigger picture, which is that the meat industry’s very business model is deeply gross. Even if pink slime is purged from the face of the earth, the system that produces our meat and related products (eggs, milk) won’t be fundamentally changed. A while back, I identified something about meat production that’s “even grosser than pink slime”—proposed new rules that would privatize inspection at poultry slaughterhouses while dramatically speeding up kill lines. Here are four more.

1. “Rodents on egg conveyor belts.” Want to see for yourself what it is like inside a teeming livestock confinements—or at least read an account from a journalist who’s been inside one? Good luck. The meat industry strictly protects its facilities from public view. That’s why animal-welfare groups have taken to sneaking camera-toting undercover agents into facilities posing as employees. Over and over again, what they record is horrific. The latest: An undercover Humane Society of the United States investigation found stomach-turning conditions at a facility run by Pennsylvania egg giant Kreider Farms. Here are some highlights:

Underground Chickens…

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From BEGINNING FARMERS

Find out where to get information about everything you need to know to raise chickens on a small to medium scale…

1) Raising chickens is becoming more and more popular with small farmers, urban farmers, homesteaders, others. Many people are realizing that the difference between pasture raised chicken meat and eggs, and those from large confinement operations is similar to the difference between fresh seasonal heirloom tomatoes, and those picked green, ripened with ethanol, and shipped across the country.

Chickens can also be beneficial in diversified farming operations by helping to control pests, providing an alternative, year-round source of income, and producing high-nitrogen manure for fertilizer.

Interest in raising chickens has grown quickly in the last few years, accompanied by a resurgent interest in heritage breeds, pastured poultry, and on-farm processing…

• Chickens 101 - offers basic information about raising chickens, starting with eggs, coop plans, chicken breeds, and more.

• Chicken Breeds List doesn’t just list breeds, as their name might suggest. They also provide great information and articles on chicken care, breeding, and much more.

• Raising Poultry – an information packed site that provides a broad range of information and resources regarding all aspects of raising poultry. A great place to start.

• The Country Chicken – is about the care and raising of backyard chickens. There is information about chicken coops, daily care, pictures of breeds, and an excellent links page.

• BackYardChickens.Com – is a terrific, comprehensive site focused on raising chickens on a small scale.

Green Smoothie Recipes – Top 5

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From THE BEST OF RAW FOOD

Try the best green smoothie recipe ever! I drink about two full blender jars of these drinks a day. They are healthy, easy and quick to make and absolutely delicious.

Each green smoothie recipe below is chuck full of healthy minerals (e.g. calcium and iron), vitamins, co-factors, life force, fiber. And very important, they are alkalizing. Green smoothies are critical for health.

To make these recipes, all you need are the ingredients and a blender. A high speed blender such as Vitamix or Blendtec is best because they break the cell wall. This way you absorb the nutrients easily. But if you’re just starting a raw vegetable diet, any other blender will do too. My first year on raw food, I just used a hand blender (Cuisine art, 700 Watt).

All recipes serve about 2-3 people and can be kept for up to 12 hours as long as you add enough water (great when traveling).

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Kale and Banana Smoothie

Ingredients

2 bananas
2 tablespoons hulled hemp seed
1 bag of frozen blue berries
2.5 cups pure water
1 teaspoon super foods of choice (optional)
5 leafs of kale

Directions

1. Put all ingredients in a high speed blender.
2. Add enough water so that all ingredients are covered.
3. Blend well.
4. You may want to add a little more water if you like your smoothie thinner.

This is a great way to add (wild edible greens) to your raw food diet. You won’t even notice it.

The Specter of Secularism: Lies and lunacy on the campaign trail…

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From READER SUPPORTED NEWS

We, the people, are united by our shared humanity and our common citizenship. We are divided by our divergent sectarian beliefs. In the past, these divisions led to oppression of those out of favor by those holding the positions of power. At times, persecution reached the point of cruelty and lethality. At other times, civil wars broke out as competing sets of true believers sought to gain or retain temporal power. Based on the sterling insight of what unites us and the shameful history of what divides us, the Founding and the Framing generation ordained and established a secular Republic.

Despite the contemporary rampant ignorance of people who should know better, secularism is not a religion; it is a philosophic perspective and a constitutional prescription. The Constitution of the United States neither enthrones nor endorses any variety of religious persuasion, any more than it anoints or approves any particular approach to economic activity.

While congregants of particular religious denominations have struggled since the start of the Republic to seize the reins of power, they have always done so without constitutional justification. America is neither a Christian nor a Capitalist nation. It is a Constitutional Republic in which all are free to follow their conscience in the practice of religion and to seek their fortune by all legal means. The only requirement consistent with the constitution is that each of us allows others the freedom to do the same.

Despite this historical background and continuing reality, Mitt Romney in his response to a question about the recent HHS contraceptive regulation requiring religiously affiliated organizations to provide coverage for all women employees, declared: “I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism.”

Rewilding Our Children

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From GEORGE MONBIOT
The Guardian

Hope for humanity lies in recognising their animal nature.

Three weeks old, warm and gently snoring on my shoulder as I write, you are closer to nature than you will ever be again. With your animal needs and animal cries, moved by a slow primordial spirit that will soon be submerged in the cacophony of thought and language, you belong, it seems to me, more to the biosphere than to the human sphere. Already it feels like years since I saw you, my second daughter, in the scan, your segmented skeleton revealed like an ancient beast uncovered by geologists, buried in the rock of ages. Already I have begun to entertain the hopes and fears to which every parent has succumbed, perhaps since the early hominids laid down the prints which show that the human spark had been struck.

Let me begin at the beginning, with the organisation to which you might owe your life. When I was born, almost 50 years ago, in the bitter winter of 1963, the National Health Service was just 15 years old. It must still have been hard for people to believe that – for the first time in the history of these islands – they could fall ill without risking financial ruin, that no one need die for want of funds. I see this system as the summit of civilisation, one of the wonders of the world.

Now it is so much a part of our lives that it is just as hard to believe that we might lose it. But I fear that, when you have reached my age, free, universal healthcare will be a distant fantasy, a mythologised arcadia as far removed from the experience of your children’s generation as the Blitz was from mine. One of the lessons you will learn, painfully and reluctantly, is that nothing of public value exists which has not been fought for.

David Sedaris on his reading habits…

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From NYT

David Sedaris

I was a judge for this year’s Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, so until very recently I was reading essays written by clever high school students. Now I’ve started Shalom Auslander’s “Hope: A Tragedy.” His last book, “Foreskin’s Lament,” really made me laugh.

When and where do you like to read?

Throughout my 20s and early 30s — my two-books-per-week years — I did most of my reading at the International House of Pancakes. I haven’t been to one in ages, but at the time, if you went at an off-peak hour, they’d give you a gallon-sized pot of coffee and let you sit there as long as you liked. Now, though, with everyone hollering into their cellphones, it’s much harder to read in public, so I tend to do it at home, most often while reclining.

What was the last truly great book you read?

I’ve read a lot of books that I loved recently. “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” by a woman named Barbara Demick, was a real eye-opener. In terms of “great,” as in “This person seems to have reinvented the English language,” I’d say Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” What an exciting story collection it is, unlike anything I’ve ever come across.

Do you consider yourself a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives. The worse off the subjects, the more inclined I am to read about them… Complete article here…
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OWS: A Pamphleteer’s Occupation…

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From GREG RUGGIERO
HuffPost

Who in their right mind would start a new small press at a time when the economy is so bad, e-books are rising, and book stores, libraries and perhaps the printed word itself are getting shoved down the same path as vinyl records and record stores?

Why bother to sink resources and turtle-pace time into producing, mailing, and shelving printed matter when we can now reach one another with speed and buzz, hummingbird-style?

Some people, like Rory O’Connor, use terms like “legacy media” to refer to old-school operations like newspapers. We have, indeed, entered an era where “friends and followers” are displacing corporations as producers of the news people give their attention to. But that does not displace printed matter as a whole. In fact, the Occupy movements are giving birth to a beautiful revival of print-based underground press activity. Tidal, a journal of Occupy theory, is one of a host of new Occupy-related print-based initiatives that is channeling the energy, ideas, art and aspirations that is making waves. The editors have two beautiful issues out to date, and give them away, thanks to donations of all types, including labor. I’ve seen people reading Tidal in the streets and in the courtroom. Just seeing it in people’s hands is uplifting to me. Print projects like Tidal, and there are many others, offer solidarity and intellectual self defense against corporate efforts to achieve cultural control.

Despite all the immediacy and connectivity offered by online communication, print still matters. Print is intimate. We can hold it in our hands, touch it, pass it to one another.

Transition: What is a carrot worth?

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From BEN JAMES
Town Farm in Northampton, Massachusetts
Excerpted from greenhorns – The Atlantic
Thanks to Janie Sheppard

Last week at market a customer complained about the price of our dill (two dollars for a not-huge bunch). He said the price was an outrage, but he was smiling, so I was too confused to ask why he was going ahead and buying the dill, or even how he’d arrived at his notion of its value.

This is not an unusual occurrence; every week at market we get at least one or two potential customers who shake their heads in dismay at a $2.75 head of lettuce or a $4.00 pint of strawberries. Sometimes I engage in conversation, sometimes I don’t. I try not to get defensive, and I frequently encourage a customer not to buy the product, offering suggestions of where to find cheaper food, either at the market or elsewhere. I do my best not to reveal that the value of our produce is a question that regularly fills me with a tremendous amount of anxiety.

What is a carrot worth? A bunch of kale? A handful of berries? Too often, I find myself on the tractor making quick calculations in my head. For a bed of carrots, there are the soil amendments, the cover crop last fall, the chicken manure, the organic fertilizer, the plowing, tilling, seeding, irrigating, thinning, weeding, harvesting, washing, bunching, packing, and selling. Plus the cost of the tractors, implements, and fuel. Plus the cost of childcare and preschool. Plus, somehow, all the time spent on the computer (where does that fit in)? And I haven’t even mentioned the cost of the land (hundreds of thousands of dollars, in our case). The sheer number of labor hours and material and property costs that went into helping this soil

Transition: Is your Home a Box or a Dynamo?

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From JOHN ROBB
Resilient Communities

I have to admit. I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking about my home in the traditional way.

What’s the traditional way of thinking about a home?  To see it as a box.

A very big box that holds a family’s things.  A box that can be decorated both inside and out.  A box that needs constant repair to maintain its box-hood.

If you really think about it.  A static, decorated box isn’t really a home.  It’s a mausoleum.  It adorns you and your family in your repose.

The new way of thinking about a home is as a dynamo:

A dynamic, living system that produces food, energy, water, and much more.  A system that helps you to actively respond to changes in the global economy and environment, particularly as they careen out of control.  A productive asset you actively participate in managing.  An asset that grows more valuable the worse the things get.

Here’s a question to think about.

Another Turn of the Crank…

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From WENDELL BERRY
Forward to Another Turn of the Crank (1995)

Field Observations: An interview with Wendell Berry

The essays in this book deal with a number of important issues that have now become obscured by poor politics, and they deal with other issues, equally important, that are now little noticed, and are perhaps not noticeable, by politicians;

The book is therefore vulnerable to some misconceptions that I would like to correct beforehand. Nothing that I have written here should be construed as an endorsement of either of our political parties as they presently function.

Republicans who read this book should beware either of approving it as “conservative” or of dismissing it as “liberal”. Democrats should beware of the opposite errors.

One reason for this is that I am an agrarian; I think that good farming is a high and difficult art, that it is indispensable, and that it cannot be accomplished except under certain conditions. Manifestly, good farming cannot be fostered or maintained under the rule of the presently dominant economic and cultural assumptions of our political parties.

Another reason is that I am a member, by choice, of a local community. I believe that healthy communities are indispensable, and I know that our communities are disintegrating under the influence of economic assumptions that are accepted without question by both our parties-despite their lip service to various non-economic “values.” The “conservatives” believe that an economy that favors its richest and most powerful participants will yet somehow serve the best interest of everybody. The “liberals” believe just as irrationally that a merely competitive economy, growing always larger in scale and controlled by fewer and fewer people, can be corrected by extending government charity

Battle for the Soul of Occupy…

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From ADBUSTERS

Alright you jammers, occupiers and Springtime dreamers,

First they silenced our uprising with a media blackout… then they smashed our encampments with midnight paramilitary raids… and now they’re threatening to neutralize our insurgency with an insidious campaign of donor money and co-optation. This counter-strategy worked to kill off the Tea Party’s outrage and turn it into a puppet of the Republican Party. Will the same happen with Occupy Wall Street? Will our insurgency turn into the Democrats’ Tea Party pet?

It’s up to you to decide if our movement goes the way of Paris ’68, the dust bin of could-have-been-insurrections, or something more daring, more inspiring, something not yet dreamed.

Will you allow Occupy to become a project of the old left, the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades? Will you allow MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry to put the brakes on our Spring Offensive and turn our struggle into a “99% Spring” reelection campaign for President Obama?

We are now in a battle for the soul of Occupy… a fight to the finish between the impotent old left and the new vibrant, horizontal left who launched Occupy Wall Street from the bottom-up and who dreams of real democracy and another world.

Whatever you do, don’t allow our revolutionary struggle to fizzle out into another lefty whine and clicktivist campaign like has happened so many times in the past. Let’s Occupy the clicktivists and crash the MoveOn party. Let’s #DEFENDOCCUPY and stop the derailment of our movement that looms ahead.
~~

Soil and Health Library…

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Soil And Health Library

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Health begins in the soil — Healing begins with hygiene — Liberty begins with freedom

[We have linked to this site from the beginning of Ukiah Blog and periodically draw attention to it for new readers. Much of this is wisdom that never grows old, though out of print and now in the public domain. There is often some stuff that science has since proven false, and some that is, yes we love it, "cranky"... but the truly useful shines through. Most recently, Linda Gray circulated this book link: http://curezone.com/upload/PDF/Arthur_F_Coca_MD_The_Pulse_Test_by.pdf, self care allergy testing for chronic health sufferers.

Linda writes: I’ve been telling anyone I know that has any type of chronic health issue about The Pulse Test because it looks to me that almost no one has ever heard of it and I think it may just drop off the face of the Earth otherwise. It’s less known now than it was almost forty years ago when I first read it. Back then I found it to be right on with my food allergies and Coca claimed that it can help some people with epilepsy, diabetes, irregular heart, depression, chronic bronchial infections, and many other chronic illnesses, besides just plain old allergies (in other words, according to him, many chronic illnesses are simply allergies). You don’t really have to read much more than the first couple of chapters to get the gist of it. It’s pretty simple." More on this in a few days... -DS]

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This website provides free e-books, mainly about holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living. There are secondary collections about social criticism and transformational psychology. No fees are collected for this service.

The library’s subject seemingly-diverse topic areas actually connect

Giving Up on Environmentalism…

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World

It’s been about 40 years since my first environmental activism, fighting against the Churchill River hydroelectric diversion in Northern Manitoba and the Mackenzie Valley Oil & Gas Pipelines through the pristine and fragile Canadian arctic to US markets.

We lost the Churchill River fight — in 1976 the so-called socialist provincial government flooded 850 square kilometres to divert 80% of the water from one huge river to another — because it was cheaper to dam one than two. All told, 2600 sq. km. were flooded, 25,000 First Nations people were either driven off their land or had their way of life irrevocably altered, and the ecosystems of the northern half of the province were desolated in ways we’re only now beginning to realize.

We stalled off development of the Mackenzie Valley pipelines then, but they are now being fast-tracked by the current corporate-owned ultra-conservative Canadian government in order to provide cheap energy to power the eco-holocaust called the Alberta Tar Sands. Big Oil wasn’t in much of a hurry back in the 1960s — they knew the value of the oil reserves they “owned” would only go up.

In the intervening 40 years, from the heady counter-culture days of the late 1960s, the human species has done more damage to this planet than we did in the previous 30,000 years, i.e. since the inception of human civilization, by almost every possible measure: loss of biodiversity on land, in the seas and in the air, loss of natural habitat capable of supporting any creature sustainably, pollution of land, air and sea, non-renewable resources extracted and non-biodegradable wastes produced. So much for the idealism of the boomer generation.

Todd Walton: He Touched Me

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.” Pearl S. Buck

Reading Bruce McEwen’s tragic Hug A Kid, Go To Jail, I thought, “My God, there but for the grace of luck and chance and (in my system of belief) the intervention of angels, I, too, might have been arrested for child molestation and been sent to prison and labeled a sex offender for the rest of my life—on several different occasions. What? How?

When I was in my late thirties and living in Sacramento, I played basketball every morning at a neighborhood park. Three days a week I met my friend Bob there for rousing games of one-on-one, and two days a week I shot around by myself. Along with the basketball court, the park featured a big lawn and a swing set and a public bathroom. So one morning I was shooting hoops and these two moms showed up, each with a cute kid in tow, and they wandered to the far end of the park and spread out a big blanket for playtime and snacking and reading and whatnot.

As I continued shooting hoops, one of the kids, a girl, skipped across the lawn to the restroom adjacent to the basketball court and entered the little cinderblock building on the side marked WOMEN. A moment later she let out a blood-curdling scream, and in the next moment I was on my way into the restroom to rescue her. But some unseen power grabbed hold of me, and a loud inner voice said, “Don’t go in there. Whatever you do, don’t go in there!”

The girl screamed again—bloody murder!—and I turned on my heels and sprinted across the lawn toward the moms, waving my arms and shouting, “Your little girl is screaming in the bathroom.”

Transition: Which train would you rather be on?…

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From ROB HOPKINS
Transition Culture

I am really pleased today to be able to share with you some of the key outputs from Transition Streets, which I have written about here before.  Let’s start, for people who are new to the concept, with this short video which beautifully captures how Transition Streets worked in Totnes:

Transition Streets has already been rolled out in places other than Totnes, but in a few weeks, a whole supported programme will be coming out whereby you will be able to run it in your community (I’ll let you know). You can see the first section of the Transition Streets workbook here to get a flavour of it. It is a great example of the tool from ‘The Transition Companion’ called ‘Street-by-street behaviour change’.

The main output from Transition Streets is the ‘Final project report’, which “shares information about the Transition Streets project, funded by the previous government’s Low Carbon Communities Challenge funded: how it worked, what it achieved, what was learnt and where we are heading next”.  You can find a summary of its findings here.  It is a very thorough round-up of the project.

However, the most fascinating to me is “Social Impacts of Transition Together (SITT): Investigating the social impacts, benefits and sustainability of the Transition Together/Transition Streets initiative in Totnes“, which goes into the more qualitative aspects of Transition Streets, what motivated people to get involved, what changes people made

Book Preview for April, May, and June 2012…

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From THE MILLIONS

April:

The Cove by Ron Rash: For the poet, novelist and short story writer Ron Rash, this could be the break-out novel that gives him the name recognition of such better-known Appalachian conjurers as Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell and Charles Frazier. The Cove, set in the North Carolina mountains during the First World War, is the story of Laurel Shelton and her war-damaged brother Hank, who live on land that the locals believe is cursed. Everything changes when Laurel comes upon a mysterious stranger in the woods, who she saves from a near-fatal accident. “Rash throws a big shadow now,” says Daniel Woodrell, “and it’s only going to get bigger and soon.” (Bill)

Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen: From Franzen, a collection of essays and speeches written primarily in the last five years. The title essay generated considerable attention when it appeared in The New Yorker in April. In it, Franzen told of his escape to a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific following the suicide of his friend David Foster Wallace. Two pieces in the collection—“On Autobiographic Fiction” and “Comma-Then”—have never been published before. Others focus on environmental devastation in China, bird poachers in Cyprus, and the way technology has changed the way people express intimate feelings to each other. (Kevin)

Immobility by Brian Evenson: Genre-bender Evenson (Fugue State, Contagion) returns with an inventive mystery centering around a brilliant detective wasting away from an incurable disease and, consequently, frozen in suspended animation for years. Thawed out by a mysterious man, he must solve an important case

Transition Town in Northern Ireland To Plant 60,000 Trees…

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From TREEHUGGER

Transition Towns have spread around the Globe as a community-lead response to peak oil and climate change. But many people still ask, what does a Transition Town actually do? My previous post on the incredible impact of just one Transition group gives us some idea, but here’s another practical, real world story of a community taking sustainability into its own hands. Transition Town Whitehead in Northern Ireland is going to be planting 60,000 trees in the coming weeks in an effort to reforest a region that is known as the least wooded spot in Europe.
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Indian Man Single-Handedly Plants an Entire Forest…

From TREEHUGGER

Way back in 1953, French author Jean Giono wrote the epic tale The Man Who Planted Trees. It seemed so real that readers thought the central character, Elzeard Bouffier , was a living individual until the author clarified he had created the person only to make his readers fall in love with trees. Assam’s Jadav Payeng has never heard of Giono’s book. But he could be Bouffier. He has single-handedly grown a sprawling forest on a 550-hectare sandbar in the middle of the Brahmaputra. It now has many endangered animals, including at least five tigers

The Top 40 Voted Best Books for Book Clubs…

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From LISTOPIA

1 The Help

2 Water for Elephants

3 The Kite Runner

4 The Time Traveler’s Wife

5  The Book Thief

6 To Kill a Mockingbird

7 A Thousand Splendid Suns

8 The Glass Castle

9 The Secret Life of Bees

10 The Hunger Games (#1)

11 My Sister’s Keeper

12 The Lovely Bones

Inside the Growing Prescription Pill Epidemic That’s Ravaging Communities…

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From ALTERNET

What started out as a situation in poor isolated areas of the country left to their own devices has taken root and spread, across Appalachia and beyond…

[...] As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps warning, prescription drug abuse is spreading. Pills, especially Xanax, the anti-anxiety drug manufactured by Pfizer, and Vicodin, Loracet and Lortabs, highly addictive opioid painkillers familiar to anyone who has had a wisdom tooth removed, are being abused more and more, all over. What started out as a situation in poor isolated areas of the country left to their own devices has taken root and spread, across Appalachia and beyond…

In Williamson, Mingo County’s big city, with 3,000 residents, a man arrested for robbing a house admitted to another robbery where he and a cohort stalked an 85-year-old man, busted into his house, beat him to the floor and stole $340 from his wallet. Police said the man admitted he used the money he stole from the elderly man to buy pills. The Williamson police chief advised residents to lock their doors and windows and be vigilant.

Shootings have become news briefs. On April 2, a 33-year-old Mingo County woman, an admitted pill addict, was sentenced to 40 years in prison for shooting her husband to death during an argument.

Too many pill stories have knocked the shock out of the populace. Southwest West Virginia in the age of pilling is like a country that has been living with war for so long, people could barely remember peace.

The Crisis in American Walking…

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From TOM VANDERBILT
Slate

[...] For walking is the ultimate “mobile app.” Here are just some of the benefits, physical, cognitive and otherwise, that it bestows: Walking six miles a week was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s (and I’m not just talking about walking in the “Walk to End Alzheimers”); walking can help improve your child’s academic performance; make you smarter; reduce depression; lower blood pressure; even raise one’s self-esteem.” And, most important, though perhaps least appreciated in the modern age, walking is the only travel mode that gets you from Point A to Point B on your own steam, with no additional equipment or fuel required, from the wobbly threshold of toddlerhood to the wobbly cusp of senility.

Despite these upsides, in an America enraptured by the cultural prosthesis that is the automobile, walking has become a lost mode, perceived as not a legitimate way to travel but a necessary adjunct to one’s car journey, a hobby, or something that people without cars—those pitiable “vulnerable road users,” as they are called with charitable condescension—do. To decry these facts—to examine, as I will in this series, how Americans might start walking more again— may seem like a hopelessly retrograde, romantic exercise: nostalgia for Thoreau’s woodland ambles. But the need is urgent. The decline of walking

Turn the lights out, I want to see the stars…

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TRANSITION CULTURE

Those of you who have seen ‘In Transition 2.0′ will have noticed the song that closes the film, ‘Turn the Lights Out’ by Rebecca Mayes, which was composed especially for the film.  The song will be released as a single on May 7th, and proceeds will go to Transition Network.  I’ll remind you of that nearer the time, but for now, here is the recently completed video, which features some of the clips you sent in of people turning lights out, and a short cameo from someone you might recognise…
~

Free FARMAGEDDON screening Tonight Wednesday 4/11/12 6:30pm @ Saturday Afternoon Club brought to you by the Mendocino Time Bank

This Event will be offered for free and asking for $ donation at the door. Alternatively a cooperator from the Mendocino Time Bank will be present with snacks and information regarding the Time Bank, how you can become a member and how the system works for you. Become a member and gain admission to the movie for your first Time Bank transaction, no US dollars involved.

The movie will begin after a 20 minute presentation regarding the state of agriculture and your community.

Visit http://farmageddonmovie.com/ for a trailer for the film

Farmageddon highlights the urgency of food freedom, encouraging farmers and consumers alike to take action to preserve individuals’ rights to access food of their choice and farmers’ rights to produce these foods safely and free from unreasonably burdensome regulations. The film serves to put policymakers

GMO/Monsanto Do Not Buy List…

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From OCCUPYFOOD

[Because of our outstanding Food Co-ops, Collectives, Responsible Markets, Local Farmers, Farmers Markets, and CSA's... and all the locals working on garden and food projects, I haven't knowingly purchased any of these products from any of these companies in many years. Are we lucky to be living here in Mendocino County or what? -DS]

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Gina Covina: On-Farm Seed Variety Trials…

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From GINA COVINA
Laughing Frog Farm
Laytonville

This year we’re progressing from “trying out new varieties” to “conducting variety trials” – same thing but with more attention to making growing conditions the same for each variety and keeping track of results. Since neither Lin nor I have the slightest tendency or training toward scientific rigor, we’re looking to the Organic Seed Alliance’s excellent booklet, On-Farm Variety Trials: A Guide for Organic Vegetable, Herb and Flower Producers (download here) for inspiration and instruction.

Here’s the gist: Plant in a location that will provide the most consistent conditions possible – not shady at one end, or different soil types. You want the differences that show up to reflect genetic variations rather than cultural ones. Include one variety you’re familiar with and have already grown. That way if the summer is cold and not one of your tomato varieties ripens until September, not even your old favorite that usually ripens by early August, you’ll know to blame the weather, not the new varieties.

Set up your trial bed with more than one block of each variety, arranging their order so each variety has a chance at an end and middle position to further rule out environmental variables. Plant the entire bed at one go, and care for it the same way – weed the whole bed at once, water every part equally, etc.

Make a list of traits

Crowdfunding Open Source Permaculture…

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From PATRICIA LARENAS
Shareable

“What are the solutions and how can I help?”

Putting open source and permaculture together is a savvy combination, and in this case, it’s also really useful. Add crowdsourcing and you have a complete online resource for all things permaculture.

Sophia Novack, a self-described permaculture geek, is currently leading a crowdfunding campaign to support the creation of Open Source Permaculture, an online resource and tool, which consists of a Q&A website and wiki, as well as a free Urban Permaculture Guide eBook.

Her vision is to create a comprehensive online public resource for anyone seeking information on sustainability for their home or community. The web site would have all the resources and support they need, just a click away.

As Novack wrote in an e-mail, she “believes that local, community-oriented solutions are crucial to creating a more sustainable, resilient culture.”

She has already been working on this project for two years by maintaining the Permaculture Media Blog  and Permaculture Directory, which she describes as one of the web’s most comprehensive and free resources for Permaculture educational materials

Ron Epstein: The Destructive Harris Quarry Asphalt Plant Should Not Be Approved — Will Pollute And Cause Cancer In Ukiah…

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Coming our way soon?

From RON EPSTEIN
Ukiah

Here are four questions the Board of Supervisors should be clear about before they make a decision on the Harris Quarry Expansion Project Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR): 1) Is this asphalt plant project needed? 2) Is it in the right location and why is it tied to a general rezoning change? 3) Is it safe? 4) Is it good for business and for our community?

Yes, we need asphalt, but no one has shown that the needs correspond to the large amount projected to be produced by this plant. No one knows when the Willits bypass is going to be built, and even the asphalt for that will be a temporary need. Given the current economic situation of the county, it is doubtful that we are going to be able to afford huge amounts of asphalt for city and county roads. Asphalt cannot be easily transported long distances, so this cannot become an export business to locations out of the county. Despite the assurances of the FEIR, asphalt plants are extremely toxic and polluting. They do not belong in areas surrounded by a lot of people. Clearly the Harris Quarry is not the right location, as has been shown by the large number of neighbors who have formally objected to the project. Although there are not unlimited sites in the county that are appropriate

Redwoods and Climate Change — Montgomery Woods Mendocino…

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From KQED

As the planet warms, will the progressive loss of coastal fog, which has declined over 30%, doom these beauties? KQED follows a team of UC Berekely researchers as they climb up into the crown of a huge old-growth redwood in Montgomery Woods to install monitoring equipment.
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From SAVE THE REDWOODS LEAGUE

Recent advances enable Save the Redwoods League and a team of pioneering scientists to unlock the record of environmental changes stored in redwood tree rings. From individual trees to whole forests, we will study redwood growth, vulnerabilities, early indicators of stress and how these trees might respond to predicted climate changes.

Save the Redwoods League has united leading scientists Stephen C. Sillett and Robert Van Pelt of Humboldt State University and Todd Dawson and Anthony Ambrose of the University of California, Berkeley, to launch the Initiative. Their studies will yield results that quantify redwoods’ vulnerabilities to climatic changes and their capacities to mitigate these changes via photosynthesis, fog interception, wood production and carbon sequestration. They are uniquely qualified, in part, because they have developed many of the methods to obtain the study’s data.

The scientists are:

• studying whole-tree and whole-forest rates of annual wood production back 1,000 years in forest plots throughout the redwood ranges. These measurements will help the team predict tree and forest growth in response to changing climates
• reconstructing past climates to learn how redwoods responded to environmental conditions

Creating Community: Lessons from Occupy…

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From SHEPHERD BLISS
Transition Voice

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began using public space in New York’s Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17, 2011, prompting hundreds of similar encampments around the world. During the past six months, this mass movement has been assaulted by police and by the corporate media. It has also experienced internal conflicts.

While planning an explosion of spring awakenings, OWS has dealt with various interpersonal problems. This happens in large movements, especially young ones. Occupy attempts to forge new, more directly democratic ways of people being with each other and collaborative decision-making that is egalitarian rather than hierarchical.  It seeks systemic changes, rather than demanding mere reforms.

Occupy goes against the grain of hyper-individualist Western culture. As one activist said,

Imagine the interpersonal strain in any group that is under constant siege by the press and the police, as well as time-consuming meetings that can go on for hours.

It took the peace movement more than a full decade to stop the Vietnam War. Occupy’s goals are even larger. It has already accomplished much, including changing the national conversation and building communities for a long-term struggle.

Ending the autocratic rule of the wealthy 1 %’s control of corporations, the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court had seemed impossible until the rise of Occupy. OWS imagined that it could help mobilize the 99% and then got busy doing it. Did anyone think this would be easy?

Infighting has discouraged some activists, who have either stepped back or left Occupy, at least for now.

The Top Short-Term Threat to Humanity: The Fuel Pools of Fukushima…

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From WashingtonsBlog

We noted days after the Japanese earthquake that the biggest threat was from the spent fuel rods in the fuel pool at Fukushima unit number 4, and not from the reactors themselves. See this and this.

We noted in February:

Scientists say that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hitting Fukushima this year, and a 98% chance within the next 3 years.

Given that nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that an earthquake of 7.0 or larger could cause the entire fuel pool structure collapse, it is urgent that everything humanly possible is done to stabilize the structure housing the fuel pools at reactor number 4.

Tepco is doing some construction at the building … it is a race against time under very difficult circumstances, and hopefully Tepco will win.

As AP points out:

The structural integrity of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building has long been a major concern among experts because a collapse of its spent fuel cooling pool could cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns.

***

Gundersen (who used to build spent fuel pools) explains that there is no protection surrounding the radioactive fuel in the pools. He warns that – if the fuel pools at reactor 4 collapse due to an earthquake – people should get out of Japan, and residents of the West Coast of America and Canada should shut all of their windows and stay inside for a while.

The Whole Pig: Meat harvesting on a small farm…

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Local Young Farmers New Book Signing Today Saturday in Ukiah at Co-op Annual Meeting 2pm…

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Co-op Owners Invited to the
Ukiah Natural Foods Annual Meeting

First Screening of Greenhorns…
a documentary exploring the lives
of America’s young farmers
and their vision for the future…

~Greenhorns Book Signing & Sales~
Co-Editor Paula Manalo
Mendocino Organics CSA
at Mulligan Books Table

~Live Music and Food~
Co-op Board Election Results

Bartlett Hall
Ukiah Senior Center
2 – 5 pm
499 Leslie Street
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Book Excerpt…

Book Review: Farmers of Forty Centuries…

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From STUART BRAMHALL
The Most Revolutionary Act

I don’t typically review (or read) 100 year old books. Farmers of Forty Centuries is an important exception. It has become a classic of the permaculture/sustainable economics movement for several reasons. First, it dispels the myth that fossil fuel-free agriculture will produce much lower yields than industrial farming. Without access to oil and natural-gas based pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, agriculture will be much more labor-intensive. However with global population at more than seven billion (as of last October), the world seems to have no shortage of human labor. Second, Farmers of Forty Centuries paints a detailed picture of tried and true regional models of food, fuel, and construction materials production, as well as regional water and human waste management. Third, it provides detailed descriptions, almost in cookbook fashion, of a broad range of permaculture and terraquaculture* techniques. As a backyard organic gardener and member of the lawn liberation movement, I have found it really easy to incorporate a number of the techniques King describes into my routine. I was also intrigued to see Charles Eisenstein cite King’s book in Sacred Economics (2011 Evolver Editions), supporting his argument that more intensive production techniques could easily produce the same or better yields as current factory farms.

Briefly, Farmers of Forty Centuries describes the voyage agronomist and former US Department of Agriculture official Franklin Hiram King made to to China, Korea and Japan in the early 1900s. The purpose of his trip was to study how the extremely dense populations of the Far East could produce massive amounts of food century after century without depleting their soils. What he discovered was a highly sophisticated system

Todd Walton: Stuff

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” Henry David Thoreau

The calendar says it is springtime, but the temperature and relentless rain say winter continues apace, this being the second year in a row that a very wet March will save Mendocino and Northern California from terrible drought. Yes, we are starved for sunlight and the woodpile is shrinking at an alarming rate, but the ongoing deluge bodes well for salmon and redwoods and huckleberries and forest frogs, so we shall not complain.

On Sunday we attended a gathering at the home of a recently deceased friend of Marcia’s, his children and grandchildren and ex-wives and friends filling his moldy old house and spilling outside to honor his memory. I was impressed by his large collection of paperback books from the 1950’s and 60’s, many of them stuck to various shelves and to each other with the mysterious glue of time. When I pulled on a volume of Kazantzakis, the book broke into several pieces, ditto a Kerouac tome, so thereafter I contented myself with reading the spines and forming an impression of the person from the books he read.

But I was most impressed by the dust that coated everything in the house and gathered in drifts in corners and indentations—dust as a measure of many years passing wherein the man left large parts of his life untouched. And I have been thinking about this dust ever since and seeing it on the surfaces of things at our house, particularly on books we will almost surely never look at again.

So on Tuesday, housebound by the pouring rain, I emerged

How To: Cast Iron Skillet Non-Stick and Lasts a Lifetime…

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From richsoil.com

Cast iron cookware in a nutshell:

1) use a good cast iron skillet with a glassy-smooth cooking surface (Griswold or Wagner). The new cast iron with the rough cooking surface is gonna be frustrating (Lodge Logic).

2) keep it dry!

Using water short term (minutes, not hours) has its uses. When the time comes to put the cast iron cookware away, give it a few seconds on a hot stove, just to make sure all the water is out.

3) use a little oil or grease

4) a little smoke is a good thing

5) too much heat on an empty cast iron skillet can ruin the surface or even crack the skillet

6) clean cast iron immediately after each use leaving a very thin layer of oil/grease

7) avoid soap!

There is a myth about how you should never use soap on cast iron. Details on that below. The reality is that you can use soap on cast iron, but it is better if you didn’t.

8) use a stainless steel spatula with a perfectly flat edge and rounded corners.

9) seasoning cast iron is nice, but you probably don’t need to worry about it.

Cast iron cookware details…

A lovely homage to a cast iron skillet:

Do you have a black iron skillet? You are a southern mountain girl, I can’t imagine you would not. Put it on the kitchen table. Turn on the overhead lights.

Frugal Early Retirement…

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From RAN PRIEUR
ranprieur.com

This is not a true list of frequently asked questions, but an explanation of the way I live in question and answer format. Back in 2004 I wrote How to Drop Out, which has since become very popular, but the way I live now is better described as frugal early retirement. Here’s another list of early retirement frequently asked questions at the Early Retirement Extreme blog.

How did you get your money?

A way that’s not available to most people. This page is not about how anyone can retire early. You need some luck. But there are people much luckier than me who have not retired yet, and people almost as lucky who could retire with a few more years of work, and even unlucky people might like to know how I live so cheaply. If you add up all the money I’ve received in my life, from all sources, it’s less than the median American male of my age. The difference is that I’ve spent less.

What are some things you did in the past to spend less?

For most of the 1990′s I didn’t own a car, and there were probably some years when I bought two CD’s and had one restaurant meal. In the late 90′s I briefly owned a car and spent a few months driving around the country living in it. Once I lived a tiny detached room from which I had to walk through a parking lot to get to the rest of the house, which I shared with a bully, a psychopath, and a guy who never left his room. Another time I shared a one-bedroom low-income apartment

Buttermilk Biscuits and Tomato Gravy [Organic Version]…

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From Jack’s Skillet

[My all-time favorite cookbook for the writing, not just for the recipes. Met the author years ago at a bookstore in Santa Fe. Make all ingredients from local, organic farmers when possible and use fresh tomatoes for the most wholesome meal - DS]

FIRST get your biscuits in the oven. You can make the gravy while they rise, and it will be hot and ready when they are. Biscuits are easy. Just remember the two-to-one rules:

You can make perfect, wonderful biscuits nearly every time if you remember three sets of two-to-one rations. Here they are:

Use 2 For every 1

Teaspoons of baking powder……. Cup of flour
Tablespoons of shortening……….. Cup of flour
Cups of flour……………………………. Cup of liquid

Biscuits are easy. Just remember the two-to-one rules:

You can make perfect, wonderful biscuits nearly every time if you remember three sets of two-to-one rations. Here they are:

Use 2 For every 1

Teaspoons of baking powder……. Cup of flour
Tablespoons of shortening……….. Cup of flour
Cups of flour……………………………. Cup of liquid

Two cups of flour will make six to nine fairly large biscuits, so let’s assume those are the proportions you’re working with. For that amount of flour, according to the rules, you’ll need four teaspoons baking powder. You’ll also need a pinch of salt and a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, not powder–really, that’s all, a quarter teaspoon.

Mendocino Organics CSA Signups…

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2012 Vegetable CSA

Mendocino Organics is pleased to offer a spring-summer vegetable CSA in 2012. Sign up to receive weekly shares of local organic produce from mid-May through October. Enjoy healthy, flavorful food and support local sustainable agriculture! (Guess what? We just added Ft. Bragg/Mendocino as a distribution option!)

Invest in your local farms – sustain a vibrant community!

For all the details and a Participation Agreement, please download: 2012 CSA

For just the agreement form, please download: 2012 Vegetable CSA Participation Agreement

To sign up online and pay with debit/credit card in full, please go to: http://mendoorganics.csasignup.com/

Details

The Vegetable CSA is for 22 weeks, from mid-May through October. A share costs $400.00. Sharing shares is allowed as is payment in installments. Farm events include a Garlic Party in July and a Potato Harvest Party in August!

Vegetables

Gene Logsdon: Nature’s Promises Kept Again

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From GENE LOGSDON

Every year in the brown, sere days before the great greening in spring, I begin to have doubts. Will the flowers come again?  Will the birds return? Will the trees leaf out? With all the despair and calamity rife in the world, the ancient fear that the end is near is as believable as ever.

Perhaps global warming will burn us up.

Oh no, it’s global cooling on the way. Watch out for glaciers.

No, no. The real fear is bombs and chemicals.

Not to worry. Disease outbreaks will get us before that.

Going into March I am gripped by a madness that has nothing to do with basketball. I am torn between despair over a political process descending into lunacy and an economic process that guarantees only an ever-growing poverty class.  I am glad I do not know how to tie a rope into a noose.

Then I look out the window one morning and see the great miracle. Snowdrops are blooming by the house wall. I blink my eyes and shake my head. They are still there. In a few more days they are joined by winter aconites, merry yellow jewels against the melting snow. Slowly but surely all the spring wildflowers return— actually this unusually warm spring, they came fast and furiously— and I feel that great uprising of joy and hope once again.

Live Power Community Farm CSA Signups…

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Member Sign Up For 2012

Okay here we go!
We are using Small Farm Central again for membership sign ups this year. Please let me know how it works for you and if you have any questions or concerns.

Returning Members

As a returning member, please look for the returning member link at the top of the page in green. Click the link and then you will need to know the email address you used last year for sign up. If you do not have the same email address, you can go back to the beginning and just sign up as a new member.

If you shared with someone last year, and will be getting your own share or sharing with someone else this year, be sure to change the information as you go along in the sign up accordingly otherwise it will not let you continue.

Here Is The Link To Sign Up

Please go to this link and follow the directions on the site. Please be sure to check a box in each section to be allowed to go to the next section.

http://livepowercommunityfarm.csasignup.com

Please be sure to include all family members’ names and phone numbers as well as share partners

Best of Joe Bageant: Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball…

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From KEN SMITH
SmirkingChimp.com

[Joe's website still alive here. -DS]

This is the introduction to Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant. It includes 25 of Joe’s essays published online from 2004 through 2010.

 “I’m so damn average that what I write resonates with people”, Joe Bageant once told an interviewer in explaining how he had gained a global following for his essays published on the web. In 2004, at the age of 58, Joe sensed that the Internet could give him editorial freedom. Without gatekeepers, he began writing about what he was really thinking, and then submitted his essays to left-of-center websites.

Joe Bageant died in March 2011, having written two books, and 78 essays that were posted on his own website and also on many other sites. The 25 essays reproduced in this book were first published on the web. I’ve selected them based on many emails from readers, web traffic counts, and specific suggestions from his online colleagues. They appear here as Joe wrote them, apart from copyediting and light corrections agreed to between me and his book editor, Henry Rosenbloom, the publisher at Australia’s Scribe Publications.

