what once were services now are luxuries

well...winter's here, and no mistake...it's been snowing here for the past twenty-four hours or better...nothing major like the plains blizzards i've been reading about....just a steady, light snowfall...a couple of inches so far...nothing new for these parts and nothing we can't handle...standard stuff...you just need to be a bit more cautious driving because of the few idiots out ther that snow seems to both embolden and stupify...but what i have noticed is that the roads seem to be in really poor shape in relation to the ammount of snow...the communities i've been in this morning ( lake station, portage, and hobart) all seem equallly bad...i don't ever expect my street will be anything but a skating rink in winter...fair enough...it's a residential street and people shouldn't go tearing through here anyway...but i was having some sliding difficulties on the main roads as well...snowy...icy..rutted...and not alot of plows to be seen...true it's still snowing, but cities usually make some sort of an effort to take care of intersections...then i saw something on my way home from my mom's that illuminated the issue to some extent...i saw a plow on old ridge road in hobart filled to the brim with sand instead of salt and the impact of an eroded tax base because of the jobless recovery recession that will end sometime in the middle of the next decade became obvious...i lived in hobart from 1959 to 1975 and again from 1980 to 1985...and all i ever saw on the streets in winter was salt...not this year apparently....when a city as arrogant and vain as hobart starts to sand the winter streets you know the shit has hit the fan economically...hobart may be a city of busybodies and crybabies, but they do like to feed their pretenses...and sand doesn't get it...doesn't do too much for the roads either really...just make the snow dingy earlier than normal...this is the first real municipal manifestation of the economic slump that's actually hit home to me...you have to wonder what services will become cut corners in the near future.

imagine their relief

"moreover, the crisis is deeply rooted in international and national policies, decided and inmplemented under the auspices of bretton woods institutions such as the international monetary fund (imf) and, more recently, the world trade organization(wto). these policies have undermined the spaces for states to respect, protect, and fulfill the human right to adequate food."

"since april 2008, the reaction of the international community to the food crisis has been coordinated by the high level task force on the global food crisis (hltf), which was instituted by the u n secratary-general ban ki-moon and is composed of all u n organizations dealing with food and agricultural issues, as well as the world bank, the imf, and the wto. in july 2008 the hltf released a comprehensive framework of action (caf), which is meant to set out the joint position of hltf members on proposed action to overcome the food crisis."
from the scope of the world food crisis by foodfirst information and action network.

only a bureaucrat could have thought this hopeless mismash up and ony a bureaucrat could love it..i don't know where to begin...in the three months that it took these people to draw up a response to a crisis what were people in places like ghana, haiti, and bangladesh doing? starving? most likely they were...who cares about joint positions, high level task forces, or frameworks of action in a crisis? bureaucrats and ngo's...which are basically holding pens for bureaucrats between official gigs and bureaucrat wannabes...that's who...certainly not anyone who's starving...and if the damned imf and wto are responsible for the trade liberalization policies that destroyed traditional agriculture in the unindustrialized parts of the world why the hell would you want them involved in any sort of relief effort? are they promoting a realistic plan for relief or just protecting their prerogatives? i never much liked ngo's...you have to pay attention to who's actually running them and whether what they say they're doing is what they're actually up to...somewhere along the line there has to be a way for people to help people directly without a lot of organizational nonsense getting in the way...simply reaching out to help out of a sense of common humanity rather than with an eye to a profit or some careerist plotting...what's the answer people?

reality declared null and void in copenhagen

in rock-solid post-modernist fashion the politicians, bureaucrats, and policy wonks at the climate change conference have slipped into denial and habitual cant as they "take note" of an agreement by the big five polluters that might set some sort of framework for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions sometime soon maybe if we all just get off their backs and let them figure out how to pass the costs on to the rest of us...the default setting is extiction and that is where the late empire nihilists seem to want to go...a stalinist response would be appropriate , if unethical, as patience with the greed heads wears thin....but who wants to sink to their level? we are obviously on our own as we try to figure this out...the system is so wrapped up in the need to generate wealth that it cannot escape the parameters of its thought long enough to see the danger or even recognize that the situation is beyond a mere problem with a soultuion waiting for ingenuity to find it....the choices will be hard and they will change the way we view things....elites will no longer be elites, and that is the problem....substantive action on the dilemmas facing us will alter societies structure fundamentally...the things that brought the elite wealth and power will be recognized as one of the major sources of our ills and they will lose ststus...expect them to stall, equivocate, lie, cheat, steal...whatever it takes to defend their prerogatives... i am disinclined to cut them any slack...meanwhile we will hear empty promises and bullshit plattitudes about the "next" conference....the time for talking is passed...if they're going to procrastinate rather than lead then it's time we led ourselves...politics and conferences will do nothing...it is time for us to act as individuals in our own best interests...go out and talk to your neighbors...it's time to save ourselves.