12-25-2010

okay...what was a rumination on the transitory nature of life turned into a self-absorbed pity party...i realized that almost as soon as i posted it and came back to delete it ( once again forgetting has not ended) and damned if someone hadn't read it already and so i feel obligated to own up to writing it...much of my adult life has been a search for some sort of permanence to anchor my addictive self to and offset the extremes i can go to...what passes for permanent isn't...always slips away...transitory...like happiness...so...no more whining about it...none of this will last...none of us lasts...i have known this since i was ten and life insists on reminding me...THAT is what wearies me so...beckett was correct...i can't go on, i'll go on.

memory

little by little bits and pieces of what my friend left behind her are disappearing from the cyberworld...the end of forgetting that the n y times hyped not that long ago is fallacious...i am not surprised...nothing anthropogenic is any more eternal than we are...it is still a depressing thought to carry into the bullshit of the holiday season...i feel a deep pariah streak coming on...fuck all this

tucholsky

The Embryo Speaks.
By Kurt Tucholsky
(1927)

They all take care of me: Church, State, Doctors, and Judges.

I should grow and thrive, I should slumber nine months long; I should not worry about a thing-they all wish me well. They protect me, they watch over me. God have mercy if my parents do something to me; then they will all be there. Whoever touches me will be punished; my mother lands in prison, my father right behind; the doctor who did it must cease to be a doctor, the midwife who helped is locked up- I am a precious item.

They all take care of me; Church, State, Doctors, and Judges.

Nine months long.

But when nine months are over, I have to see for myself what becomes of me. Tuberculosis? No doctor will help me. Nothing to eat? No milk? No state will help me. Torment and misery? The church will comfort me but that does not fill my stomach. And if I have no bread to break or bite and I steal: the judge is right there t lock me up.

Fifty years of my life no one will care about me, no one. I have to help myself. Nine months long they kill themselves, if someone wants to kill me. You tell me: isn't that a strange way to look out for the welfare of another?

disconnected?

on the way to work yesterday i heard stephen hawking on the bbc...he's flogging a new book that's gotten some attention because he says something to the effect that god isn't necessary to explain the universe...but that's not what i want to address...he also said that becaouse philosphers had not kept up with developments in physics and molecular biology their discussions about humans and their place in the universe are dated and disconnected...well...life still seems like a nietzschian struggle at times and steve seems a bit biased and a bit ungreatful...let's touch on a couple of scientific precepts...ockham's razor states, " entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily." this has been reduced to the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the most correct and is a fundamental tenet of most scientists i know ( a limited sampling admittedly...but unanamous among them)...but willam of oakham was a fourteenth century monk writing a critique of scholasticism, not a scientist...a religious philosopher writing about theological issues...he didn't believe there were natural laws because god, in his omnipotence, could change them on a whim...a borrowed idea...which is okay...we all do it...but credit the philosphical source...scientists credit carl popper with the concept of falsifiability..holding that to be valid there must be some objective way to test the fact of an idea ( or hypothesis) in order to provide proof...okay again, but karl wasn't writing about science...he was writing about marxism, and for reasons opaque to me, freudian analysis...philosophers writing about political and social philosophy and expressing ideas well suited to science...seems to me that old steve is being a bit sloppy in his popularization of science.

hey buddy! those are MY seeds

there are quite a number of "volunteer" corn plants in the beanfields of northwest indiana...monsanto has been going after farmers when their transgenetic canola pollen gets loose and floats across the fields of canada nd the dakotas..infecting the canola crops they don't own...they aren't very pleased that some of the seeds are escaping while the crop is being transported for shipment and showing up as weeds along the roadside ditches either...so how are they going to feel at bayer or monsanto or pioneer when they discover an unlicensed, illegal second generation of their corn ( won't call dense yellow number two maize on a bet ) growing in a beanfield in the middle of nowheresville indiana? the timerity of it all!! somebody call the seed police!!!