Joe began writing for various publications in his twenties. He once told me how happy and proud he was when he sold his first article to the Colorado Daily, unashamedly recalling how he got tears in his eyes as he looked at a check for $5. It was only five dollars, but it was proof that he had become a professional writer. Joe freelanced articles for a dozen years

Transition: The ultimate grass-roots experiment on the streets where we live…

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From THE AUTOMATIC EARTH

[Very inspiring... -DS]

Sustainability isn’t based merely on practical initiatives. It begins with community, in other words social capital and relationships of trust. During our stay on Hulbert Street we participated in a movie night and a pizza night, neither of which sound like they have anything to do with sustainability.

Movie night involves people from the street bringing a cushion and a picnic to the end of the cul-de-sac and sharing dinner together before watching a film. When we were there it was The Power of Community. Pizza night involves everyone bringing pizza fixings to the house with the largest veranda, then cooking and eating together using the communal pizza-oven-on-wheels. Lively discussions naturally follow.

Bringing people together like this allows ideas to spread and a common vision to develop. Before you know it there is food growing in peoples’ front gardens and on the road verges, and people are thinking about solar panels or rain-water catchment systems. People with a common vision don’t complain about the fruit trees on the verge, the guerilla garden or the bike shed on the road (the same size as a van and with a licence plate to indicate vehicle parking).

We’re very much hoping to attend this year’s festival in September, where thousands of people come to a small suburban street to enjoy the themselves while learning about how to gain and maintain local control over the essentials of our own existence. Communal buy-in is an essential part of the model, and understanding people is the means to achieving that.
~~

Promises Broken, Promises Kept…

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From THEO ANDERSON
In These Times

President Obama has fulfilled many campaign promises. But that’s cold comfort to progressives…

Many of candidate Obama’s promises have to do with issues that are important to progressives. By that measure, his record in office is less inspiring.

The path to the presidency is a long and hard grind, and a candidate makes a lot of promises along the way. Many are throwaway lines that have little chance of ever becoming policy. Everyone knows it, and hardly anybody cares. Not long after launching his presidential bid in 2007, for example, Barack Obama promised that, as president, he would deliver an annual “State of the World” speech, laying out his foreign-policy agenda. Obama has never given the speech. Few people have noticed.

But then there are promises like the one he made about closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center—promises that become central themes of the campaign. They’re repeated often enough, and they involve such a critical issue, that keeping or breaking them can partially define a presidency. And that’s the case with Guantanamo, which remains in operation.  Having failed to distinguish himself from George W. Bush on this issue, it’s as if Obama resigned himself to embracing many of Bush’s draconian policies regarding the “war on terror” and civil liberties.

How has Obama done in keeping the rest of his promises?

His record is fairly impressive overall. The website PolitiFact tracks the promises made by politicians and assigns them one of five labels: promise kept, promise broken, compromise, stalled, and

Austerity is a disaster for Europeans…

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From MATTHEW O’BRIEN
The Atlantic

Euro zone unemployment just hit a 15-year high. German unemployment just hit a 15-year low. What can those of us across the Atlantic glean from this seemingly bipolar state of affairs? That austerity, every economic conservative’s favorite prescription for an ailing economy — the medicine Republicans here in the United States are pushing hard — is an utter disaster.

A few euro zone members, including Germany and the Netherlands, are enjoying a relative jobs boom. And yet, Europe’s overall unemployment rate is 10.8 percent. How is this possible? Because of  depression-level unemployment in Europe’s austerity-plagued periphery. The chart below compares unemployment among the euro zone’s 17 members (courtesy of Eurostat).

This should put to rest the notion of “expansionary austerity” — that is, that budget cuts can spur growth by giving businesses increased confidence. It has been an epic, epic failure with interest rates at zero. The more a country has cut, the more unemployment it has. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland have all had markets (and Germany) force them to radically reduce deficits amidst already deep slumps.

OWS: Occupy San Francisco Creates Social Center in Vacant Church Building…

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From OCCUPY WALL STREET

Monday 4/2/12 – In another sign of the Occupy movement’s diversifying tactics and growing spring momentum, yesterday Occupy San Francisco liberated a vacant building owned by the Archdiocese of San Francisco and announced plans to establish a permanent occupation — including a social center, shelter, and food bank — on the site. The April 1st action began with a lively march from Union Square before arriving at the building just before 6pm. When they arrived, Occupiers who had already secured the building greeted the marchers with open doors.

The two-story building, located at 888 Turk St., soon filled with hundreds of exuberant Occupiers. Preliminary reports indicate that the Archdiocese has asked police not to take any action until the morning. However, the Occupiers are requesting help and numbers in case of any eviction attempt. If you are in the Bay Area and are able, please get down to the San Francisco Commune as soon as possible! Most recently (as of 1am Pacific time), police had surrounded the building with barricades to prevent supplies from getting inside. Occupiers have announced they will serve breakfast at 9am and are inviting everyone to join them!

Local media described the action as a ¨well-organized takeover.¨ Speaking to local press, a representative

The Constitution Explicitly Denies the Supreme Court the Power to Overturn Laws Based on the Constitution. They do it anyway….

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From THOM HARTMANN
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How American Corporations Transformed from Producers to Predators

From ALTERNET

Over the last 30 years, corporations have turned on the 99 percent. Here’s how it happened and how to fight back.

In 2010, the top 500 U.S. corporations – the Fortune 500 – generated $10.7 trillion in sales, reaped a whopping $702 billion in profits, and employed 24.9 million people around the globe. Historically, when these corporations have invested in the productive capabilities of their American employees, we’ve had lots of well-paid and stable jobs.

That was the case a half century ago.

Unfortunately, it’s not the case today. For the past three decades, top executives have been rewarding themselves with mega-million dollar compensation packages while American workers

It’s happened before: Greed-bags profiting from U.S. dysfunction…

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From DOUGLAS C SMYTH
Writing For Godot

We have a nearly dysfunctional political system and conservatives like it that way.

Dick Durban, the Senate Assistant Majority Leader, recently described how he and his colleagues–virtually all Senators and Congress-people–have to go across the street from the Capitol to a bare-bones call center, and spend hours calling for campaign contributions at least several times a week. He described it as his “other job,” fundraising.

Now, we have “Super-pacs” and non-profit affiliates collecting many millions of dollars from less than a few hundred multi-millionaires, billionaires and corporations. They are hoping to buy the election of the President, the Senate, the House, and the states. This year billions of dollars may be in play.

There was another period in the US, when the very wealthy virtually owned our government: until the 1901 accession of Teddy Roosevelt to the Presidency. TR’s Presidency was a mistake. New York’s Republican leadership saw Governor Roosevelt

Dave Smith: Cesar Chavez and Me…

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
Excerpted from To Be Of Use -
The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work (2005)

“When we are really honest with ourselves,” Cesar Chavez once said, “we must admit our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines the kind of men we are. … Our cause goes on in hundreds of distant places. It multiplies among thousands and then millions of caring people who heed through a multitude of simple deeds the commandment set out in the book of the Prophet Micah, in the Old Testament: ‘What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.’”

While my [Fundalmentalist preacher] dad was building a church, Cesar Chavez was building a union. My dad believed that by winning others to his belief system, he was building himself a mansion in heaven on a street paved with gold. Cesar was living and organizing for a better life for farmworkers in a San Jose barrio called Sal Si Puedes, which means “Escape If You Can.”

What I loved most about the farmworkers’ movement when Cesar asked me to join in 1968 was our complete and utter absorption in the cause. The work consumed our everyday lives 24/7, and it had real meaning. I had gone from work that was, for me

Will Parrish: ‘Full Court Press’ Or War On Immigrants?

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Ramiro Hernandez Farias

From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

From behind the glass partition in Yuba County Jail’s basement visiting room, Ramiro Hernandez Farias speaks matter-of-factly about the incredible ordeal to which he has been subjected by both Mexican drug cartel paramilitaries and the Mendocino County branch of the US drug war.

Farias, 28, has never been charged with a crime. Yet, for more than six months, he has been confined within a prison cage in the small, economically depressed town of Marysville, on the northern end of California’s Central Valley. He finally departs on February 14th, only to attend a hearing in San Francisco where an immigration judge will determine if he is allowed to remain in the United States – or whether he must return to his native Mexico. If he’s sent back, he will likely be tortured and killed by one of the country’s most violent drug cartels, La Familia Michoacán.

While reciting the events that have led to his harrowing predicament, Farias’ otherwise calm and measured voice becomes tinged with sadness, perhaps also some resignation, as he discusses the fate of his wife, Flor, and their six-year-old son, Eric.

“I think all the time about my family,” he says through an interpreter.

Tomatoes hurt…

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From THE PERENNIAL PLATE

The Other Side of the Tomato

On our way towards Immokalee, Florida to visit with Immigrant Farm laborers, we decided to stop into a Chipotle. We pride ourselves on not eating fast food, and have only stopped at 1-2 along the way (always either Subway or Chipotle, and always vegetarian). But there is something about Chipotle that makes me feel like I’m not eating at a fast food joint. Their decor of metallic, aztec-ish mosaics on the walls; smell of cilantro rice; and clean metal tables is familiar and comforting so far from home. Their motto is “Food with Integrity” (it’s right there when you pull up the website), and they pride themselves on working with small farmers (when they can) and providing good, local, farm-supporting food. And it tastes good. So, we pulled off of interstate 41 without any guilt and stopped in for a quick bite.

I got what I usually get: veggie bowl with lots of rice, topped with a little bit of black beans, cheese, lettuce and their mild salsa chocked full of red tomatoes

Todd Walton: Balance — a short story

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Photo by Marcia Stone

From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

I was the only child of elderly parents. They both died the year before I evolved out of puberty, and I was left in the care of a diminutive maiden aunt. She had absolutely no short term memory and even less money. My bedroom was my haven, my black and white television my constant companion. I was an uninspired student, a mediocre athlete, and I think it fair to say that I had no real friends, no one to confide in, no one to discuss my fears and fantasies with.

I cannot remember when I first became aware of the feeling I am about to describe. I know that I felt it when my parents were still alive, and before I could read, which means I may have been as young as four. I suppose it is even possible that I was born feeling this way, but my memory only stretches back to my late twos, when our big dark tabby cat killed a huge rat, and I saw him eating the rodent, staining the kitchen linoleum with bright blood.

And yet, even now, after all these years of living by and for this belief, I hesitate to reveal my secret. I fear it may sound trite and stupid to you. I fear you will think it little more than a poor excuse for a life poorly lived, a delusional, idiotic notion. But I must risk your contempt. It is my duty.

All my life I have been convinced that something spectacularly good

Dave Smith: Best Damn Pizza in the Universe Bar None… (Update)

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Oh no! This is NOT one of Greg’s pizzas!

From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

When I make pizza at home, I always, always, pile way too much and way too many different ingredients on. I guess because it seems to be the American way of living large or something. Or maybe it’s because of all the choices available at Round Table and you fall into a pattern of having tons on top.

Here in Ukiah we have several good choices when we’re hankerin’ for something cheezy and greezy. There are home town favorite Marino’s and the ever-present Round Table. There are the (ugh) cheapo national chains. Schat’s offers tempting varieties sitting there amongst the croissants and sticky buns. And only recently the new owners of the Brewpub installed a pizza oven, hired away one of the Round Table managers, and offer pretty good selections which I assume are all organic.

And then there are Greg’s pizzas at Mama’s downtown (formerly Local Flavor, and before that the Garden Bakery). Greg Shimshak says he learned pizza-making “from mama” and then honed his skills while learning and working at Alice Water’s legendary Chez Panisse in Berkeley. While there, he worked with our beloved Jacquie Lee who eventually migrated to Ukiah and opened the Garden Bakery, then retired and rented the building to Greg and Heidi. And that is why we have great, great pizzas available here in Ukiah.

Adbusters Media Empowerment Kit For Teachers Helps Break Earth-Killing Consumer Trance…

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From ADBUSTERS

[Parents/Grandparents: Please don't make your kid's teachers buy this for their classrooms. Go in with other parents in your school and share this around... -DS]

Teachers – Adbusters’ Media Literacy Kit ($125) will inspire your high school students break out of the media consumer trance! Each kit includes:

• a lesson binder with photocopy-friendly removable sleeves
• a DVD chock full of images and video clips
• For a limited time: Get a FREE 1-year subscription to Adbusters magazine with purchase of the Media Empowerment Kit.

Designed as a flexible teachers’ aid, the kit features 43 lesson ideas, including personal challenges, group activities, discussion starters and eye-opening readings. Lessons are divided into three areas:

I. Explore Your Mental Environment

• NEW IDEA: What is the Mental Environment?
• BRAINSTORM: Explore Your Mental Environment
• NEW IDEA: Pollution of the Mental Environment

Silent Spring Dawns…

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From JENNIFER BROWDY de HERNANDEZ
New. Clear. Vision.

Hot, Dry, and Merciless — Can We Keep the Flame of Hope Alive?

Usually I try to stay positive and keep the flame of hope burning brightly, a beacon for myself and for others.

But today this stark, in-your-face, first-day-of-spring evidence of the coming train wreck of climate change has guttered my hope.

Time is running short for us, just as it is for the bears and the birds and the native peoples of the forest.

We are coming inexorably into Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring…

Last week, turning the corner into the astronomical Spring, we went abruptly from warm winter to hot summer.  And I mean hot: it was 84 degrees Farenheit in western Massachusetts, brightly sunny, with puffy white cumulus clouds against a brilliant blue sky, unobstructed by any leaves.  No shade.

This day reminded me of a wax model: beautiful but blank.  The façade of beauty, with the crucial vital spark missing.

When I went for a walk up the mountain early that morning, the woods were eerily silent.

Radiation at Fukushima Plant Far Worse and Growing… Now So High It Will Kill Robots

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From COMMON DREAMS
Thanks to Meca Wawona

Radiation levels inside Fukushima’s reactor 2 have reached fatally high levels, and levels of water are far lower than previously thought, experts say today.

A radiation monitor indicates 131.00 microsieverts per hour near the No.4 and No.3 buildings at the tsunami-crippled Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture February 28, 2012. (REUTERS/Kimimasa Mayama/Pool)The current radiation levels are so high that even robots cannot enter. Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) says that new robots and equipment will need to be developed to deal with the lethal levels of radiation.

TEPCO spokesperson Junichi Matsumoto told the Associated Press, “We have to develop equipment that can tolerate high radiation” when locating and removing melted fuel during the decommissioning.

At ten times the lethal dose, the radiation levels are at their highest point yet.

At the current level of 73 sieverts, the data gathering robots can only stand two to three hours of exposure. But, Tsuyoshi Misawa, a reactor physics and engineering professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, told The Japan Times

Gene Logsdon: Watching Hens Eat

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I’ve learned more about the economies of small scale food production from watching chickens than from any library or university.  The hens reveal a world almost foreign to our human experience. Ever since farming became a capitalistic enterprise, husbandry has been organized around the idea of making money, not making food.  When the farmer is freed from the yoke of money-making, wonderful alternatives become possible in food production. More people can do it, for one thing. It doesn’t take a quarter million bucks to get started.  If more people do it, eventually the gardeners will become the farmers and the economics of food production will be turned upside down.

It amazes me how, as a farm boy, I learned to raise chickens the money way and thought that was the only way. We lived on a farm that was close to nature, but we were already evolving factory farming. The factory way meant that farmers had to raise lots more chickens in one place than nature ever intended, and the more they raised, the more they had to raise to try to squeeze out a profit. The chickens were penned up, which meant that they had to be provided all their food and water. They developed various diseases in unnatural captivity, started pecking bloody holes in each other, got lice,

How Many Circles Does it Take to Make a Community?

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World

Last evening I spent a couple of hours with three of my Bowen In Transition colleagues — Don Marshall, Rob Cairns and Robert Ballantyne — discussing what, if anything, we might do to start preparing our community (Bowen Island, off Vancouver BC, population 3800, area 20 sq. mi.) for the economic, energy and ecological crises — and perhaps even collapse — we expect to see in the coming decades.

Bowen in Transition, like many global Transition Initiative communities, is already doing several short-term small-step activities — learning about and (at a personal level) applying permaculture principles, obtaining and acting upon home energy audits, compiling a list of local experts in sustainable food, energy, building etc., holding awareness events etc. But as I noted in my recent Preparing for the Unimaginable post, I am concerned that we need to start thinking about longer-term, larger-scale, community-wide changes if we want to have a community sufficiently competent, self-sufficient and resilient enough to sustain ourselves through major and enduring crises.

I have read

A Slow-Books Manifesto…

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From MAURA KELLY
The Atlantic

[...] What about having fun while exerting greater control over what goes into your brain? Why hasn’t a hip alliance emerged that’s concerned about what happens to our intellectual health, our country, and, yes, our happiness when we consume empty-calorie entertainment? The Slow Food manifesto lauds “quieter pleasures” as a means of opposing “the universal folly of Fast Life”—yet there’s little that seems more foolish, loudly unpleasant, and universal than the screens that blare in every corner of America (at the airport, at the gym, in the elevator, in our hands). “Fast” entertainment, consumed mindlessly as we slump on the couch or do our morning commute, pickles our brains—and our souls.

That’s why I’m calling for a Slow Books Movement… In our leisure moments, whenever we have down time, we should turn to literature—to works that took some time to write and will take some time to read, but will also stay with us longer than anything else. They’ll help us unwind better than any electronic device—and they’ll pleasurably sharpen our minds and identities, too.

To borrow a cadence from Michael Pollan: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics… Complete article here…
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Gina Covina: Saving tomato seeds from different varieties…

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From GINA COVINA
Laughing Frog Farm
Laytonville

[Mulligan Books & Seeds is working with Laughing Frog Farm, Sustainable Seed Co, Transition Ukiah Valley, and others to localize organic seed breeding, growing, saving, and trading with seeds adapted to our particular soils and climate... providing a more secure local food system. We plan to establish: a network of organic seed growers in Mendocino County, a local market for locally-grown seeds, and a seed bank. Please see Underground Seeds By Hand.

A Seed Saving Guide for Gardeners and Farmers from Organic Seed Alliance condenses years of farming, gardening, plant breeding and seed saving wisdom, as well as conversations with many prominent seed experts. The guide covers the basics of seed growing from choosing appropriate varieties for seed saving to harvesting, processing, and storing seed. Download it here. -DS]

Do tomatoes cross-pollinate? That’s today’s burning question. Can you save seed from different varieties grown in the same garden? And how far apart do different varieties need to be? You’ll find as many answers as there are tomatoes, all contradictory, with the majority tending to the self-pollinating end of the spectrum, which is where I started when I first saved tomato seed. I did it casually, with no thought of isolation distances, and the first few times it seemed to work – the next year’s tomatoes were recognizably similar to the ones from which I’d saved seed.

Then I grew Big Rainbow, a beefsteak heirloom with swirls of red/yellow/orange inside and out, and so delicious I saved seed and eagerly waited for the next year’s crop. Which turned out to have the coloring of Big Rainbow, but a size closer to a cherry, and a taste so bland only the chickens would eat it.

There are two factors, it turns out, that contribute to a widespread belief that tomatoes do not cross-pollinate. The first is that sometimes it’s true. Modern open-pollinated varieties have flowers that are not capable of cross-pollination (as in the photo above). The pollen-carrying stamens are fused into a tube that encloses the stigma, which is the girl part that takes in the pollen and transports it to the flower’s ovary. You can grow these varieties right next to any other tomatoes and save the seeds with confidence. Mountain Gold is the only tomato seed Laughing Frog offers that has this kind of flower. It was developed twenty years ago

Organic Seed Stakeholders Meet in California…

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From JARED ZYSTRO
Organic Seed Alliance

Did you know that California produces more vegetable seed than any other state? And that, according to a survey conducted as part of OSA’s State of Organic Seed report, the vast majority of California organic farmers surveyed agree that organic seed is important in maintaining the integrity of organic food production? Yet, only 38% of the vegetable seed used by California organic farmers surveyed was organic. Why are California farmers relying so much on conventionally produced seed? And how can we work to advance a seed system that benefits farmers and sustainable agriculture in the golden state?

In order to advance organic seed systems in California, OSA, with support from Columbia Foundation and in partnership with FarmsReach, convened an organic seed stakeholder meeting at the EcoFarm conference earlier this month to gather diverse perspectives on what’s working and not working in the seed industry and brainstorm ways to strengthen organic seed systems in California.

More than 20 participants — from farmers to certifiers to seed company representatives — identified opportunities for innovation, collaboration, and better communication across all phases of the seed supply chain. The interactive session gave these stakeholders a chance to make their voices heard. Some of the things we heard included:

From a farmer: “How do we work with the increasing number of private and public farmer training programs to incorporate seed saving/breeding curricula into their programs?”

From a seed producer: “We need more local trials.”

From a farmer: “Why do I go to the extra effort and money to buy organic seed while my neighbor gets away with using conventional seed?”

From a distributer: “We’re working on a new trial farm, but a database of seed trial [reports] would be incredible.”

By the end of the meeting, groups had formed to divise solutions in the following four areas:

– Information Networks for Seeds
– Seed Education & Training
– Seed Quality
– Seed Economics & Viability

I left the meeting inspired by the enthusiasm and insight of the participants. Moving forward, OSA will use both the input from this stakeholder’s session and the continued involvement of the members of these four focus groups to make targeted efforts to strengthen California’s organic seed system.
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U.S. employs Vinnie the Kneecapper to collect student debt…

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From THE AUTOMATIC EARTH

On the heels of the assessment we saw from Tyler Durden, via Fitch, of the implosion of US student loan debt, which stands at over $1 trillion, increases by $40-50 billion (!!) each month (or $500-$600 billion per year), and of which 27% is already 30 days or more delinquent, John Hechinger explains for Bloomberg how the US Education Department goes about collecting this debt.

Turns out, it’s case of “Eat your heart out, Tony Soprano”. Hard to believe this could happen in a supposedly civilized country, but there you have it. Here are some excerpts from Hechinger’s article:

Obama Relies on Debt Collectors Profiting From Student Loan Woes

The debt collector on the other end of the phone gave Oswaldo Campos an ultimatum:

Pay $219 a month toward his more than $20,000 in defaulted student loans, or Pioneer Credit Recovery, a contractor with the U.S. Education Department, would confiscate his pay. Campos, disabled from liver disease, makes about $20,000 a year.

“We’re not playing here,” Campos recalled the collector telling him in December. “You’re dealing with the federal government. You have no other options.”

Campos agreed to have the money deducted each month from his bank account, even though federal student-loan rules would let him pay less and become eligible for a plan — approved by Congress and touted by President Barack Obama — requiring him to

Shelf lives: my brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine…

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From MAC McCLELLAND
Mother Jones

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

[...] This town somewhere west of the Mississippi is not big; everyone knows someone or is someone who’s worked for Amalgamated. “But look at it from their perspective. They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can. So they’re gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they’re gonna increase the goals. But they’ll be yelling at you all the time. It’s like the military. They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be. So they’re going to tell you, ‘You’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough,’ to make you work harder. Don’t say, ‘This is the best I can do.’ Say, ‘I’ll try,’ even if you know you can’t do it. Because if you say, ‘This is the best I can do,’ they’ll let you go. They hire and fire constantly, every day. You’ll see people dropping all around you. But don’t take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you.”…

“This really doesn’t have to be this awful,” I shake my head over Skype. But it is. And this job is just about the only game in town, like it is in lots of towns, and eventually will be in more towns, with US internet retail sales projected to grow 10 percent every year to $279 billion in 2015 and with Amazon, the largest of the online retailers, seeing revenues rise 30 to 40 percent year after year and already having 69 giant warehouses, 17 of which came online in 2011 alone…

Complete article here
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Serfs up…

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From THOM HARTMANN

The Republican Vision of America Is One in Which 99 Percent of Us Are Condemned to Be Feudal Serfs…

Republicans in Congress [have] unveiled their vision for America, and if they succeed, the 99 percent of us are condemned to live like serfs. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, himself a multimillionaire, released his blueprint budget for fiscal year 2013 which includes massive cuts to food stamps, student loans, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The budget also dismantles Medicare as we know it — transforming an insurance program into a voucher program, leaving millions of senior citizens on their own to deal with for-profit health insurance companies.

And in a nod to the Republican Party’s super-rich members like himself, Ryan proposes enormous tax breaks for the 1 percent — lowering the top income tax rate from 35 percent down to 25 percent. According to the Tax Policy Center — Ryan’s budget would give $3 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans — all paid for by cutting spending on education, healthcare, and Medicare. Congressman Ryan said about his budget, “It’s up to the people to demand … a choice between two futures. The question is which future will you choose?”

That is the question indeed — will we choose the future in which a middle class can thrive again in America like it did for 50 years after the New Deal until Ronald Reagan blew everything up?

Or — will we choose Paul Ryan’s path to an Ayn Rand dystopia, in which only the super-wealthy can go to good schools and see doctors, and everyone else is left with what trickles down from the tables of the rich?
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All this general bullshit started with Reagan…

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This story is part of Dissent magazine’s special issue on Workers in the Age of Austerity

Alan Greenspan described the 1981 destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization as “perhaps most important” of all of Reagan’s domestic undertakings. The defeat of PATCO during the first summer of the Reagan administration “gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.” With employers’ “freedom to fire” renewed, entrepreneurial initiative could once again be unleashed. Reagan’s action thus inaugurated a miraculous era of “low unemployment and low inflation.” If we substitute Greenspan’s phrase “freedom to fire” with “break unions, strip them of the right to strike, redistribute wealth upward, and create massive economic insecurity,” then we have a story that is similarly satisfying to the Left. Indeed, the PATCO strike has become the pivotal event—both symbolically and substantively—in almost everyone’s understanding of the massive realignment of class power in the United States in the last few decades.

The PATCO strike may be the watershed moment in the consolidation of the post-New Deal order, but it has also become a bloated political symbol. Fortunately, Joseph McCartin gracefully moves the union and its famous strike from myth to complex historical analysis in his new book Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, The Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America. McCartin’s assessment captures the very real importance of the strike coolly, without reading too much into it: “No strike in American history unfolded more visibly before the eyes

Dave Smith: Inequality is the problem, not the solution…

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

To the Editors AVA, UDJ, WN:

In their fine, insightful book The Spirit Level, authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett offer irrefutable, empirical evidence that what matters most in determining not only the health and mortality of any society but also the prevalence of a host of other social problems — including mental illness, obesity and homicides — is how wealth is distributed or, in other words, the extent of inequality.

In the most unequal societies — US, Britain, Portugal and New Zealand — the level of homicides, mental illness, teenage pregnancies and so on is much higher than in the more equal societies, such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Japan. “The reason why these differences are so big is, quite simply, because the effects of inequality are not confined just to the least well-off; instead they affect the vast majority of the population.” Inequality causes shorter, unhealthier, unhappier lives all around.

America is one of the world’s richest nations, with among the highest figures for income per person, but has the lowest longevity of the developed nations, and a level of violence — murder, in particular — that is off the charts. For some, mainly the young, the experience of daily life at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy is enraging. The US has institutionalized economic and social inequality to the extent that, at any one time, a quarter of our respective populations are mentally ill. Yet we are constantly bombarded by the monotonous drone of the “free traders” and neo-conservatives touting low wages, low benefits and low public spending that increases inequality, and imposes unhappiness on us all, as the answer to our ills.

Don Sanderson: Notes on two recent Diet articles posted here on Ukiah Blog…

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

[Don's article is well worth the time invested in reading it... -DS]

Re: Is Modern Medicine the biggest swindle of them all? and Red meat, mortality, and the usual bad science….

A problem I have with most articles appearing on the internet is they give little evidence of serious investigation, even when I agree with their premises. Of course, the issues are so complex and we mostly have so little time and background that we must defer. So, it isn’t surprising that telling counter arguments can be presented in response. In fact, I agree with the conclusions of both of these specific articles, but have reached them by what surely most would regard as heroic investigations by a layman. I’m a bulldog when an issue is important to me and won’t let loose until I understand at least how difficult the topic really is. Ok, I have a doctorate in mathematics and physics, so I’m unafraid of science. I’ve also had a longstanding interest in the biological sciences, much deeper it turns out than in my majors, which I chose for the job prospects.

I have Addison’s Disease

The original 1% wealthy white guys who stole our Democracy…

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From PRISCILLA STUCKEY
New. Clear. Vision.
Thanks to Don Sanderson

Rolling Back Democracy by Keeping the Rabble in Check

We learned in grade school about the Constitutional Convention, right? That summer of 1787 when the founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia to write the US Constitution? Many of us would be shocked to learn that what the framers of the Constitution did was roll back democratic gains of the American Revolution. They were frightened of too much democracy.

Why does this matter? Because the pressures against democracy today — the interests of the 1 percent of the wealthiest, most powerful Americans who make corporate decisions that threaten the health and well-being of people and Earth — are the same pressures that led to limiting democracy at the start of this country.

The delegates who wrote the Constitution were the 1 percent of their time — white men of means who were merchants and landowners and slaveholders, the majority of them lawyers and a few of them, like Washington, extremely wealthy. They had been living in a democratic experiment for eleven years under the Articles of Confederation, and most of them didn’t like it. They’d seen social upheaval — poor farmers revolting because they were losing their land on account of taxes levied against them to pay for the revolution. Slaves growing more numerous

Todd Walton: The Manure Chronicles, Part Two

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino
Part 1

“Pleasure is spread through the earth in stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.”— William Wordsworth

Long ago in the Santa Cruz of 1972, I was a member of a large commune occupying a grand old abode on the edge of the sea. A former stagecoach stop, hotel, brothel, and motel, the three-story main house shared a two-acre plot with four one-room cottages and a large barn that had once been a carriage house and served us as woodshop and garage. I am convinced that my vow to plant and maintain a big vegetable and flower garden was what decided the communards to vote me in, but it may also have been that they liked me.

In any case, I did plant a big vegetable and flower garden, roughly a fifth of an acre, and I not only grew enough vegetables to feed our twelve members and myriad guests throughout the year, but I frequently traded surplus vegetables for eggs and fruit produced by other communes in the area, and I made a bit of extra money for the communal pot from passersby attracted to my Pick-Your-Own-Bouquet sign affixed to the trunk of a fallen but still-living cypress at the mouth of our driveway. Our soil was sandy loam

Occupy UC Davis Shuts Down A Bank… Permanently

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The Occupy movement is building towards a big bang in May

From ADBUSTERS

For the last two months, Occupy UC Davis has been blockading a campus branch of U.S. Bank. Now, in a victory for Occupy that potentially gives birth to a new movement tactic, U.S. Bank has capitulated and permanently closed the branch.

U.S. Bank has been a visible symbol on campus of the corporatization and monied corruption of education in part because, as The Aggie campus newspaper explains, “in 2010, all students were required to get new ID cards with the U.S. Bank logo on the back.”

The tactic of the occupiers was simple, nonviolent and highly effective. The Aggie describes the scene: “the blockade became a daily ritual. Protesters — typically numbering around 15 — would arrive around noon, followed by an officer from the campus police department. Thirty minutes later, bank employees would leave and the entire process would be repeated the next day.”

A celebratory statement posted on Occupy UC Davis’s website said, “the blockade of the U.S. Bank was a real battle against the privatization agenda, and its closure is a victory… This is not enough, this is not the end.”

The victory at Davis opens a new tactical horizon for Occupy. Can the bank blockade tactic be replicated across the nation? Could shutting down big banks every day for a month be the tactical breakthrough we need for May?
~~

Will Parrish: ‘We Are Stealing Because We Feel Like It’

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

An expedition of Lake County-based Anglo-Irish settlers landed ashore Rattlesnake Island, just offshore the Elem Pomo Indian Colony in Clearlake, this past Saturday — St. Patrick’s Day – and christened it New Ireland. Despite the satirical act’s pointedly white supremacist rationale, it was performed in solidarity with the Elem, for whom the 56-acre island has been the political and religious center for more than 6,000 years.

Jeff Ott of Glenhaven, spokesperson for the New Ireland group, provided this legal rationale for “stealing” of Rattlesnake Island from current paper titleholder John Nady, an exorbitantly wealthy East Bay inventor and entrepreneur: “we Irish are White/European people, and in the United States private property is based on the age-old legal principal ‘White makes might makes right.’ We are stealing [Rattlesnake Island] because we feel like it.”

In just the last few months, Nady has run roughshod over regulations governing developments in archaeologically sensitive areas, even receiving a special exemption from normal grading regulations to begin developing his vacation home and related structures. In a press release, Ott pledged that his group would evict “the criminal Dutch settlement”

Is Walmart really going Organic and Local? Well, define Local…

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From TOM PHILPOTT
Mother Jones

I live on an organic farm in North Carolina, so I don’t spend much time roaming my local Walmart looking for produce. But on a recent trip to Austin, Texas, I decided to stop by a busy supercenter to see how the company was going about its well-publicized push to sell more local and organic food.

The produce section sat between the in-store McDonald’s and some giant coolers packed with Hormel bologna. There were crates piled high with perfect orbs of cabbage and tomatoes, onions and melons. Elephant-ear-size collard greens sat in tight bunches; stacks of fist-size lemons beamed yellow. Plenty of fresh food, to be sure, though a few “Grown in USA” signs were the nearest thing I could find to an indication of local. Organic? A few bags of house-brand lettuce claimed that standard.

But you can’t judge Walmart on a single store. The company sells 18 percent of all the groceries bought in the United States—more than anyone else by a wide margin. And it’s not just Froot Loops and rock-hard tomatoes. Over the last decade, Walmart has emerged as a massive player in the organic-food market. By 2006, the year it made a splashy announcement about doubling its sales of organic food, it was already the nation’s No. 1 seller

Michael Pollan’s Food Rules Animated…

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From OPEN CULTURE

If you’ve listened to the past decade’s conversations about food, you’ll have noticed that eating, always a pursuit, has suddenly become a subject as well. One flank of this movement of enthusiasts has taken up Michael Pollan, a professor at UC Berkeley’s journalism school, as its leading light. Whether they agree or disagree with his principles, intellectually engaged eaters who don’t have at least a basic familiarity with Pollan’s books such asThe Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food can hardly consider themselves conversant in the food questions and controversies of the day.

Both Pollan’s potential boosters and detractors alike can get themselves up to speed with his latest volume, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, which boils down his culinary weltanschauung into a series of simple sentences, including “Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature,” “Pay more, eat less,” and, “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.” Pollan also takes positions on entirely gnarlier issues, such as the efficiency (or lack thereof) of agribusiness, and that’s when animators like Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle provide their enlivening services. In the two-minute video above, Jacimovic and Detalle use pieces of actual food to illustrate Pollan’s critique of large-scale food production.
~~

… and you thought Monsanto was evil?…

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From ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS SERVICE
Thanks to Granville

Scotts Miracle-Gro pleads guilty to selling poisoned bird seed

[Shelf life and profits trump bird life...]

Ohio lawn and garden care company Scotts Miracle-Gro has pleaded guilty to breaching federal pesticide laws by using an unapproved insecticide on bird seed sold nationwide for two years.

In Columbus, U.S. District Court Judge James Graham accepted the company’s guilty plea on Tuesday.

Scotts is proposing to pay a $4 million fine and give $500,000 to help support wildlife conservation and study. Judge Graham said he will issue his decision on the plea agreement at sentencing, which has not yet been scheduled.

The government alleges that beginning in 2005, Scotts produced a line of wild bird food products under names including “Morning Song” and “Country Pride” that contained insecticides.

Red meat, mortality, and the usual bad science…

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From ZOË HARCOMBE

[Complete article here with the science and the data. See also Science, Pseudoscience, Nutritional Epidemiology, and Meat]

The media lit up on the evening of Monday March 12^th as a press release was issued about an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine published that day.

The BBC were among the first to pick up the story and the story was featured extensively on BBC Breakfast TV and Radio 4 on Tuesday 13^th March. Interestingly, John Humphries asked the pertinent question of science reporter Tom Feilden “We’re all going to die – let’s accept that. So what does this lower risk mean?” Tom couldn’t answer the question. He replied “It’s very difficult to unpick these statistics – these numbers are used as bald headlines.” Quite so!

So let us try to unpick the data and see what this article is all about:

At the outset we must highlight the error that this, and every similar study, makes. All that a study like this can even hope to achieve is to suggest a relationship between two things. To then leap from an observed association to causation or risk is ignorant and erroneous. This article makes this mistake – as has every other study I have reviewed demonising red or processed meat over the past year such as this or this…

Is Modern Medicine the biggest swindle of them all?

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From JIM KUNSTLER
Author of The Long Emergency

[Followup to this article is here]

[...] Last week, after a four year misadventure on an ultra low-fat vegan diet (no meat, no cheese, no eggs), I turned around 180 degrees and resumed eating all those verboten things again. I had been feeling shitty for a long time, in particular with muscle pain, muscle weakness, penetrating fatigue, and some weird neurological symptoms and I decided to take drastic measures.

This personal misadventure started about four and half years ago when my doctor read me the riot act on my cholesterol numbers. The total was around 290. I forget exactly what the LDL (“bad” cholesterol) was, but it wasn’t good, and ditto the HDL (“good” cholesterol) and the triglycerides (oy vay). The upshot was that my doctor put me on a whopping dose of the most powerful statin drug, Crestor 40mg (made by AstraZenica). I left his office feeling like my identity was transformed from a healthy normal person to a prisoner on death row.

I thought I had been leading a healthy life. Being self-employed, and master of my own schedule, I was able to work in a lot of exercise. For twenty-five years I was a runner. A hip replacement put an end to that. During that same period, I also swam a mile a day in the local YMCA lap pool. After hip surgery, I walked daily instead of running, kept swimming, and also did at least four weekly sessions in the weight room (including the cardio machines such as the elliptical trainer

Transition: Preparing for the Unimaginable…

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World

[For those of us organizing for Transition, this may be the key insight... -DS]

One of the lessons of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is that the events that have caused the greatest changes (and collectively most of the substantive change) to our civilization and our way of life were completely unexpected, unpredictable “black swan” events. His new book argues that rather than trying to plan and prepare for a future we can’t predict, we should do things that improve our resilience, and create systems that are “anti-fragile”. Unlike most fragile, complicated human-made systems, “anti-fragile” systems (such as evolution and other complex natural systems) actively adapt to, learn from and benefit from upheaval and dramatic change.

I have often said that that I believe the key to resilience in the coming decades will be our ability, in the moment, to imagine ways around the crises we cannot prevent, predict or plan for, and then navigate them.

So now I am sitting down with a small group of colleagues here on Bowen Island, starting to think about creating what the Transition Movement calls an “energy descent” plan for our island, and wondering how we can hope to plan for the unpredictable, unforeseeable, and unimaginable future we face.

I’ve been part of several

Why do they hate us?…

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From CHRIS HEDGES
TruthDig

Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War

The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.

Military attacks like these in civilian areas make discussions of human rights an absurdity. Robert Bales, a U.S. Army staff sergeant who allegedly killed 16 civilians in two Afghan villages, including nine children, is not an anomaly. To decry the butchery of this case and to defend the wars of occupation we wage is to know nothing about combat. We kill children nearly every day in Afghanistan. We do not usually kill them outside the structure of a military unit. If an American soldier had killed or wounded

How Greece threatens you and how going local offers the only refuge…

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From RALPH NADER
Transition Voice

Banksters are now plundering Greece. How can turmoil in this tiny overseas economy affect your personal finances? 

For months now our stocks have gone up and down due to various concerns, but none more recurrent than concerns about the financial crisis in Greece. Morning after morning, New York City based casino capitalists trade with Greece and the latest rumors from Western Europe on their minds.

What will affluent Germany do to bail out the collapsing, debt-ridden country of Greece? Will France go along with those plans? Will the massive injection of liquidity by the European Central Bank help the banks to behave in ways that help Greece, among other countries? Day after trading day, the U.S.

Why? Greece is a country of just over ten million people with a GDP smaller than that of New Jersey. But because it is closest to the fiscal cliff, financial observers fear a domino effect. If Greece defaults badly, it could pull Portugal, Spain, Ireland and then possibly Italy closer to financial disaster.

Hey Mendo! So Cool! Free Skool Kicks Off Tonight 3/20/12 in Ukiah

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From MENDO FREE SKOOL

Mendo Free Skool is a cooperative approach to living and learning. Run entirely by volunteers, Mendo Free Skool gives people an opportunity to share their skills and knowledge with one another. Anyone can be a teacher/learner/facilitator, so classes take on the flavor of whatever people are interested in at a given time. Through this project, we want to challenge dominant institutions and hierarchical relationships.

Some of the classes offered…

Brewing All-Grain Beer
Butchering Chicken Nicely
Creative Writing Workshop
Farm Day Frey Ranch
Field Video and Studio Production
Goat Milk Soap-Making
Intro to Guitar for Young People
Knitting and Radical Discussions
Practical Permaculture
Quilting Basics
Singing Circle
Bicycle Polo
Willow Basketry

Meet and greet each other for the initiation of the first Mendo Free Skool quarter of classes.

Collapse? Really?

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Cuba

From SHARON ASTYK
ASPO-USA

[...] What’s interesting about the examples of Cuba is that it is further evidence to suggest that fairly small energy resource shocks can cause fairly serious consequences – one-fifth of all oil shouldn’t have led to serious hunger. Most people would reasonably argue that waste in the system and proper allocation of resources should have been able to absorb this – or will argue that the fault was the Cuban government’s. To some extent that last point is probably true, but we should remember that we have examples from the US that show that small energy supply disruptions can be extremely destructive – the oil shocks of the 1970s and the major recession that followed resulted from a reduction in imports of just over 5 percent.

So yes, I think we’re on a path toward some kind of collapse, without necessarily assuming cannibalism or even roving gangs of white-supremacist kale-stealers. I would like such a collapse to be averted very much, but it seems less and less likely that we will do so. And the evidence is becoming compelling that we are going to be facing economic, energy and climate crises all at the same time – and that I find it hard to imagine us navigating successfully. Is it impossible? Probably not, but certainly improbable.

What are the common features of collapsed societies?

Popup book of another kind…

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Andreas Johansson, From where the sun now stands, 2011, paper and glue

From ANDREAS JOHANSSON
Voltashow.com

I have in recent years been engaged in making hand-made collages. I take photos of areas in my neighborhood that I cut apart and join together again in new constellations. By doing this, I create imaginary places that are both recognizable and completely alien. These new sites are constructions and have no history, while the places where the photographs once were taken have a very important past. For me, deserted places have a great symbolic value. They represent society’s backside, but also freedom beyond control and regulations. As a child, it was the funniest playground imaginable.