ngo junk mail

in 2007 i had a need to belong and so i set about joining things like the bertrand russell society...the dada network...an unfortunate group of existentialist thinkers on yahoo...all kinds of stuff ( i was also new to the internet and was wild with abandon)...among other things i shipped thirty-five bucks off to amensty international...not a bad thing i suppose...a bit impulsive perhaps..but nothing ethically damning...then 2008 rolled around and the "recession" took its toll on my income and my attitude...changes had to be made and disgressional expenditures had to be prioritized...there was school...and through that i was hipped to the idea of micro lending by mik stokely in the anthro department( thanks mik!)...that wasn't going to be abandoned, economic stabillity ( not obscene wealth) fulfills a human need and a right in my book...neither was contributing to local food pantries...alas amensty found its way onto the expendable list and went by the wayside...doubly alas amnesty didn't agree and since my membership lapsed i have received monthly mailings of all sorts of stuff like address labels, pens,quarterly financial reports, and now christmas cards...all of this leads me to wonder exactly how much of my intiial membership fee amnesty has used up in trying to get me to fork over more lucre...postage, trinket importing, printing all the stuff they cram in there with the graft that is supposed to shame me into re-upping...surely they've used up that thirty-five bucks in three years and just who have they gotten out of camp x-ray or some cia balck prison since then? are they an ngo watchdog keeping tabs on human rights violations or an importer doing buisness? it has certainly sown doubts in m y mind about rejoining...and they aren't the only ones...credo wants me to express my support for progressive causes by buying a cell-phone plan...technologically advanced they use way more emails than mailings...but that means i get them weekly instead of monthly...i can't help but think that liberals have been infiltrated by bunko artists and low level capitalists...sure kiva asks for my support, but only when i make a loan or if they need a vote in some contest for corporate funding...they don't send me stuff to try to guilt me into making loans...it all very shady and it taints the issues ( in my opinion, mind you) with a seedy sort of capitalist manipulation...i could go on...doctors without borders isn't shy about asking for donations and neither are a lot of others...it is, perhaps, the carnival side-show barker facet of it that chills me...i will pick my own causes and i will back my beliefs with hard-earned cash given to people who use it to HELP others...not promote their own organization...it's my momey after all.

quarantined?

i have been seeing these green things on utility poles all over lake and porter counties as i've been out surveying the crops and photographing seed signs and i had been wondering what they were...they resemble baited traps we used one year to trap japanese beetles ( do not do this...the pheromones in the traps we put up attracted all the beetles in the surrounding area to our yard, overwhelming the traps and leaving us with the neighborhood's largest infestation ) and traps are what they are...seems gypsy moths are on the move in indiana this year...where exactly i cannot say beyond infering that lake and porter counties are involved due to the presence of the traps...the map on the dnr website ("use this site for current and correct information") only shows quarantined counties up to 2000, so we may be under a usda quarantine...among other things that means if you are moving from a quarantined area to one that is not you are required to have your household goods checked for gypsy moth eggs prior to moving...bear that in mind if you're planning an exodus form the rust-belt to sunnier economic climes ( wherever those may be)...introduced accidentally in the boston area in 1868 or 69, the moths have been moving westward since pigging out on oak leaves or almost anything elese that they can find...the migration seems to be spasmotic and pilot populations in newly colonized areas seem to die out suddenly...small mamals, birds, fungus, and a specialized virus all can do them in before they reach a threshold for successful establishment in any given area...despite this they are still moving westward as well as south...nothing to do with climate change apparently...just ignorance one hundred and forty-one or forty-two years ago.


and by the way, i did not disturb the trap...i only photographed it...i do not how many gypsy moths were harmed.

what kind of culture is industrial agriculture?

"Pioneer maintains the industry's largest winter seed production program with a capacity for 1.3 million units. With the recent addition of a fifth dryer our installation at Paine, Chile is the world's largest seed corn production plant."

"Incorporate superior and reliable sources of disease and insect resistance through intensive breeding and use of marker-assisted selection techniques."

"The unique proprietary genetics that make up Pioneer brand seed products are valuable assests of the company. Patenets and plant variety protection laws are tools to protecr germplasm and research knowledge in order to bring new and improved products to the marketplace that provide value to growers. For example, Pioneer wheat varieties introduced contain a genetic package that takes an average of twelve years and over a million dollars a year to develop."

"When a customer purchases a Pioneer wheat variety or trait having the protection of an issued patent, the purchaser is granted a limited license to ONLY PRODUCE A SINGLE CROP OF GRAIN OR FORAGE FOR FEEDING OR PROCESSING. The patent prohibits any unauthorized making, selling, or use of the pateneted variety. NO SEED CAN BE SAVED from this commercial crop and used for planting purposes. Persons willfully infringing on this patent protection are subject to multiple damages and costs."

from the pioneer website. the capitalized passages are theirs, not mine.

sounds like a globalitarian corporate culture to me. far removed form the yeoman farmer who won the war for independence ( americans do not have revolutions...not since hamilton and madison got hold of the government anyway ) "production plants" "proprietary genetics" "limited license"...those don't sound very agrarian to me...okay...there's been a vigorous trade in food as long as there has been agriculture...and generations of farmers have willfully interfered in the reproductive processes of plants and animals to encourage traits they found desirable...artificial selection is genetic engineering...but it took place in fields over generations of human and their domesticates, not in twelve years in a labratory...and there were exchanges of species and landraces of plants between farmers...if farmer brown grew wheat that made a superior flour you might like to buy some of his seed and grow some yourself, so there was some sort of "marketplace" for those genetic enhancements...but once you bought or bartered it, it was yours and you could keep part of the crop back to resow the next year or maybe cross with a somewhat hardier breeed you'd found without the local sheriff hauling you in front of the justice of the peace for doing so...if i go out to the field where i took that photo of that sign later this autumn and flich an ear or two of the corn there ( and let me assure the good people at pioneer that i have absolutely no intention of stealing their genetic secrets...the stuff is inedible and genetically modified corn is somewhat contrary to my evolving food philosophy) and plant it around like some sort of guerilla pirate of intellectual property i could be walloped with some doozies in the way of fines and arbitrary damages...just over some seeds..seed producers sound alot like pharmaceutical companies these days...and i wonder what happens if some of pioneers pollen blows across the road into farmer jones' field and infects his corn with pioneers genes..is farmer jones liable for the actions of the wind and the corn? i'll be he would be if it were detected...maybe pioneer should splice some gene in that makes their corn purple so they could tell more readily...whatever kind of culture agriculture has become it has mostly passed out of the hands of farmers and smallholders and into labs, boardrooms, and courtrooms...when, i wonder, will they start policing my gardens?

extractive agriculture

in the last garden blog i was remarking on the dearth of soybeans...well today i was driving around warming up my truck before taking it to be emissions inspected so i headed south-east into porter county between routes 130 and 30 and i found some...quite a few fields like the one in the bottom photo...so the traditional industrial agricultural crops are alive and well here in northwest indiana..i also found a bunch more corn and there really are feilds of alfalfa out there too...a pioneer variety by the look of the sign...that sign triggered a whole slew of memories from my childhood...when we'd go to visit my grandmother and my great aunts and uncles down in jasper county ( places like fair oaks...before the dairy, i never want to go to fair oaks again, it could not possibly be what it was when i was eight and i would absolutely hate to violate that memory...wolcott, parr, remington...my grandfather left the farm along with his brothers but my grandmother's kin stayed on the land) we'd go down route 231 through de motte and down through renesselaer ( where my granny lived on webster street) and all along the way by the cornfields would be little sign printed with an ear of corn, the name pioneer seed, and a lot number for the hybird seed in the field...today i saw a sign for the alfalfa, but nothing in the way of an explanation of what the corn or beans were...i only knew what they were because i rcognized them...so, have the seed giants like bayer and monsanto so restricted the genetic make of things like "roundup ready" or "liberty link" corn that there is no need to differentiate seedlots? does everyone have virtually genetically identical plants in thier fields? or is it so engineered with spliced genes that no-one wants us to know what's in those fields? just speculating here, but i wonder what the story is...more later...it's specualtion that won't go away.

my consumerism is dysfunctional

i went to the bookstore today...and i bought nothing...huh...the history and current events section looked like propaganda, not information...mass media bullshit from people with an agenda about how i should think..politicians and the yahoo punditry...you can forget about that..so i went to the gardening section and found absolutely nothing helpful in a quest to grow teosinte...i will have to continue researching on line and irritating helpful academics with endelss emails ( they can be a very patient group on the whole...get to know some...most likely you'll come out smarter)...my consumerist function is atrophied by the current economic slump, and i find i don't miss it...i've learned not to be impulsive...this is bad news for retailers...if i can get by on borrowed or copied materials and used books, i don't need them...if a bunch of people develop these skills it could crate a whole new economy based on use instead of growth...bad news for wall street and its greed mentality too...no more growth=no more finacial instrumments=no obscene wealth...a pipe dream? i don't think so...they are the ones in denial.

anyway on my way home i stopped off at deep river and took a photo from about the same place i took on on march twenty-sixth..almost three months makes quite a difference in appearance for the place...i like both photos...but i like one more...your guess...the cornfield is a reminder of industrial agriculture that treats nature as an extractive resource like the rest of industry does...on a finite planet it is a pattern of thought that's best unlearned a quickly as possible...it's summer now, but it won't last forever.