See video display of book here
~~

James Houle: United Nations — Just Another Imperialist Tool

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From JAMES HOULE
Obama-Watch.com
Redwood Valley

One year after the United Nations gave their approval for NATO to intervene in the civil war just then erupting in Benghazi, their Human Rights Commission has issued a “mousey” report accusing both sides of violations of human rights but purposely avoiding any mention of the destruction of civilians neighborhoods of major cities and the wanton obliteration of whole towns by precision bombing raids conducted by Norway, Denmark, Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States. NATO refused to cooperate in the HRA investigations. The article below by Vijay Prashad carefully summarizes the UN report. It does not take much imagination to see how the same tactics can be employed in Syria: NATO airstrikes to eliminate the air defenses, the import of foreign agents and mercenaries, and the smuggling of weapons.

NATO’S Craven Coverup of Its Libyan Bombing 
by Vijay Prashad March 15, 2012
Ten days into the uprising in Benghazi, Libya, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council established the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya. The purpose of the Commission was to “investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law in Libya.” The broad agenda was to establish the facts of the violations and crimes and to take such actions

Cabin Porn…

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From THE ATLANTIC

What It Means That Urban Hipsters Like Staring at Pictures of Cabins

“In dreaming about an idyllic past, we are also imagining the future.”

A generation of hipsters has contracted cabin fever. The Cabin Porn website has become one of these internet hits, spreading through blogs, Facebook posts, tumblr reposts, Twitter mentions, and so on. Why can’t all these people stop looking at cabins? What is the allure? Put simply, Cabin Porn is visual stimulation of the urge for a simpler life in beautiful surroundings. Commenters are likening it to “channeling your inner Thoreau.” Cabin Porn represents the return of the homesteader, living off the grid, self-sufficient and self-reliant… Story here…

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Dave Smith: Soul School…

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
Excerpted from To Be Of Use -
The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work (2005)

Guy Murchie wrote a wonderful book called The Seven Mysteries of Life, published in 1978 and still in print. Subtitled An Exploration in Science and Philosophy and almost 700 pages in length, it was called by one reviewer “a staggering work of encyclopedic proportions, with a stirring noble vision to match.”

Murchie’s artful combination of scientific explanation and visionary, mystical spirit is both challenging and inspirational. Murchie writes, “The only hypothesis for the nature of this troubled world that fits all the known facts [is] the hypothesis that planet Earth, is, in essence, a Soul School.” He asks us to test that hypothesis by imagining that we are God, intent upon creating a world for the creatures we are creating to live in. Could we “possibly dream up a more educational, contrasty, thrilling, beautiful, tantalizing world than Earth to develop spirit in?” Would we want to make the world comfortable, safe, and free of danger, or “provocative, dangerous, and exciting” — as it is? He then goes on to say that the tests we meet in life are not to punish us but are here to “reveal the soul to itself,” that the world is a “workshop … for molding and refining character.”

Is there such a thing as a ‘sincere conservative’ Christian?…

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“…Ha! Surely thou jests!”

From MIKE LUX
Co-founder and CEO, Progressive Strategies

A lot of people have asked me how it is that so many Republicans claim to follow Jesus in spite of apparently not following his actual teachings at all. How is it that they say they are Christians yet seem to believe the exact opposite of what he taught? How can you square the fact that — while the Jesus of the New Testament preached kindness, generosity, mercy, not judging others, welcoming the stranger and helping the poor — people who claim they follow him seem to disdain the poor, vigorously judge everyone who doesn’t agree with them, show no mercy and seem to have a serious mean streak? Excellent questions…

In his first sermon, he says he has come to bring good news to the poor and liberty to the captives, and calls for the rich to forgive the debts of the poor. He repeatedly spoke with disdain about the wealthy, almost as much as he talked about the importance of helping the poor. He challenged the authorities who were about to stone a woman to death. He drove the money changers from the Temple.

The Manure Chronicles, Part One

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Rabbit Manure Garlic Mulch photo by Marcia Sloane

From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.” Hank Williams

Sandy calls to say she’s gotten permission to harvest rabbit manure from her friend’s rabbit barn. So I load my wheelbarrow and a big shovel into my little old pickup and head for Fort Bragg. A sunny spring morning, the angry winds of the past few days in abeyance, I roll along the Comptche-Ukiah Road at forty miles per and try to remember if over the decades of gathering manure for my various gardens, I have ever scored more than a baggy of rabbit manure. Horse, mule, cow, sheep, goat, chicken…but never a truckload of rabbit poop, until today.

At the intersection of Little Lake Road and Highway One, I pull over to pick up two scruffy humans, their formidable backpacks, and three large dogs. Before I can announce how far I’m going, the humans and dogs scramble into the back of the pickup and hunker down around my big blue wheelbarrow, a smile on every face. I roll down my window and say, “I’m going to Fort Bragg. Please keep a good hold on your dogs.”

To which the taller human rejoins, “No worries, man. No worries.”

Patriots of Place

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Coming April 7th to Ukiah
Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op Annual Meeting
Co-Edited by Paula Manalo
Mendocino Organics
~~ 

Sacred Economics…

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The story of our separation from each other and from nature is becoming obsolete, is no longer true, is generating crises that are unsolvable… At each crisis moment we have a collective choice: do we give up the game and join the people, or do we hold on even tighter? It’s up to us to determine at what point this wakeup will happen…

You can visit the Sacred Economics homepage here.

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to make money and human economy as sacred as everything else in the universe.

Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. Money seems to be the enemy of our better instincts, as is clear every time the thought “I can’t afford to” blocks an impulse toward kindness or generosity. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term “a sellout” demonstrates. Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as corporate power steers legislation toward the aggrandizement of its own profits. Money seems to be destroying the earth, as we pillage the oceans, the forests, the soil, and every species to feed a greed that knows no end.

From at least the time that Jesus threw the money changers from the temple, we have sensed that there is something unholy about money. When politicians seek money instead of the public good, we call them corrupt. Adjectives like “dirty” and “filthy” naturally describe money. Monks are supposed to have little to do with it: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”

At the same time, no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. From ancient times thinkers have marveled at the ability of a mere mark to confer this power upon a disk of metal or slip of paper. Unfortunately, looking at the world around us, it is hard to avoid concluding that the magic of money is an evil magic.

Obviously, if we are to make money into something sacred, nothing less than a wholesale revolution in money will suffice, a transformation of its essential nature. It is not merely our attitudes about money that must change, as some self-help gurus would have us believe; rather, we will create new kinds of money

Letting it all go…

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From GUY McPHERSON
Transition Voice

I had the brass ring. And I let it go. I had reached the pinnacle of the educational world: I was atenured full professor by the age of 40. I walked away from that life, which I loved, an act that made most people think I’d lost my mind. I’ll not rule that out, but I want to tell you my side of the story anyway.

After trying to change the morally bankrupt system in which we are immersed, I realized the system was changing me, and not for the better. So I let go when I realized the first step I can take toward destroying this irredeemably corrupt system is to leave it. I hope you come to understand some of the disadvantages of industrial civilization. If you do, I invite you to join me in letting go.

The beginning of the story is an important part, so I’ll start much earlier than you’ll appreciate — with my birth, in fact, though I won’t get into the bloody details.

Born into captivity

Born into captivity and assimilated into the normalcy bias of a historically abnormal period in world history, I did all the things this culture expected from me. For example, I began my career in the expected manner: I was a classroom conservative. I even taught my dog to whistle. As you might expect, I received accolades and numerous awards for teaching, advising, and scholarship. Early on, I realized students don’t care what you know until they know you care — about them. And I did, in ways that made my colleagues question whose side I was on even while I was pointing out that, in educating ourselves and others, we’re all on the same side.

Even though I taught, and taught, and taught, my dog never did learn to whistle, which showed me something important: Even earnest, caring teaching doesn’t necessarily lead to learning. The Sage on the Stage approach is dead. So, too, is the model of student as customer. So I switched my approach to one based on a “Corps of Discovery” in which every participant is expected to contribute to the learning of every other participant.

Rev Billy…

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~

Whistleblowers in Solidarity

From REV BILLY

It was a three day gathering, February 17, 18, 19th at the International Hotel at UC Berkeley. It left me dazed and elated. After the Whistleblowers – the things we’ll do inside banks has just escalated to the surreal heights. There’s no turning back now!

The Whistleblower’s Conference was organized by the Fresh Juice Party. This was the group that interrupted Barack Obama’s fundraising dinner last year. A number of the President’s many-bucks-per-chew friends stood up unexpectedly and sang directly at him a song with lyrics that repeatedly rhymed with “Bradley Manning.”

The Whistleblowers gathering had a certain feeling from the start. The circles of people presided over by for Defense Dept. and CIA whistleblowers like Col. Ann Wright and Daniel Elsberg and Ray McGovern –  seemed to be sitting inside history. By “inside” history I mean for the first time in decades history felt sensible – able to be sensed. Old warriors who had blown the whistle on government lies were sitting in folding chairs talking with Occupy youth with pup tents on hotel’s lawn.

The heightened quality in the way participants spoke had to do with the general emergency of world CO2 emissions rising every week. That was the climate of the conference. The specific scandal was  saber rattling over Iran, a script so identical to Iraq, to the bombing

Making Local Food Our Future: A Community Response to the Global Food System

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From KATHERINE DARLING
STIR UK

Attempts to find solutions to the problems we face in the current climate of economic uncertainty, energy insecurity and environmental concerns can seem overwhelming. One of the biggest challenges we face is that of food security – leading food producers have warned that unless the UK urgently develops a food strategy we will be left relying on imported food and without a sustainable future for British food production.

But it seems more and more people are taking notice. Across the country, individuals are coming together to set up their own food solutions – from community shops and co-operative farmers’ markets to community supported agriculture projects and veg box schemes. In fact, their impact is so great that they are considered a movement, with community food enterprises springing up in communities everywhere, from small rural villages in Cumbria to the busy streets of central London.

Making Local Food Work – a Big Lottery Fund funded initiative led by Plunkett Foundation – has worked with over 1,300 of these enterprises, reaching out to over 3 million people. Jennifer Smith, head of managing the programme, notes the real shift in momentum over the last four and a half years of the project: “The community food sector as a whole has grown significantly over the past four and a half years,” she says. “But interestingly, it’s not just that the number of enterprises has grown; we’re increasingly seeing communities linking up different activities to create a local food system, with the ability to offer their community a much broader range of services.”

You Have to Join YOGOL!

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From KATIE PETRACHONIS
McSweeney’s

You absolutely have to join YOGOL—it’s this cool, new social media site I just found out about! It’s incredible. It takes all your current social networking sites and builds on them to make your whole social media experience so much better. Seriously, I have no clue how I ever lived online without it.

Let me explain how YOGOL works. Basically you sign up through all your current sites—Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google+, LinkedIn, etc—and YOGOL measures your usage to find out how much time you spend being social online. Isn’t that cool?! Haven’t you always wanted to know exactly how much of your one and only life you’re giving to social networks? I know I have!

Here’s a perfect example of why you need YOGOL! Remember when I posted that remark on Facebook and Twitter about how Justin Bieber seemed sadder after he cut off his hair? Well, just like everyone else, every time I make that kind of astute observation, I spend the next 6-12 hours tracking the likes, comments, shares, favorites and re-tweets. Basically, I am still participating in social media and wasting my life away, but not really getting credit for it. That’s just not fair! I forgot to count all those hours of refreshing my browser every 15 seconds as circumventing reality, even though it clearly is—but not anymore.

That’s why you have to join! YOGOL analyzes your time online and gives you credit for every hour of your life that you dedicate to sidestepping your existence. Before this site I thought I spent maybe 5 or 6 hours online a week, but now I know that I devote more than 60 hours to living but not really living on my social media sites every week. Huh, who would have thought? I’m so much more committed to avoiding real

Scars Keep The Record of Our Lives

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer 

If you want to get a lively conversation going among farmers, bring up the subject of scars. For some reason we glory in telling about the marks of maiming or near death that decorate our bodies like so many road signs along the trail of life. Hardly a one of us doesn’t have a crooked leg or missing finger, or a lost limb from getting tangled in a power take off shaft, the most dangerous (and handiest) thing technology every invented this side of the automobile. We all know of someone who lost his or her life trying to argue with power take off shafts. Perhaps it is the gravity of the situation that awes us into wanting to talk about it. I am only here today because once in my very stupid youth, I was lucky enough to be wearing a pair of jeans that were so rotten they were about to fall off from shear gravity. When the jeans caught in the power take off, they ripped completely off my body in a split second and wrapped tightly around the shaft. Better pants and my leg would have been wound around the shaft too. I remember standing there in my underwear, giggling like the idiot I was.

As a child, one of my fascinating past times was sitting in my grandfather’s lap while he rocked and sang. I was totally enchanted by his fingers. His middle and forefinger on his right hand were cut off half way down and I would search out the short stubs as he rocked, hold them in my chubby fists and stare up at him until he told me once more the story. He had caught them in the mechanism on top of the grapple fork which was used to lift great gobs of loose hay from the wagon to the loft. In only a few more years, I would be “setting the fork” and being careful where I set my fingers.

In our local coffee shops

Dave Smith: Counter Cultured…

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
Excerpted from To Be Of Use -
The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work (2005)

Religion is something you do, not something you believe. ~Kenneth Rexroth

Once upon a time, members of my generation broke free and created what was labeled a “counter culture.” Because the surrounding culture was not living up to our young ideals, we began creating our own work, our own services, our own communities. I prefer to call what many of us were doing a “parallel culture,” as my experience was more about building something new rather than countering or opposing. Between the straight culture and the anticulture, we chose to be part of a third way, seeking to build something positive out of the chaos rather than just spending all our time protesting and demonstrating. We chose to compose new social and workplace structures and relationships, practicing and feeling them, discovering how to make them meaningful and how to restore a measure of love and joy and amazing grace to our daily work. Instead of remaining within rigid hierarchies and stratified gender roles, we were all in it together. Sure, we made mistakes, but we were willing to fail young rather than take our assigned places and nod off into the ethical and moral wasteland we found around us.

Those times in the sixties and seventies mean different things to different people, and our memories of that time are most often associated with events and places. One image we have is Woodstock: free lovin’, dope smokin’, skinny dippin’, screw-it-all, hippie heaven. Another is Berkeley: radical, peacenik, burn-it-down, anti-war, anti-nuke, anti-everything. Another is the summer of love in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco in 1967. At the time, I was coming of age in the center of it all, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I migrated after having grown up in South Florida, a land of racial segregation

A Good Food Farmer…

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~

From THE GREENHORNS

Oz Farm on Mendocino Coast Seeking Farm Manager

[See also 'keep the raindrops falling' video below...]

OZ Farm, located 10 minutes outside the vibrant small town of Point Arena in coastal Mendocino County, California, is looking for a new farm manager to start as soon as possible. The farm is also managed as a licensed retreat center (handled by a separate retreat manager) for weddings, yoga groups, family reunions, and the like.

17 acres of the property have been certified organic by CCOF since 1991. We are entering our 23rd growing season and provide produce for a 35 member local CSA, two weekly seasonal farmers’ markets’, and several retail and restaurant clients. Our three acre espaliered orchard produces 55 varieties of antique and heirloom apples as well as varietal fresh apple juice.

We are looking for someone (or a couple) with significant farming experience in the above areas to take charge of the day-to-day farming operation, expand our markets, help us move into new niche markets, and improve and expand farming operations in general.

Farm manager responsibilities will include: Developing and following an annual work plan; budgeting time and costs; recruiting, training, and supervising seasonal apprentices; and managing all aspects of our CSA, farmers’ market, and other accounts

Reclaiming the Sacred in Food and Farming…

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From JOHN E. IKERD
Professor Emeritus of Agricultural & Applied Economics
University of Missouri Columbia College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources

What is this thing called spirituality? First, spirituality is not religion, at least not as it is used here. Religion is simply one of many possible means of expressing one’s spirituality. William James, a religious philosopher, defined religion as “an attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.” Paraphrasing James, one might define spirituality as “a ‘need’ to be in harmony with an unseen order.” This definition embraces a wide range of cultural beliefs, philosophies, and religions.

Farming is fundamentally biological. The essence of agriculture begins with conversion of solar energy through the living process of photosynthesis. The food that sustains our lives comes from other living things. If life is sacred, then food and farming must be sacred as well. Throughout nearly all of human history, both food and farming were considered sacred. Farmers prayed for rain, for protection from pestilence, and for bountiful harvests. People gave thanks to God for their “daily bread” — as well as for harvests at annual times of Thanksgiving. For many, farming and food are still sacred. But for many more, farming has become just another business and food just something else to buy. Those who still treat food and farming as something sacred may be labeled as old-fashion, strange, radical, or naïve.

But, the time to reclaim the sacred in food and farming may well be at hand. The trends that have desacralized farming may have run, even overrun, their course. There is a growing skepticism concerning the claim that more “stuff” – be it larger houses, fancier cars, more clothes, or more food – will make us more happy or satisfied with life. There is growing evidence that when we took out the sacred, we took out the substance, and have left our lives shallow and empty. Humanity is beginning to ask new questions. The old questions of how can I “get” more is being replaced with questions of how can I “be” more?

How Conservatives are Wiping Small Town America Off The Map…

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From TERRANCE HEATH
Our Future

Two years ago, I wrote that Colorado Springs was a conservative “Utopia,” for its rejection of tax increases, which led the city to lay off firefighters and police officers, stop paving roads, eliminate evening and weekend bus service, reduce garbage service, turn off streetlights, and asked residents to mow the grass in public parks (light work, since the city’s water cutbacks ensured most grass in most parks would be dead). Tent cities began springing up as the city cut social services.

David Sirota called it conservatism’s real “shining city on the hill.”

This is what Reaganites have always meant when they’ve talked of a “shining city on a hill.” They envision a dystopia whose anti-tax fires incinerate social fabric faster than James Dobson can say “family values”—a place like Colorado Springs that is starting to reek of economic death.

But that was so two-years-ago. Move over, Colorado Springs! Youngtown, Arizona has totally got you beat.

In Youngtown, Ariz., city officials are contemplating the legal equivalent of shutting down.

The city of about 6,500 people 30 minutes northwest of Phoenix is, for all practical purposes,a small-government, low-taxes, no-compromise kind of place. Youngtown sold its water authority to a private company nearly two decades ago. It’s been nearly three years since city crews, instead of private contractors, mowed the lawn outside town hall. And trash pick-up has never been a city-run operation.

Youngtown was founded almost 50 years ago as the nation’s first all-senior citizen city, where part of the attraction was the absence of a property tax. A 1998 court order forced Youngtown to welcome younger residents. But as the city expanded its police force and other services to meet its changing needs

Why I call myself a Commoner…

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From HARRIET BARLOW
On The Commons

Each day I walk out of my Minneapolis house into an atmosphere protected from pollution by the Clean Air Act. As I step onto a sidewalk that was built with tax dollars for everyone, my spirits are lifted by the beauty of my neighbors’ boulevard gardens. Trees planted by people who would never sit under them shade my walk. I listen to public radio, a nonprofit service broadcast over airwaves belonging to us all, as I stroll around a lake in the park, which was protected from shoreline development by civic-minded citizens in the nineteenth century.

The park, like everything else I have mentioned so far, is a commons for which each of us is responsible.

Frequently I visit the public library, where the intellectual, cultural, scientific, and informational storehouse of the world is opened to me for free—and to anyone who walks through the door. My work requires me to constantly keep up with new knowledge. My best tool is the Internet. The library and Internet, too, are commons.

Returning home I stop at the farmer’s market, a public institution created by local producers who want to share their fare. The same spirit prevails at our local food co-op, of which I am the owner (along with thousands of others), and at community-run theaters and civic events. These commons-based institutions provide us with essential services, the most important of which is fun. Living in the commons isn’t only about cultural and economic wealth; it’s also about joy.

Candido Grzybowski, the Brazilian sociologist who co-founded the World Social Forum, advises, “If we want to work for justice, we should work for the commons.” Protecting and restoring precious gifts from nature and from our foreparents for future generations is one the greatest privileges of a being a commoner.
~~

Back to the land?…

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From CLUB ORLOV

Talking about it is easy. Doing it is something altogether different.

You hear a lot of talk about relocalization and deindustrialization. The pastoral life, the good old days. How romantic! Reality pays you a visit when your pick-axe hits a rock, a chunk hits your face, and you taste your own blood.

Unaware of it at the time, I was a child of privilege, one of five born to a Chairman of Earth and Space Sciences at a State University in New York. We were all expected to be high achievers. I fulfilled the expectation and put in 32 years as an engineer helping the über-wealthy zip around the skies in personal rocket ships from one golf game to another while chalking it off as business expenses, when all I ever really wanted to do was sit out in the woods and cook some food on a stick over a fire.

In 1994 I acquired a 160 acre tract of land in southeast Kansas, for a price only slightly above chicken feed, as a weekender place to go sit by that fire and decompress from the rat-race. 18 years ago the future didn’t look quite so ominous. Reel forward to the present and this full-time back-to-the-land experiment is starting to look like a pretty good idea. Some stark realities become self evident however when you are actually ‘living the life’. Talking about it is easy. Doing it is something altogether different. Here is where I wish to convey a few ‘notes from the field’:

1. You realize after a while it is mostly hard, dirty, repetitive and boring. Mud, blood, shit, sweat, discomfort, disappointment, death. There are rewards, but you have to have a passion for it to endure. People who have grown up ranching already know these things of course

Tiresome Times Ten…

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

Those of you who do not read the Ukiah Daily Journal didn’t see a response to my recent Letter to the Editors, Pursuing Happiness. My original letter is reposted, and then the response. I didn’t want you to miss it…

To The Editors:

Are you happy? Chances are, if you live here in the United States, you are not. Despite the enshrinement in our Declaration of Independence of the phrase “Pursuit of Happiness” as one of the sovereign rights of mankind, we are way down on the list of the happiest countries in the world. In fact, we are not even in the Top 10.

According to a study by “24-7 Wall Street” that looked into the OECD’s Better Life Index to determine what the happiest nations on the planet are, it turns out that the happy nations spend far more of their GDP on social programs than we do here in America. The study examined quality of life things such as health, education, housing, the environment, jobs, community, work life, and income to figure out what truly makes a nation happy.

Old, stable nations of northern Europe took five of the top 10 spots on the list. These include the “socialist” Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark, all way happier than we are down the list at number 19.

Does it surprise you that the happiest nation, Denmark, also has the highest taxes of all?

As we are continually warned and berated by the tiresome scolds in our local opinion columns and letters to the editor to fear those who hold firm on providing a basic social safety net for the least among us, we must ask ourselves what motivates such a steadfast and determined assault on our personal and community happiness.

Dave Smith
Ukiah

Occupy: America’s Authoritarian Turn…

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From ADBUSTERS

Ever since the rise of Occupy, corporatist authorities have been trying to figure how to squash our emerging social movement. First they tried a media blackout, but when over 700 nonviolent meme warriors were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge our Gandhian ferocity catalyzed a thousand encampments and the 1% could ignore us no more. Next elites tried the Bloomberg model of midnight paramilitary raids backed up by excessive force and sometimes-lethal munitions. That worked well to evict encampments in New York City, Oakland and nationwide … but it backfired when occupiers became diffuse, appearing at scripted events and interrupting the spectacle of corporate-funded politics with mic checks of truth. Now they are trying the new tactic of “lawfare” – using draconian laws to squash free speech in a last ditch effort to put an end to people power.

A week before the G8 Backdown, the US House of Representatives voted in near unanimous consensus in favor of an authoritarian law, H.R. 347, that makes it a federal crime to disrupt “Government business or official functions” or to enter any building where a “person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting.” In other words, to mic check Obama is now a federal crime punishable by a year in prison. And so too is the banner drop if it takes place in any building that a “protected” person might be visiting in the future, even if jammers don’t know it. And so is the anti-globalization tactic of blocking road access to a meeting of world elites, there is a special clause about that too. Obama signed the bill into law on March 9.

History shows that using authoritarian laws to silence the authentic, legitimate concerns of the people always boomerangs into a fatal loss of legitimacy. Governments derive their authority and right to exist from the people and when the people are ignored and beaten back regimes fall.

Read more about H.R. 347 at the dailyagenda.org and the lawfareblog.com.
~~

Hey Occupy Psycho, you can be cured! See your Doctor…

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From BRUCE E. LEVINE
AlterNet

[Are you an occupier? You may have "oppositional defiant disorder" and, yes, they can make you well again... -DS]

In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by 1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians; and 2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.

Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.

Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.

Why Mental Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness

Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops

Wendell Berry: The Agrarian Standard

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From Wendell Berry
Orion Magazine
[Repost]

The Unsettling of America was published twenty-five years ago; it is still in print and is still being read. As its author, I am tempted to be glad of this, and yet, if I believe what I said in that book, and I still do, then I should be anything but glad. The book would have had a far happier fate if it could have been disproved or made obsolete years ago.

It remains true because the conditions it describes and opposes, the abuses of farmland and farming people, have persisted and become worse over the last twenty-five years. In 2002 we have less than half the number of farmers in the United States that we had in 1977. Our farm communities are far worse off now than they were then. Our soil erosion rates continue to be unsustainably high. We continue to pollute our soils and streams with agricultural poisons. We continue to lose farmland to urban development of the most wasteful sort. The large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now global, and are replacing the world’s agricultural diversity, which was useful primarily to farmers and local consumers, with bioengineered and patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations. The purpose of this now global economy, as Vandana Shiva has rightly said, is to replace “food democracy” with a worldwide “food dictatorship.”

To be an agrarian writer in such a time is an odd experience. One keeps writing essays and speeches that one would prefer not to write, that one wishes would prove unnecessary, that one hopes nobody will have any need for in twenty-five years. My life as an agrarian writer has certainly involved me in such confusions, but I have never doubted for a minute the importance of the hope I have tried to serve: the hope that we might become a healthy people in a healthy land.

Lucy Neely and Will Parrish: Local Food Movement — Mendo & Beyond, Part II

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From LUCY NEELY and WILL PARRISH
Ukiah

In the first installment of this two-part series, the participants discussed the factors in their individual lives that influenced them to dedicate themselves to their present work, the barriers to a local food economy that the regulatory system imposes, and the growing popularity of the local food movement in Mendocino County and elsewhere, among other subjects.

All four participants are involved in ongoing educational work. For example, Tamara Wilder will conduct a weekend workshop on pig slaughtering and processing on March 24-25 at Ro Sham Bo Farms in Healdsburg, titled “Using the Whole Animal.” For more information, contact naomi@sonic.net  or subscribe to Tamara’s Facebook page. She regularly teaches classes in Mendocino County and other regions of California.

Ellen Bartholomew works closely with the group Ecology Action, which was founded by pioneering biointensive farmer John Jeavons. The group regularly conducts events, including five-day workshops called “Grow Biointensives.” at its demonstration site in Willits. For more information, see www.growbiointensive.org .

Whereas most permaculture classes cost several hundred dollars, Rain Tenaqiya is offering a completely free course entitled “Practical Permaculture,” which is a part of a new project called Mendo Free Skool. His weekly sessions start in early-April and cover a wide range of topics. For more information, contact mendofreeskool@gmail.com. Rain is also the author of the book West Coast Food Forestry, available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/2029243/West-Coast-Food-Forestry.”

Doug Mosel can be heard on KZYX’s “Ecology Hour” on some Tuesday evenings at 7pm. His grains are available at Westside Renaissance Market at

Todd Walton: Signs Of Spring

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Starry Starry Mona painting by Ben Davis Jr.

From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” Claes Oldenburg

Harbor seals have returned to the mouth of Big River, sleek silver gray cuties with childlike faces and spindly white mustaches, as curious about me as I am about them. When the wind is right and the sun is out, I will sometimes toss my Frisbee up into the offshore breeze and the disk will boomerang back to me, and the seals will cease their fishing to follow the flight of the disk to and from the sky, just as humans might watch the ball going back and forth in a tennis match.

The harbor seals of Big River are curious about singing, too. I recently had a wonderful experience singing to the seals, an experience witnessed by two people visiting Mendocino from Los Angeles. The tide was way out and the sun was shining when I stopped on the edge of the river to commune with a seal who had popped his head out of the water to take a look at me. Thinking he might enjoy a tune, I started to sing, knowing from past experience that high notes held for a long time are more intriguing to seals than low notes held briefly; and shortly after I commenced my singing, the aforementioned couple from Los Angeles, a middle-aged woman and man, stopped to watch the seal watching me.

After a minute or two of listening to my impromptu song, the seal sunk below the surface and swam away, but I kept on singing. The middle-aged woman opined, “Guess he didn’t like your song, huh?” And then she and her mate laughed. No. They cackled. At which moment, the seal returned with a friend, and the two seals listened to me for quite a long time.

Where’s Woody Guthrie When We Need Him?…

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From JIM HIGHTOWER
Creators Syndicate

Where’s Woody when we need him?

In these times of tinkle-down economics — with the money powers thinking that they’re the top dogs and that the rest of us are just a bunch of fire hydrants — we need the hard-hitting (yet uplifting) musical stories, social commentaries and inspired lyrical populism of Woody Guthrie.

This year will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of this legendary grassroots troubadour, who came out of the Oklahoma dust bowl to rally America’s “just plain folks” to fight back against the elites who were knocking them down.

As we know, the elites are back, strutting around cockier than ever with their knocking-down ways — but now comes the good news out of Tulsa, Okla., that Woody, too, is being revived, spiritually speaking. In a national collaboration between the Guthrie family and the George Kaiser Family Foundation, a center is being built in Tulsa to archive, present to the world and celebrate the marvelous songs, books, letters and other materials generated from Guthrie’s deeply fertile mind.

To give the center a proper kick-start, four great universities, the Grammy Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the Kaiser Foundation are teaming up to host a combination of symposiums and concerts (think of them as Woody-Paloozas) throughout this centennial year. They begin this Saturday, March 10 at the University of Tulsa, then they move on down the road to Brooklyn College and on to the University of Southern California and Penn State University.

If Woody himself were to reappear among us, rambling from town to town, he wouldn’t need to write any new material. He’d see that the Wall Street banksters who crashed our economy are getting fat bonus checks, while the victims of their greed are still getting pink slips and eviction notices, and he could just pull out this verse from his old song, “Pretty Boy Floyd”:

Creative Action Heroes: Rattlesnake Island. Democracy School. Mendo Free Skool.

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah

Ukiah Stands With Rattlesnake Island 

A benefit dinner to support Protection and Preservation of Rattlesnake Island’s Cultural and Historical Resources…

Tomorrow, Friday, March 9, 5-7:30 pm
Saturday Afternoon Clubhouse
107 South Oak, Ukiah

Sliding scale entrance fee: $10-$25. Pay at least $20 and you receive a dinner featuring Indian tacos. All funds will go to help support Friends of Rattlesnake Island.

This special evening of performances and presentations features: Jim Browneagle, Elem Pomo Spiritual Leader and historian; John Parker, leading archeological authority on Rattlesnake Island and local prehistory; Morning Star Gali, international sacred sites defender; an Elem Pomo youth dance troupe performance; and a raffle featuring beautiful traditional Elem items.

As you read these words, one of the Northern California East Bay Area’s wealthiest men is getting away with an act of cultural genocide in neighboring Lake County. Construction crews employed by wireless technology magnate John Nady of Emeryville recently began trenching grading, excavating, and building atop Rattlesnake Island in Clear Lake. For more than 6,000 years, this lush 56-acre island on the lake’s eastern arm has been the cultural and spiritual center of the Elem Pomo.

Lake County’s message to the Elem: the one percent are exempt from our normal regulations. The construction proceeds on this sacred site because Nady received a special extension of Lake County’s normal grading season. In September, the Lake County Supervisors voted (3-2) against requiring that Nady file an Environmental Impact Review

Rooftop revolution: How to get solar onto 100 million U.S. homes…

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From DAVID ROBERTS
Grist

Get a load of this:

Nearly 100 million Americans could install over 60,000 megawatts of solar at less than grid prices – without subsidies – by 2021.

That’s from a new report by John Farrell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance called “Rooftop Revolution: Changing Everything with Cost-Effective Local Solar.”

It’s about the spread of “solar grid parity” over the next 10 years, where grid parity is defined as “when the cost of solar electricity — without subsidies — is equal to or lower than the residential retail electricity rate.” People often talk about grid parity as if it’s some magic moment, but in fact it will happen in different places at different times, depending on local conditions and electricity prices. And it’s a moving target: It depends on how fast the cost of solar falls and how fast electricity rates rise.

Farrell says that the “installed cost of solar has fallen 10% per year since 2006 and grid electricity prices have averaged a 2% annual increase in the last decade.” In his projections, he uses 7 percent annual decline for solar costs and 2 percent for electricity increases, which seems conservative but reasonable. Obviously either of those rates could change, but almost everything I’ve read and heard predicts rising electricity rates; the rate of solar cost decline is somewhat harder to predict. As a technophile, my money is on the cost of solar falling faster than expected.

Anyway, given those assumptions, here’s a map that shows how and when solar grid parity will spread.

By 2021, some 100 million people in the top 40 U.S. metropolitan areas will be at grid parity for residential rooftop solar. The number is larger if you take into account people living outside those areas. It expands again if you assume widespread time-of-use pricing. And of course

James Houle: To the Ukiah City Council regarding Honeywell’s $3 Million Dollar Proposal

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From JAMES HOULE
Redwood Valley

To the Ukiah City Council

March 7, 2012

Re: Honeywell’s $3 Million Dollar Proposal for New Water Meters and Conference Center Renovation

Dear Council Members:

A review of the Honeywell proposal dated March 7, 2012 shows that they expect an increase of 6.12% in revenues after the installation of more accurate water meters and that this will net the City $276,845 per year. The total cost of the water meter replacement and leak detection project ($2.5 million) would be paid by we the consumers through higher water service charges. Should the smart water users, mostly small homeowners and renters, elect to reduce water consumption through modest conservation measures in the home, then the extra revenue Honeywell predicts would disappear and the City would be faced with paying off these municipal bonds out of general funds.

The companion proposal would cost $592,000 to upgrade the Conference Center with cleaner carpets, more comfortable chairs, and a commercial kitchen that would allow hosting banquets cooked right there on the premises! This taxpayer debt would supposedly be paid back by avoiding the rental of commercial kitchen equipment that costs $62,400 per year. (I have never heard of “rent-a-kitchen” but that’s what Honeywell says and they’re a major Pentagon contractor after all!) What would happen if the kitchen was upgraded and no high rollers elected to have banquets there? What would happen if these happy conventioneers

Buying this thing will make me happy…

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From RIVER CLEGG
McSweeneys

I know what you’re thinking, so don’t even say it. Buying that thing won’t make you happy, is what you’re thinking. Buying things never makes you happy, so why would you buy this thing? It won’t make you happy.

But you haven’t seen this thing.

It’s really cool. They just started making it and not many people have one yet. It does all sorts of stuff and can fit in my pocket, but it can also get bigger than that if I want it to. Plus it’s made by a company I trust to put out things that will make me happy.

(Not that I wouldn’t consider buying this thing even if it weren’t made by a familiar company—that’s how cool this thing is—but the fact that I know and trust the company makes it even better.)

It comes in both black and white, but I can also buy an affordable cover for it in a different color if I want. For example, if I buy it in black but decide I want it to be red today, I just buy the red cover and slide it on. Now it’s red—until I want it to be black again, that is. (I can do that for any other color too, not just red.)

This thing will make me happier during my commute. Whether I take the train or ride my bike, it will be there for me, and since it’s waterproof, I don’t even need to worry if it’s raining out. Making my commute stress-free will go a long way towards making me happy.

Other people will look up to me because I own this thing and use it frequently, which will make me very happy. When I’m at a party, for instance, I can wait for a moment when people start talking about how cool it looks from the latest advertisement. Then I can stroll over and take it out and start using it, pretending that I hadn’t heard their conversation

John Cleese carefully considers your futile comments…

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If you’re very, very stupid, how would you know you’re very, very stupid?…
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No Public Education, No Democracy

From SIMONE HARRIS
Counterpunch
Thanks to Bob Banner

This is why we reject this authoritarian education mandated by an illegitimate corporate power.

I teach English at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, California.  I love my school, my amazing colleagues, and the kids who enter my classroom each year.  But I hate what is happening to public education.

From the national to the local level, our public schools are under attack, and that means our students are under attack.  This attack takes more than one form.  The cuts to vital education services are horrifying enough, but they’re only half the picture.  The other half is the violation of our public trust by private interests.

It’s not a pretty sight, but we must look squarely at the vultures of privatization that prey on the damage to our schools, from New York to New Orleans to Wisconsin to California.  Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, refers to the three big education funders, Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton Family, as the Billionaire Boys Club in her excellent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  Ravitch has come a long way since her days of working under Bush Sr.  I’ve even heard people refer to her as the Noam Chomsky of education, a sure sign of how far to the right our political culture has drifted.

But we were talking about vultures.  These corporations are poised to supply the artificial heart of learning to a wounded public school system they fully intend to finish off.  But they won’t succeed. No they won’t because our communities are going to fight for our beloved schools, we teachers are going to fight for our students, and our students are going to demand

A Manifesto for Psychopaths…

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From GEORGE MONBIOT
monbiot.com

Ayn Rand’s ideas have become the Marxism of the new right… I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and Social Security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill-health…

It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the post-war world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.

Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her non-fiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as “refuse” and “parasites”, and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.

Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention, in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers.

Rosalind Peterson: Urgent! Take Action! Protect Our Marine Mammals, National Marine Sanctuaries, Recreation & Fishing Industries…

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From ROSALIND PETERSON
Redwood Valley

I have sent the attached and/or same letter to our Senators and U.S. Congressman Thompson today. We need to send out as many letters as possible to all of our elected officials at every level of government. Please feel free to use this one or make any changes you deem necessary to make your wishes known. Toll Free Number for all elected officials in Washington, D.C. (1866) 220-0044

The closest event is in Fort Bragg, CA for us….see the links below for more information.

Right now we need a lot of pressure placed on our elected officials and others today.

March 6, 2012

RE:

• U.S. Navy Open House Information Sessions under NEPA
• U.S. Navy NEPA Violations
• Formal Request for a U.S. Navy Formal Presentation & Q&A Period With Proper NEPA Notice
• Protect Our Marine Mammals, National Marine Sanctuaries, Recreation & Fishing Industries

Dear                                                    :

On Saturday, March 3, 2012, I received a postcard from the U.S. Navy inviting the public to participate in the National Environmental Policy Act Process.  However, the U.S. Navy is only holding Open House Information Sessions in easily accessible places in California, Oregon, Washington (State), and Alaska.

We believe, for the following reasons, that the U.S. Navy is not following NEPA requirements:

Triumph of the Generalists…

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From SHARON ASTYK
Casaubon’s Book

[As Peak Oil takes hold and energy prices rise, the many years of centralization, consolidation, and specialization will begin to reverse course and erode. The unfortunate "dumb farmer" phrase, blaspheming generalists, that I wrote about the other day, will be replaced with "just a specialist". The generalists' smarts and many skills required to garden, farm, survive and prosper in the future will once again take their rightful place of honor in our communities. Oh, yeah... and good luck referencing these books on your Kindle, punk... -DS]

I admit it, I’m a generalist in a world of specialists, and I always have been. Looking back on my career history, for example, I see the way I attempted to make the academic model of specialization adapt to my own taste for generalism – my doctoral project was a little bit insane, integrating demography, history, textual analysis and half a dozen other disciplines across a 250 year timeline – just the sort of thing advisers hate to see. The polite word was “ambitious” but “nuts” is probably more accurate. As you can probably guess from the title of this blog (for those who haven’t read George Eliiot, Casaubon is trying to write the ultimate unified theory of everything – and failing miserably), both the joys and dangers of generalism are something I try and keep in mind.

Having left academia behind, it is perhaps natural that I would find myself a career as a generalist- as a writer covering a wide range of subjects and as a farmer, the ultimate generalist. Agriculture requires a wide-ranging set of skills vaster than almost any field I can imagine, and while one becomes deeply expert in some parts of the work, it is still necessary, even imperative, to constantly be gaining some superficial understanding of a host of new things.

The generalist is jack of many trades, but master of few. That’s not a criticism. Being good enough at things is often sufficient for most of a life – particularly an agricultural life. I don’t need to be able to handle the most complex medical crises

Steinbeck: ‘God damn it. This is my book. I’ll make the children talk any way I want…’

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From Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
Via Letters of Note

During the nine months of 1951 that saw him working on his novel, East of Eden, author John Steinbeck began each day of writing by penning, in his notebook, a brief letter to his editor and good friend, Pascal “Pat” Covici. Early-1952, with the book finished, Steinbeck wrote him a final letter — a dedication to Covici in which he spoke of the frustrations and insecurities faced by an author during such a process. It can be read below.

New York
1952

Dear Pat:

I have decided for this, my book, East of Eden, to write dedication, prologue, argument, apology, epilogue and perhaps epitaph all in one.

The dedication is to you with all the admiration and affection that have been distilled from our singularly blessed association of many years. This book is inscribed to you because you have been part of its birth and growth.

As you know, a prologue is written last but placed first to explain the book’s shortcomings and to ask the reader to be kind. But a prologue is also a note of farewell from the writer to his book. For years the writer and his book have been together—friends or bitter enemies but very close as only love and fighting can accomplish.

Then suddenly the book is done. It is a kind of death. This is the requiem.

Miguel Cervantes invented the modem novel and with his Don Quixote set a mark high and bright. In his prologue, he said best what writers feel

Dave Smith: Transition — Clothes and Cars That Last Forever…

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

Old Levi didn’t last forever but his old blue jeans do. I still have a pair of Levi’s 501 denims I wore in high school 50 years ago… and they still fit! The style then was to roll up the leg hems once. The blue suede shoes from Junior High are long gone but those Levi’s still sit in storage in a foot locker and if we ever have a Sock Hop in Ukiah I’m gonna to put them on…

Pity old Levi. Walmart screws up his pants along with everything else they touch…

Used to be there were cars that would last forever. In the 60s it was the Plymouth Valiant getting 500,000+ miles before collapsing… and only then because they had hung around so long people started pointing and hooting at the silly fin design and they slunk off to the junkyard on their own and died there of embarrassment …

In the 70s it was the Datsun 510. I know, I had one just like this…

Stockman: ‘When the real margin call in the great beyond arrives, the carnage will be unimaginable’…

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From BERNARD CONDON
Associated Press

He was an architect of one of the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history. He spent much of his career after politics using borrowed money to take over companies. He targeted the riskiest ones that most investors shunned — car-parts makers, textile mills.