well...we know there was an election

there had to be because there is a run-off election later this month due to , of all things, a tie in the election for the buisness representative ( see what i mean about craft unions? not a steward or a griever, a business representative...not a worker's representative...just someone who conducts union buisness...i loathe john r. commons) in the indianapolis area..."it is very important for the union that your vote be cast." because one is an insider ( or rather the incumbant member of the ruling caste) and the other is not...i will haul my ass out to the hall that day and i will NOT take a dues receipt...i signed dues check-off, let them prove my dues are unpaid...i don't have to prove a goddamned thing...incidently this is the only election result form last saturday i do know...the rest is mystery...i have been to local 20's website and i have asked my union representation at the plant ( they don't know either...seemingly it's a secret...or a foregone conclusion) no-one knows or is willing to tell...maybe i'll find out on the twenty-sixth...perhaps i won't.

union democracy

i just got back from the union hall after voting in the election...it was a pretty standard sort of thing...i was approached by a number of people outside the poll who were campaigning for this candidate or that...a lot of people were running unopposed which sort of defeats the purpose of an election, but this one was really about one race for a local-wide post rather than the representative from the various areas ( the local covers a few states so it is divided into local areas each with their own union officials )...it boils down to a case of the incumbant versus the challenger...outsider versus insider ( except, of course, both candidiates are complete insiders...incumbancy is probaly more the isssue here and in 2010 incumbancy may be a really difficult onus to bear...seems you have to be strong to remain incumbant)...most likely the only people who would be significantly impacted by a change of regime would be the aforementioned union officials in the local areas...as a rank and file member and an industrial worker to boot i don't see this doing anything to change my status as a non-person, except when it comes to insurance co-pay or union dues...speaking of which...when i got in the hall and showed them my drivers license they asked for a dues receipt...i get those in the mail, and i do keep them...but when i joined this organization i signed a dues check-off agreement which allows my employer to deduct my union dues form my paycheck and remit them directly to the union...my dues are automatically paid...i paid them when i signed the agreement...if the union cannot get my employer to remit them that is their problem not mine...i signed the agreement, i am a member in good standing whether my employer pays up or not...this legal fact held no sway and i was denied a ballot untill the election officials called the main union office in indianapolis to verify my existence, even though the name and address on my license mathced their records and it's my fucking picture on the license..can you tell i'm a bit irked? something like being asked for a dues receipt at a union meeting...up yours pal...look at your records...anyway i got to vote after i gave the people in indianapolis my social secutity number...it was special...you could get the idea that i don't like unions much from reading all this, but that's not true...i don't like craft unions because they are utterly anachonistic and belong to the century before last...they are run like businesses and leadership has far more in common with management than they do with rank and file...they also have virtually no clue about the needs and intersts of industrial workers...rigidly hierarchical...almost oligarchical...they are something less than responsive to issues that do not directly involve the craft side...on the whole i think i'd rather be part of the steelworkers...or even the umw...they may be no less hierarchical, but everyone started out unskilled on the floor or in the pit...a bit more egalitarian in approach.

elites and communal behavior

"every piece of the few useful patches of land in the western and eastern settlements was owned either by some individual farm or else communally by a group of farms, which thereby held the rights to all of that land's resources, including not only its pastures and hay but also its caribou, turf, berries, and even its driftwood. hence a greenlander wanting to go it alone couldn't just go off hunting and foraging by himself. in iceland if you lost your farm or got ostracized, you could try living somewhere else-on an island, an abandoned farm, or the interior highlands. you didn't have that opportunity in greenland where there wasn't any 'somewhere else' to which to go.
the result was a tightly controlled society, in which a few chiefs of the richest farms could prevent anyone else form doing something that seemed to threaten their interests-including anyone experimenting with innovation that did not promise to help the chiefs...we shall see that this consideration may help us undrstand the eventual fate of greenland norse society."