That is one image of David Stockman, the former White House budget director who, after resigning in protest over deficit spending, made a fortune in corporate buyouts.

But spend time with him and you discover this former wunderkind of the Reagan revolution is many other things now — an advocate for higher taxes, a critic of the work that made him rich and a scared investor who doesn’t own a single stock for fear of another financial crisis.

Stockman suggests you’d be a fool to hold anything but cash now, and maybe a few bars of gold. He thinks the Federal Reserve’s efforts to ease the pain from the collapse of our “national leveraged buyout” — his term for decades of reckless, debt-fueled spending by government, families and companies — is pumping stock and bond markets to dangerous heights…

Complete article here…
~
See also Kuntzler: Reality Check

…Our reality-based assignment is the intelligent management of contraction. We don’t want this assignment. We’d prefer to think that things are still going in the other direction, the direction of more, more, more. But they’re not. Whether we like it or not, they’re going in the direction of less, less, less. Granted, this is not an easy thing to contend with, but it is the hand that circumstance has dealt us. Nobody else is to blame for it…
~~

Transition: 55 Real Things to Worry About If You Must…

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We have other things to worry about right now…

From KATHY McMAHON
Peak Oil Blues

Peak Oil, Climate change and the Greater Depression will pose many challenges to our way of life but let’s get real, for a moment: Golden Hordes aren’t one of them. At least not now. Economic depression brings with it a host of serious problems, and I think you can say quite confidently, without being a chicken little, that most of the world is in a Greater Depression. But still, we’ve got a few years to go before we can say that the USA is no longer a viable culture, when no one wants to live in Paris or London, when potatoes no longer grow in Poland, and before donkey’s begin pulling our rusted-out cars. Bikers with shotguns; weaving socks from milk thistle; crashing waves drowning our cities; evacuating your house on a moments notice to house troops; the government coming to confiscate your precious metals; a mass exodus of cities as the violence and mayhem escalates to untolerable levels—all of these things should not be on the top of the list of what to prepared for.

So what should be?

1. Job loss is up there.

2. We’ve already seen retirement accounts deteriorate, leaving us less money to live on in our aging years.

3. Our elderly today, like that 93 year-old who froze to death in his kitchen, will face real challenges in keeping themselves medicated, warm and fed. It may be time to get concerned about the old folks who live on your street, and start having tea with them on alternating days.

4. The rising price of everything from food to fuel is likely to be a serious problem for a lot of us.

5. Food pantries won’t be able to feed all of the people who need resources from them, and people who used to give generously to those same pantries, might now be lining up for help.

6.Managing depression–emotional depression, that is, should be up there.

Don Sanderson: Transition Redux…

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”  – Aldo Leopold

I was born and raised on make-do Depression and WWII farms, the tail end of a long family tradition extending far back, in one case to sixteenth century Yorkshire peasantry. I’d always expected to continue the tradition, but by the time I was ready the industrial age had surged over Midwestern agriculture and equipment and land were far beyond my reach. I have ever since sought return to the land, but modern day lords of the land always demanded more blood than I had to give. By the mid-sixties, I was reading Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac” and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, singing old union and Woody Guthrie songs, subscribing to and collecting Mother Earth News, gardening in every spare corner I could find, and escaping into the wilds at every opportunity. It was clear to me that civilization was sick to death, I ever sought a way out, but found every avenue had been bought by “them”, or so I thought – in retrospect, I realize I could have taken more risks, but I stupidly acquired a family while too young to know better. Transition early had become a constant drumbeat in the background. As a result, I’ve long explored options in considerable depth.

Transition: Taming the Zoning Monster…

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From SHARON ASTYK
Casaubonsbook

For the last several years I’ve been working on the invention of “Urban and Suburban Right-to-Farm Laws” and have had some notable successes including a legal conference on the idea and a few municipalities that have implemented them. This is one of the reasons I think this is so incredibly important – zoning presumptions simply can’t be allowed to prevent people from using less and meeting their own needs.

Over the last 50 years, food and zoning laws have worked to minimize subsistence activities in populated areas. Not only have we lost the culture of subsistence, but we’ve instituted legal requirements that make it almost impossible for many people to engage in simple subsistence activities that cut their energy use, reduce their ecological impact, improve their food security and improve their communities. In some cases, these laws were instituted for fairly good reasons, in many cases, for bad ones that associate such activities with poverty.

Scratch most of the reasons for these things both for zoning laws and HOA policies, and you’ll find class issues under their surface in the name of “property values.” There are ostensible reasons for these things, but generally speaking, they derive from old senses of what constituted wealth They stem from the notion that what constituted wealth was essentially having things that don’t do anything

Occupy: The rich like taking candy from babies…

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From THOM HARTMANN
Democratic Undergound

The Banksters like stealing candy from little children. No, I’m not exaggerating…they really do. At least according to a new study out of the University of California Berkeley and the University of Toronto. Two teams of researchers discovered that wealthy upper-class Americans are more likely than middle-class or poorer Americans to break traffic laws – lie for financial gain – and yes – steal candy from children.

First – when it comes to traffic laws – people driving higher-end cars like BMWs and Mercedes were seen breaking traffic laws and cutting off pedestrians more often than people driving cars like Camrys and Corrollas. In another observation – wealthier people were three times more likely to lie in a game of dice when a $50 prize was at stake for whoever rolled the highest number. As the lead researcher Paul Piff noted, “Even in people for whom $50 is a relatively small amount of money, cheating was three times as high.”

Bruce’s Daily Dish…

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From BRUCE ANDERSON
TheAVA
Anderson Valley

[Many local readers of The Anderson Valley Advertiser go directly to Publisher Bruce Anderson's column "Off The Record" before venturing into the rest of the popular Mendo weekly. Bruce now writes a daily blog post "of daily bulletins on breaking stories specific to or affecting Mendocino County" in the on-line version of the AVA, complete with a summary limerick... -DS]

Mendocino County Today: March 2, 2012

MENDOCINO COUNTY’S NEW PROSECUTOR, Paul Sequeira, 53, has sued a former Contra Costa County colleague. Sequeira alleges that Harold Jewett, 55, assaulted him during a hallway argument in March of 2010. Jewett says he was merely defending himself against Sequeira. Much of the dispute between the two men seems to have been fueled by office politics as each backed opposing candidates for DA in the 2010 Contra Costa County elections.

FLIP OUT OF THE WEEK (so far). Deputies were first called to the North State Street trailer park Wednesday morning about 8:30 where a young woman was said to be “running through the area and displaying bizarre behavior.” Bizarre behavior being a rather elastic phrase any more, deputies soon concluded that Lacey Lynn Mononi, 26, was merely drunk and animated beyond the normal parameters of alcohol intoxication.

Lucy Neely and Will Parrish: Food Localization, Mendo & Beyond — A Dialogue

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Adam Gaska – Mendocino Organics CSA

From LUCY NEELY and WILL PARRISH
Ukiah

On February 10th, on a misty morning at Rain Tenaqiya’s permaculture demonstration site in the hills far above Ukiah, we gathered with four pillars of the local food movement for an in-depth discussion of their respective philosophies and goals.

Mendocino County is home to a diversity of food production and/or cultivation, and one of the reasons that makes this area an exciting place to live for people who value ecological balance and social justice. We sought to reflect this diversity in our choices of conversation participants.

We first approached our mutual friend Mr. Tenaqiya, in whose hand-crafted earthen home on Parducci Road the conversation took place. He has been a permaculturalist and food forester of twenty years. He is zealously committed to reducing his carbon footprint and easing the suffering of all beings. He’s growing out dreadlocks. When we presented the idea of our discussion to him, he enthusiastically agreed to participate.

From there, we invited Doug Mosel of the Mendocino Grain Project, a sage observer of the local food movement, as anyone who listens to his twice-monthly

Todd Walton: Better Be Good

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“In Hollywood they place you under contract instead of under observation.” Walter Winchell

I recently read a brief rave review of a new movie, not a remake, but the umpteenth “psychological thriller” about a psychopath keeping someone trapped in a closet for years on end. And this review, which sounded suspiciously like a press release, reminded me of one of the more bizarre and disturbing passages in my long ago Hollywood sojourn when I tried to succeed as a screenwriter. But first a little of the back-story, as they like to call the past in the movie business.

In 1981, following the success of my first novel, I was hired by Warner Brothers to write a screenplay based on my second novel Forgotten Impulses, with Laura Ziskin the producer. Laura would eventually produce the Spiderman movies and several other blockbusters, including the incredibly popular prostitute-to-riches movie Pretty Woman, but at the time of our collaboration she had yet to make it big. Laura was passionate about my book, had wonderful ideas about translating the story

Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Dead Wrong…

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Olaf Otto Becker
Icebergs in Iceland’s Jökulsárlón lagoon, which is constantly growing as the Vatnajökull glacier—Europe’s largest—melts; photograph by Olaf Otto Becker from his book Under the Nordic Light: A Journey Through Time, Iceland, 1999–2011, which has just been published by Hatje Cantz

From WILLIAM D. NORDHAUS
New York Review of Books

The threat of climate change is an increasingly important environmental issue for the globe. Because the economic questions involved have received relatively little attention, I have been writing a nontechnical book for people who would like to see how market-based approaches could be used to formulate policy on climate change. When I showed an early draft to colleagues, their response was that I had left out the arguments of skeptics about climate change, and I accordingly addressed this at length.

But one of the difficulties I found in examining the views of climate skeptics is that they are scattered widely in blogs, talks, and pamphlets. Then, I saw an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal of January 27, 2012, by a group of sixteen scientists, entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” This is useful because it contains many of the standard criticisms in a succinct statement. The basic message of the article is that the globe is not warming, that dissident voices are being suppressed, and that delaying policies to slow climate change for fifty years will have no serious economic or environment consequences.

The truly despicable personal war against our climate change science heroes…

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[Human-Caused Climate Change is not complicated and is beyond challenge, yet the scientists who have proved it scientifically are subject to a fierce, dishonest, anti-science disinformation campaign and daily attacks threatening their lives and their families... funded by the fossil fuel industries... See also: I Heart Climate Scientists -DS]

A Climate Warrior Puts It All on the Line — Including His Life

From BRYAN WALSH
Time Science

The climate war — the public opinion battle between skeptics of man-made global warming and those who believe in the scientific consensus — escalated to a new level of ferocity this past month. First a series of memos allegedly from the Heartland Institute — a libertarian think tank that has long supported climate skepticism — surfaced on the Internet, detailing the group’s previously anonymous corporate funding and outlining its plan to fight action on global warming. Then came the news last week that the Heartland memos had been fraudulently acquired by the environmental advocate and scientist Peter Gleick, who — after allegedly being sent an initial memo by a person he identified as a Heartland insider — impersonated as a Heartland board member via email in order to obtain several additional internal documents. Worse, Heartland now claims

Keep Climate Denial Out of Our Schools…

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From The Climate Reality Project

Sign our petition and stand up for reality. Say NO to climate denial in our schools:

http://forms.climaterealityproject.org/page/s/heartland

The Heartland Institute’s President and CEO just admitted that Heartland is writing a “global warming curriculum” that would say climate science isn’t settled. Heartland would like to create the appearance of a scientific debate where there is none by having our teachers claim we just don’t know if humans are changing our climate.

Corey Husic, a student and trained Climate Presenter, is sending the message below to Joseph Bast, President and CEO, Heartland Institute. Sign our petition and join Corey in standing up for reality. Say NO to climate denial in our schools.

Dear Mr. Bast,

I’m Corey Husic, and I’m a high school student in Pennsylvania. It’s come to my attention that you are prepared to spend a significant amount of money on a “global warming curriculum” to teach kids that climate change isn’t real.

That’s right. According to your own budget documents, you want to hand teachers a curriculum that says global warming is “a major scientific controversy” and that carbon dioxide might not even be a pollutant.

Dave Smith: Pursuing Happiness…

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To the Editors: The AVA, UDJ, WN

Are you happy? Chances are, if you live here in the United States, you are not. Despite the enshrinement in our Declaration of Independence of the phrase “Pursuit of Happiness” as one of the sovereign rights of mankind, we are way down on the list of the happiest countries in the world. In fact, we are not even in the Top 10.

According to a study by “24-7 Wall Street” that looked into the OECD’s Better Life Index to determine what the happiest nations on the planet are, it turns out that the happy nations spend far more of their GDP on social programs than we do here in America. The study examined quality of life things such as health, education, housing, the environment, jobs, community, work life, and income to figure out what truly makes a nation happy.

Old, stable nations of northern Europe took five of the top 10 spots on the list. These include the “socialist” Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark, all way happier than we are down the list at number 19.

Does it surprise you that the happiest nation, Denmark, also has the highest taxes of all?

As we are continually warned and berated by the tiresome scolds in our local opinion columns and letters to the editor to fear those who hold firm on providing a basic social safety net for the least among us, we must ask ourselves what motivates such a steadfast and determined assault on our personal and community happiness.

Dave Smith
Ukiah
~~

Hey Ayn Rand Worshippers: Face the Facts and STFU — Our Liberal Blue States are the Providers while Your Conservative Red States are the Parasites…

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From SARA ROBINSON
AlterNet

Last week, the New York Times published a widely discussed article updating an argument that progressive bloggers noticed a very long time ago. It’s now well-understood that blue states generally export money to the federal government; and red states generally import it.

TPM published a great map showing exactly how this redistribution works: (click here) Progressives believe in the redistribution of wealth, so we’re not usually too upset by this state of affairs. That’s what it means to be one country. E pluribus unum, and all that. We’re happy to help, because we think we’ve got a stake in making sure kids in rural Alabama get educations and seniors in Arizona get healthcare. What’s good for them is good for all of us. We also like to think they’d help us out if our positions were reversed. It’s an investment in making America stronger, and we feel fine about that.

Gina Covina: Planning ahead to save your seeds…

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From GINA COVINA
Laughing Frog Farm
Laytonville

[Gina's seeds from Laughing Frog Farm now available at Mulligan Books & Seeds. -DS]

If you haven’t saved seed from your vegetable garden, here are the basics you need to know before you plant. Some planning is required – you can’t reliably save seed as an afterthought.

First, be sure you’re starting with an open-pollinated variety rather than a hybrid. All the food crops we know and love were developed by countless generations of seed savers and will breed true to type from seeds you save – that’s open-pollinated. Hybrids are first-generation crosses between varieties – F1 crosses – that result in a very uniform set of characteristics (handy for mechanical harvest and for transport and sales) and a boost in robustness that is known as hybrid vigor. Save and grow the seed from your hybrid and the result (the F2 generation) will revert to a large range of characteristics, with most plants being unsatisfactory from an eater’s perspective.

Hybrids were developed as a way for seed companies to create and hold a market

Occupy chock full of traitors, infiltrators, and provocateurs…

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From KEVIN ZEESE and MARGARET FLOWERS
TruthDig

On the very first day of the Occupation of Wall Street, we saw infiltration by the police. We were leaving Zuccotti Park and were stopped in traffic. We saw the doors of an unmarked van open and in the front seat were two uniformed police. Out of the back came two men dressed as Occupiers wearing backpacks, sweatshirts and jeans. They walked into Zuccotti Park and became part of the crowd.

In the first week of the Occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., we saw the impact of two right wing infiltrators. A peaceful protest was planned at the drone exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. The plan was for a banner drop and a die-in under the drones. But as protesters arrived at the museum, two people ran out in front, threatening the security guards and causing them to pepper spray protesters and tourists. Patrick Howley, an assistant editor at the American Spectator, wrote a column bragging about his role as an agent provocateur. A few days later we uncovered the second infiltrator, Michael Stack, when he was urging people on Freedom Plaza to resist police with force. We later learned he was from the Leadership Institute, which trains youth in right wing ideology

The Ungodly Godly…

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From ZEPP JAMIESON
The Big Weasel’s Weblog

[...] The huge advantage to religious demagoguery is that you can use the name of the Christ Jesus to persuade people to oppose their own best interests. You have to be careful, of course, because Jesus was a socialist and anti-authoritarian besides. There was that “eye of the needle” and “the least among you” stuff that had to be glossed over, and a right wing group has been busy writing a version of the New Testament that eliminates all the touchy-feely left-wing stuff and essentially creates the impression that Jesus was a supply sider and probably wanted to keep Jews out of his country club.

Neo-cons are still in disrepute, despite the ongoing efforts to gin up a war against Iran, and the Occupy movement has made appeals to peoples’ supply-side sensitivities a limited one. People aren’t as willing to give to billionaires so they can soar like eagles as they were a few years earlier. The only thing that comes from soaring eagles is predation and eagle shit, and people who are already struggling don’t find that in their own best interests.

That leaves religious demagoguery. Which is why you have a religious nut like Rick Santorum leading the race (for now) in the GOP, and why Newt Gingrich, of all people, has been trying to exploit this by mooing religious noises of his own.

The GOP have nothing to offer

OWS: How to Create, Buy and Sell Criminals…

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From ARVIND DILAWAR
The Occupied Wall Street Journal

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), owner of the largest private prison system in the United States, recently sent a letter to 48 states offering up to $250 million to manage government-owned detention centers. The letter lists the criteria of eligible purchases, which include an assurance that state corrections agencies “have sufficient inmate population to maintain a minimum 90 percent occupancy over the term of the contract.”

This guarantee isn’t difficult to rationalize when considering it from CCA’s point of view. They are paid by the government for each prisoner they house, so they want to house as many prisoners as possible in order to maximize their revenue.

But what if there aren’t enough prisoners to fill CCA’s quota? Private prisons have faced this dilemma before, and they’ve responded by buying prisoners through legislation, government infiltration and old-fashioned bribery. And in the not too distant future, these conditions may mean that the mass arrests of Occupy protesters could become a windfall for investors.

HOW TO PURCHASE PRISONERS

1. Write the Laws

Transition Ukiah Valley Film Series: The Economics of Happiness at the Saturday Afternoon Club – Tonight 2/27/12 6:30 pm

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TRANSITION UKIAH VALLEY
PRESENTS

Are you concerned about the future?

Communities around the world are recognizing the reality of peak oil and climate change, and are coming together to create economies that are more sustainable, resilient and socially just. This film explores the problems we are facing and how a renewal of localization can heal both the earth and ourselves.

The Saturday Afternoon Clubhouse
107 S. Oak Street
Monday, February 27th
6:30 PM
$5-10 Donation requested
Light refreshments provided

Transition Ukiah Valley is part of an international localization movement to build community resilience in the face of climate change, peak oil and environmental degradation.

Learn more about us here…
www.transitionukiahvalley.org

A Fiscally Sponsored Program of the Cloud Forest Institute
~~

Not Ready to Do What’s Needed…

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World

There is a period in most relationships when one or more of the members knows in their heart that the relationship is not sustainable and something very difficult must be done, but they aren’t yet ready to do it. Most likely they are hoping that someone else will acknowledge it as well, and maybe even do it for them, save them the trouble. This period of awkwardness, tension, partial denial, suffering and unspoken grief, can last a long time.

I think we, the human species, in our astonishing relationship with each other, in this contract we call “civilization”, are now in such a period, and we have been for some time. We don’t want to give up on the relationship — it has given us a lot, we are used to it, and we can make ourselves believe it still has promise

Hey! There IS no tomorrow…

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~

Gas prices set records, soon to reach new highs

Mainstream media outlets throughout the country are now reporting on record-breaking gas prices, the highest ever for this time of the year.  Also making the rounds is the commonly cited prediction by former Shell CEO John Hofmeister that there is a better than 50 percent chance that gas prices will reach $5 a gallon by this summer in the U.S.  This is in spite of the fact that U.S. oil production is up and oil consumption down, since 2008.  What the media isn’t reporting on is the rest of what Hofmeister said in a recent peak oil themed debate he had with Tad Patzek on Feb. 14.

In the debate, Hofmeister said that we’re heading for $7 to $8 gas and rationing by 2015, and rolling blackouts and brownouts.  He also made clear that oil is the lubricant

Basketry: Out of hundreds of traditional crafts, none has so many everyday applications…

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From BRIAN KALLER
Low-Tech Magazine

We tend to think of technology as rock and metal – from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, from pyramids and statues to Viking swords and pirate cannons. We think of the things that survive to be placed in museums, in other words, and tend to neglect the early and important inventions that ordinary people used every day but whose materials did not survive centuries of exposure.

29,000 years of history

Virtually all human cultures have made baskets, and have apparently done so since we co-existed with ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats; for tens of thousands of years humans may have slept in basket-frame huts, kept predators out with basket fences, and caught fish in basket traps gathered while paddling along a river in a basket-frame boat. They might have carried their babies in basket papooses and gone to their graves in basket coffins.

The earliest piece of ancient basketry we have comes from 13,000 years ago, but impressions on ceramics from Central Europe indicate woven fibres — textiles or baskets

The Wobblies Legacy…

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From DICK MEISTER
www.dickmeister.com

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and the other anti-capitalist forces of today could find no greater inspiration than the Industrial Workers of the World – the IWW, one of the most influential organizations in U.S. history, that was founded in Chicago in 1905 by a band of fiercely dedicated idealists.

The Wobblies, as they were called, battled against overwhelming odds. Their only real weapon was an utter refusal to compromise in a single-minded march toward a Utopia that pitted them against the combined forces of government and business.

Their weapon, their goals, the power of their opponents, the imperfect world about them made it inevitable that they would lose. But this is not to say the Wobblies failed because they didn’t reach their goal of creating “One Big Union” to wage a general strike that would put all means of production in the hands of workers and transform the country into a “Cooperative Commonwealth of Workers.”

To say the Wobbles failed

Dave Smith: ‘Dumb Farmers’…

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah
to be of use (2005)

The most fundamental of businesses, and one whose values I believe come closest to those taught by the wisdom traditions, is organic family farming. I’ve found my own Creative Action Heroes among the peasants and those who look at life with a peasant’s perspective — organic market farmers, organic restaurateurs, and others involved with the organic food movement. Their mission, and the missions of their businesses, address a problem, either directly or indirectly, that touches all of our lives: environmental pollution from toxic chemicals on the land, in our water, and in our food that cause health problems.

Our culture’s idyllic idea of the small farm features the white farmhouse with the red barn, chickens clucking in the barnyard, pastured animals munching sleepily on green hills, and the farmer rocking gently on the front porch at dusk. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. A small organic or sustainable farm is a beehive of swarming activity from before first light until way after the sun has disappeared. I remember reading somewhere that 70 percent of Americans, if they had the choice, would live on a farm. Whether or not they would choose to work that farm is another matter entirely.

Gene Logsdon: Our Hidden Wound

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From GENE LOGSDON (1992)
The Contrary Farmer
[Repost]

I’m a hayseed, I’m a hayseed,
and my ears are full of pigweed.
How they flop in stormy weather—
gosh oh hemlock, tough as leather…

—From a children’s rhyme heard in the Midwest in the 1930s and forties.

Most of us grew up in a society where farmer was often merely a synonym for moron, and I am quite sure that many farmers are still haunted by feelings of inferiority laid on them by this kind of urban and urbane prejudice. In fact, I suspect that many of the most competent farmers among us continue to expand their farm empires not out of greed or an insatiable desire for wealth, but because they feel compelled to prove again and again that, by God, they are not inferior to anyone. They want to cram that fact as far down the throats of their boyhood taunters as they can, and, sadly, they spend their lives doing it.

In my high school days in the late forties, supercilious town girls routinely claimed that milking cows

Todd Walton: Greek To Me

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“The church is the great lost and found department.” Robert Short

The terrace at the Presbyterian in Mendocino can be a wonderful place to sit and read and write and eat a snack, especially on a sunny day. From every bench one has a view of either the ocean sparkling in the distance or of the stately white church with its impressive shingled spire. Tourists and itinerants frequent the terrace, and sometimes these visitors will notice me there on a bench, deduce from my appearance and demeanor that I am a local character, and then ask me questions, which I do my best to answer.

“Where is the historical monument?” I think you mean historical landmark, and this church is the landmark.

“Is it a Catholic church?” No.

“Can you go inside the church?” I can, but I prefer to stay out here.

“I mean can we go inside the church?” If the door is unlocked, ye may enter.

“Is there a good Mexican restaurant in the village?” No.

“Is there a homeless shelter around here?” Not in Mendocino, but there is Hospitality House in Fort Bragg providing shelter for well-behaved homeless people.

“How far is it to Fort Bragg?” Eight to ten miles depending on which sign you believe.

“Is there an inexpensive motel around here?” No.

“Where is the best place to watch whales?” Alaska.

“We meant around here.” Take Little Lake Road to where it ends at the ocean. Get out of your car and…

“We have to get out of our car?” No. You can watch from your car, though your chances of actually seeing a whale or a whale spout will be greatly diminished if you stay in your car.

“Is there a good Chinese restaurant around here?” No.

“German?” Nein.

“Pizza?” Frankie’s.

Will Parrish: A Travesty Of A Mockery Of A Sham

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

The United States government’s “compensation” to American Indians for past and present injustices typically amounts to what Groucho Marx called “a travesty of a mockery of a sham.”  Case in point: In 1974, the California State Legislature voted to pay enrolled members of California Indian nations $0.47 an acre – about $650 per Indian — in exchange for having expropriated all the land of California.  California officials arrived at their $0.47-an-acre calculation because that’s what land was worth in the state, on average, in 1853.

Another example is an agreement announced last week between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Bradley Mining Company, and the Elem Pomo’s US federal government-recognized tribal administrators. As compensation for poisoning the Elem’s land and waters with prodigious amounts of methyl mercury tailings for several decades, thereby causing premature deaths, birth defects, cancers, and bodily deformities among tribal members, while in the process destroying the tribe’s ability to grow food or harvest fish safely (as they have for more than 10,000 years), the Bradley Mining Company would pay the Elem $50,000 and give them five land parcels under the settlement. The EPA says the 380 acres that make up these parcels have been decontaminated.

In exchange, the Elem would never again be allowed to sue the United States government, including the EPA and BIA, or even the Bradley Mining Company, for any reason.

Within days of the settlement agreement’s release, Elem Cultural Leader Jim Browneagle submitted a “public comment” letter to the US Department of Justice and the EPA denouncing the terms of the settlement.

“If the current settlement agreement is approved, it will be a travesty of the federal justice system and violation of Indian Civil Rights Act and Indian Self-determination, while undermining the protection of natural resources and tribal sovereignty,” he wrote. He also called the settlement “a setback of environmental justice [and] a denial of fair and equal compensation to the living surviving Elem members and families for their lifelong pain and suffering and loss of tribal lifeways (gathering of healthy foods and fish).”

The Politics of a Local Economy with Doug Mosel Tonight 2/24/12 7-10 pm…

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Presentation and discussion with Doug Mosel, founder of the Mendocino Grain Project and Campaign Coordinator for Mendocino’s Measure H (no GMO) initiative…. in the Plowshares Community Room, 1346 S State Street.  $5-$10 donation requested for this benefit event.
~
From Occupy Our Food Supply Global Day of Action Next Monday 2/27/12:

Vandana Shiva, Indian physicist and internationally renowned activist, adds: “Our food system has been hijacked by corporate giants from the Seed to the table. Seeds controlled by Monsanto, agribusiness trade controlled by Cargill, processing controlled by Pepsi and Philip Morris, retail controlled by Walmart – is a recipe for Food Dictatorship. We must Occupy the Food system to create Food Democracy.”

Raj Patel, activist, academic and author of The Value of Nothing, reflects: “It’s hard for us to imagine life without food corporations because they’ve made our world theirs. Although we think food companies make food for us, in almost every way that matters, we – and our planet – are being transformed to suit food companies. From their marketing to children and exploitation of workers to environmental destruction in search of profit, the food industry represents one of the most profound threats to sustainability we face today.”

Occupy Wall Street’s Sustainability and Food Justice Committees issued this statement in support of #F27: “On Monday, February 27th, 2012, OWS Food Justice, OWS Sustainability, Oakland Food Justice & the worldwide Occupy Movement invite you to join the Global Day of Action to Occupy the Food Supply. We challenge the corporate food regime that has prioritized profit over health and sustainability. We seek to create healthy local food systems. We stand in Solidarity with Indigenous communities, and communities around the world, that are struggling with hunger, exploitation, and unfair labor practices.”

“On this day

Are you happy? Is this really as good as it gets?…

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From THOM HARTMANN

Are you happy? Chances are… you probably aren’t. That’s because according to a new study by “24-7 Wall Street” that looked into the OECD’s Better Life Index to determine what the happiest nations on the planet are… the US didn’t even crack the top 10. The happy nations spend far more of their GDP on social programs than we do here in America. What’s the point of being exceptional – as Ronald Reagan would describe America – if that exceptionality doesn’t make us happy? Until we fix our elections – and kick the corporate millionaires and billionaires out – and claim once and for all that our democracy belongs to We The People – that it’s part of the commons – then we’ll always be stuck in the muck wondering if this… is as good as it gets…

Transition: What’s happening around the world right now…

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From TRANSITION CULTURE
Complete Story with all videos here

Let’s start this month’s round up in Derbyshire, where Melbourne Area Transition have received planning permission to install 48 PV panels on the roof of their local 12^th century church, and there they now sit, in their energy-generating splendour.  Here’s a short film made by Chris Bird (author of the Transition book ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ who blogs here) where MAT’s Graham Truscott gives him a tour of the roof.

In a second video, Chris and Graham get in off the roof and talk in more depth about how the scheme came into being, and the obstacles it overcame:

TT-Llandeilo in Wales are fighting to save their historic Market Hall while plans are being considered for a new Sainsbury’s supermarket to the north of the town – read more in This is South Wales.  Picking up a story from last month’s round up, which was explored in more detail in the last Transition podcast, here is an article in Treehugger on TT-Whitehead planting 60,000 trees which includes their fantastic video that we featured here last month.

#Occupied: Reports From the Front Lines…

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WEEKLY ROUNDUP OF OCCUPY MOVEMENT NEWS

Mexico City: #Occupied. Photo: Miguel Angel Guzman

This week in Occupy, there was an outpouring of solidarity for Greece, Ric Santorum got mic-checked in Tacoma and the NYPD continued to rack up lawsuits as a result of its thuggery.

#As Greece faced a second bailout, its citizenry continued to protest the government’s severe austerity measures. Occupiers everywhere took to the streets in solidarity. In Berlin, militants from several groups organized protests in front of the Greek embassy and Occupy Berlin organized protests at the Berlinale International Film Festival.

#Stop-and-frisks performed by the NYPD increased 14 percent in 2011; 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic.

Occupy Tampa

#Anthony Bologna, A.K.A. Tony Baloney, the pepper-spraying New York cop, is being sued by the unarmed women he sprayed during a demonstration in September in an incident that brought Occupy Wall Street to global prominence.

Secret Crying Places

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer 

I was up in the haymow throwing hay down to the sheep the morning after our grandson scored the winning points at the buzzer in a high school basketball game. It had been a thrilling moment in our lives, of course, and I was still riding high on the memory. I happened to look over in the corner of the loft and saw lying there in the corner, a basketball, now partially deflated. Nearby the old homemade banking board hung from the wall with cobwebs streaming down from the hoop. Over the last decade, there is no telling how many hours Grandmother and I played there with Evan and his brother, Alex. I joked that I had taught the boys everything they know about the game but the truth was just the opposite. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help wondering if all that dribbling, passing, and shooting might have contributed to Evan’s dramatic drive to the basket with just four seconds left in the game. And yes, as I sat there on a bale, staring at the old deflated basketball, I was crying my eyes out.

My barn has often been the place I go to cry. No one can see me there except the cats. We must never let the young people know about secret crying places. Perhaps oddly, I go there to cry more over happy events than sad ones. I went there to cry when our daughter and then our son grew upand left home as they must do, to start their own families. Now the grandchildren too will leave, nevermore to ripple that old basketball net, and I will go to the barn to weep even as I cheer them on.

I knew I needed a secret crying place when my mother died. We were living the suburban life then, but had managed to turn our big backyard into a kind of secluded garden with a chicken coop at the center of it.

Occupy and The Commons…

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From DAVID BOLLIER
Bollier.com

The Occupy movement is beginning to discover the commons, and the result could be a rich and productive collaboration.  This was the lesson that I took from a three-day conference, “Making Worlds:  A Forum on the Commons,” hosted by Occupy Wall Street in Brooklyn this past weekend. Rarely have I seen so many ordinary people from diverse backgrounds embrace the commons idea with such ease and enthusiasm.

There was a certain cosmic appropriateness that this gathering was held in a church meeting hall, the Church of the Ascension in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  This is the kind of humble, out of the way setting that gave rise to the civil rights movement 50-60 years ago.  Church basements virtually require us to shed our pretensions and credentials, and to get real with each other.  As they say in the Occupy world, this was a “truth event” – an occasion meant to rip a hole in the fabric of mainstream culture and provoke some deep and honest reflection on the truth.

Can the commons paradigm take us to higher ground?  For the 100-plus people who showed up, the forum was an occasion to consider how the commons can open up new vistas in “alternative economies, open source, education, environment, technology, labor, politics, race, gender, sexuality and more.”  In typical Occupy style, the meetings were run in a fairly loose fashion; it was not always clear who was “running” the meeting because many people intervened at various times.

And yet things never got out of hand, and I cannot recall a meeting of this size that was richer, more provocative and constructive. People really listened to each other.  People actively invited everyone to speak out, especially those who were more reticent.  Your professional credentials

David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview (2003)…

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From OPEN CULTURE

In 2003, an interviewer from German public television station ZDF sat down with novelist David Foster Wallace in a hotel room. The ensuing conversation, whose raw, unedited 84 minutes (find links to the complete interview below) made it to the internet after Wallace’s suicide, remains the most direct, expansive, and disarmingly rough-hewn media treatment of his themes, his personality, and the fascinating (if at times chilling) feedback loop between them. You can also experience this conversation in short, thematically organized clips; above, we have “David Foster Wallace on Political Thinking in America.” Wallace expresses his concerns about the strong influence of television ads on elections, which means, he says,”we get candidates who are beholden to large donors and become, in some ways, corrupt, which disgusts the voters, makes them even less interested in politics, less willing to read and do the work of citizenship.” This he sees coupled with an individualistic marketing culture which stokes “that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire” — “a strange kind of slavery.”

But as his pained, self-questioning expression reveals — especially when it retreats into strangely endearing post-answer cringes — Wallace did not believe he possessed the cure for, or even a precisely accurate diagnosis of, a sick society. Offering social criticism at a vast remove from the avuncular condemnation of a Noam Chomsky or the raised middle finger of a Bill Hicks, Wallace discusses his fears through a novelist’s consciousness that longs to, as he explains the desire elsewhere in the interview, “jump over the wall of self and inhabit someone else.” When the interviewer tells him about her peers’ frustration at feeling educated but “not being able to do anything with it,” Wallace puts himself in the mind of students who go from studying “the liberal arts: philosophy, classical stuff, languages, all very much about the nobility

I stand with Farmers vs. Monsanto…

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From FOOD DEMOCRACY NOW

On January 31, 2012, 55 farmers and plaintiffs traveled to Manhattan to hear oral arguments regarding Monsanto’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) vs. Monsanto.

At the heart of the lawsuit is the threat that family farmers face due to genetic trespass on their fields as a result of Monsanto’s genetically modified (GMO) seed and the aggressive enforcement of the biotech seed and chemical giant’s alleged patent rights.

In court, Federal Judge Naomi Buchwald declared that she would rule on the motion to dismiss the trial or move forward in the next 60 days or by March 31st. If you want to
support America’s family farmers, sign the letter to say, “I Stand with Farmers vs. Monsanto!”

Please take a moment to tell America’s farmers why you support them.

I support America’s farmers in their pursuit of justice and their right to grow food without fear and intimidation. It’s time for family farmers to have their day in court and put an end to this unjust harassment.

Sign here
~

Very funny romp through the lives of wanna-be, urbanite, country weekenders who think they’ve got what it takes to “go back to the land.”
~~

Lying Plutocrats, Killing Our Democracy, Pure and Simple…

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From GEORGE MONBIOT
The Guardian

Now it’s a straight fight with the billionaires and corporations

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers.

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

Luntz’s technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution or burning fossil fuels causes climate change is still wide open, and that both sides of the “controversy” should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multi-millionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools, which teaches that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” and “whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial.”

The institute has claimed that it is “a genuinely independent source of research and commentary” and that “we do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors”.

Rosalind Peterson: Mendocino County Billboard Pollution…

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From ROSALIND PETERSON
Agriculture Defense Coalition

It is time for Mendocino County to take stock of the ever-increasing number and size of ugly billboards that are destroying the wonderful views here in Mendocino County.

If tourism is to increase we need to have a decrease in the number and size of unsightly billboards rather than increasing numbers. Thus, the County billboard ordinance, rules, and regulations should be upgraded in order to attract tourism here and also to enhance the beauty of Mendocino County.

Action Items:

1. All current billboards should be inspected to make sure that the size of the billboards in our county have not been increasing with additions in the last 10 years. Any billboards that have increased in width, height or length should be brought back into compliance by fines levied by the County Planning Department. It appears that extensions on the sides, tops, and width of older billboards have been changed without approval by the Mendocino County Planning Department. (Note the height extension on the billboard in this photograph on U.S. 101.)

2. All billboards that have ugly backsides should be removed or upgraded.

Gina Covina: Saving squash seeds…

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From GINA COVINA
Laughing Frog Farm
Laytonville

We’ve spent the last week in the heady thrill of garden planning. The process used to be an orgy of seed catalog porn, but now we’re in transition to sustainability, so the first step was identifying the crops we want to grow for seed this year. That list included way more than we can grow ourselves, so we brought our favorite candidates to the Laytonville Seed Swap on Sunday and found growers for them from the ranks of the newly evolving Mendocino Seed Growers Co-op. The near future is looking good for local seed.

Here’s one example. Squash divide themselves into three main species (and a couple more minor ones) and within those species they cross-pollinate like crazy. Between species, no. Cucurbita pepo includes most summer squash, as well as acorn, delicata, and many pumpkins. Cucurbita maxima includes a long list of buttercups, Hubbards, turbans, bananas, and more pumpkins. The third, C. moschata, has the butternuts, cheese, trombetta – and yes, more pumpkins. A gardener without near neighbors can grow one variety from each species and confidently save the seeds without having to resort to hand pollination. Our only C. pepo this year will be Dark Star zucchini, the result of Bill Richards’ many years of breeding work on the Eel River flood plain. Delicious, prolific as the hybrid zucchinis, deep-rooted (Richards grows without irrigation), and cold-tolerant beyond the limits of other zukes.

But we also have

Transition: When they cut Social Security by 40%…

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From JOHN ROBB
Resilient Communities

As most of us already know, the Greek government is bankrupt.

So far, it has been forced to cut expenses by 34%.

That means they have already made deep cuts in pension payments, government employee incomes, and government employee headcount.  And they are just getting started.

The Greek economy is in free-fall and likely to set the record for the most severe depression in a modern country so far this Century.

Our collective problem is that the Greek experience will soon seem commonplaces. Almost all of the nations in the West are headed towards a Greek style bankruptcy given current trends. The US deficit alone is running at over a trillion a year with NO end in sight. So, eventual bankruptcy of the US and most of the EU isn’t a question of what is right or just or what could happen in a perfect world.  It’s what is likely to happen.

Given this, the question you should be asking yourself is:  What would happen if the US and the EU cut their budgets as deeply as Greece?  What if there was an across the board budget cut of 40%?

This is an important question since it is almost certain to happen and it will be ugly.  Why?  The number of people that…

1. currently work for the government,
2. get a government pension (or military pension),
3. or get social security/medicare/income support payments

is very large.

So, for planning purposes

Occupy The Neighborhood: How Counties Can Use Land Banks and Eminent Domain

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From ELLEN BROWN
The Web of Debt

An electronic database called MERS has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives.

John O’Brien is Register of Deeds for Southern Essex County, Massachusetts. He calls his land registry a “crime scene.” A formal forensic audit of the properties for which he is responsible found that:

• Only 16% of the mortgage assignments were valid.
• 27% of the invalid assignments were fraudulent, 35% were “robo-signed,” and 10% violated the Massachusetts Mortgage Fraud Statute.
• The identity of financial institutions that are current owners of the mortgages could be determined for only 287 out of 473 (60%).
• There were 683 missing assignments for the 287 traced mortgages, representing approximately $180,000 in lost recording fees per 1,000 mortgages whose current ownership could be traced.

At the root of the problem is that title has been recorded in the name of a private entity called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS). MERS is a mere place holder for the true owners, a faceless, changing pool of investors owning indeterminate portions of sliced and diced, securitized properties.

Todd Walton: Shooting Hoops

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.” Sherman Alexie

I suppose it’s a good thing we don’t have a basketball court at our house or I might never go anywhere, but if someday housing prices around here fall from insane to merely absurd and we manage to buy our own place, and assuming the house is not on a cliff, I’ll put up a backboard and hoop. In my younger days I had a big sign on the refrigerator that said When In Doubt, Shoot Hoops, and doing so saved my sanity a thousand times. Shooting hoops should not be confused with playing basketball, because one can shoot hoops alone and have an experience more akin to walking meditation than that of a full-blown game of basketball.

We recently watched Smoke Signals, a movie based on the short stories of Sherman Alexie, with a screenplay by Alexie, and we loved it. I hadn’t seen the film since it came out in 1998, and I had forgotten how important basketball is to the story, not in terms of plot, but as a metaphor for the game of life. Smoke Signals is definitely not a basketball movie, nor is it really an American Indian movie, though the film is peopled almost entirely with Indians and set on the Coeur d’Alene reservation. But below the skin, this is a tender and universal story about parents and children and sorrow, and how the unresolved past may impinge on the present and trap us in anger and confusion. Smoke Signals might have been set in Poland or Iraq or San Francisco rather than on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, but that’s where Sherman Alexie came from, so that’s where the movie takes place, with a brief cameo by the inimitable John Trudell as the reservation radio DJ intoning, “It’s a good day to be indigenous.”

Transition: As our civilization declines, it will increasingly be up to households and communities to provide the basics for ourselves…

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From RICHARD HEINBERG
Post Carbon Institute

It is this contest between traditional power elites on one hand, and growing masses of disenfranchised poor and formerly middle-class people attempting to provide the necessities of life for themselves in the context of a shrinking economy, that is shaping up to be the fight of the century.

[Mendo Free Skool offers an alternative to traditional education. With classes like Bicycle Repair, Practical Permaculture, Demystifying Anarchism, and D.I.Y. Movie Making, it's a refreshing variety of completely free classes for people of all ages. Run entirely by volunteers, Mendo Free Skool gives the community an opportunity to share their skills and knowledge. Anyone can teach for the Free Skool, so the quarters take on the flavor of whatever people are interested in at the time. “Classes” take place in homes, cafes, and community centers. A quarterly calendar is available online and in print accompanied by the location and description of each course. Spring Quarter runs March 20th - June 20th. Questions, comments and class submissions can be sent to: MendoFreeSkool@gmail.com -Will Parrish]

1. Prologue

As economies contract, a global popular uprising confronts power elites over access to the essentials of human existence. What are the underlying dynamics of the conflict, and how is it likely to play out?

As the world economy crashes against debt and resource limits, more and more countries are responding by attempting to salvage what are actually their most expendable features—corrupt, insolvent banks and bloated militaries

Coming to our towns? Austerity policy is destroying Greek Society…

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From DIMITRI LASCARIS
Real News Network

Heart wrenching personal stories show that Greece should reject austerity deal and pull out of Eurozone

The following is a letter from Dimitri’s sister in Greece:

“Friends of ours have died of heart attacks, stressed to the limit by debt, or worse, the loss of their cars and homes”

Dimitri…the decline in our income and therefore in many facets of our lives began in the fall of 2009. In our family carpentry business, we began to go without work intermittently, but for longer and longer stretches as time progressed. Customers who owed us large amounts of money couldn’t pay even 5% of the balance owing on their account. Our customers of course gave priority to the payment of bank loans they had incurred as first-time homeowners or for the expansion of their businesses, or worse, they gave priority to the payment of credit card debts they had incurred in order to maintain the quality of their life, or simply to secure the basic necessities… rent, water, electricity, health insurance and food. Slowly, cash has became more and more scarce for our customers, and therefore for us.

In Greece, the baby boomer generation has placed tremendous emphasis on education. In a very competitive job market, Greek parents sought to equip their children to secure a job as a civil servant. For that purpose, Greek parents commonly employed ‘frontistiria’ (or supplementary education through tutoring)

A week in the life of the Occupy movement…

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From The Occupied Wall Street Journal

This week in Occupy, Wisconsin marked a year of activism by marching on the state capitol, efforts are introduced to rein in NYPD abuses toward Occupy protesters, Sarah Palin got mic-checked and attention turned to #F29, the next big action.

#Protesters gathered on Capitol Square for a “Wisconsin Day” anniversary rally marking a year since Republican Governor Scott Walker’s introduction of a bill to eliminate collective bargaining for most public employees.

#On Monday, about 200 demonstrators from Occupy Oakland gathered for a day of action to protest the arrest of 400 people, including journalists, at the #J28 action, during which police employed tear gas and flash grenades. Predictably, police officers confiscated a loudspeaker from Occupy protesters, prompting a march.

#To avenge #J28, the hacktivist collective Anonymous posted the private information of Oakland city officials online, including phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, salary information (top city officials apparently pull down a quarter of a million a year) and property value information. Among those targeted were mayor Jean Quan, police chief Howard Jordan, Oakland city administrator Deanna Santana, city attorney Barbara Jean Parker and a number of city council members. “We are shocked and disgusted by your behavior,” Anonymous wrote. “Before you commit atrocities against innocent people again, think twice.”

New Rules for Radicals: 10 Ways To Spark Change in a Occupied World

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From SARA ROBINSON
AlterNet
Poster discovered thanks to Christina Aanestad

The first rule is this: The world is different now. The rules have changed.

Since Occupy, we all understand this. Nothing works now the way it did even just a couple of years ago. Political tactics that haven’t budged public opinion in years — like petitions and big street demonstrations — are suddenly working again. Narratives that seemed unassailable — like the primacy of free markets and low taxes — are being openly questioned. Doors that used to be closed to us are now opening. The media that once ignored us is now starting to listen. The conservatives are shaken and fumbling, stuck on autopilot and unable to re-route away from their old course even as disaster looms dead ahead. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is that we are (finally!) in the first giddy months of a deep-current sea change in American politics, the kind of realignment that happens once every several decades. This change has put us into a whole new political era, one that runs by an entirely new set of rules — and one in which a great many impossible things may, all of a sudden, become possible.

The reasons for this shift are complex and wonky, and are the stuff of other articles. But we all sense it, and we all want to know what it means.

As a Silicon Valley brat-turned-futurist, I’ve spent a lot of my life in a culture that churned constantly with this kind of upending, unending change.

Young farmers and the future of farming…

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Paula Manalo, Adam Gaska – Mendocino Organics CSA

From VICKI LIPSKI
Transition Voice

It’s all in a day’s work for family farmers of the 21st century:  Colony Collapse Disorder, dealing with Monsanto’s threats, global warming disasters, the government crackdown on family farms, genetically-engineered crops.

Where once American plowmen had merely to contend with unpredictable weather, infertile soil, inaccessible water supplies, poverty, accidents and disease, today’s food producers face a further cornucopia of sophisticated and bewildering attacks from all sides. That fewer than one percent of Americans want to wrestle a crop from abused soil, while attempting to anticipate how global warming or ailing honeybees may thwart them, should surprise no one.

Nonetheless, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack is calling for hundreds of thousands of new farmers nationwide.

Assuming a new crop (sorry) of fresh-faced novices can surmount the double whammy of little affordable land and even less capital, what else awaits them, in as uncertain a future as humankind has ever confronted? We’ll consider the “easy” problems first. The 800 pound gorilla – climate change – will just have to wait.

Cole Porter was right: Bees do it – or used to

Back in the early 1990’s, I began subscribing to a beekeeper’s magazine (the title of which I’ve long since forgotten), thinking it could serve as an introduction to my latest enthusiasm. That was a smart move on my part, because the editors

Paula Manalo: Seeds galore…

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From PAULA MANALO
Mendocino Organics CSA

“You want to try a new eggplant variety? Look at this one – it’s marbled”

“We’re not growing that one variety of cucumber that was s**t last year. F**k that.”

“This greenhouse tomato is resistant to all these diseases. And this other variety comes in organic.”

“Oh, good, we still have a lot of that seed from last year so we don’t have to buy any.”

“Well, if we grow two rows of cucumbers and two rows of tomatoes in the greenhouse, let’s do basil in the fifth row.”

That’s what the office conversation is full of when we’re preparing our annual giant seed order. With seed catalogs, lists, calculators, pens, and papers around us, sitting on the floor, we get to envision our fields and future harvests. It’s rather exciting. Some farmers and gardeners compare seed catalogs to porn. Leafing through the pages of colorful produce, herbs and flowers, you can’t help salivate over the contentment of a bountiful harvest in the growing season to come. Agronomic info and variety descriptions only enhance the flavor of this vision.

Our hand-drawn maps may be out of proportion on pieces of scrap paper, but with accurate calculations, feedback from CSA members, and mostly experience, we’re able to figure out what seed we need to buy. We’re a bit anxious because cash flow is almost stagnant this time of year, and we know that popular varieties, particularly organic ones, sometimes sell out quickly. We have to act fast and just get the order in. A late catalog in the mail or “seed crop failure” of a favorite variety can be a source of consternation.

After about a month of pouring over our maps, thinking about how we want to rotate our crops, looking at

A country for old men…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Unless you suffer from an overactive bladder as many of us do, you may find this essay a bit on the crude side. But nevermind, you will get there too eventually unless you are lucky. In terms of overactive bladders, there is an advantage to living on a farm that rarely gets mentioned, even though the “fall out” from it is quite significant for society at large. Farms provide owners with a private place far from any bathroom where they can relieve themselves.

You know all the old jokes, even if they aren’t all that funny. How old men develop the habit of checking every building they enter for the location of the bathroom before they do anything else. How the farmer with the round barn had an “accident” as he frantically looked for a secluded corner to pee in.

Until I joined the legion of men with enlarged prostates, I did not appreciate the full meaning of tranquility on the farm. In public, I must keep a furtive eye on the nearest bathroom and make sure I do not move more than a minute or two away from it. If I have to give a speech, I am usually safe beforehand because I am too scared for any bodily function to work no matter what. After the speech, however, if I avoid eye contact and abruptly breeze by you as if I am trying to steal second base, please understand. Even in my office at home, absorbed in writing, I have to make mad dashes for the bathroom. This is another unsung advantage of cell phones. You don’t have to hang up in this situation.

But in the field or garden hoeing, or among the trees sawing and chopping, or in the barn trying to convince my sheep that Lucretius said it all over 2000 years ago, no problem.  Believe me, knowing this adds another dimension to the calming effect that a rural environment can bestow.

But using your farm for a bathroom has social significance too. What if, as in my perfect world, some 50 million Americans (out of 300 million) lived and worked part of the time on their own little farms. Let us say they committed half their bodily waste directly to the soil or to the animal manure bedding in the barn

Cooperatives are the biggest secret in the world economy…

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From DAVID BOLLIER
On The Commons

Cooperatives employ more people than multinational companies

There’s more than Olympics and Elections going on in the coming months. 2012 has been named International Year of Cooperatives by the United Nations [6] in recognition of the fact that more than 800 million people around the world belong to one of these economic networks. Coops flourish in all sectors of the economy proving that economic efficiency and equitability can co-exist. They represent a commons-based alternative to both the private market and state controlled enterprises.

Four in ten Canadians are coop members (70 percent in the province of Quebec). In the U.S. 25 percent of the population belongs to at least one coop ranging from credit unions to food coops to major firms like REI and Land O’ Lakes dairy, according to the International Co-Operative Alliance [7] In Belgium, coops account for 20 percent of pharmacies: in Brazil, 37 percent of all agricultural production is from coops; in Singapore, coops account for 55 percent of supermarket purchases: in Bolivia, one credit union handles 25 percent of all savings; in Korea and Japan, 90 percent of farmers belong to coops; in Kenya, coops account for 45 percent of the GDP; in Finland, 34 percent of forestry products, 74 percent of meat and 96 percent of dairy products come from coops.

Around the world, coops provide 100 million jobs, 20 percent more than multinational companies. But what’s most remarkable is how little attention they receive in business coverage or anywhere else.

“We may be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.”— Gar Alperovitz

While a great many commons seek to develop alternatives to conventional businesses – and even to bypass markets altogether – the struggle to democratize capital should not be lost in the shuffle. Popular ownership of capital

The Commons — Short, simple, and sweet…

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From DAVID BOLLIER
On The Commons

The classic commons are small-scale and focused on natural resources

The commons must be understood, then, as a verb as much as a noun. A commons must be animated by bottom-up participation, personal responsibility, transparency and self-policing accountability.

I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp. In preparation for a talk that I gave at the Caux Forum for Human Security, near Montreux, Switzerland, I came up with a fairly short overview, which I I think it gets to the nub of things.

The commons is….

*A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity.

*A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State.

The wealth that we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children. Our collective wealth includes the gifts of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural works and traditions, and knowledge.

*A sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State.

There is no master inventory of commons because a commons arises whenever a given community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.

• The commons is not a resource.* It is a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources. Many resources urgently need to be managed as commons, such as the atmosphere, oceans, genetic knowledge and biodiversity.

Where is Kropotkin when we really need him?…

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From DAVID MORRIS
On The Commons

Kropotkin honored Darwin’s insights about natural selection but believed the governing principle of natural selection was cooperation, not competition. The fittest were those who cooperated.

On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Petr Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism.

Some 90 years later few know of Kropotkin. And the word anarchism has been so stripped of substance that it has come to be equated with chaos and nihilism. This is regrettable, for both the man and the philosophy that he did so much to develop have much to teach us in 2012.

I am astonished Hollywood has yet to discover Kropotkin. For his life is the stuff of great movies. Born to privilege he spent his life fighting poverty and injustice. A lifelong revolutionary, he was also a world-renowned geographer and zoologist. Indeed, the intersection of politics and science characterized much of his life.

His struggles against tyranny resulted in years in Russian and French jails. The first time he was imprisoned in Russia an outcry by many of the world’s best-known scholars led to his release. The second time he engineered a spectacular escape and fled the country. At the end of his life, back in his native Russia, he enthusiastically supported the overthrow of the Tsar but equally strongly condemned Lenin’s increasingly authoritarian and violent methods.

In the 1920s Roger N. Baldwin summed up Kropotkin this way.

Kropotkin is referred to

OWS: We must reassert our rights to occupy public spaces…

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Tahrir Square in Cairo, where a revolution coalesced

From THOMAS HINTZE and LAURA GOTTESDIENER
The Occupied Wall Street Journal

After the raid on Liberty Plaza, the absence that opened up in the center of our movement was greater than the size of the physical space in that tiny, granite park. For us, space is not a mere necessity—a place to lay our head, to eat our meals, to congregate and assemble—it is also a symbol and a direct action. Literally, vacant lots are voids that we fill with physical representations of our concerns, hopes, fears, and dreams. We invite others to join us and create an infrastructure that liberates minds. We must reassert our rights to occupy public spaces.

Privatization has created a dichotomy of those with and those without, those with being landowners—a fraction of the population. We must partner with communities, artists, educators, not just taking for ourselves, but opening locked gates for all to occupy.

Now that we are rebuilding, some say that it is in our best interest to occupy indoor spaces. Occupying indoor spaces, such as foreclosed houses and abandoned buildings, politicizes individual struggles. It answers the question of how to survive through the winter and how to create a life outside of the spectacle of this revolutionary project. It allows the message of our movement to enter communities through individual voices. But occupying indoor space is fundamentally about reclaiming private space, a shift from our notions of what it is to be public, transparent, inclusive and collective.

Outdoor spaces symbolically oppose Wall Street in a manner that directly threatens its stability, and maintaining our presence in opposition is crucial to enfranchising more supporters moving forward. Indoor spaces are an important compliment to whatever we do, but we must remember that outdoor public spaces embody the heart of this movement. With each space we consider, we must ask whether it gives form to our collective desires. This is our metric. We will not wait for channels of bureaucracy to gift spaces to us. We will liberate them.
~~

Move to Amend Speaker David Cobb in Ukiah Tonight Monday 2/13/12 at the Saturday Afternoon Club 7pm…

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David Cobb is National Projects Director of Democracy Unlimited. He is a lawyer, political activist, and engaged citizen. He has dedicated his adult life to making the promise of a democratic republic a reality in the United States.

He has sued corporate polluters, lobbied elected officials,  run for political office himself, and has been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience. He truly believes we must use ALL the tools in the toolbox to effect the systemic social change we so desperately need.

His talk tonight: Creating Democracy and Challenging Corporate Rule
~

Proposed Amendment

Section 1 [Corporations are not people and can be regulated]

The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only.

Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.

The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law, and shall not be construed to be inherent or inalienable.

Section 2 [Money is not speech and can be regulated]

Federal, State and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own contributions and expenditures, for the purpose of influencing in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure.

Federal, State and local government shall require

The First Dominoes: Greece, Reality, and Cascading Default…

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From CHARLES HUGH SMITH
oftwominds.com

I asked frequent contributor Zeus Yiamouyiannis to comment on the coming Greek default. Here is his insightful response.

Greece is the epicenter of a drama that threatens to unwind with all the intrigue and subterfuge of ancient Greek myths and tragedies. As with the legend of Icarus, big, and now bigger, transnational banks provoked the gods with their wax-and-feather financial fabrications to create the appearance of soaring wealth. Now that they have flown too close to the sun and their wings have melted, these banks are being brought to earth by the obligations and consequences imposed by their fabrications.

Rather than take responsibility, these banks seek to appease the gods by sacrificing taxpayers. In fact, if one looks closely, these banks aspire to be gods themselves. They clothe themselves in their indispensability and shield themselves from accountability with tales about how many innocent citizens will be hurt if they don’t get their next bailout. It is as if they say, “We are above the law… We are the law.” Mathematics, legal enforcement, restraint, humility all must fall under the sword of their hubris.

In the end, just as with a Greek tragedy or a Yeats poem, this center cannot hold and things fall apart. When one abuses the laws and principles of mathematics and capitalism, claiming to be a faithful servant, consequence and accountability eventually catch up. The breaking point inexorably nears. Citizens are beginning to think, voice, and act: “We can do without the false idols that call themselves banks. In fact, we need them to be dissolved for us to survive and thrive.”

Reality is the revenge of the gods.

Not just about fairness: Everything unwinds

This is not just about fairness anymore; it is about the exposure of central, global illusions that affect everyone, not just banks. For the last three plus decades, debt-fueled “growth” has instilled

Whole Foods Fraud: The Myth of So-Called Natural Foods…

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From RONNIE CUMMINS
Organic Consumers Assn

[What's true for the so-called "natural foods" at Whole Foods is also true for our local "Natural Food Stores" and "Natural Food Co-ops" who should have labled GMO products on their shelves years ago and boosted the demand for organic foods. Demand Certified Organic foods and GMO labelling, and get the GMOs out of our treasured local stores... -DS]

On Jan. 31, organic and natural foods giant Whole Foods Market (WFM) once again attacked the Organic Consumers Association, the nation’s leading watchdog on organic standards, as being too “hard-line” for insisting that retailers like WFM stop selling, or at least start labeling, billions of dollars worth of so-called “natural” foods in their stores – foods that are laced with unlabeled, hazardous genetically engineered (GE) ingredients.

WFM’s most recent attack on OCA predictably backfired, throwing gasoline on the fiery debate surrounding my previous essay “The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto.” In that essay, written in January 2011, I criticized WFM and several other well-known organic companies for their foolish (now hopefully repudiated) stance of espousing “co-existence” with the USDA and Monsanto, in exchange for minimal federal regulation of genetically engineered crops.

In subsequent articles OCA has called for an end to “organic infighting” and for the organic industry, farmers, and consumers to join forces and pass laws or state ballot initiatives (like the current campaign in California) that would require mandatory labels on products containing genetically engineered ingredients, as well as to make it illegal to label or market GE-tainted foods as “natural” or “all natural.”

Anger is now running so high against Monsanto and the USDA, as well as anyone appearing to tolerate “co-existence” with either group, that rumors are fast spreading that Monsanto has bought out, or plans to buy out, WFM. That rumor is untrue. However, it has focused attention once again on the critical issue of food labeling. WFM, and all of us in the organic community

OWS: A New Declaration…

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From DERRICK JENSEN
The Occupied Wall Street Journal

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That the real, physical world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise.

Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet.

It is self-evident that to value a social system that harms the planet’s capacity to support life over life itself is to be out of touch with physical reality.

That any way of life based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition not sustainable.

That any way of life based on the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources is by definition not sustainable: if, for example, fewer salmon return every year, eventually there will be none. This means that for a way of life to be sustainable, it must not harm native communities: native prairies, native forests, native fisheries, and so on.

That the real world is interdependent, such that harm done to rivers harms those humans and nonhumans whose lives depend on these rivers, harms forests and prairies and wetlands surrounding these rivers, harms the oceans into which these rivers flow. Harm done to mountains harms the rivers flowing through them. Harm done to oceans harms everyone directly or indirectly connected to them.

That you cannot argue with physics. If you burn carbon-based fuels, this carbon will go into the air, and have effects in the real world.

That creating and releasing poisons into the world will poison humans and nonhumans.

Transition: 10 Reasons for Financial Optimism (If You Invest Locally)

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From MICHAEL SHUMAN
LivingEconomies.org

Even though these are tough times for tens of millions of Americans, there’s reason for hope.  That’s the message of my new book from Chelsea Green, Local Dollars, Local Sense:  How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity, which showcases dozens of ways individuals, businesses and communities are reinvesting their money locally and creating new jobs.  To give you a little taste of what’s in the book, let me share my Top 10 Reasons for Optimism.

10.  Wall Street’s Decline – Fortune 500 companies have long enjoyed an unnatural competitive advantage as all of us have unquestioningly forked over some $30 trillion of our retirement funds into their stocks and bonds.  This lemming behavior is now coming to a close. Occupy Wall Street has been so effective that even Newt Gingrich is questioning our fealty to “vulture capitalism.”  My book documents that the long-term historic rate of return for U.S. stocks has been an astonishing 2.6% per year.  Against that record, all kinds of many local investment opportunities seem fabulous!

9.  Main Street’s Rise – Evidence continues to mount that local small businesses are the best job producers in the U.S. economy, at least as profitable as their global competitors, and becoming increasingly competitive (thanks in part to groups like BALLE).  Local investment can pay off, big time, if we can figure out how to create, pool, trade and evaluate local “securities” more efficiently.

8.  The Crowdfunding Revolution – The bad news is that archaic

Producers Vs. Moochers, Freeloaders And Losers — The Cruel Pro-Rich Propaganda Of The Right…

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From DAVE JOHNSON
Campaign for America’s Future

“Producers” and “parasites.” Cruel language justifying extreme greed seems to be mainstream now. Even Presidential candidates feel free to disparage 99% of us! In today’s right-wing folklore government by We, the People is an evil thing that takes from “producers” and gives to “moochers,” “freeloaders,” and “losers.” Government and taxes “take money out of the economy.” Decision-making by We, the People is “collectivism” and “mob rule.” And those of us who think the insanely wealthy should pay fair taxes suffer from “envy.”

In today’s discourse wealthy elites receiving $20 million a year in “capital gains” while paying almost no taxes are “producers,” while janitors or nursing home workers, working two jobs and not making enough to pay rent and feed themselves, are “moochers” and “freeloaders.” Right.

This email came in to CAF yesterday, (see also Richard Eskow’s take on it, John Galt Is A Crybaby And So Are You)

I am really curios to know what motivates the mind of a socialist. Why do you think its fair to penalize those of us who produce while rewarding those who do not? If healthcare should be a right then where does it stop?

Could one not use the same argument that everyone has a right to free housing? A free car? Perhaps free air travel? Who will pay for all this?

What happens when the government has exhausted the money acquired from the producers? I have a feeling producers will stop producing

Will Parrish: ‘Full Court Press’ Or War On Immigrants?

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA.com

From behind the glass partition in Yuba County Jail’s basement visiting room, Ramiro Hernandez Farias speaks matter-of-factly about the incredible ordeal to which he has been subjected by both Mexican drug cartel paramilitaries and the Mendocino County branch of the US drug war.

Farias, 28, has never been charged with a crime. Yet, for more than six months, he has been confined within a prison cage in the small, economically depressed town of Marysville, on the northern end of California’s Central Valley. He finally departs on February 14th, only to attend a hearing in San Francisco where an immigration judge will determine if he is allowed to remain in the United States – or whether he must return to his native Mexico. If he’s sent back, he will likely be tortured and killed by one of the country’s most violent drug cartels, La Familia Michoacán.

While reciting the events that have led to his harrowing predicament, Farias’ otherwise calm and measured voice becomes tinged with sadness, perhaps also some resignation, as he discusses the fate of his wife, Flor, and their six-year-old son, Eric.

“I think all the time about my family,” he says through an interpreter. “They’re suffering a lot economically, and also emotionally because of the distance between us.”

Until this past July 21st, the family lived together in a small Ukiah home off of South State St. Flor, a US citizen, attended classes at Mendocino College and looked after the couple’s domestic life, including raising Erik. Ramiro put in long hours as a landscaper and laborer for Saul’s Vineyard Contracting of Ukiah, as well as for Rosewood Vineyards in Redwood Valley

Todd Walton: Junior High

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table Books
Mendocino

“Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.” Rex Stout

Today I fit several important pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of life, having found the first of those pieces a few days ago while I was at Mendocino K-8 School on Little Lake Road, shooting hoops despite the biting chill in the air and…

Wait. Doesn’t it strike you as remarkable, even astonishing, that in Mendocino of all places, a town known the world over as a seething vortex of artists and poets and potheads, that our K-8 school doesn’t have at least a mildly groovy name? Fantasia Archetype School. Raven Big Tree Learning Center. Earthling Haven Academy. Middle Earth Education Fulcrum. Doppelganger Nine. Fields of Elysium Lyceum. Mind Body Spirit Cognition Node. But I digress.

So…I was shooting hoops despite the biting chill when down the steps from the school to the playground came two people, a shapely young woman with hair of spun gold and a boy some four inches shorter than the young woman, a skinny, dorky boy with drab brown hair wearing a blue Mendocino K-8 School sweatshirt. And though I was a hundred yards away, I knew this boy and woman were courting, that they were the same age, numerically speaking, and that they were headed for the swings where many Mendocino K-8 junior high couples go to swing and flirt and talk about whatever junior high kids talk about these days.

Seeing these two physically mismatched lovebirds, I journeyed back through my memory archives

Certified Organic, Open-Pollinated, Heirloom Seeds now available at Half Price or less from Mulligan Books & Seeds…

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Underground Seed Co.

Certified Organic Seeds-By-Hand

From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

Here is a comparison of Imported-from-Vermont High Mowing Organic Seeds-By-Packet prices and local California-Grown Underground Organic Seeds-By-Hand prices…

Underground Seed Co. is a project of Mulligan Books & Seeds
~

Why Save Seeds? Here’s the Big Picture view from last week’s Laytonville Garden Club meeting…

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From GINA COVINA
Laughing Frog Farm
Laytonville

Agriculture began as a partnership between people and plants. Every plant we know as food was co-created, sometimes over a thousand years of growing seasons, by the equivalent of a backyard gardener in partnership with the plant. Someone started selecting the best teosinte seeds from that wild Mexican grass, planting and nurturing them with special care. By the time Europeans arrived in the New World, indigenous gardeners in partnership with teosinte had created 7,000 distinct varieties of corn, some of them adapted to thrive as far north as New York.

This is plant breeding. As William Tracy (dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison) pointed out at the Organic Seed Growers Conference in Port Townsend, Washington in late January, plant breeding is not a science but a technology. “Plant breeding is working with plants – the breeder selects, and the plant creates solutions.” It’s a process ideally suited to small ecological farmers and home growers, whose success depends on close observation and careful selection. Every discerning seed saver is a plant breeder, as long as they pay attention to two important conditions: the minimum population necessary to ensure the particular species’ genetic diversity, and sufficient isolation from related species that could cross-pollinate with undesirable results.

Where does our seed come from today? The exponential curve of seed industry consolidation is the same curve shown by wealth consolidation

A Day in the Life of a Transitioner…

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From CHARLOTTE DU CANN
Transition Norwich

It was cold when I woke up last Sunday. The jackdaws were gathering in the fields and there was a hard frost on the ground. Ah, good I said to myself. Then I sighed, put on two large jumpers and went downstairs to put the kettle on for coffee and a hot water bottle. Switched on the computer and got down to work. It was 7am.

How has Transition changed my life? Utterly, completely, forever. This is not how I would have started a Sunday morning several years ago. I would not, for example, have known why the birds were feeding in the arable fields, I would not have rejoiced in and lamented the frost, thinking simultaneously of the vegetables and the fruit trees that need a winter to flourish and the shivering people in the Occupy encampments. I would not have put on two recycled jumpers or got down to write a blog at 7am. The central heating would have automatically warmed up the house, and I would be up around nine, thinking about my private world, lying in a hot bath.

I could go through each moment of that Sunday and every detail would form part of a Transition narrative: from my breakfast millet (Sustainable Bungay buying group) and apples (our Produce Swap day) to our neighbour’s car that we now share. But most of all it would show how that narrative is shaped by the times I go up to Norwich and my relationships with the people there.

Here I am at 11.30am talking to Kit at Occupy Norwich about Occupied Times in London. I’ve put some stuff in the kitchen, I tell him

A deep, complex garden book that is fun to read…

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From SHARON ASTYK
casaubonsbook

There are a lot of gardening books out there, and whenever anyone asks me for my favorite ones, I find myself struggling to make a list. There are three rules about garden books to remember.

1. All garden books are local to one degree or another, unless they are very general. That is, all garden books are fundamentally about the experience of gardeners in particular places and in particular circumstances. Beyond basic books, the best garden books are by authors who remember this and try and connect what they have done with others, while also acknowledging the limits of their experience. Bad garden books become prescriptive “no one should use mulch” or “everyone should use mulch” or whatever because their experience with mulch is deemed to be universal.

2. There is a difficult middle-space gap in garden writing between books that are written for the absolute beginner (many) and speak in such general terms that after you’ve mastered the basics, you don’t really need to read more of them, and the technical research papers that often present new research or ideas. By this I mean that the experienced, engaged gardener who doesn’t need to read another basic explanation of how soil fertility works or how to start seeds leaves them with little truly new, exciting and creative to read. The papers can be useful and inspiring, but they are rarely readable or entertaining, the general books may be fond and familiar material, but one goes back to them as reference, and there are only a few dozens of good books written for the expert gardener who wants to learn something new.

Transition: Seeing Wendell Berry’s Wilderness Again…

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From CHRIS CHANEY
Transition Voice

In the early ’90s I made the conscious decision to drop out of college. I distinctly remember the day I withdrew from classes and made the call to my parents. I remember thinking: “Now I’m a statistic.” College dropout.

I watched as the debt grew and my confidence in finding a suitable career faded. I made the decision to drop out based on the reality that I could avoid debt and simply work. I resolved to be satisfied with less. I broke my social contract outright.

Believe it or not, I had a plan.

No, I didn’t start up a software business. I didn’t pursue any entrepreneurial track to riches. My plan was simply to get any job I could and spend my free time exploring the Red River Gorge which is located near where I grew up in Eastern Kentucky. My plan had no long term component.

I don’t know when I first discovered Wendell Berry’s The Unforeseen Wilderness, but it was about this same time in my life. I wanted to read it, but as a poor college dropout with little cash to spend on books it remained out of my hands for a time.

One day I was out with a friend and saw it on a bargain table. I had no cash, but the friend, seeing my eagerness to read it, bought it for me. It was a fortunate encounter because the book changed the way I looked at the world, my life, and the landscape of my soul.

Gene Logsdon: Cold Weather Conundrum…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I say that a love of nature is at the root of my love for farming, but in fact I hate cold weather, an integral part of nature in the north. How can I explain the contradiction? I’ll give you my line of reasoning as long as you don’t hold me to it too strictly. I argue that cold weather is the biggest threat to human existence on earth. That’s why I hate it. We seldom think about it but humans, unlike other animals, can only survive in northern climates with some kind of artificial heat, which means burning up the earth’s supply of stored sunlight as fuel. We are not polar bears. We live through northern winters by plundering the rest of nature.

What made me think of this again is that, much to my surprise, fur prices are on the rise. Muskrat pelts are selling for $8 and up at auctions, coyotes at $60 and up, red foxes from $25 to $50, and raccoons from $13 to $19 each. China and other “newly rich” countries are driving up the prices because the people there not only think fur coats are fashionable but because animal fur is a very good insulation against cold weather. Muskrat belly fur for example, makes an excellent lining for cold weather boots because it is nearly impermeable to moisture.

Obviously, as humans migrated from their natural environment of warm weather, they not only had to discover fire but gird themselves in animal skins until they figured out how to make insulated underwear out of polyester. Before that there must have been eons of migration from warmer climes to colder and back again as winter approached, a practice still honored by migrating birds and quite a few corn-beans-and Florida farmers. With furs and fire, humans slowly learned how to stay in the north through winter. This led to the whole silly culture of clothes and heaven only knows how much that has cost the earth. Even with clothes, humans had to have shelter to survive bitter cold. They used caves or built structures out of wood or stone or ice, leading to the ultra-extravagant housing industry of today.  All of this, in the beginning, just to stay warm.

As fuel supplies seem to diminish now and dreams of grandeur soar, this kind of un-sustainability continues. We cover entire sports arenas from the weather; we set up acres of solar panels to produce electricity. More and more, greenhouse tunnels and hoop houses become part of agriculture.

Occupy Monsanto: The seed is the foundation of civilization and of democracy…

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From ANNA LEKAS MILLER
Alternet

Activists, Farmers Fight the Corporation They Fear Will Take Over All America‘s Crops

Monsanto, if you will, is the 1 percent of Big Agriculture–the scourge of small farmers everywhere. But now those farmers are fighting back, backed by activists from Occupy Wall Street.

First, some history. In 1982, Monsanto scientists were the first to genetically modify a plant cell. Three years later, the US Patent Office ruled that plants were a patentable subject matter.

By 1985, Monsanto had already become a corporate giant by creating RoundUp, the most popular herbicide in the world. Now that it had the legal protection of seed patents in addition to the biotechnology to genetically manipulate its seeds, Monsanto scientists engineered a specific brand of Monsanto seeds that were RoundUp-resistant—unlike organic, natural seeds, these seeds are sterile and have to be re-planted each year, ensuring that customers return year after year to replenish their supply.

In order to achieve a monopoly over the market, and keep farmers from saving their own seed as they have done for centuries, Monsanto begin to purchase as many seeds as possible—spending $8 billion and acquiring over 20 seed companies over the past decade alone. Today, Monsanto controls 93 percent of soybean crops, 86 percent of corn crops, 93 percent of cotton crops, and 93 percent of canola seed crops in the United States alone.

Monsanto is far from finished. To continue its corporate monopoly and push more seeds off the market, Monsanto specifically targets organic farmers, often testing their crops without permission. If the crops are resistant to RoundUp, Monsanto’s signature pesticide, Monsanto sues the farmer for patent infringement.

In many instances, pollen from a neighboring farm growing Monsanto’s genetically modified crops can migrate to an organic farm, contaminating its crops. In addition to losing these crops and losing important organic buyers due to this genetic trespass, many organic farmers face undeserved, crippling lawsuits from Monsanto that force them into debt, bankruptcy

When did vegetarianism become passé?…

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From LISA HYMAS
Grist

It used to be that when I told a fellow progressive I’m a vegetarian, I would get one of three reactions: (1) an enthusiastic “me too!,” (2) a slightly guilty admission of falling off the veg wagon, or (3) a voracious defense of the glories of steak.

These days, there’s another increasingly common reaction: People look at me with a mix of pity and confusion, like I’m some holdover from the ’90s wearing a baby-doll dress with chunky shoes and babbling on about No Doubt. I can see what they’re thinking: “You’re still a vegetarian?”

At some point over the past few years, vegetarianism went wholly out of style.

Now sustainable meat is all the rage. “Rock star” butchers proffer grass-fed beef, artisanal sausage, and heritage-breed chickens whose provenance can be traced back to conception on an idyllic rolling hillside. “Meat hipsters” eat it all up. The hard-core meaties flock to trendy butchery classes. Bacon has become a fetish even for eco-foodies, applied liberally to everything from salad to dessert, including “green” chocolate bars and “sustainable” ice cream.

All of which has led some vegetarians to give up their plant-based ways. But food fads aside, vegetarianism still has its place and deserves its due respect.

Let me state, for the record, that I wholeheartedly support the shift from factory farming to more sustainable meat production. Treating animals humanely, letting them eat what they’re naturally inclined to eat, raising them without antibiotics and hormones, incorporating them into holistic farmsJoel Salatin-style, and, once they’re slaughtered, eating every last bit of them, nose to tail — that’s all good stuff.

But let’s get real. Only a teeny-tiny fraction of meat in the U.S. is actually produced in any way that could conceivably be described as “sustainable” — less than 1 percent, according to the group Farm Forward — and only a teeny-tiny fraction of that is raised in the super-duper-über-conscientious Salatin style. Most of the meat raised even by those trying to do it right comes with serious environmental impacts, from high water consumption to large land footprints to excessive methane emissions.

So it really gets my goat (ahem)

Transition: Building community resilience to cope with collapse…

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World

In my previous article, I recapped and built upon Nicole Foss’ (Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth blog) presentation in Vancouver last week. The first part of her presentation, I noted, was about the current intractable economic (and specifically debt) problems we face at all levels (governments, corporations, individuals), and how neither of the most-supported top-down alternatives (austerity or stimulus) can hope to improve the situation or avoid total economic collapse.

The second part of Nicole’s presentation focused on what we can do, at the local community level, to prepare for and build resilience to cope with this collapse. There are a number of things, she said, we can do personally:

• Get out of debt, so that our property cannot be foreclosed upon or repossessed when the situation worsens and we are unable to repay these debts.
• Keep as much cash on hand (and not in the bank) as reasonably possible (enough to last several months).
• Acquire useful, non-perishable hard assets (when the economy fails, so will trade, making many hard goods hard to obtain and expensive).
• Do not depend on governments to do anything useful.
• Be wary of banks (they may simply close when ‘runs’ begin, preventing you from accessing your money).
• Be wary of insurance companies and plans (they will not be able to pay out when their investments collapse).
• Find the right place to live and move there (in or near small towns near healthy agricultural areas; avoid suburbs).
• Learn practical essential skills, both technical and non-technical (e.g. mediation, facilitation).

There was considerable discussion near the end of the presentation

Harris Quarry Project: ‘Something wicked this way comes’…

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From JACK MAGNE
LTE Willets News
Thanks to Janie Sheppard

Something wicked this way comes is, of course, the famous line from the Shakespearean play Macbeth, which forewarns of an impending ominous, dangerous and traitorous entity.

Fast-forward from the 17th century to a real threat we now potentially face in Mendocino County, which is perhaps no less insidious or alarming; with modern day wide-reaching consequence for the entire county.

The proposed Harris Quarry Expansion Project is the benign-sounding name of a determined push to install a 300-ton per hour asphalt manufacturing plant neighboring the LaVida Charter School, Christ’s Church of the Golden Rule and Golden Rule senior residential park, which are proximate to the famous Seabiscuit Ranch, former home of legendary racehorse.

The Bountiful Gardens research garden and cherry orchard also are nearby.

The proposal also seeks to ambitiously involve the entire county through zoning changes specifically allowing heavy industrial/manufacturing uses on land designated in the general plan as “RL-Range Lands,” which includes 90 percent of the private property in Mendocino County.

Everyone’s “back yard” in Mendocino County could potentially be vulnerable if the designers and proponents of this plan get their way.

There is legitimate concern the so-called Mineral Processing Combining District Overlay feature of this proposal is an add-on, benefiting special interests. Sooner or later this (ear-mark) may affect unsuspecting citizens countywide, in a very up close and personal way.

Many are concerned this movement which is portrayed ostensibly as a need for a single asphalt plant, is actually a much farther-reaching agenda “opening the door” to manufacturing related development of not only more asphalt plants around the county; but also possibly for the development of oil refineries (to accommodate off-shore drilling), natural gas, geothermal and concrete manufacturing plants, along with a whole host of other activities which could bring adverse

Why Newt is afraid of the gutsy organizer Saul Alinsky…

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From BILL MOYERS
Moyers & Co

[See also Excerpts from Reveille For Radicals and Right Wing Understands Saul Alinsky — Why Doesn’t the Left? -DS]

BILL MOYERS: Time, now, for a word about a good American being demonized, despite being long dead. Saul Alinsky is not around to defend himself, but that hasn’t kept Newt Gingrich from using his name to whip up the froth and frenzy of followers whose ignorance of the man is no deterrence to their eagerness, at Gingrich’s behest, to tar and feather him posthumously.

Here’s how you slander someone who can’t answer from the grave:

NEWT GINGRICH: If you believe as we do in the Declaration of Independence and you think that’s a better source than Saul Alinsky, welcome to the team […] The president believes in a kind of Saul Alinsky radicalism which would lead to a secular European socialist model […] If you have a Reagan conservative versus a Saul Alinsky radical, it’s a pretty easy debate.

BILL MOYERS: So clever, so insidious. The same tactic Newt Gingrich invoked with those radioactive words he used in the GOPAC memos to demonize his opponents. The crowd knows nothing about the target except that they are supposed to hate him.

And why not? There’s the strange foreign name. Obviously an alien. One of them. And a socialist at that. What’s a socialist? Don’t know. But Obama’s one, isn’t he? Barack-Hussein-Obama-slash-Saul-Alinsky. Bingo! Two peas in a pod — a sinister, subversive pod at that.

Just who was Alinsky? Born in the ghetto of Chicago’s South Side, he saw the worst of poverty and felt the ethnic prejudices that fester, then blast into violence when people are crowded into tenements and have too little to eat. He came to believe that working people, poor people, people put down and stepped upon, had to organize if they were going to clean up the slums, fight the corruption that exploited them, and get a hand-hold on the first rung of the ladder.

He became a protégé of the labor leader John L. Lewis and took the principles of organizing onto the streets, first in his home town, then across the country. He was one gutsy guy.

SAUL ALINSKY: The first rule of change is controversy. You can’t get away from it

Will Parrish: New Real Estate Predators…

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From WILL PARRISH and DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM
Ukiah
TheAVA

“During depressions, assets return to their rightful owners.” — Andrew Mellon, banker, US Treasury Secretary, and intellectual father of “trickle down” tax cut ideology.

“Buy on the fringe and wait. Buy land near a growing city! Buy real estate when other people want to sell. Hold what you buy!” — John Jacob Astor, real estate speculator-cum-fur trader and global opium trafficker.

Throughout much of the North Bay and North Coast, real estate values closely correlate with the value of wine. In recent decades, the wine industry’s relentless development of “raw land” — as industrial agriculturists refer to forests, prairies, savannahs, meadows, deserts, or any other landbase not yet totally subsumed by the industrial economy — into vineyards has markedly driven up regional property prices. The industry has further impacted real estate values via its integration with the real estate economy as a whole. More than any other artifact or image, it is the vineyard and wine glass that have come to epitomize the “Good Life” of Northern California for a global market of real estate investors, vacation-takers, and home buyers. The political and business establishment tout wine’s economic impact in triumphalist terms, virtually never exploring the dark sides of gentrification and growing inequality.

With the 2007-8 collapse of the real estate market, and the attendant decline of pricey “premium” wine brands, new forms of predatory real estate capital have emerged to prey on the “distressed assets” that now pervade the suburbs, exurbs, and countryside. “Distressed” is a financial sector euphemism for assets that have lost significant value due to the fact that the middle class has been gutted by foreclosures, high unemployment, loss of savings and other factors. Most often, of course, those who are truly distressed by this state of affairs are families or individuals who can no longer afford to pay bills, save, or even survive, let alone purchase the growing inventory of foreclosed homes that have glutted the market.

To understand how this development ties into the fate of this area’s wine industry, it helps to recount the rise and recent fall of one of the wine industry’s largest speculative entities of the last decade, Premier Pacific Vineyards (PPV).