Collapse by jared diamond p.236

elites positively sanctioning communal behavior that strengthen their positions and negatively sanctioning that which does not is nothing new anywhere. the long history of the stuggles of working people to organize themselves and have some degree of control over the terms and conditions of the work they do is well documented. the resistance to that organization by business and governmental leaders is equally well evidenced. it is partly what james madison had in mind when he cited the threat that an "interested and overbearing majority" posed to the rights of a small but economically powerful minority in Federalist X. the struggle goes on today and labor usually finds itself facing negative sanctions of their attempts to form reconized organizations. additionally there is today heated debate on the subject of climate change. those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo are usually climate change deniers, scoffing at the unsound science and arrogance of "warmers". entrenched and politically powerful due to the flourishing of the system of government by special interst enshrined in the constitution derived form the philosphical leadership of hamilton, jay , and madison, those deniers control multiple media outlets they use to proselytize their views and propagandize the masses even though real science and any small ammount of common sense tell us that things are indeed changing and not for the better. the greenland norse disappeared after a run of about five hundred years because the climate they exisited in was changing and the chiefs refused to recognize the need to change their culture in ways that would have undermined their positions. the inuit survived the change by hunting ring seal, whales, and fishing proving that adaptabillity meant survival. the greenland norse, clinging to a european culture and agriculture that they had brought with them in the face of obvious cliamte change vanished...perhaps it was a version of james axtell's "reactive change"...the english coming to america could no longer be english, but they refused to become native american and so , as a reaction, became americans...the greenland norse, in refusining to become inuit evanesced we are facing a similar dilemma with an elite that stands to lose significantly in terms of wealth and power if we undertake the necessary changes. are we going to make the same errors and suffer the same fate?

export model

"if farmers in the great rift valley ever doubted they were intricately tied to the global economy, they know now that they are. because of a volcanic eruption more than 5,000 miles away kenyan horticulture. whiich as the top foreign exchange earner is a critical piece of the national economy, is losing $3 million a day and shedding jobs."

" there is no diversionary market," mr. mbithi said. "flowers and courgettes are not something the average kenyan would buy."

from the new york times 4-20-2010

the kenyan horticultural export model is falling apart because thay can't fly their produce out to the only market they have, europe. all that wilting produce will go to feed cattle or just rot because one critical part of the machinery has failed. but it wasn't always like this. kenya has a diverse climate that is not all suitable for growing crops for export. "the country also had a strong two-tier farming culture, hundreds of large estates ( built by the british to export coffee, tea, and maize, but now owned by kenya's black elites) and an army of some ten million smallholders working tiny one and two acre plots of maize or sorghum and raising goats and chickens." [the end of food by paul roberts p. 147]. the green revolution held some promise of improving the lot of smallholders until the 1970s and the onset of rising petroleum prices, which, in turn, raised the cost of the fertilizers that powered the green revolution. the kenyan government tried to intervene by putting subsidies in place for fertilizers and instituting price supports. all this was financed by foreign borrowing and when the debt became too big to be serviced in stepped the globalitarians from the imf and world bank who insisted on kenya opening its markets and finding its "competitive advantage" niche. some prospered as being evidenced by the losses now being sustained by the export sector...but not everyone...and, perhaps, no-one will in the long term. "kenya can produce baby corn and green beans competitively, at least until jet-fuel prices rise much higher. yet such advantages aren't equally distributed across the country, but are generally held by a specific region or economic sector; in this case, large producers and exporters operating in the best growing areas. small farmers in the arid and semi-arid are simply not able to participate in the global food economy...because kenya has few barriers to imported maize, its farmers compete with producers in more developed countries whose low-cost output is unbeatable. nearly half of all kenyan farmer lack the productivity to grow maize as cheaply as their counterparts in south africa or faraway brazil who are taking mora nad more of the kenyan market as kenya's own production falls behind its massive population growth." [the end of food p.170]. so the promise of the green revolution led to the destruction of traditional farming because the debyt incured by the kenyan goverment allowed it to be leveraged open to cheap imported food. the elites that prospered by using their control of the best land to engineer an export economy are now finding that they are vulnerable too and there is no cultural base to return to in order to restore food security. we are all connected to this and we are all subject to having our illusions of security disabused. we need to think hard about the way we do things...and even harder about consequences.

drama, comedy, or farce?

the bbc said this morning that drama schools in the united kingdom are giving politicians and bureaucrats ( the home office and the military are on their client lists as well as politicians...no specific names for any of them...seems businessmen are going in for acting classes too ) lessons in lying with sincerity...stoking up their believability...not a tremendous surprise...politicians here have always been drama queens and the epitome was the eight year reign of that cretin reagan with his vicious wife and a deadly remix of nixonite cast-offs...even hitler had an opera coach to help him with his "natural" ability for oratory...politics sham and posturing...who would've thought? the cadre of professional manipulators is adding a new weapon in its battle to manufacture desire and ensure the "consent of the ruled" doesn't stray from the elite's agenda...the opening of the documentary "hitler: seducer of a nation" is footage of the first nazi rally in berlin after hitler became chancellor...it's voiced over by a p r professional who marvels at the technique that was used, from the stage setting and ritual to the fact that hitler kept the crowd waiting to build tension and used long pauses in the beginning of his speech to gauge the mood of the crowd and tailor his speech to it...the pro says something ot the effect ( i'm working from memory here)of "we are only now beginning to use these methods"...not a promising sort of testimonial to current political thinking among the media types...goebbels must be smiling in propaganda hell.