OWS: 5.6 Million Americans have switched their Banks in the last 90 days…

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From PAT GAROFALO
Think Progress

Back in November, the Occupy Wall Street movement inspired “Bank Transfer Day,” a day for Americans fed up with the actions of the nation’s biggest banks to move their money to a different institution. Initial estimates of the impact of Bank Transfer Day placed the number of accounts moved at around 600,000, but later estimates revised that downward to around 200,000.

However, new estimates from Javelin Strategy and Research, a research and consulting firm, show that the original numbers were closer to the truth. Javelin found that 5.6 million people have moved their bank accounts in the last 90 days, with 610,000 citing Bank Transfer Day as their reason:

Bank Transfer Day and the Occupy Movement have received tremendous attention, and for the first time we have market research data to measure the impact on the financial services industry. Javelin’s research estimates that 5.6 million U.S. adults with a banking relationship changed providers in the past 90 days. Of those switchers, 610,000 US adults (or 11% of the 5.6 million) cited Bank Transfer Day as their reason and actually moved their accounts from a large to a small institution.

Javelin noted that this pace of account closing is three times the normal rate. While 11 percent of people moving their accounts cited Bank Transfer Day, one quarter said they moved their money because their old institution charged too many fees. Account closures at Bank of America, the nation’s second largest bank, actually jumped 20 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, potentially driven by the bank’s ill-fated decision to implement a $5 monthly fee for its debt cards.

According to the consulting firm cg42, the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose as much as $185 billion in deposits this year due to customer defections. Of those banks, “Bank of America is the most vulnerable and could lose up to 10% of its customers and $42 billion in consumer deposits.”
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Saturday Song: Love and Happiness…

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For J. Lovejoy’s contributions to our community…
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Rosalind Peterson: How to opt-out of PG&E SmartMeters…

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From ROSALIND PETERSON
Re: PG&E SmartMeter Opt-Out

[The PG&E Opt-Out is based on a California Public Utilities Commission Decision on February 1, 2012. See my notes below... -RP]

What are the costs to opt-out of the SmartMeter™ Program?
There is an initial $75 setup charge and a $10 monthly meter-reading charge. For income-qualified customers (those enrolled in our CARE or FERA programs), the initial setup charge is $10, and the monthly meter-reading charge is $5.

Why do I have to pay a charge to opt-out of SmartMeter™?
Generally, the opt-out costs include an initial setup charge, which pays for the technology changes necessary to offer two meter-reading systems plus the initial visit, which is to install a new analog meter, or test the existing analog meter. The monthly service charge provides for a meter reader to read the meter on a monthly basis as well as other costs associated with the maintenance of separate meter programs.

Will PG&E refuse to provide me an analog meter if I don’t pay?
No. We will process your opt-out request and install your analog meter, but you still will be responsible for these charges.

Do I have to pay a setup charge and monthly charge for each of my meters?
No, the setup charge is per residence, not per meter. If you have both a gas meter and an electric meter at your property, only one setup charge and one monthly charge will be added to your energy statement. However, if you would like to opt-out for other residences on your account, there is a setup charge and a monthly charge for each additional household.

Once I opt-out, when can I expect to receive my analog meter?
We’re working as quickly as possible to assist all of our customers with their opt-out preferences. We do not have

Todd Walton: Practice(ing)

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks
Mendocino

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath

Marcia and I were walking on Big River Beach yesterday, the wet sand firm underfoot—Big River swollen and muddy from the recent deluge, a light rain falling.

As we reveled in the windy wet, free from our various indoor practices, our conversation ran from gossip to silence to politics to silence to memoir to silence to what we might have for supper. And at some point Marcia asked me about a speaking engagement I’ve accepted, a keynote address at a writers’ conference, the dreaded topic—The Creative Process—chosen for me by the conference planners. I say dreaded because I think most of what I’ve ever read about the so-called creative process is hogwash, and I fear that anything I might add to the dreaded subject would be hogwash, too.

Long ago I worked in a day care center overseeing a mob of little kids. The day care center was located ten minutes from Stanford University and we were forever being visited by earnest graduate students writing theses about educational techniques, educational philosophies, educational processes, and God knows what else pertaining to mobs of little kids. Having no degree of any kind, let alone a degree in Small Child Management, I found it highly amusing to be the frequent recipient of attention from these humorless academics, some of whom, I’ll wager, went on to author textbooks for aspiring nursery school teachers, kindergarten teachers, and other Small Child Management educators. Could it be that information gathered from interviews with me conducted by these earnest humorless people helped shape curricula for early childhood education in America? I hope so, but I doubt it.

Transition to Democracy: Facing the future with full employment and a renewed commitment to civil action…

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From DAN KERVICK
New Economic Perspectives

There is a war going on everywhere between the corporate form of organization based on authoritarian control and elite hierarchy and the democratic form of organization based on shared power, empowered citizenship and the cooperation of equals.  Right now, the corporations and plutocrats are winning...

The failing neoliberal world system is beyond wrong: it is a stupid, backward and barbaric system, and the countries who continue to practice it inflict needless losses and suffering on their own citizens.

As you read this, millions of Americans who desperately want to work either cannot find employment at all, or cannot find the quantity and quality of work they need to meet their own needs and the needs of their families.  This is real suffering.  The unemployed are real flesh-and-blood people, not just fractions of percentage points on Labor Department spreadsheets.

At the same time, we have tremendous unmet social needs.  Any well-informed high school student can point to large, daunting national challenges that we sorely need to address, but that we are not addressing with anything approaching the urgency and commitment that the gravity of the challenges would seem to demand of us.

So the availability of unemployed human labor power is extremely high, while the need for applied, energetic human effort is extremely acute.

Mainstream textbook economics tells us that these kinds of problems

You can thank Reagan Republicans for Climate Change Hell…

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From SAM PARRY
Consortium News

The documentary “A Road Not Taken” chronicles the story of the 32 solar panels that President Jimmy Carter installed on the roof of the White House in 1979, the same solar panels President Ronald Reagan unceremoniously removed.

After being taken down in 1986, the solar panels were stored away in a government warehouse, like that scene at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Arc.” They were mostly forgotten until 1991, when Unity College, a small private school in central Maine that promotes sustainability, acquired them and put them to use on the roof of the school’s cafeteria.

Later, one of the panels was donated to the American History Museum in Washington, DC, and another found its way back to Jimmy Carter, given to the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia, where it was made a permanent exhibit in 2007, recalling Carter’s early commitment to renewable energy.

Yet, besides following the fate of these particular solar panels, the 2010 documentary reflects on the lost opportunity for the United States and the world in the change of direction that the solar panels represented, the fateful turn on energy issues from Carter’s presidency to Reagan’s.

President Jimmy Carter’s solar panels being installed

The Decline and Fall of the Mall…

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When was the last time you danced at Walmart or Costco?
Downtown Iowa City offers many things you can’t find at Big Box

From JAY WALLJASPER
Shareable

[See also Why We Need Resilient Communities below... DS]

In December while you were wrapping presents and sipping egg nog, a huge shift was occurring in the American economy—one that will have a major influence on our towns and cities.

What happened?  A lot of Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa and Solstice shopping migrated to the Internet.

It’s been a steady trend for years, but finally hit home in 2012.  After enduring dampened sales over the past three holiday shopping seasons, America’s retailers were counting on a consumer comeback.  Big sales on Black Friday looked promising, but when all the receipts were counted, it was another year of yuletide restraint—at least in brick-and-mortar stores.  Meanwhile Internet sales continued to rise.

After New Years Sears, K-mart and even swank Bloomingdale’s announced nationwide store closings. It’s very likely holiday shoppers will discover even more empty storefronts next December

Similar to the housing bubble that burst in 2008, some places will be more devastated than others. Brooking Institute Real Estate expert Christopher Leinberger documents how many outlying suburban areas were swamped by massive devaluation of housing prices–more than established neighborhoods in cities and inner-ring suburbs.

I think the same will hold true for the coming retail crunch. Downtowns and neighborhood

Transition: New film being unveiled in England today…

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From TRANSITION NETWORK

[New film series from Transition Ukiah Valley to be announced soon... -DS]

‘In Transition 2.0′ is nearly ready to be unveiled to the world! We are very excited about this inspiring new telling of the Transition story, and want to tell you more about it here, and about how it will be rolled out over the coming months. To get us started, because we are so excited about sharing this with you, here is the film’s trailer, directed by Caspar Walsh.

Hopefully that has sufficiently whet your appetite for what is a remarkable film. We describe it thus:

“In Transition 2.0 is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. You’ll hear about communities printing their own money, growing food everywhere, localising their economies and setting up community power stations. It’s an idea that has gone viral, a social experiment that is about responding to uncertain times with solutions and optimism. In a world that is awash with gloom, here is a story of hope, ingenuity and the power of growing vegetables in unexpected places”.

It has been produced by Emma Goude, with animation by Emilio Mula, photography by Beccy Strong and with stunning original music by Rebecca Mayes. They have drawn together stories from around the world showing Transition initiatives at the various stages of transitioning their communities. In order to be able to feature some of the stories from overseas

What the Farm Bill could accomplish…

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From SHARON ASTYK
casaubonsbook

Kari Hamerschlag has a post up about the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential to move money away from large scale industrial agriculture and towards smaller producers. For most small farmers producing for local markets, the idea is heady – after all, the economics agriculture are tenuous for many of us – we get all of the burdens of regulation without any of the economies of scale that accompany large scale agriculture. Most small producers are driven, then, to serve communities that can pay, rather than necessarily their poorer rural neighbors (although all of us do some of that too). We then get accused of being elitist (as I’ve written about before), usually with the word “arugula” mentioned somewhere (I’ve never fully grasped why a perfectly nice green, fast growing, easy to grow plant like arugula is actually a code word for “rich asshole” – why not “mustard greens” or “kale?”)

The accusation that local food is elitist is actually a product of the industrial food infrastructure – that is, the requirements of an industrial food system, the presumption that the basic structure of food production should be industrialized is what makes the price of good food higher. The accusation that local food isn’t “serious” because it costs more is an accusation in bad faith – the reason it costs more is because the same system makes it cost more.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing in favor of farmers’ not getting a fair price for their food, but consider the cost of a gallon of milk. I can produce a gallon of milk from my barn for about $2.40 in hay, grain, amortized goat costs, and a tiny chunk of my mortgage payment.

Jim Houle: Setting Aside Assad…

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From JIM HOULE
Obama-Watch
Redwood Valley

The Propaganda Buildup to Regime Change in Syria has gone on since last spring but almost no one in the US pays much attention. Partly this is because the stories that are floated on the air waves sound so much like the usual buildup to war: whether it be the NATO intervention in Libya last year, the recent Somalia intervention, or the Iraqi invasion back in 2003. The Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has kept most foreign journalists out and we are left with precious little of that bloody street fighting video our bored TV watchers can sink their chops into. When we tried to enter southern Syria ourselves last May, the border was suddenly closed while the Army proceeded to shoot unarmed protesters in the southern town of Daraa.

Last November, our Arab League vassals got President Assad to invite 165 “observers”, wearing those orange vests that highway workers normally wear around here, to see what Assad was doing. Their mission expired recently and there was little enthusiasm to risk further stray bullets on the streets. They were unsuccessful in curbing the bloodshed and opposition groups within Syria felt they had merely whitewashed the Assad regime’s suppression. A spokesman for the Syrian National Council, Burban Ghalioun, complained that: “conditions did not allow observers to submit an objective report”. Nevertheless, the Qatar foreign minister bravely stated: “We are with the Syrian people and with their will and their aspirations” ( NYT -1/22) and wanted foreign troops to enter so long as they were not Qataris.

Occupy: Spiritual Insurrection…

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From Culture Jammers HQ
AdBusters

We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.

And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?

Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.

In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.
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At Last, The Plowgirl Has Arrived…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

The most obvious and promising sign of the new agriculture is the leadership that women are taking in the movement.  Women have always played the key role in farming but at least in the last two centuries in America, they have rarely gotten credit for it. Farming is a man’s world, American culture wants to believe, and, as is true of all culturally-treasured myths, no amount of plain everyday evidence to the contrary matters. Oh sure, women were the milkmaids of yesteryear but men pretended that milking cows wasn’t farming. Few males wanted to be tied down to what they considered boring barn jobs if they could escape it. Chickens too were “wimmenswork”. No real he-man farmer wanted to get off his tractor or step from behind his team of horses to do sissy work with a bunch of clucking hens.

Fieldwork was real he-man stuff, the men insisted, even though women ended up doing a lot of that too. Women rarely did the plowing however, and that seems to be the key difference. Lots of plowboys, nary a plowgirl.  In other field work, women did more than their share. (I have theories but will leave it to someone smarter to explain why women didn’t plow.)   The notion that males were the real farmers probably was rooted in the hunting and gathering stage of civilization where men brought home the game from afar (adventure time) and the women did the rest of the work at home (boring).

At any rate, after the plow became the symbol of agriculture in America, the role of women in farming did recede from the public eye. Women were supposed to stick to the kitchen and leave the real business of farming to their menfolks. This prejudice was astonishingly apparent even at farm magazines.

Growth is over. Time to move on…

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From RICHARD HEINBERG
Thanks to Bob Banner
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…but we’re exceptional…
~

From PAUL KINGSNORTH
Orion Magazine

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist

…We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction to the wild world. Most of us wouldn’t even know where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability.” What does this curious, plastic word mean? It does not mean defending the nonhuman world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so.

It is, in other words, an entirely human-centered piece of politicking, disguised as concern for “the planet.” In a very short time—just over a decade—this worldview has become all-pervasive. It is voiced by the president of the USA and the president of Anglo-Dutch Shell and many people in between. The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul…

Original article here
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Occupy California: Single Update: Payer Health Care Urgent Action Needed Today Tuesday January 31…

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[Update: Money again defeated democracy. These democrats get money from the medical/insurance corporations and they abstained again. Pitiful! -DS]

From Nurses for Social Responsibility
Santa Barbara Independent

There is a vote in the California State Senate on Senate Bill 810, Health Care for All today, and just two more votes are needed for passage. Four Democrats abstained from voting. We could turn them around if you decide to OccupySacramento and get insurance corporations out of health care!

Call these four California senators now, and urge them to vote for Healthcare for All. And call/email your friends, too.

Ca. Sen. Juan Vargas, Juan.Vargas@sen.ca.gov, 916 651-4040

Ca. Sen. Alex Padilla, senator.padilla@sen.ca.gov, 916 651-4020

Ca. Sen. Rodrick Wright , senator.wright@sen.ca.gov, 916 651-4025

Ca. Sen. Michael Rubio, michael.rubio@sen.ca.gov, 916 651-4016

The bill, Senate Bill 810, ensures primary care and preventative care to head off disease before it is too late to get well.\ It is comprehensive, because it not only includes short term care, like clinics, ERs, labs, etc., but it also covers holistic medicine, chiropractic, dental, and vision, and it does so without deductibles, co-pays, or added out-of-pocket costs.

If you are employed and have healthcare through your employer, your employer no longer has to go through an insurance company. This cuts your portion you pay because your employer will pay a lot less for health care. And the bill insures that those out of work

Occupy a Garden This Year: How to sow vegetable seeds directly into the soil…

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Onion Seeds

From VERONICA HAWKINS
HowToDoThings.com

[See also Monsanto’s new seeds a dead end below... -DS]

If you have a patch of land that you are not making use of, why not consider planting vegetables?

Nowadays, people should be more practical in sourcing basic necessities such as food. Plant some vegetables in your garden and enjoy the freshness of your food while also saving money to purchase your other needs.

To know more about how you can sow vegetable seeds directly into your garden, read on.

• Pick a spot. Make sure that the land in which you plan to plant is not covered with sand or rock beds. The soil should be conducive for the vegetables to grow on.
• Purchase the materials you need. Go to the nearest gardening store to purchase all of the supplies you need for this project.
• Pick the vegetables you want to plant. Be cautious about the type of vegetables that you want to plant. This will be very much dependent on the weather conditions of your area. Try to research online on what types of vegetables are suitable in your area and the type of soil and land area that you have.
• Read the seed packaging instructions. Each seed will require a different way of planting. Read the instructions in the packaging to know how much depth you need to dig to plant and how much sunlight and water the seed needs in order to grow.

• Set up your soil. Make sure that the area where you will plant is composed of suitable soil

Global supply lines are breaking down…

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From NATURAL NEWS
Thanks to Dave Pollard

[Here's a followup to my recent Peak Walmart letter to the editors where the claim was made that Walmart, Costco, and other big box stores would contract and die themselves after destroying our local "supermarkets, our co-op, our family farmers and farmers markets, our downtown family-owned shops and our local community networks of economic exchange"... -DS]

This is one of the most important trends you’ll see in 2012 and beyond: Global supply lines are breaking down. The just-in-time system of deliveries on tap is deteriorating. Have you noticed how often the products or parts you need are backordered or delayed? That’s what I’m talking about.

Try to order 3TB hard drives for data storage. You’ll discover they’re all back-ordered. When you order items from Amazon.com that are shipped by third party companies, they’re often delayed due to sourcing problems. Even our own NaturalNews Store has suffered from sourcing challenges, where customer demand is much higher than the available supply, and the suppliers sometimes can’t get us products in a timely manner.

This issue is especially notable across the firearms industry, where record firearm sales

Dying Honeybees: It’s been insecticides from seed companies all along…

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From JEANNE ROBERTS
Reader Supported News
Thanks to Peggy Bruton and Janie Sheppard

With news that the U.S. honeybee population has been so devastated that some beekeepers will qualify for disaster relief dollars, comes a report from Purdue University that one of the causes of honeybee deaths is – as long suspected - neonicotinoids.

I say one of the causes, because the article does. In fact, the levels of neonicotinoid contamination of the powder used to spread seeds – up to 700,000 times the lethal dose – suggest that this insecticide may be the major, or precipitating, cause, with Varroa mites and other problems simply the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

And this, a myriad of causes, none of them dominant, is what agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture would have us believe, either because (as some suggest) they are understaffed to adequately investigate Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or because some of their former (or present) members are in bed with major chemical

Collecting a wild honeybee swarm…

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From COOKING UP A STORY

When the population of worker bees exceeds the resource capacity of a hive, a portion of the colony will leave to find a new home. A swarm is the natural way for a hive to divide itself (usually) in half, and transport the new colony (with the old queen) to a temporary spot (cluster) from which select bee members (scouts) search for a new home.

There are a number of incredibly complex interactions that the honeybees make in order to decide when its time to form a new colony, when to actually start swarming (leave the hive); for the scouts to locate potential new homes; communicate their findings to other bees; select among a choice of different offerings; and then finally, direct the majority of the colony (that have never seen the new home) to its precise location. Chemical signals called pheromones play an integral role in their ability to communicate, but honeybees also rely upon acoustic signally methods. For example, the buzz-run dance signals the bees it’s time to leave the hive.

In this video, beekeeper Matt Reed demonstrates how to collect a wild honeybee swarm; this one is about 2 pounds in size, or 7000 bees. A swarm may range in size anywhere between roughly 1000 to 30,000 bees, and relies upon a small contingent of scouts to find a suitable home, and relay that information back

The Welfare Entitlement Queens of Crony Capitalism

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From BILL MOYERS

Moyers & Company explores the tight connection between Wall Street and the White House with David Stockman – yes, that David Stockman — former budget director for President Reagan.

Now a businessman who says he was “taken to the woodshed” for telling the truth about the administration’s tax policies, Stockman speaks candidly with Bill Moyers about how money dominates politics, distorting free markets and endangering democracy. “As a result,” Stockman says, “we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.”

Stockman shares details on how the courtship of politics and high finance have turned our economy into a private club that rewards the super-rich and corporations, leaving average Americans wondering how it could happen and who’s really in charge.

“We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do… whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward,” Stockman tells Moyers.
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The intercession of a thousand small sanities…

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World

In last week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik laments the epidemic of imprisonment in America, especially of the young and visible minorities, and explores what leads a society to give up on, incarcerate and hence enslave so many in brutal, soul-destroying institutions. In the article he describes the atrocity of privatization of prisons:

No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

“Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes

Get Rhythm…

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For K. Dornhuber coming west…
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What to do? Take Action! Build the new economy by generating alternatives…

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From The Economics of Happiness

Across the world millions of people are actively resisting the process of corporate globalization while simultaneously creating viable local alternatives in the here and now. This powerful emerging movement represents a radical departure from ‘business as usual’. In place of the imposition of a single, global world economy, the new paradigm seeks ‘a world that embraces many worlds’ – an adapting biocultural mosaic rather than a global monoculture. Proponents of this approach call for ‘small scale on a large scale’ rather than one-size-fits-all, ‘too big to fail’ blueprints. In turn, the kind of solutions that are being generated flow from diversity, are attentive to the ecological particularities of place, are more responsive to social needs, and are often far more equitable, participatory and democratic.

Help create the new economy from the ground up!

Support local independent businesses, cooperatives & social enterprises…

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Buy local first

Keeping money circulating locally will help reinvigorate the local economy and generate desperately needed jobs. If you are a business owner, source locally for your supplies and services whenever possible and engage in fair and sustainable (‘translocal’) trade for those goods that can’t be sourced locally.

The 3/50 Project

Local Multiplier Effect

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

Start or support a “Local First” campaign in your town or city

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies – Local First

The New Economic Foundation’s Local Multiplier 3

Civic Economics

Crossroads Resource Center

Join, start or support a local worker cooperative

Help create more equitable and democratic local economies…

Don Sanderson: Scylla

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

We cannot resolve the problems of our existence at the same level of thinking that created them. – Albert Einstein

As blind Homer told us so long ago, after a series of torturous adventures in which most of his men are lost, Odysseus is swept up into the whirlpool Charybdis guarded by the six-headed monster Scylla. He only just survives to undergo still more challenges before finally years later returning to his home to slay his last adversaries and end his Odyssey.

The oil-guzzling Scylla we confront is a bizarre creature of many clashing colors and shapes. Its most prominent three heads, on coiled necks entangled nearly in strangleholds, are continually quarreling, each attempting to use the others for its own purposes. Those protuberances are that grossly bloated wealth symbolized by Wall Street, a Zionism that fantasizes rebuilding Solomonic empires on Islamic bones, the original of which archeologists can find no trace, and an apocalyptic Christianity determined to see a new Jerusalem constructed on the smoking remains of the present damned world. Scylla’s spoor is seen everywhere in smoking remains of villages, of starving urban homeless, of thousands of dying species, of degradation of arable land, rainforests, fresh water, and the oceans, all the excesses of climate change, and the increasingly likely demise of the human species. The U.S. military is the blaze with which it is attempting to use to enflame the world into submission. Units are buzzing everywhere, notably in equipping and training others, both foreign militaries and American police, to attempt to control popular movements that embarrass Scylla, reminding it that it is actually powerless to succeed without the hearts of those it seeks to overbear.

Leonard Cohen takes Austin (1988)…

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1) First We Take Manhattan
2) Tower of Song
3) Everybody Knows
4) Ain’t No Cure For Love
5) The Partisan
6) Joan of Arc
7) Jazz Police
8) If It Be Your Will
9) Take This Waltz
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Will Parrish: ‘America’s Last Newspaper’

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Bruce Anderson, Editor/Publisher, Anderson Valley Advertiser
From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

I decided to enroll in the journalism program at my alma mater, the University of California Santa Cruz, during the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, circa late 2002 and early 2003. UCSC was home to a trenchant anti-war movement, far more than in most of the country. For example, a 2,000-person demonstration against the impending US invasion of Afghanistan took place there on October 11, 2001. It was the first event I covered as a student journalist.

The experience of these actions — which reached their pinnacle on February 15, 2003, when more than 15 million people protested throughout the world — gave me my first sense of belonging to a force capable of transforming history. We jumped on the earth, as Abbie Hoffman once put it, and the earth jumped back. With each demonstration, the repressive and heavily militaristic post-9/11 political climate thawed a bit more. Several US-allied countries responded by backing out of the invasion. Though the movement tragically failed to stop the war, many thousands of people — me included — were compelled to continue on with political resistance of various kinds.

Most journalism programs at US universities are feedlots of mediocrity. Their underlying purpose in most cases is to prepare the students for careers propagandizing on behalf of corporate and state power. By contrast, the lure of UCSC’s journalism program was that it encouraged advocacy journalism and dissident thinking. The course instructors were accomplished investigative reporters, authors, and academically-inclined people from various backgrounds. Yet, their lessons and assignments tended to be based on an unapologetic left-wing slant on news reporting and the functions of mass media.

The program’s main architect was a member of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most fascinating Irish political family, Conn Hallinan. His grandfather, Patrick, was a member of the revolutionary Irish National Invincibles who fled to the US to avoid persecution, then became a leading San Francisco labor agitator. His father, Vincent, was a famous Communist attorney best remembered for successfully defending union leader Harry Bridges against perjury charges

Todd Walton: Going Postal

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Saroyan Envelope by Jenifer Angel

From TODD WALTON
Under The Table Books
Mendocino

“I claim there ain’t


Another Saint


As great as Valentine.” Ogden Nash

The notices currently taped to both sides of the glass doors of the Mendocino Post Office proclaim that starting February 14, 2012, our post office will henceforth be closed on Saturdays, and postal business shall only be conducted Monday through Friday from 8 AM to 4 PM. That our government, otherwise known as the Council of Evil Morons, would choose Valentine’s Day to kick off this latest contraction of our terrific postal system strikes me as ironic and cruel, as well as evil and moronic.

I and most Americans over fifty first learned how the postal system worked when we were in First and Second Grade and our teachers helped us create and operate our very own in-classroom post offices for the purpose of sending and receiving Valentines to and from our classmates. At Las Lomitas Elementary School we had actual post offices (built by handy parents) that took up big chunks of classroom real estate. These one-room offices featured windows behind which stood postal workers from whom we could buy stamp facsimiles (fresh from the mimeograph machine) to affix with edible white paste to our properly addressed envelopes. These envelopes contained store bought or handmade Valentines, and we would drop these childish love missives into cardboard mailboxes located across the rooms from the post offices. Then every hour or so postal workers would open these mailboxes, empty the contents into transport bags, and carry the mail to the post offices wherein the letters would be sorted into cubbyholes bearing the names of the recipients. And we, the children, got to be the postal workers and do all these fun jobs. How cool is that? For a six-year-old, way cool.

These Valentines postal operations stimulated many other sectors of our classroom ecology. Making art took on new and urgent meaning, as did writing. Anyone could send a regular valentine, but only artists and poets could make valentines covered with glitter (affixed to that same edible paste) bearing heartfelt original (or accidentally plagiarized) rhymes. Roses are red, violets are blue, please be my Valentine, shoo bop doo wah.

Valentines were the gateway drugs

Unions = Democracy = Middle Class = Shared Prosperity…

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From DAVE JOHNSON
Campaign for America’s Future

Democracy v. Plutocracy, Unions v. Servitude

Servitude: “a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one’s course of action or way of life”

Democracy: “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections”

Plutocracy: government by the wealthy

Labor union: a [democratic] organization of workers formed for the purpose of advancing its members’ interests in respect to wages, benefits, and working conditions

You may have seen the recent flurry of stories about how hi-tech products are made in China. The stories focus on Apple, but it isn’t just Apple. These stories of exploited Chinese workers are also the story of how and why we — 99% of us, anyway — are all feeling such a squeeze here, because we are suffering the disappearance of our middle class. Our choice is democracy or servitude.

Working In China

A collection of excerpts from the Charles Duhigg and David Barboza story, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad and the Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher story, How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work both from the NY Times:

Rousted from dorms at midnight, told to work:

Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.”

Banners on the walls warned the 120,000 employees: “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.”

(How close is that to the very definition of servitude?)

Rosalind Peterson: Good News! Groups sue over Navy sonar use off Northwest coast…

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SEATTLE (AP) — Conservationists and Native American tribes are suing over the Navy’s expanded use of sonar in training exercises off the Washington, Oregon and California coasts, saying the noise can harass and kill whales and other marine life.

In a lawsuit being filed Thursday by the environmental law firmEarthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service claims the service was wrong to approve the Navy’s plan for the expanded training.

They said the regulators should have considered the effects repeated sonar use can have on those species over many years and also required certain restrictions on where the Navy could conduct sonar and other loud activities to protect orcas, humpbacks and other whales, as well as seals, sea lions and dolphins.

Instead, the Navy is required to look around and see if sea mammals are present before they conduct the training.

Kristen Boyles, a Seattle-based attorney with Earthjustice, said it’s the job of the fisheries service to balance the needs of the Navy with measures to protect marine life.

“Nobody’s saying they shouldn’t train,” she said. “But it can’t be possible that it’s no-holds-barred, that there’s no place where this can’t happen.”

In 2010, the fisheries service approved the Navy’s five-year plan for operations in the Northwest Training Range Complex, an area roughly the size of California, about 126,000 nautical square miles, that stretches from the waters off Mendocino County in California to the Canadian border. The Navy has conducted exercises in the training range for 60 years, but in recent years proposed increased weapons testing and submarine training.

The groups want the permit granted to the Navy to be invalidated. They are asking the court to order the fisheries service to study the long-term effects of sonar on marine mammals, in accordance with the Endangered Species Act and other laws.

Regulators determined that while sonar use by navies has been associated with the deaths of whales around the world, including the beaching of 37 whales on North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 2005, there was little chance of that happening in the Northwest. The short duration of the sonar use, typically 90 minutes

Transition to the future — Making it simple and local…

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From THE AUTOMATIC EARTH

[Nicole Foss videos above extremely important! Please watch... -DS]

Ilargi: Ironically and unfortunately, the economic growth faith delusion is too strong to make people, even if they acknowledge that harder times lie ahead, understand that they need to focus some place other than how much their gold is worth today, or their pension. That things other than monetary items will be much more important to their survival and well-being.

That land and community and practical skills will in the future trump all the things they’ve ever seen as valuable. And, to be honest, how can you be expected to change your myopic points of view when everyone around you holds on to them in the exact same way that you do? You look around, and everything seems alright, nothing a spoonful of austerity and hard work can’t cure.

But, just as the only good thing to do for Obama right now is to abolish Fannie and Freddie and Sallie Mae and the FHA and FHFA, to get out, which he won’t, there’s an equivalent for Jill and Jack on Main Street. And that is also to get out. Get out and cut, to the extent possible, all dependence on the government that makes its decisions for all the wrong reasons, and on all other top-down systems that rely on it.

Because those systems are going to crash, and there’s no doubt that they will bring all the Jack and Jills that depend on them, down with them. Obama and Merkel won’t get out of the way, and that increases the urgency for Jack and Jill to do so.

There are people whose role in this unfolding tragedy will be to Occupy Wall Street or Tahrir Square. And there are people whose role it will be

Fibershed: Sourcing Textiles Locally…

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From CHRIS MARTINSON

Most of us dress ourselves each morning with garments that were grown, processed, designed and sewn by an anonymous supply chain. A combination of animal, plant, machinery, imagination, and technical skill came together to clothe you, but it is rare to have connection to any of these real life elements.

It is the goal of one central Californian community’s members to put a face on their wardrobes, and to uncover, develop, and build a new way of engaging with the textiles of their lives. A bioregional supply chain known as a Fibershed is being grown out of a region with a 150 mile diameter — the epicenter just north of San Francisco.

The project aims to bring a thriving local alternative to conventional textile manufacturing systems and to support communities in reviving, sustaining, and networking their raw material base with skilled design and artisanal textile talent.

The Rationale for Domestic, Sustainably-Made Textiles

This DIY revival is steeped in an awareness of the global economic, social, and environmental realities brought forth by conventional textile supply chains and is a response to the following situation:

• After agriculture, the textile industry is the #1 polluter of fresh water resources on the planet.
• The industry’s carbon footprint has been deemed the ‘elephant in the room’ by many in the trade –- ranking as the 5th largest polluter in the United States, where only a fraction of the industry even remains.
• The chemical cocktail used to soften, process, and dye our clothing is attributed to a range of human diseases – including chronic illness and cancer.
• Even the most ‘eco-friendly’ synthetic dyes contain endocrine disrupters, and the most commonly used dyes still contain heavy metals such as cobalt, chrome, copper, and nickel.
• Labor is sought for cost, first and foremost – not quality — leading to massive exploitation and many unstable jobs.

In 1965, 95% of the clothing in a typical American’s closet was made in America. Today less than 5% of our clothes are made here. Unfortunately, this huge movement of the industry was not prompted by a desire for higher standards of production, economic equity for laborers, or tight environmental regulation. It was done to circumvent

Occupy: Showdown in Chicago May Day 2012

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From ADBUSTERS

Hey you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.

And so will we.

On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide.

And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, we’ll be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax … a ban on high frequency ‘flash’ trading … a binding climate change accord … a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals … an all out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East … whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring. If we don’t stand up now and fight now for a different kind of future we may not have much of a future … so let’s live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens …

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
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Gene Logsdon: Talking To Animals…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Have you ever had this happen to you? You stop at a friend’s farm. Knowing he or she is in the barn doing chores, you saunter across the barnyard unannounced. You can hear your friend carrying on quite an animated conversation with someone. You walk through the barn door and there indeed is your friend and he is indeed talking but there is no one else in the barn. He sees you and abruptly falls silent. He gets a look of awful embarrassment on his face. He has been talking to his animals as we all do but don’t like to admit it.

During the days when I was milking a hundred cows, I was often caught carrying on learned discussions with my Holsteins. If the visitor were a friend, especially if he had been caught talking to animals himself, he might put on a big show of mystification, going to great lengths to look around to see whom I had been talking to.

A milker of cows is sort of like the blacksmith of yore. Morning and evening you are always in your office, so to speak, and the whole neighborhood knows it. You are a captive audience to every fervent Republican who wants to pleasure you with his latest joke about stupid Democrats. Or vice versa.  Salesmen know you can’t escape them.  Every righteous crusader for every righteous cause wants to practice his pitch on you. Every hunter has a new escapade to tell you about how he saw the buck deer with the biggest rack in the county but of course did not get a shot at it.

Animals are great to talk to. They can be trusted to keep any secret, will not point out to you embarrassing contradictions of logic in your arguments, and they never argue back. They just nod and keep on eating. They will only interrupt your flow of brilliant reasoning if they run out of food.

Conversing with animals can be quite effective.

“I tell you, they should just throw all those politicians out of Washington and start over.”

“Munch, crunch, munch, crunch.” The sound of a cow chewing hay is as soothing as the sound of a waterfall.

“Well, yes, of course, somebody has to run the government but why can’t they compromise more.”

“Munch, crunch, munch crunch.” The big round cow eyes stare placidly out on the world, unperturbed.

“As long as they don’t kiss up to those rich Republicans too much.”

“Munch, crunch, munch, crunch.” One ear wiggle-waggles.

Resilient Communities: Decoupling from a global train wreck…

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From JOHN ROBB
Resilient Communities

Most of us are DEPENDENT on a global network to get through the day.

Unfortunately, this network is tightly coupled.

Tightly coupled?  What the heck is that?

Tightly coupled is a term used by engineers.   It’s a system where the parts are interdependent.

As a result, a change or failure in one part of the system has an immediate impact on the other parts of the system.

In world that’s tightly coupled, a disaster in one part of the world will immediately be felt in another part of the world.   We saw this on a grand scale with the financial disaster in 2008, and we are going to see it again and again in the future.

Here’s an example of tight coupling in practice:

___________

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last decade working on “what if” scenarios for the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA.

One of those scenarios, naturally, was a war with Iran (one of the world’s top oil exporting countries).

A little known conclusion of that scenario analysis was that a war with Iran greatly increased when deep sanctions were applied.

Why?  Simply:

1. Sanctions disconnect the Iranians from the global economy which soften the impact of a war with them.
2. Sanctions also accelerate societal and economic decay in Iran, making it highly likely that it would start a conflict.

The reason I’m bringing this up, is that these deep sanctions are now being put in place.

In particular, the EU is about to start a boycott Iranian oil and the Chinese are already looking for alternatives.

This means one thing:  our governments have radically increased the probability of a war with Iran.

Oh joy.

So, what does a war with Iran mean?  I could spend hours on this analysis, but most of that really would not matter to you.  What does matter is that a war with Iran will ripple through the world as energy prices zoom and economies already on the brink crump.

Books: Top 5 characters I’d like to punch in the face…

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From greengeekgirl
Insatiable Booksluts

1. Albert Johnson from The Color Purple

Yeah, I’d love to wipe that smile right off of your face. With a hammer.

If you’ve never seen or read The Color Purple–well, for one thing, it’s just an excellent book and film, you really should experience it. But for those who might need an explanation of why I would deck Mr. Johnson, the story centers around a young girl, Celie, and her supposedly more attractive sister, Nettie. Mr. Johnson, being from that era when creepy old dudes look for wives who have barely hit puberty, wants to take Nettie for a wife, but “settles” for Celie. He treats Celie like total shit, sends Nettie away and hides her letters so Celie thinks she’s dead or something, and constantly cheats on Celie (but it’s not cheating if a man does it, amirite Albert?) openly with a singer named Shug Avery. Not only that, but he beats Celie and emotionally abuses her while she takes care of his children and his house. He won’t even let her learn to read; she has to do it on the sly. He’s a world-class dick. As a woman from a bygone (good riddance) era, Celie has no recourse for a long time but to shut up and take it.

Until this happens, of course. If you haven’t read it, I won’t ruin what happens in the end. Suffice to say that I would have no compunction decking Mr. Johnson if I ran into him on the street. And maybe giving him a swift kick in the balls.

2. Claudius from Hamlet

Shit, wait. Wait. I CANNOT PUNCH PATRICK STEWART IN THE FACE…

It’s bad enough that Claudius murdered his brother so he could shack up with his brother’s wife. It’s even worse that he did this because he wanted to become the king of Denmark. But murdering one person is one thing–Claudius, though, he just keeps on murdering when his initial murder causes him some problems… Original article here
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Why the rich bash the poor…

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From SHARON ASTYK

Well, as the republican donnybrooks narrow down, the enemy becomes evident – the American poor. Newt Gingrich particularly dislikes poor folk, especially poor children, because after all, if they were good people they wouldn’t be poor, they’d be working 50 hours a week in some nice sweatshop!

Celeste Monforton at The Pump Handle has a nice post on the realities of the food stamp recipients Newt claims are lazy buggers.

“And we think unconditional efforts by the best food stamp president in American history to maximize dependency is terrible for the future of this country.”

It is absolutely true that there are more food stamp recipients as a percentage of the population than ever in history – and that that was also true during the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency. President Obama’s claim that this is due to the recession is only partly right – the reality is that as fossil energies, health care and housing costs have risen, most households have a smaller and smaller portion of their income to devote to discretionary expenses like food – and oddly, food as become functionally discretionary for many people, I’m not just being facetious, although I wish I was.

For most people with fixed costs for transportation, medications and high housing and associated costs, food is one of the few things you can cut back on – which means that the end of the month looks very different than the beginning. The incredible draw on food pantries, food stamps and soup kitchens isn’t about dependency – or at least dependency on social programs. It is about another kind of dependency, on an economic system that is slowly chewing people up and spitting them out.

It is disturbing that 1 in 7 Americans will soon probably depend on food stamps and 1 in 3 children. As I have argued before that represents a fundamental shift in our culture – we can no longer afford to eat well even on the cheapest food in the world, and the US has now functionally joined other nations that have to subsidize food for its people in order to ensure that they eat. This is a huge fundamental shift – but we also know what happens when we don’t subsidize food for the hungry poor in any nation. The kids suffer, the elderly suffer and those with the strength and the anger riot.

The reason so many people (and you can see this in the comments at the Pump Handle) get so angry about recipients of any kind of aid is that we are so good at setting people against one another, particularly the weakest and most desperate people – so the barely getting by working poor hate the unemployed poor – and we feed on this just as we do on our government subsidized milk.

Depending on food subsidies should not be a source of shame as the last three presidents have moved towards making them normative, and our whole culture has worked to making sure that food came second to everything else. What should be more troubling is asking why we are spending so much

We need a maximum wage: High pay to the executive class is both counterproductive and unnecessary…

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From MONBIOT
“Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.”
The Guardian

The Great Pay Robbery

The successful bank robber no longer covers his face and leaps over the counter with a sawn-off shotgun. He arrives in a chauffeur-driven car, glides into the lift then saunters into an office at the top of the building. No one stops him. No one, even when the scale of the heist is revealed, issues a warrant for his arrest. The modern robber obtains prior approval from the institution he is fleecing.

The income of corporate executives, which the business secretary Vince Cable has just failed to address, is a form of institutionalised theft, arranged by a kleptocratic class for the benefit of its members. The wealth which was once spread more evenly among the staff of a company, or distributed as lower prices or higher taxes, is now siphoned off by people who have neither earned nor generated it.

Over the past ten years, chief executives’ pay has risen nine times faster than that of the median earner. Some bosses (British Gas, Xstrata and Barclays for example) are now being paid over 1000 times the national median wage. The share of national income captured by the top 0.1% rose from 1.3% in 1979 to 6.5% by 2007.

These rewards bear no relationship to risk. The bosses of big companies, though they call themselves risk-takers, are 13 times less likely to be sacked than the lowest paid workers. Even if they lose their jobs and never work again, they will have invested so much and secured such generous pensions and severance packages that they’ll live in luxury for the rest of their lives. The risks are carried by other people.

The problem of executive pay is characterised by Cable and many others as a gap between reward and performance. But it runs deeper than that, for three reasons.

As the writer Dan Pink has shown, high pay actually reduces performance. Material rewards incentivise simple mechanistic jobs, such as working on an assembly line. But they lead to the poorer execution of tasks which require problem solving and cognitive skills. As studies for the US Federal Reserve and other such bolsheviks show, cash incentives narrow people’s focus and restrict the range of their thinking. By contrast, intrinsic motivators — such as a sense of autonomy, of enhancing your skills and pursuing a higher purpose — tend to improve performance.

Even the 0.1% concede that money is not what drives them. Bernie Ecclestone says “I doubt if any successful business person works for money … money is a by-product of success. It’s not the main aim.” Jeroen van der Veer, formerly the chief executive of Shell, recalls, “if I had been paid 50 per cent more, I would not have done it better. If I had been paid 50 per cent less, then I would not have done it worse”. High pay is both counterproductive and unnecessary…

Original article with references here
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500 Referees to ‘Blow the Whistle’ today on Big Oil’s Corruption of Congress in Washington…

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From Real Time with Bill Maher: Bill Moyers discusses the importance of people power and popular support to help enable the President to do the right thing using Bill McKibben and Occupy Movement, as it relates to Obama not allowing the Keystone pipeline for now, as an example.

Chris Hedges, suing Obama, speaks to Occupy Movement…
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500 Referees to  “Blow the Whistle” on Big Oil’s Corruption of Congress

Keystone XL pipeline protesters will go on the offensive this Tuesday with a rally on Capitol Hill featuring 500 people dressed as referees “blowing the whistle” on fossil fuel funded corruption in Congress.

Who: 500 referees, a marching band, Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Steve Cohen, 350.org founder Bill McKibben, Energy Action Coalition Environmental Justice Director Lili Molina, Greenpeace Executive Director Phil Radford, and peace and justice advocate Rev. Graylan Hagler.

What: 500 referees blowing whistles, throwing penalty flags, and holding signs that call out individual members of Congress for the amount of money they have received from the fossil fuel industry. After the event on Capitol Hill, protesters will march to the American Petroleum Institute to protest the industry front group.

Where: West Lawn, US Capitol Building

When: 12:00 – 2:00 PM, Tuesday, Jan 24

Why: Despite President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL permit, Speaker Boehner and certain members of Congress continue to push the pipeline, in large part because of the millions of dollars in campaign contributions they’ve received from Big Oil. This sort of bribery wouldn’t be allowed at the Super Bowl – let alone a high school football game – and it shouldn’t be allowed in our democracy. One day before Congress holds new hearings on Keystone XL (and two weeks before the Super Bowl), protesters will “blow the whistle” on this fossil fuel funded corruption and use Keystone XL to hold politicians accountable for their ties to Big Oil.
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National Call to Action Made by the Portland General Assembly – January 1st, 2012

Occupy Portland calls for a national day of non-violent direct action to reclaim our voices and challenge our society’s obsession with profit and greed by shutting down the corporations.  We are rejecting

Things I learned from opening a book store…

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From jlsathre
Open Salon

1.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.  Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money.  Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.

2.  While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.

3.  If someone comes in and asks where to find the historical fiction, they’re not looking for classics, they want the romance section.

4.  If someone comes in and says they read a little of everything, they also want the romance section.

5. If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can’t think of one, the person is not really a reader.  Recommend Nicholas Sparks.

6.  Kids will stop by your store on their way home from school if you have a free bucket of kids books.  If you also give out free gum, they’ll come every day and start bringing their friends.

7.  If you put free books outside, cookbooks will be gone in the first hour and other non-fiction books will sit there for weeks.  Except in warm weather when people are having garage sales.  Then someone will back their car up and take everything, including your baskets.

8.  If you put free books outside, someone will walk in every week and ask if they’re really free, no matter how many signs you put out .  Someone else will walk in and ask if everything in the store is free.

9.  No one buys  self help books in a store where there’s a high likelihood of  personal interaction when paying.  Don’t waste the shelf space, put them in the free baskets.

10.  This is also true of sex manuals.  The only ones who show an interest in these in a small store are the gum chewing kids, who will find them no matter how well you hide them.

11.  Under no circumstances should you put the sex manuals in the free baskets.  Parents will show up.

12.  People buying books don’t write bad checks.  No need for ID’s. They do regularly show up having raided the change jar.

13.  If you have a bookstore that shares a parking lot with a beauty shop that caters to an older clientele, the cars parked in your lot will always be pulled in at an angle even though it’s not angle parking.

14.  More people want to sell books than buy them, which means your initial concerns were wrong.  You will have no trouble getting books, the problem is selling them.  Plus a shortage of storage space

Occupy San Francisco takes the fight to local banks in ambitious next step for movement…

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From GARY KAMIYA
Salon

… 198 different methods of nonviolent action. Camping out is one tactic. We still have 197 more tactics to go through, and another 500 to create.

Act II of the Occupy Wall Street movement, San Francisco version, kicked off on a rainy, blustery Friday in the heart of the city’s financial district. Targeting specific corporations like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and emphasizing real, tangible issues like home foreclosures, affordable health care and education as well as broader ones like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, several hundred protesters – the exact number was impossible to estimate – fanned out across the city, snarling traffic, getting arrested, holding sidewalk teach-ins, and generally serving notice that after its brief winter hibernation, the Occupy movement was back and kicking.

Occupy’s first act, the Tent Phase, ended in early December, when city authorities raided its urban camp at Justin Herman Plaza near the Ferry Building. But even before the tents were removed, it had become clear that the movement needed both to develop new tactics and deepen its strategic vision.

“After the raid, when our attention was no longer focused on [the encampment], people turned back to their neighborhoods and their campuses,” said David Solnit, who is part of a direct action working group associated with Occupy SF. “We started Occupy Bernal Heights [a multi-ethnic, mixed-income neighborhood on the edge of the Mission District], and we had 65 people at the first meeting. We went door to door meeting folks facing foreclosures. We got meetings with mid-level people at Wells Fargo Bank.”

Solnit – who is the brother of San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit – said that OccupySF Housing, a housing-related spinoff of the movement, had held marches in four neighborhoods and succeeded in saving four homes from foreclosure.

“We’re more diversified now, but more powerful than when all our eggs were in one basket,” Solnit said. “Gene Sharp came up with 198 different methods of nonviolent action. Camping out is one tactic. We still have 197 more tactics to go through, and another 500 to create.”

At 6:20 a.m., in pitch darkness, with a miserable rain pelting down in front of the enormous 52-story monolith of 555 California, it seemed like a good idea for Occupy to come up with a new tactic immediately.

Bay Area Solutions Guides: chickens, greywater, rainwater harvesting …

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From BAY LOCALIZE (San Francisco Bay Area, California)
(January 2012)

Our Mission

We inspire and support Bay Area residents in building equitable, resilient communities. We confront the challenges of climate instability, rising energy costs, and recession by boosting our region’s capacity to provide for everyone’s needs, sustainably and equitably. We achieve this by equipping local leaders with flexible tools, models, and policies that strengthen their communities.

Why local? Why now?

Humanity is at a turning point. We’re using so much of the Earth’s resources that we’re endangering the very life-support systems upon which we all depend. At the same time, too many people in our communities are going without the basics to lead healthy lives. The task of our generation is to learn to live happily on fewer resources, to distribute these resources equitably, and to make our communities resilient enough to withstand the bumps in the road along the way.

The goal is clear. Reaching it means coming to terms with climate change, our addiction to oil, and deep social inequalities. Bay Localize creates innovative solutions for communities to meet basic needs in ways that harness local resources creatively, sustainably, and equitably. We catalyze change at the community level by providing tools to chart a path to resilience, and ramping up good models to scale through local policy change. Bay Localize focuses our work where we live in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, but our tools and models are replicated throughout the country and the world.

Bay Localize believes that vibrant local economies and healthy communities are the answer to our growing challenges. They are the best safeguard against global insecurity, an essential part of achieving social equity, and a vital way to enrich our day-to-day lives. Join Bay Localize in creating a hopeful and vibrant future for us all.

With the growing interest in urban agriculture, greywater, rainwater catchment and permaculture solutions, we have a tremendous opportunity to help meet the needs of our communities and boost our local economy. Explore the following Solutions Series Guides to help you get started on making a real difference in your household and neighborhood!

Chicken Coops
Greywater Systems
Rainwater Harvesting
Rooftop Gardens
Urban Farming and Gardening
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Misery Loves Company: Top 10 Depression Films…

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From DENNIS HARTLEY
Hullabaloo

I’ve sure been hearing the “D” word an awful lot lately. They say that in times of severe economic downturn, people crave pure escapism at the movies. I say, screw that. I wanna revel in economic downturn, ‘cos there’s something else “they” say as well: Misery loves company. So, with that in mind, and in the spirit of a little cinematic aversion therapy, here’s my Top 10 Great Depression Movies. Study them well, because there’s yet one more thing that “they say”: Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.

Berlin Alexanderplatz- When you think of the Great Depression in terms of film and literature, it tends to vibe America-centric in the mind’s eye. In reality, the economic downturn between the great wars was a global phenomenon (not unlike our current situation); things were literally “tough all over”. You could say that Germany had a jumpstart on the depression (economically speaking, everything below the waist was kaput by the mid 1920s). In October of 1929 (interesting historical timing), Alfred Doblin’s epic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story Of Franz Biberkopf was published, then adapted into a film in 1931 directed by Phil Jutzi. It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later that the ultimate film version would appear as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 hour opus. It’s nearly impossible to encapsulate this spiritually exhausting viewing experience in just a few lines; I’ll just say that it is (by turns) the most outrageous, shocking, transcendent, boring, awe-inspiring, maddening and soul-scorching film I’ve ever hated myself for loving so much.

Bonnie and Clyde- The gangster movie meets the art film in this 1967 groundbreaker from director Arthur Penn. There is much more to this influential masterpiece than just the oft-mentioned operatic crescendo of violent death in the closing frames; particularly of note was the ingenious way that its attractive antiheroes were posited to directly appeal to the rebellious counterculture zeitgeist of the time, even though the film was ostensibly a “nostalgia piece”. Our better instincts may tell us that the real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were nowhere near as charismatic (or physically beautiful) as Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, but we don’t really care, do we? (Is it getting warm in here? Woof!)

Bound for Glory-There’s only one man to whom Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan

Playing for keeps…

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From DERRICK JENSEN
OrionMagazine.org

People who read my work often say, “Okay, so it’s clear you don’t like this culture, but what do you want to replace it?” The answer is that I don’t want any one culture to replace this culture. I want ten thousand cultures to replace this culture, each one arising organically from its own place. That’s how humans inhabited the planet (or, more precisely, their landbases, since each group inhabited a place, and not the whole world, which is precisely the point), before this culture set about reducing all cultures to one.

I live on Tolowa (Indian) land. Prior to the arrival of the dominant culture, the Tolowa lived here for 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time. This story may sound familiar, but its significance has, thus far, been lost on the dominant culture, so it bears repeating: when the first settlers arrived here maybe 180 years ago, the place was a paradise. Salmon ran in runs so thick you couldn’t see the bottoms of rivers, so thick people were afraid to put their boats in for fear they would capsize, so thick they would keep people awake at night with the slapping of their tails against the water, so thick you could hear the runs for miles before you could see them. Whales were commonplace in the nearby ocean. Forests were thick with frogs, newts, salamanders, birds, elk, bears. And of course huge ancient redwood trees.

Now I count myself blessed when I see two salmon in what we today call Mill Creek. Another Tolowa staple, Pacific lampreys, are in bad shape. Just three years ago you could not hold a human conversation outside at night in the spring, and now I hear maybe five or six frogs at night.

Our time to come alive…

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From DIANNE MONROE
Transition Voice

This is an amazing time to be alive!

“Yeah, right,” my inner cynic says, “crumbling economy, peak oil, peak everything, melting ice caps, mass extinctions…”

The list goes on and on, all woven together, I remind my cynic within, by the fact that we’re living in a time when the old is crumbling, which is when there’s the greatest opportunity to create something new.

And that is an amazing time to be alive!

If you’re alive today, you’re part of this Great Unraveling/ Great Turning, or whatever we choose to call it. If, like me, you’re middle aged or beyond, we’ve lived through the apex of a global empire now passed irrevocably into decline.

When exactly that point of turning was passed is the topic of many discussions. I’m not sure how important it is to know the precise point. We know that something big happened on the way down with the economic crisis of 2008, even if the mainstream economic pundits keep assuring us that prosperity is just around the corner.

We’re experiencing this great crumbling from within, and that’s a very good (if at times painful) thing. In times of crumbling, when the old way of being and doing can no longer hold itself, can no longer hold us in its grip, there’s greater fluidity, a greater opening. In times like these even small actions can reverberate widely into the future.

That makes it an amazing time to be alive.

The gift

Think about all the humans that have ever lived. They lived through times of joy and plenty, through wars, famines, natural disasters. They lived through the rise and crumbling of empires.

Dreams from endangered cultures…

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From WADE DAVIS
National Geographic
Ted Talks video here

You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, or that in the Himalaya, the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago.

And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. We’re all born. We all bring our children into the world. We go through initiation rites. We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art.

But what’s interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara — this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with a month ago — or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, Everest, the goddess mother of the world.

All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere, and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.

The California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act

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From RONNIE CUMMINGS
Organic Consumers Union

We are on the road to victory in California with coalition members, strategic allies, and key donors increasing their support all the time. We now have over 50 environmental, alternative health, and sustainable food organizations and businesses advocating for our cause. But, most importantly, we have over 1,500 dedicated CA volunteers trained and ready to hit the streets when signature gathering begins in February. You can go here to volunteer by gathering petition signatures in California.

This November 2012 California Ballot Initiative, which will require foods
sold in California retail outlets to be labeled as such, may be the most important GMO battle of all time. A win in California will mean radical changes to food labels everywhere. Producers will either have to change the way they market Frankenfoods or else stop using GMOs altogether. We think we can reverse the biotech strangle-hold on our food system in our lifetimes.

You don’t have to live in California to donate to this historic ballot initiative.

Consumers everywhere have a right to know what’s in the food we buy and eat and feed our children, just as we have the right to know how many calories are in the food we buy, or whether food comes from other countries like Mexico or China. In the past, we’ve successfully fought for labels telling us the country of origin of products, as well as whether foods have been irradiated. Now it’s time to stand up for our right to know which foods are laced with GMOs.

Efforts to enact labeling laws in Congress and in other state legislatures have been blocked by big food and chemical company lobbyists. The California Ballot Initiative will take the issue directly to the people. For more information about the initiative visit California Right To Know and the Organic Consumers Fund.
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Todd Walton: Crazy Memory

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“Every man’s memory is his private literature.” Aldous Huxley

I used to know a loquacious drunk who punctuated his pontifications with the disclaimer, “Of course, memories are, at best, only fair approximations of what actually happened, so please don’t quote me.” At least I think that’s what he said. And I took his disclaimer to mean that his memory was not so sharp, whereas my own recollections were essentially photographic and therefore highly accurate. Silly me.

A few nights ago we watched the movie Bedazzled (the original work of genius, not the execrable remake) created by and starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, with a stirring cameo by the preternatural Raquel Welch, and we laughed so hard at some of the scenes I felt five years younger at movie’s end. I hadn’t seen Bedazzled in thirty years and feared the sarcastic romp might not stand the test of time, but it did with ease. However, what did not stand the test of time were my memories of favorite scenes from the film, for they were, as the drunk foresaw, only approximations of the actual scenes.

Indeed, I was crestfallen that my most favorite scene (as I remembered it) only barely resembled the actual scene in the film. Which scene? The one in which Raquel Welch brings Dudley Moore breakfast in bed. In my misremembered version, Raquel’s seduction of the hapless Moore lasts a good ten minutes and features the nearly naked Raquel erotically enunciating each syllable of the expression, “hot buttered buns” as part of an excruciatingly slow build to an orgasmic finish; when in actuality Raquel spat that delectable phrase rapid fire in the midst of a badly blurted speech prelude to seductus interruptus.

Bash the Beast…

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From orgtheory.net

A long time ago, in graduate school, my television was stolen and it changed my life. I now had lots of free time. I never understood on a gut level what I was missing until my tv was gone. There was a whole world beyond my living room low rent studio apartment. Jacob Levy once told me during a party, “Fabio, if you don’t watch tv, you had better be very well read.” Indeed, fair ranger, I am now quite well read.

I learned a second lesson. Most television is garbage. Once you unplug and then start watching later, you are immediately confronted with this truth. Ever since childhood, I was accustomed to watching whatever came on. Sure, I had preferences. Some shows are better than others, but I was letting someone throw rubbish at my face every night for hours at a time. For free!

Later, I realized that the issue wasn’t drama or comedy. Ultimately, there’s no harm in having an abnormally thorough knowledge of the Jeffersons and its catchy theme song. There real issue is television news. As a social scientist in training, I began to believe that I am seeking the truth about social life. It’s my calling. It is what I have decided to dedicate my life to at the expense of more remunerative careers. Therefore, it is unethical for me to consume or support cultural products that are misleading depictions on the social world.

You don’t need to be a die hard Chomskian who believes that the media is a mere tool of corporate and state interests, although that does happen to fair degree. Rather, you need to compare social science 101 to what happens on the news.

Example 1: Local television news is driven by “if it bleeds, it leads.” That gives the impression that crime is ubiquitous. Instead, much evidence shows a long term decrease in criminal violence in Western society. Steven Pinker’s recent book on violence merely documents what historical criminologists have known for a while.

Small scale organic farmers our only hope…

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From ROBIN BROAD and JOHN CAVANAGH
Yes! Magazine 

There is battle raging across the world over who can better feed its people: small-scale farmers practicing sustainable agriculture, or giant agribusinesses using chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

It was small-scale organic farmers growing rice for themselves and local markets in the Philippines who first convinced us that they could feed both their communities and their country. Part of what convinced us was simple economics: These farmers demonstrated substantial immediate savings from eliminating chemical inputs while, within a few harvests—if not immediately—their yields were close to or above their previous harvests. From these farmers, we also learned of the health and environmental benefits from this shift.

Moving up from what we learned in the Philippines to examine other countries, we have concluded that small-scale farmers practicing different kinds of what is now called agroecology can feed the world. Agroecology extends the organic label to a broader category of ecosystem-friendly, locally adapted agricultural systems, including agro-forestry and techniques like crop rotation, topsoil management, and watershed restoration. (For more details on our research and conclusions, check out our “Can Danilo Atilano Feed the World?” in the current Earth Island Journal, the magazine of the California-based Earth Island Institute.)

Eager to learn more and network with others from across the globe, Robin accepted an invitation from the Transnational Institute and the International Institute of Social Studies to speak about our Philippine research at a global conference in the Netherlands on alternative approaches to food and hunger.

She came away even more convinced that small-scale farmers are our only hope. She also came away excited to have met an impressive range of experts on the subject, including a bold champion for small-scale farmers:

Walking away…

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From JOHN MICHAEL GREER
The Archdruid Report

Last week’s Archdruid Report post, despite its wry comparison of industrial civilization’s current predicament with the plots and settings of pulp fantasy fiction, had a serious point. Say what you will about the failings of cheap fantasy novels—and there’s plenty to be said on that subject, no question—they consistently have something that most of the allegedly more serious attempts to make sense of our world usually lack: the capacity to envision truly profound change.

That may seem like an odd claim, given the extent to which contemporary industrial society preens itself on its openness to change and novelty. Still, it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of that very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty to which it applies amount to, basically, more of the same thing we’ve already got. A consumer in a modern industrial society is free to choose any of a dizzying range of variations on a suffocatingly narrow range of basic options—and that’s equally true whether we are talking about products, politics, or lifestyles.

I suppose the automobile is the most obvious example, but it has dimensions not always recognized and these bear a closer look. To begin with, the vast majority of cars for sale these days are simply ringing changes on a suite of technologies that was introduced in the late 19th century and hit maturity close to fifty years ago. That’s as true of electric and hybrid cars, by the way, as it is of the usual kind—the hype surrounding the so-called “hybrid revolution” conveniently fails to mention that the same system has been used for more than sixty years in diesel-electric locomotives, and cars powered by electricity were common on American roads before the Big Three auto firms succeeded in getting a stranglehold on the industry during the last Great Depression. Steam-powered cars were also to be had back then—the Stanley Steamer was a famous brand; try finding one now.

What variations can be found nowadays are almost entirely a matter of style rather than substance, and this becomes even more evident when it’s recognized that the auto is simply one way

When the people rise up…

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From MARY BOTTARI
OurFuture.org

1 Million Petition for the Recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

The petition drive to recall and remove Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has surpassed all expectations, collecting one million signatures in just 60 days. The signatures represent the largest recall effort in the history of the United States.

Petitioners were only required to collect 540,000 by law. They far exceeded this number, making a successful legal challenge of the recall highly unlikely. Volunteers also gathered 845,000 signatures to recall Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and additional signatures to recall four of the state senators who voted for Walker’s collective bargaining bill in March 2011, creating a mountain of paper estimated to weigh over one ton.

As for Walker, he attended a New York fundraiser hosted by no less than Hank Greenberg, the former CEO of American International Group, according to Mother Jones.

Wisconsin Recall Will Make History

The numbers coming out of Wisconsin are stunning. Of the 19 states that permit the recall of governors, Wisconsin has one of the highest thresholds. For governors (and legislators), recall organizers must gather signatures equaling 25 percent of the turnout in the previous election for the office. That means organizers faced the daunting task of collecting 540,000. To avoid losing the election through signature challenges, signature collectors wanted a “cushion” of additional signatures, so they set a goal of 720,000 signatures. They surpassed even that goal.

When California governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, residents collected 1.6 million signatures out of 21.1 million eligible voters or approximately 7.6 percent. In Wisconsin, 25,000 trained volunteers had 60 days to collect approximately 1 million signatures from 4.37 million eligible voters… Original article here…
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Can a Godless Farmer be a Good Steward of the Soil?

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From GENE LOGSDON

There is a growing realization in organized religion that something is awry in our industrial food delivery system. Churches are actively urging their members to become more involved directly in local and family gardening and farming. This is great news for those of us who have been fighting this battle for a long time. Organized religion can be a very powerful force in getting society’s feet back on the ground (literally) and we welcome all the help we can get.

But I am not sure how this is going to turn out. Hardly a week goes by now that someone doesn’t send me a book about church involvement in food production or I am not invited by a member of the clergy or a professor at a Christian college to give a talk, which pleases me deeply. But it also causes me a problem. I hardly qualify as a Christian anymore. I don’t know what I am. Sometimes I lean toward Buddhism but then I read a little more in that direction and don’t much agree with that either. I sort of envy Christians and Muslims because they believe in something so fantastically wonderful as an eternal life of utter bliss. I’ve tried to believe. Just can’t. Sorry.  So anyway when I am asked to give a talk about farming at a private religious college or, horrors, in a church, I get nervous. If the inviters knew that I was a godless contrarian, would they really want me to speak? America is a place where “godless” suggests “sinner” or certainly not saint. So I retreat into hypocrisy, giving my talk while cagily hedging my words so that I do not sound too heretical or hypocritical.

Last week when a professor of religion at a private college wanted me to give a talk, I decided it was time to be honest. I told him he might not like what I would say especially about how religious institutions so often glorify rich industrial farmers who practice destructive farming but who give generously to the churches. I told him I was sort of a godless heathen. Did that bother him?

Here was his reply, verbatim: “I am not offended one bit by the approach you are outlining in your email. I am more offended by the vast majority of religious folk who are gleefully ignorant of how their behavior affects the environment and the others around them

New tool reveals country’s most polluted places: How close do you live?

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From ALTERNET

Thanks to a new tool from the EPA, you can see how close you live to the country’s biggest polluters.

Looking for some awkward synergy? The Environmental Protection Agency recently released a comprehensive database of America’s greatest greenhouse gas creators. It interactively indexes the 6,700 power plants and other facilities responsible for 80 percent of U.S. emissions, in an accessible online resource that gives interested citizens the ability not only to monitor their local and national pollution, but also to reproduce data-specific graphs and charts to fire off to colleagues and friends on social networks.

The tool debuted the day after President Obama made his first-ever visit to the EPA, a much less impressive debut. Fueled by billions of tons of the greenhouse gases the EPA’s GHG Reporting Program data publication tool dutifully tracks, global warming has recently unleashed an unseasonal hellscape on the U.S., with temperatures scorching some regions 40 degrees above normal. But at least Obama came with his environmental game-face on.

“We don’t have to choose between dirty air and dirty water or a growing economy,” President Obama stumped to a crowd of 800 employees gathered at the EPA’s Washington headquarters. “We can make sure that we are doing right by our environment and in fact putting people back to work all across America. When I hear folks grumbling about environmental policy, you almost want to do a Back to the Future reminder of what happened when we didn’t have a strong EPA. You have a president who is grateful for your work and will stand with you every inch of the way.”

He may joke about time travel, but late last year it was the Sierra Club and many others — likely including some of those EPA employees he addressed for the first time — who wondered aloud whether America had slipstreamed straight back to the Bush regime after President Obama halted EPA regulation of smog and air pollution…Original article here…
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Contraction…

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From CHARLES HUGH SMITH
oftwominds.com

For the past 67 years, Americans have been conditioned to expect expansion and more of everything: more income, more stuff, more opportunity, more benefits, more medical care, more government entitlements, and so on.

As a result, Americans have habituated to permanent expansion. The concept that contraction–less of everything–is the new normal simply doesn’t register; it is rejected, denied, or decried as a great tragedy. The notion that it is simply reality does not compute with a populace habituated to permanent “growth” that is at worst interrupted by brief recessions.

U.S. politicians have learned that Soaring Rhetoric (TM) about “morning in America,” “the New Frontier,” “hope” and other ritualistic appeals to permanent expansion win elections, while accurate descriptions of reality lose elections.

The voting public’s demand for “permanent good news” promising permanent expansion has spawned a feedback loop of officially sanctioned manipulated statistics and media spin (a.k.a. propaganda) that expands with every administration, even as the real economy visibly weakens. Though the Obama Administration has perfected the techniques of presenting “permanent good news,” the divergence of the real economy and the official “story” that “we’ve returned to permanent expansion” is widening.

The real story is the “expansion” has cost the taxpayers trillions of dollars in new debt and trillions of dollars of backstops, shadow purchases and money-printing by the Federal Reserve. Roughly speaking, $6 trillion in additional Federal borrowing has been blown to simply keep the Status Quo from imploding, and around $13 trillion in guarantees, backstops, asset purchases, and losses made good have been issued to keep the Status Quo’s financial sector afloat and in charge.

By any credible, unmanipulated measure, for example, the number of people with fulltime employment

Peak Walmart

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From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

To the Editors (AVA, UDJ), Ukiah City Council, Ukiah City Management

For every 2 jobs Walmart creates it destroys 3 (Institute of Local Self-Reliance)… are yours and mine next? Walmart is so desperate to grab every last piece of retail sales it can that, even as it tries to force a huge expansion of its local store on our community, it is downsizing its new stores into “express size” units to kill off even more downtown merchants in urban areas across the US.

A secret behind Wal-Mart’s rapid expansion in the United States has been its extensive use of public money. This includes more than $1.2 billion in tax breaks, free land, infrastructure assistance, low-cost financing and outright grants from state and local governments around the country. In addition, taxpayers indirectly subsidize the company by paying the healthcare costs of Wal-Mart employees who don’t receive coverage on the job and instead turn to public programs such as Medicaid (walmartsubsidywatch.org).

Not only will we lose many jobs and small businesses when Walmart expands its Ukiah store into a gigantic grocery market featuring extremely cheap “organic” produce and meats from China, but even more will be lost as it eventually contracts. Contracts? The Wall Street Journal reports: “Walmart’s U.S. business… has reported declining sales at stores open at least a year for two consecutive years.”

So once Walmart, and the looming Costco store, have killed off their local competition… our supermarkets, our co-op, our family farmers and farmers markets, our downtown family-owned shops… and destroyed our local community networks of economic exchange, it will face its own demise as Peak Oil’s inevitable rising energy costs destroy the big box business model… and the ship loads of containers from China grind to a halt.

What then?
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Farmers talk about the books that inspire them…

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From CYNTHIA SALAYSAY
Civil Eats

Scores of books depict farms as little slices of heaven on earth, where venison is smoked and butter is churned, and things seem perfect. But today’s farmers are far from unrealistic dreamers, longing for a Little House on the Prairie-esque pastoral ideal. They’re socially conscious doers. And when asked about books that inspire them, they cite writings that are practical, at times poetic, and that beckon them to rescue the land.

Here are some of the books that farmers are reading and getting inspiration from today.

The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. “I had spent  seven or so years of my life as a ‘punk’ growing up in the the central NJ suburbs of NYC, disgruntled and disillusioned and looking for real meaning and ways to be in the world, and [Berry] was someone seemingly so disgruntled and disillusioned, yet incredibly intelligent and coherent, with a posited solution of sorts…. Challenges [were] laid forth to take full responsibility for our lives and to truly push against what our culture is feeding us, to move towards a society built around community, equality, a new free culture, and a cooperative economy in which we all work satisfying jobs in support of each other; ideals I cannot imagine any human being would deface. Farming could embrace these challenges and reconnect us with the land and each other like no other, I was convinced.” — Anthony Mecca, Great Song Farm

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. “I read The Good Earth when I was a child, I think I was ten or eleven. I read it again in my 20s, and again in my 30s…. It’s an inspiring novel about building a dream, perseverance. I think the best line is at the end of the novel when it says, ‘without land, you’re nothing.’ It’s a quote my father and mother used to repeat to us kids all the time. So that book always meant something for many reasons.” — Alexis Koefoed, Soul Food Farm

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. “I read it as a freshman in college. This was kind of a critical treatise

A Time to Break Silence…

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From REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING
4 April 1967

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

[Please put links to this speech on your respective web sites and if possible, place the text itself there. This is the least well known of Dr. King's speeches among the masses, and it needs to be read by all]

http://www.ssc.msu.edu/~sw/mlk/brkslnc.htm

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I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well

Fukushima — Pacific Ocean radiation levels up 45 million times…

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From ALEX ROSLIN
Montreal Gazette
Thanks to Rosalind Peterson

Evidence has emerged that the impacts of the disaster on the Pacific Ocean are worse than expected

After the world’s worst nuclear accident in 25 years, authorities in Canada said people living here were safe and faced no health risks from the fallout from Fukushima.

They said most of the radiation from the crippled Japanese nuclear power plant would fall into the ocean, where it would be diluted and not pose any danger.

Dr. Dale Dewar wasn’t convinced. Dewar, a family physician in Wynyard, Sask., doesn’t eat a lot of seafood herself, but when her grandchildren come to visit, she carefully checks seafood labels.

She wants to make sure she isn’t serving them anything that might come from the western Pacific Ocean.

Dewar, the executive director of Physicians for Global Survival, a Canadian anti-nuclear group, says the Canadian government has downplayed the radiation risks from Fukushima and is doing little to monitor them.

“We suspect we’re going to see more cancers, decreased fetal viability, decreased fertility, increased metabolic defects – and we expect them to be generational,” she said.

And evidence has emerged that the impacts of the disaster on the Pacific Ocean are worse than expected.

Since a tsunami and earthquake destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant last March, radioactive cesium has consistently been found in 60 to 80 per cent of Japanese fishing catches each month tested by Japan’s Fisheries Agency.

In November, 65 per cent of the catches tested positive for cesium (a radioactive material created by nuclear reactors), according to a Gazette analysis of data on the fisheries agency’s website.

This culture is @†‰Ø the planet…

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From DERRICK JENSEN
Orion Magazine

What we don’t say and why we don’t say it

This culture is @†‰Ø the planet. The latest studies show that global warming will be far #+?þ than anyone has imagined, and could easily lead to an increase of #-+^)@ Fahrenheit by 2100, which would effectively spell the ?*#-+@* of life on Earth. Yet our response—including the response by most of the #/?*#-+^)!@* community—is utterly incommensurate with the #216;‰§« posed by #/?*#-+^)!@*. For crying out loud, most @?#/?*#-@ can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge that the @†‰Ø system is inherently unsustainable, much less that ?*??#-+^)!@ itself must be !$#/?*#=-+^)!@*.

I’m #/?*#-+^)!@* of it. I want to talk about what we #/?*#-+^)!@*. But before we can talk about what we #/?*#-+^)!@*, it’s necessary for us to talk about why we don’t talk about it.

One big reason is censorship—from without and within.

The United States government is said to have been founded on free speech and freedom of expression. After all, doesn’t the First Amendment to the Constitution state that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”? Pretty clear, no? And haven’t we seen landmark case after landmark case declaring that even such vile material as the most degrading

Occupy: The over-winter diehards…

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From ADBUSTERS

Holding the ground till crocuses bloom next Spring.

In Auckland. In London. In Newfoundland. In Austin, Boulder, Delaware, Buffalo and DC, they’re hanging in there against all odds, defending sacred ground for what will surely be the magical soil of Spring. As we indoors continue brainstorming, networking and tactical planning for the actions to come, lets take a moment to celebrate those inspirational die hards hanging in there through Winter. Our hearts go out to you … you are our heroes … we are in awe of your resolve.

Here is a message from Occupy Newfoundland, Canada’s last-standing encampment:

Day 83. We have survived critique from politicians, citizens and media. Been pelted with rain, sleet and snowstorms. Endured the cold, damp and windy conditions that only the turbulent Atlantic Ocean can offer. We have tolerated and embraced the difference of opinion on the major issues we as people and as a society are now facing, for we believe only dialogue and communication without violence is the key to our success. Occupy has more to do with becoming engaged in your community, city, country and own personal ambitions and beliefs than it does with Occupying a park or a tent. It’s the reflection of the desire and hope inside the people of this planet. This is why we remain, this is why we will persevere … Occupy Newfoundland/Everywhere 2012 and beyond.
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Occupy the fundamentalist God…

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From REV BILLY

Life is dying…

Tropical forests, wetlands and estuaries, and the coral reefs beneath the ocean’s surface are the carriers of most of the life on the Earth. Tropical forests are the home of half of all species, and they are, as of the beginning of 2012, one third gone. Caught in the slash-and-burning and lumbering and fast-food grazing of current economies, the planet will be deforested for our grandchildren.

We are turning out the lights on the stage of the creation of life. Life needs enough life to keep making life. Life-a-lujah! Put it this way: Evolution, to work, needs its genetic pool. No-one knows for sure how many species and in what numbers will survive as the centers of intense life are cut down.

We are witnessing the extinction of hundreds of thousands of species of life. How can this be? And, this is not a decision that has been open to much public discussion. It is an apocalypse of accumulating silence. No public leader would dare state that human beings will be the only life remaining, and yet that seems to be the plan. The idea that people would be the only living thing – with I suppose pets, and parks preserved like museums… Is that where we are heading? People simply don’t realize how extreme this is: the extinction rate has risen to 400 times above the average. Life is dying.

Todd Walton: Close Calls

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“Fate laughs at probabilities.”  E.G. Bulwer-Lytton

For me to be born, my parents had to meet at Beverly Hills High in 1939, which only happened because in 1932, when my mother Avis was eleven, she went on a long walk in Phoenix, Arizona and learned from the announcement on a hotel marquee that Tommy Dorsey and his band were playing there that very night.

Avis took that fateful walk because she was tired of being cooped up in a motel room with her seven-year-old brother Howard and her thirty-three-year-old mother Goody, and because she was sad and lonely and didn’t know what else to do. Avis and Goody and Howard were living in that Phoenix motel room, having hurriedly left Los Angeles some weeks before, because Goody was fed up with her husband Casey for failing for the umpteenth time to bring home enough bacon, so to speak, to keep the bill collectors at bay and put sufficient food on the table for two growing kids. Casey was a real estate broker and a gambler, and in the depths of the Great Depression things were not going well for him in either field. Goody and Casey were Jewish, their last name Weinstein, and so their struggles were compounded by the fierce anti-Semitism of those times. They would eventually change their last name to Winton so they could pretend not to be Jewish, a tactic they hoped would increase their options for housing and employment.

Why Phoenix? Family lore has it that Phoenix was as far as they got before Goody ran out of money. Goody’s parents were in Michigan where Goody was born, so perhaps Goody’s plan was to get back to the Jewish ghetto of Detroit where her relatives would not let her starve. But I think Goody chose Phoenix because it was just close enough to Los Angeles (an eight-hour drive) for Casey to visit every weekend to give Goody a little money, if he had any, and to beg her to come back to him. Goody was adamant she would not come back to him until he started making good money and giving most of that money

Transition: What it looks like when food grows everywhere…

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From ROB HOPKINS
Transition Culture
Transition Ukiah Valley

Today I’d like to share a map with you (you can download a hi resolution pdf of it here — caution, it’s a big file), and I’m hugely grateful to Geri Smyth for giving me this.  It is a map of the town of Guildford (or Guldeford as it was then) in 1793.  Regular readers will know I love a good map, and I have spent a fair while poring over this one.  There are a couple of things I love about it.  Firstly, it is the most amazing piece of draughtsmanship.  It is a thing of extraordinary beauty in a way that Googlemaps can only dream of.  The way its laid out, the calligraphy, the attention to detail, are beautiful in a way very few people could recreate today.  But what is so extraordinary, upon closer inspection, is how it captures what it looks like when food grows everywhere. Think of it, if you like, as Incredible Edible Guildford, circa. 1739.

This is a Guildford before the car, before before shopping malls, before tarmac.  It is also clearly a Guildford with a much lower population than today, with far far lower living standards, and with a lot more mud on the soles of its shoes.  My reason for posting this beautiful artifact isn’t to romanticise times that were very different, and in many ways much harder, rather it is to marvel at what a really local food culture looks like in reality for those of us who have no living memory of such a thing.

We see, for example, that the hospital has its own vegetable garden. The Free School has its own orchard.  While many of the houses have their own gardens, others appear to have allotments out the back, large pieces of land divided into plots.  In the centre of the map is a cluster of coaching inns, each of which have yards full of vegetable gardens.  Behind every house, on every piece of ground, food is being grown.  It is an extraordinary snapshot of a time when food production was the principal form of urban land use after roads and buildings.

Plan C: Community Solution…

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From COMMUNITY SOLUTION
Thanks to Debora McGillivray
Transition Ukiah Valley

Plan A seeks to maintain economic growth by developing unconventional fossil fuels (tar sands), increased use of “clean” coal and more nuclear power plants. Plan B also seeks to maintain the status quo, believing this is possible with “renewable” energy sources – bio-fuels, wind turbines and solar photovoltaics (PVs). Both require technological breakthroughs or very rapid scaling up of existing technologies. Both are expensive with high technical and ecological risks.

Plan C focuses on ways to dramatically reduce, or “curtail,” our per capita energy consumption by reducing the goods and services we consume. This is in contrast to “conservation” which refers to reducing the energy required to produce and use goods and services. Plan C focuses on solutions for the household sector of the economy – homes, auto transportation and food – which account for two-thirds of the total energy consumed and CO2 generated in the United States. These areas of use are under our direct personal control.

Curtailment and Community

The two main components of Plan C Solutions are Curtailment and Community. Curtailment is the action of reducing our consumption of fossil fuels. Community is the context for a culture where consumption is not the primary value. Community also describes a culture or way of living where relationships are more important than material goods. Since World War II our consumption of fossil fuels has risen dramatically while at the same time the values and benefits we obtained from “community” have declined.

We are facing massive challenges and there is no guarantee that they can be solved or solved quickly. Thus the C of Plan C also stands for Contingency as in “a contingency plan.” Even though it is possible that some breakthrough technology will suddenly make all our concerns go away, it is unlikely. If we do not take seriously the possibility that oil depletion or climate change will force change upon us, we might not begin looking for other options until it is too late. A contingency plan

Here’s Mitt Romney — King of the Republican Scumbags…

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Occupy Wall Street: What’s next?…

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From NAOMI KLEIN
Common Dreams
Excerpt

…Personally, I think the greatest possibility lies in bringing together the ecological crisis and the economic crisis. I see climate change as the ultimate expression of the violence of capitalism: this economic model that fetishizes greed above all else is not just making lives miserable in the short term, it is on the road to making the planet uninhabitable in the medium term. And we know, scientifically, that if we continue with business as usual, that is the future we are heading towards. I think climate change is the strongest argument we’ve ever had against corporate capitalism, as well as the strongest argument we’ve ever had for the need for alternatives to it. And the science puts us on a deadline: we need to have begun to radically reduce our emissions by the end of the decade, and that means starting now. I think that this science-based deadline has to be part of every discussion about what we’re going to do next, because we actually don’t have all the time in the world.

We should also be aware that this kind of existential urgency could be a very regressive force if the wrong people harness it. It’s easy to imagine autocrats using the climate emergency to say, “We don’t have time for democracy or participation, we need to impose it all from the top.” Right now, the way the urgency is used within the mainstream environmental movement is to say, “This problem is so urgent that we can only ask for these compromised cap-and-trade deals, since that’s all we can hope to achieve politically.” Talking about the links between economic growth and climate change is pretty much off the table because, supposedly, we don’t have time to make those kinds of deep changes.

But that was a pre-OWS political calculation. And as you pointed out, OWS is in the business of changing what is possible. So what I’ve been saying when I speak to environmental groups is:

Small farms adding value…

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From BLAINDESIGN
Etsy

...AllStar Organics, a small specialty farm owned by the husband-and-wife team of Marty Jacobson and Janet Brown. “When we started about 20 years ago,” says Janet (who I should add is my big sister), “we wanted what a lot of people want — to work where we live. We had no business plan, and limited resources.”

Starting with a difficult backyard that was almost too steep to mow, the couple dug some terraces and planted tomatoes, herbs, and heirloom roses, three things that already grew in their home garden.

“For us, value-added production emerged entirely from our mistakes and failures,” says Janet. “It was all an attempt to salvage something out of what had gone wrong.”

What today is a successful line of dried herbs and herbal products resulted from another “mistake.” “One day we picked 22 pounds of Thai basil to fill an order that turned out to be for only two pounds,” said Janet. “Rather than composting 20 pounds of ‘leftover’ organic herbs, I tried drying them by hand on sheets of newspaper with a house fan. Over time, we expanded the drying operation step by step until we built what we have today — a drying facility, a line of herbs, and an organic certification as a ‘simple on-farm post-harvest handler.’”

As AllStar grew, Janet joined with other farmers to form the region’s first organic marketing association, Marin Organic, a very select group of growers who met with sustainable agriculture advocate Prince Charles on his most recent trip to the U.S.

Allstar’s growth eventually required that it expand beyond a backyard operation…

Here are few of Janet’s ideas for anyone thinking of launching a value-added operation:

The joy of books…

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Thanks to Janet Rosen
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Occupy the land with peasant agriculture to resolve the food crisis and the climate crisis…

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From CLIMATE CONNECTIONS

La Via Campesina always goes to all the places where the UN, the G8, or the WTO, or anyone else are making decisions about our lives. Because it is a question about our lives, and it’s a question of the destruction of the planet. We are very concerned because small farmers represent about three billion people, producing about seventy percent of the food for all of the world’s seven billion people. The United Nations process is not about the climate crisis, it is about big business, because the rich countries with their big corporations want to put all the world’s resources into the market. This is why it is very important for La Via Campesinato be spokespeople for the peasant sector – to be the peasant voice.

So we are here to say NO to the false solutions: industrial agriculture, land-grabbing, carbon markets, REDD, REDD+. We are here to say we don’t want agriculture on the table of the negotiations because agriculture is too important for life for it to be a business. We can’t put agriculture on the table where the big corporations are discussing how they can continue to pollute the planet and get more money. We are here to say agro-ecology can cool down the planet, to say that food sovereignty is the way to resolve the climate crisis. The biggest problem for the climate is industrial agriculture. With agro-ecology we can produce food for the world, develop local markets, and cut off the industrial process. The studies are very clear: industrial agriculture and the industrial food system are responsible for 57 percent of greenhouse gas emissions…

When we see the situation in the world we could say it’s impossible to do anything. But here in Durban I saw a lot of people coming, from the US, from the EU, from all over the world, to say, the planet is not for sale. Nature is not for sale. A lot of organizations from around the world give me hope

As centralized systems devolve, the solution is Localism…

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From CHARLES HUGH SMITH
oftwominds.com

Depending on Central State/central bank borrowing and spending to prop up the Status Quo is a doomed strategy.

I think the thread between these three seemingly disparate stories is clearly visible. I am indebted to longtime correspondent Joel M. for sending me these articles:

A Dimly Flickering Light in a Darkened Downtown. An Ohio mill town’s once-bustling main street is now a ghost town; people are desperate to sell their family heirlooms to one of the downtown’s few remaining businesses, a vintage shop, to raise cash.

A Fight for Post Offices and Towns’ Souls. Even as the number of family farms rises for the first time in decades in the U.S., long-standing services to rural communities such as post offices and schools are being slashed.

With Work Scarce in Athens, Greeks Go Back to the Land. As Greece’s economy plunges and unemployment rises, many Greeks are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation’s rich agricultural past as a guide to the future.

The thread that connects these stories is the devolution of centralized concentrations of control and the power of localism to fill the void. As I have often noted here, the expansive Central State is on an S-curve of decline, and this is most apparent in places such as Greece that cannot print a couple trillion dollars a year to fund a bloated Status Quo like the U.S. can (at least for now).

But the Central State is on an S-curve even in nations such as the U.S. and “socialist” France, where rural post offices are also being closed or their hours drastically slashed for budgetary reasons.

Hail, the mighty pocketknife…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Time was, a farmer would feel naked without a pocketknife in his bibs. Even today, it is the handiest tool of all. There is always a bale twine to cut, a splinter in the skin to remove, a fingernail to trim,  a scion to be grafted, a hoof to be cleaned, a pig testicle to be removed, a marshmallow stick to be sharpened, spark plugs to be scraped clean of carbon, an apple to peel, a hide to skin, a seed potato to cut, a lid to pry open, a beer bottle cap to pop off, string holding a sack closed to sever, a hole to be poked in fabric or rubber. It would be fun to hold a contest to see who can come up with the most uses for a pocketknife on the farm.

As boys, we used our knives mainly to play a game we called “mumblety-peg.”  (I have a hard time believing this, but Merriam-Webster says the first known use of that word, mumblety-peg, was in 1647, and that it first referred to what the loser in the game had to do— pull a peg out of the ground with his or her teeth.) The essence of the game was to stand the open knife vertically on arm, head, knee, whatever, and flip it so that the blade stuck in the ground. That’s how I learned that any knife will fall, end over end, and stick into the ground every time if allowed to fall from the right height using only gravity without any extra push or flip. Experienced mumblety-peg players knew that and had rules about how the knife was to be flipped or not flipped. Often it had to be flipped from between two fingers, going consecutively from one pair of fingers to the next. Off an arm, the player might have to execute a double flip before the knife stuck in the ground for the maneuver to be legitimate. We also spent a lot of time throwing our knives at trees so that they would stick like in Tarzan movies. This was a good way to ruin a pocketknife in a hurry.

Any of you readers ever play mumblety-peg? I asked my grandson and he never heard of it.

Today, everyone, country or city, needs a pocketknife handy. Anyone who has to open packages (and that’s everyone) encased in the latest impenetrable

The very real danger of genetically modified foods…

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From ARI LeVAUX
The Atlantic
Thanks to Gail Johnson and Janie Sheppard

New research shows that when we eat we’re consuming more than just vitamins and protein. Our bodies are absorbing information, or microRNA. The Chinese RNA study threatens to blast a major hole in Monsanto’s claim. It means that DNA can code for microRNA, which can, in fact, be hazardous.

Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to proteins in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood.

The type of RNA in question is called microRNA, due to its small size. MicroRNAs have been studied extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been linked to human diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. The Chinese research provides the first example of ingested plant microRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function.

Should the research survive scientific scrutiny, it could prove a game changer in many fields. It would mean that we’re eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but information as well.The Chinese RNA study threatens to blast a major hole in Monsanto’s claim. It means that DNA can code for microRNA, which can, in fact, be hazardous.

That knowledge could deepen our understanding of cross-species communication, co-evolution, and predator-prey relationships. It could illuminate new mechanisms for some metabolic disorders and perhaps explain how some herbal medicines function. And it reveals a pathway by which genetically modified (GM) foods might influence human health.

Complete article here
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Four sleezy ways Big Pharma pushes drugs…

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From ALTERNET

Big Pharma uses ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and sell diseases to adults and their children.

It’s no secret that advertising works. Big Pharma wouldn’t spend over $4 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising if it didn’t mean massive profits.

What is more unknown is why drug ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and “sell” diseases are often the most common–and effective–even when the drugs themselves are of questionable safety.

The nation’s fourth most frequent drug ads in 2009 for were Cymbalta, making Eli Lilly $3.1 billion in one year, despite the antidepressant’s links to liver problems and suicide. Pfizer spent $157 million advertising Lyrica for fibromyalgia in 2009, despite the seizure pill’s links to life-threatening allergic reactions. The same year, it spent $107 million advertising the antidepressant Pristiq, even though it also had links to liver problems.

So, how does Pharma dupe us into using unsafe drugs? Today’s drug ads, targeted directly to consumers since 1999, seem like they sell diseases and often cast women, children, the elderly and mentally ill in a bad light. But a quick look at ads before direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) in medical journals shows that drug ads have always done so. It’s just that patients didn’t used to see them.

Here are some of Pharma’s most offensive ad campaigns, then and now.

1. You’re Sicker Than You Think

When psychiatric drugs first became popular for use in the general population, in the late 1960s

Hey Occupy England: It’s okay to protest as long as you’re ineffective…

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From GEORGE MONBIOT
The Guardian

Making Democracy Safe for Business

The government is ensuring that we can mount no effective protest against the banks and corporations.

When governments seek to protect the rich from the poor, they act swiftly and decisively. When they undertake to protect the poor from the rich, they fanny about for years until the moment has passed.

This afternoon the House of Lords will consider a bill containing a cruel and unnecessary clause, whose purpose is to protect landlords who keep their houses empty. Under current law, if squatters move into your home (or a home you are soon to occupy) and fail to leave the moment you ask, the police can immediately remove them.

The only houses with weaker protections are those which remain empty. There are 700,000 such homes in England alone, almost half of which have been empty for a long time(1). They have long been a refuge for street sleepers and other homeless people. Landlords already possess civil powers to remove them, and the police can step in if squatters ignore the court orders(2).

Last year the government launched a consultation on criminalising all squatting in residential buildings. Ninety-six per cent of the respondents argued that no change in the law was necessary(3). But on November 1st, just five days after the consultation ended, the government jemmied an amendment into the legal aid bill, which was already halfway towards approval(4,5). This meant that the House of Commons had no chance to scrutinise it properly, and objectors had no chance to explain the issues to their MPs.

James Cone’s Gospel of the penniless, jobless, marginalized and despised…

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From CHRIS HEDGES
Truthdig
James Cone’s Jesus by Felicia Follum

“The Cross and the Lynching Tree are separated by nearly two thousand years,” James Cone writes in his new book, “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” “One is the universal symbol of the Christian faith; the other is the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America. Though both are symbols of death, one represents a message of hope and salvation, while the other signifies the negation of that message by white supremacy. Despite the obvious similarities between Jesus’ death on the cross and the death of thousands of black men and women strung up to die on a lamppost or tree, relatively few people, apart from the black poets, novelists, and other reality-seeing artists, have explored the symbolic connections. Yet, I believe this is the challenge we must face. What is at stake is the credibility and the promise of the Christian gospel and the hope that we may heal the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society.”

So begins James Cone, perhaps the most important contemporary theologian in America, who has spent a lifetime pointing out the hypocrisy and mendacity of the white church and white-dominated society while lifting up and exalting the voices of the oppressed. He writes out of his experience as an African-American growing up in segregated Arkansas and his close association with the Black Power movement. But what is more important is that he writes out of a deep religious conviction, one I share, that the true power of the Christian gospel is its unambiguous call for liberation from forces of oppression and for a fierce and uncompromising condemnation of all who oppress.

Occupy San Francisco: Seniors in walkers shut down local Bank of America…

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From SFWeekly

What some healthy and spry Occupy Movements across the nation couldn’t quite accomplish, San Francisco geriatrics have!

KCBS reports that a small group of senior citizens between the ages of 69 and 82 successfully shut down a Bank of America in Bernal Heights on Thursday with nothing more than walkers and oxygen tanks. That’s right: No shouting, chanting, tear gas, or window-smashing.

The group, which dubbed itself “Wild Old Women” set up camp right outside the BofA, holding signs in what they were calling “a run on the bank.”

While the protesters said they had no intention (or oxygen) of storming the bank, as occupiers in other communities have done, officials at Bank of America shut the doors and locked them as they spotted the slow-moving group make its way to the front of the bank.

So the seniors took a seat outside the bank where they explained their demands, which were no different than every other occupiers: They want lower fees, and they want the bank to pay higher taxes and stop the foreclosures.

“We’re upset about what the banks are doing, particularly in our neighborhood and neighboring areas, in evicting people and foreclosing on their homes,” 80-year-old Tita Caldwell told KCBS reporters. “We’re upset because the banks are raising their rates, because it really affects seniors who are on a fixed income.”

And that’s just no way to spend your Golden Years.
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Vandana Shiva: We learn from the seed…

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…the first thing we do here on the farm is save seeds… more than 1,500 varieties, and we grow them out for the future. It is also a place where farmers come to get seeds.

In addition, it is an organic farm, an ecological farm. It was a desert when we started. As we have practiced organic farming the soil is alive, the pollinators have come back… it has bacome a biodiversity sanctuary…

Our research shows that ecological systems can produce 2 to 5 times more food per acre than the industrial monocultures… the the lie of industrial farming, the lie of genetic engineering has been put to rest by the loving practices of this farm…

We learn from the seed, renewal… we learn from the seed, generosity… we learn from the seed multiplicity… we learn from the seed diversity…

The emergency of saving seeds is because seed has now been appropriated and colonized. Corporations have declared it is their intellectual property. And the only way they can get intellectual property is by modifying and mutilating through genetic engineering… we have to defend life, we have to defend freedom,  and that’s why we save seeds…

I have hope, because I have deep trust in the earth… she is more resilient than all actions. I have deep trust in people and the irrepressible urge for freedom and happiness…
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‘Locally Adapted’ Organic Garden Seeds available soon here in the Ukiah Valley…

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· Underground Seeds ·

Certified Organic · Locally Adapted

Coming soon to Mulligan Books & Seeds

From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

We need a zillion new family farms and gardens in this country, and we need to fill the Ukiah Valley with them to come through the challenging times ahead. It all starts with seeds…

Sadly, one of the dirty little secrets of the organic seed trade, and the seed trade in general, is that many of the “organic seeds” now being offered to gardeners are grown by giant transnational corporations in China and India.

Mulligan Books & Seeds is partnering with Sustainable Seed Company in Covelo to localize seed breeding, growing, saving, and trading in Mendocino County with seeds adapted to our particular soils and climate… providing a more secure local food system.

Certified Organic, Locally Adapted, heirloom, untreated, open-pollinated, garden seeds, grown by local and regional organic and biodynamic family farmers, will be offered beginning this month, at Mulligan Books & Seeds in Ukiah. The seeds offered this year will be California-grown, including our local region. We are recruiting local organic and biodynamic farmers to begin growing a portion of their plants for seed so we can gradually localize the seed trade closer to home. Seeds adapted to our local soils and climate produce more abundantly and cost far less than those being shipped around the world and across the country by who knows who, who knows where.

See our Seed Pledge here and below…

We encourage local

Seed Pledge from Mendocino County’s Own: Sustainable Seed Company and Underground Seed Company…

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GMOs: World’s Greatest Scam

Fear Not Fine Folks! Our Seeds Are Safe!

Sustainably Grown Means…

• We do not knowingly grow OR buy seed that is surrounded by GM crops.

• We do not buy seed from foreign seed companies. We support local seed houses, farmers and their families. When you buy seed from us you are supporting American farm families and companies.

• We don’t chemically treat our seeds and since we don’t buy from out of country the USDA does not treat our seed like many seed companies. Don’t assume that if a company uses the word “heirloom” that it is grown here in the US. In fact we get hundreds of emails from companies in China and India trying to sell us cheap “heirloom” seed. Where does you seed company get it’s seed from?

• All of our organic seed is grown strictly without the use of ANY chemical fertilizers and pesticides. We use only organic fertilizers and methods of pest control.

• We farm in a sustainable, water conscious and environmentally responsible manner.

One of the major purposes of this heirloom organic seed company is genetic preservation of heritage open pollinated seeds. We believe it is every person’s right to control and grow their own food. We pledge that we do not knowingly buy or sell genetically engineered seeds or plants. Unlike other seed companies (click & discover who…it might surprise you), we will not buy ANY seed from Seminis, a Monsanto owned subsidiary (Click here to learn more about Monsanto).

Heirloom seeds belong in the hands of people, not nameless, faceless corporations that we feel don’t have our best interests at heart. Corporations that lobby our government so that GM food goes unlabeled in stores for example. We may not know what is in a box of cereal, but you can trust we will not be buying their seed. With this you have the ability to grow your own clean food for your family.

Doug Mosel: ‘Farmageddon — The Unseen War on American Family Farms’ Screening and Panel at Anderson Valley Grange TODAY Sunday 1/8/11 2pm. Please…

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From DOUG MOSEL
Anderson Valley

“Farmageddon, The Unseen War on American Family Farms” will be shown at the Anderson Valley Grange on January 8, 2 p.m. The 90-minute film will be followed by a panel discussion with Sara Grusky or Michael Foley of Green Uprising Farm, Paige Polous of John Woolley Ranch, and Doug Mosel of the Mendocino Grain Project.

Produced by Kristin Canty, mother of four children, Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.

The film highlights the urgency of food freedom, encouraging farmers and consumers alike to take action to preserve individuals’ rights to access food of their choice and farmers’ rights to produce these foods safely and free from unreasonably burdensome regulations.

The film and panel discussion are sponsored by the Anderson Valley Foodshed, the Anderson Valley Grange, and the Mendocino Organic Network.

Further information at farmageddonmovie.com
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Occupy your community legally with a local Bill of Rights…

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From YES!

When communities try to keep corporations from engaging in activities they don’t want, they often find they don’t have the legal power to say “no.” Why? Because our current legal structure too often protects the “rights” of corporations over the rights of actual human beings.

If we are to elevate our rights and the rights of our communities above those of a corporate few, we, too, need to transform the way laws work.

As we wrote in Turning Occupation into Lasting Change, mainstream progressive groups have failed by constraining their activities within legal and regulatory systems purposefully structured to subordinate communities to corporate power. Truly effective movements don’t operate that way. Abolitionists never sought to regulate the slave trade; they sought to transform the legal structure that supported it by treating slaves as property rather than people under the law. Suffragists did the same with the legal status of women.This style of organizing moves away from traditional activism—mired in letter writing campaigns and lowest common denominator federal and state legislation—toward a new activism in which communities claim the right to make their own decisions, directly.

To help them do so, we’re offering the model Community Bill of Rights template below, a legislative template for communities that want to protect their own rights. It’s based on real laws already passed from the municipal to the national level—from Pittsburgh stripping drilling corporations of Constitutional “rights” to Ecuador including legal rights for nature in its Constitution. Think of the template as a menu to pick and choose what’s important in your community. It’s meant to provide a framework and a starting point, not necessarily to be used in its entirety.

Passing a new bill of rights is a way for activists to “occupy” their cities with new legal structures that empower community majorities over corporate minorities, rather than the other way around.

Follow Iceland where the people are sovereign…

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From SACSIS

An Italian radio program’s story about Iceland’s on-going revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. Americans may remember that at the start of the 2008 financial crisis, Iceland literally went bankrupt.  The reasons were mentioned only in passing, and since then, this little-known member of the European Union fell back into oblivion.

As one European country after another fails or risks failing, imperiling the Euro, with repercussions for the entire world, the last thing the powers that be want is for Iceland to become an example. Here’s why:

Five years of a pure neo-liberal regime had made Iceland, (population 320 thousand, no army), one of the richest countries in the world. In 2003 all the country’s banks were privatized, and in an effort to attract foreign investors, they offered on-line banking whose minimal costs allowed them to offer relatively high rates of return. The accounts, called IceSave, attracted many English and Dutch small investors.  But as investments grew, so did the banks’ foreign debt.  In 2003 Iceland’s debt was equal to 200 times its GNP, but in 2007, it was 900 percent.  The 2008 world financial crisis was the coup de grace. The three main Icelandic banks, Landbanki, Kapthing and Glitnir, went belly up and were nationalized, while the Kroner lost 85% of its value with respect to the Euro.  At the end of the year Iceland declared bankruptcy.

Contrary to what could be expected, the crisis resulted in Icelanders recovering their sovereign rights, through a process of direct participatory democracy that eventually led to a new Constitution.  But only after much pain.

Geir Haarde, the Prime Minister of a Social Democratic coalition government, negotiated a two million one hundred thousand dollar loan, to which the Nordic countries added another two and a half million. But the foreign financial community pressured Iceland to impose drastic measures.  The FMI and the European Union wanted to take over its debt, claiming this was the only way for the country to pay back Holland and Great Britain, who had promised to reimburse

Occupy the global financial system: The first historic trades have taken place…

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From eClinik

 The first historic trades within the new financial system have taken place!

The many global, independent trading networks all over the planet are rapidly connecting with each other, forming an infinitely expanding web of local and international commerce, exchange and trade.

People have woken up to the fact: for most of what we spend WE DO NOT NEED GOVERNMENT ISSUED MONEY.  In fact, so many different groups have been abusing the money system, it can no longer fulfil its original purposes, which were:

a)    as a medium of exchange

b)    as a unit of account, and

c)     as a store of value

It is the last of these that has led to systemic abuse and criminality, along with usury – the charging of interest.  Money stopped merely facilitating things (a job it can do supremely well) and started to be seen as value in itself – which is one reason why so much is out of circulation! The ‘value’ is being hoarded, availability manipulated, markets distorted.  No wonder the older religions all forbade usury – for they knew that the usurer and his schemes means that he always ends up owning everything, and tends to manipulate ruthlessly to that end.

There have been some interesting clues as to how this controlling and enslaving global finance system might be broken up.  In the 1980’s, in Canada, a man called Michael Linton named the first Local Exchange Trading systems (LETS), from which a number were established.  They then spread around the planet, but were largely ignored by anyone even remotely mainstream.  The system, in brief, means that you have a local, non-interest bearing currency, and members of the system trade together for all sorts of goods and services: up to 70% of everything you need can be acquired this way in a properly run system with enough members. See definition at:

Occupy Facebook with democratic alternatives…

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From SHAREABLE

The dominance of Facebook is a democratic problem. Our only hope is to use the same tactic the internet used to win against the networks of the time: Open up for collaboration between networks. This is done through federation. Here is how and why it will work, and how you can help.

At a recent conference in Norway, Clay Shirky was asked what he thinks of the domination of Facebook. His answer is discouraging. You can see it below, but in short he says that Facebook might now be so big that it’s impossible to challenge its dominance.

Facebook has 800 million active users around the world. In some countries its grasp on the population is staggering. In the US, 41.6% of the population has an account. In Norway, 73% of the population uses Facebook every month, and young people spend 40% of their online time there. You can see why Clay has a negative outlook.

So, is the fight lost? Will Facebook rule for all foreseeable future?

Yes. It might do just that, if we don’t have a radical shift in our thinking. We need to start thinking like the internet. We can not follow the old pattern of one company replacing another (6 degrees -> Friendster -> Myspace -> Facebook) any more. Here I think Clay might be right.

What can replace Facebook then is not another social network, where all your friends have to agree to join the same new place, but something more akin to the internet itself: A network of social networks.

HOW IS THIS DONE?

Through decentralization with federation. Federation means that two people with profiles on two different social networks can do all the things together that they would normally need to be on the same network to do: Follow, @reply/comment, self organize trough hashtags/groups, etc. Social networks using federation is called distributed social networks.

Take a look at this fantastic walk-through explaining what distributed/federated social networks are, how they work, and more, presented as an old school point-and-click game.

Pandering to the rich, now in handy chart form…

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From KEVIN DRUM
Mother Jones

As a public service, I’ve collected charts showing all the Republican tax plans to date in one convenient place. (The Tax Policy Center hasn’t yet tried to score plans from Santorum, Huntsman, or Paul.) It’s really pretty spectacular seeing them all together like this. It’s not just the amount of pandering to the super-rich that’s so breathtaking, it’s the lockstep unanimity. At all costs, every single Republican candidate knows that he has to promise the ultra-wealthy a huge tax break as the price of staying in the race. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the modern Republican Party in a nutshell.

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Wendell Berry: Men Untrained to Comfort

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From WENDELL BERRY

Jason Needly found his father, old Ab, at work
at the age of eighty in the topmost
tier of the barn. “Come down!” Jason called.
“You got no business up there at your age.”
And his father descended, not by a ladder,
there being none, but by inserting his fingers
into the cracks between the boards and climbing
down the wall.

And when he was young
and some account and strong and knew
nothing of weariness, old man Milt Wright,
back in the days they called him “Steady,”
carried the rastus plow on his shoulder
up the high hill to his tobacco patch, so
when they got there his mule would be fresh,
unsweated, and ready to go.

Early Rowanberry,
for another, bought a steel-beam breaking plow
at the store in Port William and shouldered it
before the hardly-believing watchers, and carried it
the mile and a half home, down through the woods
along Sand Ripple.

“But the tiredest my daddy
ever got,” his son, Art, told me one day
“was when he carried fifty rabbits and a big possum
in a sack on his back up onto the point yonder
and out the ridge to town to sell them at the store.”

“But why,” I asked, “didn’t he hitch a team
to the wagon and haul them up there by the road?”

“Well,” Art said, “we didn’t have but two
horses in them days, and we spared them
every way we could. A many a time I’ve seen
my daddy or grandpa jump off the wagon or sled
and take the end of a singletree beside a horse.”
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Todd Walton: Mystery Inventions

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Mr. and Mrs. Magician and Daughter Mystery painting by Todd

From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

Deeply moved by a concert of music by Martinû and Mozart, a man gives fifty dollars to a street musician, a Venezuelan bass player whose musical inventions are reminiscent of Eric Satie and Bill Evans. The bass player uses the fifty dollars to buy herself the first nourishing meal she’s had in weeks, after which she catches a train to visit her mother for the first time in several months, and arrives to find her mother dying. With her last breath, the bass player’s mother reveals the identity of the bass player’s real father; and while questing to find her father, the bass player meets a pianist with whom she records ten improvisations, each a musical meditation on the question: what is life all about?

“As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.” Albert Schweitzer

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas makes an excellent case for the digging stick and the ostrich egg being the two most important inventions in human history—more important than fire or weaponry. I am reading The Old Way again, Thomas’s masterpiece about the Bushmen of the Kalahari; and I find her book the perfect antidote to the information overload and resultant anxiety of this digital age. Here is a tiny taste of The Old Way.

“A digging stick is humble, yes. The very name of this item in the English language shows how seriously we underrate it—we assign specific nouns, not vaguely descriptive phrases, to objects that we consider important. Our long stick with a blade at the end is call a spear, for instance, not a stabbing stick. But even if a pointed stick seems insignificant to us in our innocence, as an invention of consequence it ranks with the discovery of the deep roots themselves and has made more difference to our species than virtually all the other inventions we celebrate with more enthusiasm.”

“Then, too, there is the ostrich egg. This useful item is first a meal and then a water bottle. To use these eggs, we had to do only two things—steal a fresh egg without being kicked by the ostrich, and open a hole in the shell.

A December round-up of what’s happening out in the World of Transition…

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From TRANSITION CULTURE
Original post with ALL the cool videos here

Welcome back to Transition Culture, and a Happy New Year to you.  We’ll kick off with our round-up of Transition for December.  We’ll start with a few stories of Transition groups working on energy efficiency and fuel poverty which, even though this has been the UK’s mildest winter for many many years, is still a big concern for many people, especially as energy prices continue to rise.  TT High Wycombe have created a Warm Homes Team (see right) who have taken to the streets with their council loaned thermal imaging equipment to address winter fuel poverty.

Also in Buckinghamshire, members of TT-Marlow are now trained in using thermal imaging cameras so they can help local residents see where they are losing heat from their homes and take appropriate action (see left).  In Lincolnshire, TT-Louth have teamed up with another community group called Groundworks to help those living in fuel poverty. Funding will enable them to carry out draught busting and other energy reduction techniques

Chris Hedges on self-help magical thinking…

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From CHRIS HEDGES
Transcribed from BookTV interview

Q: What do you think of Oprah’s role in the cultural and religious pursuit of personal wealth?

CH: Negative. Oprah peddles this fantasy that we can have everything we want if we just focus on happiness and grasp that we are truly exceptional if we dig deep enough in ourselves, and this is just magical thinking. It’s not just peddled by Oprah… I don’t want to pick just on Oprah. The Christian Right does it, Hollywood does it, Corporatism does it. Tony Robbins, self-help gurus do it… and it’s just a myth… a myth used to beat up on the poor.

There are no jobs in Camden, New Jersey. They used to make Campbell’s soup in Camden… even that’s gone… everything is gone. The school’s are dysfunctional with a gigantic drop out rate, the streets are unsafe… and to somehow tell a poor black child who’s not getting an adequate education, not being raised in an environment that provides safety and security and nurturing… and upon that, being tossed out into a city where there is no work, that they have to dig deep enough within themselves is really a way for us to turn our backs on the vulnerable and the poor. And to say, the cultural message is, “you are responsible for  your fate”… that’s just the way the corporate state wants it as it sheds job after job… as larger and larger segments of American society are reduced to a subsistence level without any kind of job security, without any kind of adequate health insurance… that it’s sort of their fault because they haven’t managed to tap into their inner strength… this is not only delusional, but in the end, I think, callous to the weak and the poor and the working class.

There should be

Monsanto says hello to home gardeners…

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From GOOD FOOD WORLD

Who needs “Better living with chemistry” when you have “Better breeding with Monsanto?”

If you thought that planting your own garden and growing and harvesting your own crops would keep you safe from the long arm of Monsanto, think again!

The agribusiness giant already has quietly stepped into the marketplace with commercial and consumer vegetable seeds, says the LA Times in Monsanto sprouting a produce-seed line.

Monsanto moved into the vegetable seed business in 2005 when it acquired Seminis Inc., Oxnard CA. Since then, it has bought four other vegetable seed companies and staffed 57 research centers around the world with seed geneticists and agricultural researchers.

Revenue from Monsanto’s vegetable seed business totaled $895 million for the company’s fiscal year that ended Aug. 31. That’s about 8% of its annual revenue, a figure the company hopes to grow steadily in coming years.

That long arm reaches even further; the company also breeds and sells organic seed.

Sue McGann, coordinator at Marra Farm in Seattle, turned down a donation of organic vegetable seed when she learned it came from one of Monsanto’s subsidiaries. Martha Baskin, Green Acre Radio, visits the farm and explores the issue with Sue

Earth is dying and so are you…

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From RICHARD B. ANDERSON

[A periodic repost... -DS]

At the heart of the modern age is a core of grief.

At some level, we’re aware that something terrible is happening, that we humans are laying waste to our natural inheritance. A great sorrow arises as we witness the changes in the atmosphere, the waste of resources and the consequent pollution, the ongoing deforestation and destruction of fisheries, the rapidly spreading deserts and the mass extinction of species.

All these changes signal a turning point in human history, and the outlook is not particularly bright. The anger, irritability, frustration and intolerance that increasingly pervade our common life are symptoms associated with grief. The pervasive sense of helplessness and numbness that surrounds us, and the frantic search for meaning and questioning of religion and philosophy of life, are likewise often seen among those who must deal with overwhelming sorrow.

Grief is a natural reaction to calamity, and the stages of grief are visible in our reaction to the rapid decline of the natural world. There are a number of steps that people go through in the grief process. The first stage is often denial: “This can’t really be happening,” a feeling common among millions of Americans. Eighty percent of American adults say they are concerned about the environment, and there is some awareness of the gravity of our situation, yet a widespread awareness has yet to be felt in practical terms. We know the facts, but we’re ignoring in the interests of emotional survival.

The second stage of grief is often anger. We go into the “I’ll fight it” mode. Many environmental thinkers and activists put a lot of grief energy into constructive work. That energy is a factor in the undeniable successes of environmentalism, yet it is a sign of suffering and is probably a constraint on the intellectual vitality of the movement.

The third stage in the grief process is often despair. We feel that “no matter what I do, it’s still happening.” Because the planetary future seems so grim, it’s likely that many Americans have despaired, turning away from the quest for a meaningful solution.

The final stage of the grieving process, for those who can achieve it, often brings a more hopeful state of acceptance, even serenity. When we emerge from the bottom of despair, we may find the inner strength for a peaceful accommodation to reality. We can continue to take positive actions, but we are no longer in denial, rage or despair.

Even if we face the consequences of our assault on the natural environment, we may still find that the problems are too big, that there’s not much we can do. Yet those of us who feel this sorrow cannot forever deny it without suffering inexplicable disturbances in our own lives. It’s necessary to face our fear and our pain and to go through the process of grieving because the alternative is a sorrow deeper still: the loss of meaning. To live authentically in this time, we must allow ourselves to feel the magnitude of our human predicament.

Image: Bleeding Heart Dove (endangered)

Dave Pollard: Feeling Unbearable Grief For Gaia
~~

Gene Logsdon: Maybe Old Tractors Do Die

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

After the conversations we had here recently about old tractors, I began to hear about a problem that really does affect their longevity.  Ethanol in gasoline is not the wonder fuel it has been made out to be. It is causing problems when used in off-road vehicles— lawn motors, chain saws, boat motors, four wheelers, not to mention old tractors. Although I have had no cause to complain yet myself, I first heard rumors of these problems when 10 percent ethanol was added to gasoline (E-10 fuel. Now that the EPA has approved 15 percent ethanol in gasoline (E-15 fuel) the complaints are increasing. Ethanol corrodes plastic and rubber and even some metal not made to handle it. It also absorbs water into the fuel. You don’t want to leave a can of gas set around very long unused if it has ethanol in it.  And recently out of California came reports that E-15 gas pollutes the air more than pure gasoline (can you call gasoline “pure”?) — contrary to all the propaganda the champions of ethanol have been putting out for several years.

I called a local small engine repair shop whose proprietors I know and trust and asked them if the problem is serious. The mechanic’s first reply was a long drawn out groan. “Oh yes, unfortunately,” he finally replied. “Our carburetor repair work has at least doubled lately.”

What can you do about it since there are now reports that E-10 gas is causing problems too? He sighed again. “Well, you just have to get your carburetor worked on more often. There are additives now to put in ethanol gas, but I am not yet sure if they are all that effective. And they are expensive. It looks like manufacturers will have to design and develop new carburetors for their motors. Right now, it you look at the warranty on your new lawnmower or chain saw, you will see that the carburetor and attendant parts are not covered. Manufacturers are washing their hands of the whole problem.”

The government requires service stations that sell E-15 gas to have labels on the pumps which say: “Use only on 2001 and newer passenger vehicles and in flex-fuel vehicles.”  The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers think the warning labels ought also to include specific instructions directing consumers to check their owner’s manual to determine the appropriate fuel for their vehicles but so far the EPA evidently does not think that’s necessary. But that complaint might be beside the point because some mechanics say that E-10 shortens the life of small engines too.

Obviously, owners of old tractors are going to be hard hit by this situation because no one is going to start making ethanol-proof carburetors for them, I don’t think. You are going to be forced to buy a new tractor whether you can afford to or not. Or better yet, move forward to draft animal power.

This situation seems to me unconscionable. If you look at only the ethanol news from the corn industry or ethanol manufacturers, you would never know there is this problem because most of these sources simply ignore it. Ethanol from corn is, furthermore, so expensive that it requires huge subsidies from the government

When the taxman comes for your garden…

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G.G. Bain Hey Mrs. Tambourine Woman New York, August 1913. Suffragettes on way to Boston: ‘suffrage caravan’ campaign for women’s voting rights”

From STONLEIGH
The Automatic Earth

One of our consistent themes at TAE has been not expecting solutions to come from the top down. Existing centralized systems depend on dwindling tax revenues, which will dry up to a tremendous extent over the next few years as economic activity falls off a cliff and property prices plummet.

We have already seen cuts to services and increases in taxes and user fees, and we can expect a great deal more of that dynamic as central authorities emulate hypothermic bodies. In other words, they will cut off the circulation to the fingers and toes in order to preserve the body temperature of the core. This is, of course, a survival strategy, from the point of view of the core. But it does nothing good for the prospects of ordinary people, who represent the fingers and toes.

Centralized systems also depend on the political legitimacy that has been conferred upon them as a result of public trust in them to serve the common interest. This trust is rapidly breaking down in an ever-expanding list of places, as ordinary people realize that their interests have been betrayed in favour of the well connected.

Those who played fraudulent ponzi games with other people’s money, and were in the best position to know what could result, have been bailed out time and time again, while the little guy has been told to expect more austerity measures. Protest is inevitable as political legitimacy fades. We are already seeing it spread like wildfire, which is exactly what one would expect given that human beings internalize, reflect and act on the emotions of others. Collective social mood that turns on a dime is very much part of what it means to be human.

The job of national and international politicians in contractionary times is typically to make a bad situation worse as expensively as possible, as they attempt to rescue the dying paradigm that has conveyed so much personal advantage in their direction.

2012 Predictions from Association for the Study of Peak Oil…

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From ASPO-USA

[Richard Heinberg et al. -DS]

(Note: Commentaries do not necessarily represent the position of ASPO-USA.)

Last year ASPO-USA brought together a host of leading thinkers and their predictions for what to expect in 2011. While not all the predictions were on target, last year’s thinkers and leaders on energy issues were remarkably prescient, accurately anticipating among other things Arab Spring, the flow of energy prices, the re-emergent world food crisis, and the next step in the Transition movement. While foreseeing the future is a delicate exercise, there are real trends that are evident to eyes prepared to see.  Here are their thoughts about the coming year. A Hopeful New Year to all from ASPO-USA!

COLIN CAMPBELL

“Oil and gas are finite resources formed in the geological past, which means that they are subject to depletion. For every gallon used one less remains, and the more we use the steeper the decline. A debate rages as the date when production peaks but misses the point when what matters is the vision of the long decline on the other side of it, which is beyond dispute. The main reason for the uncertainty is the unreliable nature of public data due to lax reporting and ambiguous definitions. For example, the Oil & Gas Journal reports that 66 countries have unchanged reserves at the end this year, although it is manifestly implausible that new discovery and/or so-called reserve growth should exactly match production. Oil-based energy is central to the modern world fuelling transport, trade and agriculture, which has allowed the economy to expand and the banks to lend more than they had on deposit confident that Tomorrow’s Expansion was collateral for To-day’s Debt. The decline of production during the Second Half of the Oil Age

Supping with the devil…

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From DOORS OF PERCEPTION

…I just don’t think it’s defensible any more to turn a blind eye to the social and ecological crimes Big Food is committing, in other parts of the world, so that you and I can eat what we damn well feel like.

When it comes to the food business, I’ve been having my cake, and eating it, since 1995. That was when Vandana Shiva spoke at Doors of Perception 3 about the hidden but devastating ecological and social costs of global industrial agriculture. That was a wake-up call.

Food figured prominently in 2000, too, when we did Doors East in Ahmedabad. We learned, then, that for eighty million women in India, who own or look after one or two cows, milk is their only livelihood.

It should not have been a surprise last week, then, to read a grim report entitled The great milk robbery: How corporations are stealing livelihoods and a vital source of nutrition from the poor

In a long and scrupulously documented report, an NGO called Grain confirms the importance of so-called ‘people’s milk’ to the livelihoods and health of hundreds of millions of poor people in the global South – from small-scale farmers and pastoralists, to local cheesemakers and fresh milk vendors. They nearly all supply safe, nutritious and affordable milk at a mainly local scale.

The report chronicles in distressing detail the global push by Big Dairy corporations such as Nestlé, PepsiCo and Cargill to colonise this entire milk flow. Instead of fresh, high-quality milk produced and supplied in the most sustainable ways by small scale farmers, Big Dairy’s strategy is to replace their local milk with powdered and processed milk; produce it on highly polluting mega farms; sell it in excessive packaging; display it in wildly over-chilled stores; and, after all that, charge at least double the cost of ‘peoples milk’.

A continued shift to large-scale farms would be an environmental and public health catastrophe. Big Dairy’s farms guzzle enormous quantities of water, often at the expense of local communities that depend on the same sources.

Monsanto declared Worst Company of 2011…

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From NATURAL SOCIETY

Biotech giant Monsanto has been declared the Worst Company of 2011 by NaturalSociety for threatening both human health and the environment. The leader in genetically modified seeds and crops, Monsanto is currently responsible for 90 percent of the genetically engineered seed on the United States market. Outside of GM seeds, Monsanto is also the creator of the best-selling herbicide Roundup, which has spawned over 120 million hectacres of herbicide-resistant superweeds while damaging much of the soil. Despite hard evidence warning against the amplified usage of genetically modified crops, biopesticides, and herbicides, Monsanto continues to disregard all warning signs.

In a powerful review of 19 studies analyzing the dangers of GMO crops such as corn and soybeans, researchers revealed some shocking information regarding the safety of these popular food staples. Researchers found that consumption of GMO corn or soybeans may lead to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice – particularly in the liver and kidneys. This is particularly concerning due to the fact that 93 percent of U.S. soybeans are known to be genetically modified. Ignoring this evidence, Monsanto continues to expand their genetic manipulation.

Monsanto’s Genetic Manipulation of Nature

Outside of genetically modifying crops, Monsanto has also created genetically modified crops containing Bt. Bt is a toxin incorporated in GMO crops that are intended to kill different insects, however Bt usage has subsequently spawned insect populations which are resistant to the biopesticide. After being exposed to Bt, many insect populations actually mutated to resist the biopesticide. So far at least 8 insect populations have developed resistance, with 2 populations resistant to Bt sprays and at least 6 species resistant to Bt crops as a whole. Farmers are therefore forced to use even more pesticides to combat the resistant bugs.

What is the answer to this problem, according to Monsanto? To further genetically modify the Bt crop to make it a super-pesticide, killing the resistant insects.

Tests, however, have concluded that further modified Bt toxin crop

The Economic Bill of Rights…

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From FDR

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

Todd Walton: Creative Paradox

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.” Nadia Boulanger

During the four years in the early 1990’s when I ran the Creative Writing program for the California State Summer School for the Arts, I oversaw the work of two hundred teenaged writers and worked intimately with fifty of those talented scribblers. Three of the two hundred were, in my estimation, brilliant and original and highly accomplished writers; yet these three were so deeply introverted I predicted they would never succeed as professional writers. Sadly, so far, my prediction has proved true. In the publishing world of today, ambition entirely trumps talent, and believe it or not, ambitious imitators rule the narrow roost of your favorite bookstore, independent or otherwise.

We recently watched the first two-thirds of Robert Altman’s excruciatingly painful film Vincent and Theo about Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo—two-thirds of the movie being all we could bear, and even at that I was an emotional wreck. Whether or not the film is an accurate portrayal of the real Van Gogh, the movie conveys the very real suffering that many visionary artists feel in the absence of lasting emotional connections to other people and society, emotional connections these artists desperately want to make through their art. Yet because society is largely a manifestation of well-established perceptions and carefully regulated protocols for the presentation of those perceptions, most creative introverts are doomed to commercial failure unless they are rescued through the intervention of a sympathetic agent (catalyst) in the body of a functional extrovert.

The few moderate successes of my own writing career occurred because of the divine efforts of an extraordinary literary agent named Dorothy Pittman, the likes of which no longer exist, for she was wholly concerned with quality and originality, while caring not a whit about commerciality or the emotional idiosyncrasies

It looks at me…

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From DERRICK JENSEN
Endgame Volume II Resistance
[Repost]

[One of the most moving passages about nature has to be this... DS]

It’s a beautiful day, and solitary bees are flying low to the ground, buzzing around their homes, then crawling underground to deliver food to their unhatched babies. Small black spiders scurry everywhere, and I see an ant carrying an impossibly large piece of wood from who knows where to who knows where for who knows what reason. There’s a slight breeze, and the tips of redwood branches sway softly. A small blue butterfly lands on my elbow. I walk to the pond. Tadpoles hang beneath the surface, and if I get too close they dive and wriggle their fat bodies into the mud. Caddisfly larvae, looking for all the world like clumps of wet duff (probably because their armor is clumps of wet duff) trundle along reeds. Bright blue dragonflies dip their abdomens into the water, laying eggs, and tiny mayflies hover there, too. A couple of mayflies must have been caught earlier in spiderwebs, for now they’re motionless, suspended.

I sit cross-legged on the ground a couple of feet from the edge, and begin to edit this morning’s work. A quick movement catches me, and I see that a gray jumping spider has landed on my hand. Fearful of accidentally crushing it, I try to wipe it off on a piece of grass. It slips around my hand, always away from the grass and toward me. I let it stay. It turns to look at me, and I look back at it. I lift my hand so I can better see its gray face and many black eyes. It shifts, too, to keep my face always in view. I shift my hand. It shifts its body. I put my hand back on my knee, and begin to write with my other. The spider moves to the edge of my right hand that is closest to my left, clearly considers the distance, and finally jumps. It makes it. I stop writing. It peers again at my face, then walks to my wrist. I’m wearing a long-sleeved shirt, and the spider crawls in and out of the folds, stopping now and again to look up at me. It gets to my shoulder. It stops. It looks at me. I look at it, eyes straining to focus this close. I don’t know how long it stays there. Maybe five minutes. Maybe ten. Then it makes its way back down to my wrist, to my hand, and jumps off into the grass.

Life is really, really good.
~
[Jensen’s two volumes of almost a thousand pages