pointless...but i did it anyway

earth hour wasn't much really...an exercise in making people feel they were actually doing something...alieviating some consumerist guilt...painless..did anyone turn everything off? the only landmark from the photos i saw that looked even remotely blacked-out was the pyramids...okay, so you don't want aircraft flying into the eiffel tower (they turned off the lights on the tower, but every streetlight in town was left on)...that's fair enough...but also part of my point...did aircraft stop flying for an hour? did power plants shut down? did opec stop pumping oil? did mittal stop making steel? did everyone on the interstate highway system pull over? like five sentence mission statements, symbolic acts are too simplisitic to really give scope to the problems we face as a species...those issues are too complex to be boiled down and sloganized...energy, environment, consumption are all parts of the dilemma, and they are closely interconnected...that renders them immune to politically expedient quick fixes...that complexity and the need for a shift in cultural values is what people need to be educated to...earth hour doesn't stand a chance of doing that...a clear definition of a problem such as industrial agriculture's dependence on petrochemicals for inputs such as fuel for farm machinery, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers and the resulting impact on the environment from the pollution of groundwater, streams, rivers, and estuaries from runoff as well as the environmental nightmares of confined animal feeding operations that run on the grain the pertochemicals produce, would illuminate both the shortsightedness of our energy policies and how a system of industrilaized, pre-packaged food and supermarket convenience shield us from the impact of our everyday actions...we expend nearly nine calories of energy to produce one calorie of food...turning out the light won't fix that...we need a new viewpoint.

payoff

the treasurer of lake county indiana has sent me a check for time and srevices renderd in the pursuit of justice in lake county superior court on the eleventh and twelfth of this month...i am still not convinced that i was a good choice for this...it was a case about someone killing a dog...i'm not overly fond of dogs and there is such a divergence in cultural norms about them that it's a tough call...there are people who eat dogs rather than keep them as pets...and people here who keep pigs a pets...and doubtlessly more who view breakfast sausage as cruelty...so who's correct? damned if i know...it's all releative and having a "big picture" overview is no help in specific, localized decisions...so i tried to stay inside the framework the judge set out since i figure she knows more about how the law is structured...but law is made by people who are the products of their cultures with all the strengths and weaknesses those cultures contain...ours is no more perfect...so i tried, uncharacteristically, to find the middle ground...an unusual outburst of aristoteliean moderation...an abberition from my usual on the bus/off the bus, no bullshit moderation stance...i tried to tell them this...it makes me unsuitable for deliberation...my downfall was an insistence on providing a cogent definition of reasonable doubt when the rookie prosecutor asked me what it was...i tried to give a reasonable answer instead of playing dumb...suddenly the long hair, ripped jeans, and sloganizing tee shirt were invisible...i had become a juror...well...the cash will go into the perennial garden project's budget...some good will come of it

post-modern jurisprudence

the truth was in the courtroom someplace...but no-one was spending much time searching for it...they were busy manufacturing simulacrums designed to bring the jury around to their way of thinking so they would achieve their desired outcome...since i was on the jury ( and was made the foreman because my fellow jurors were unwilling to read a guilty verdict in open court...whiners) i was part of the focus of all this subtle and not so subtle manipulation...half-truths, lies by omission, distortions, outright untruths, surreal moments...all of life was there to see...i've never been on a jury before so i naively thought that if i sifted through the information dilligently enough i could find it...no such luck...so many contradictions..even in testimony taken from witnesses at different times over the course of the investigation..."experts", or professionals anyway, disagreeing about facts and interpretations of events...sloppy police work...a defendant who was combative and something less than forthcoming...neighbors with grudges to settle...inept prosecutors and a weak case for the state ( a singularly surreal moment came when a member of the prosecution asked a veterinarian's assistant if a gunshot wound was consistent with wounds from a dogfight...dogs are arming themselves with colt .380's? time to do something about stricter dog licensing)...an oleagenous defense attorney, strongly reminicent of everett dirksen... in the end no-one was believable...no-one deserved to be believed...they all had an agenda and the truth was in the way of their achievement of it...it had to go...bludgeoned, battered, stunned, dazed, fatigued, and pissed off the jury split the verdict...no-one would tell the truth so no-one got entirely what they wanted...i have to say that the judge and the bailiffs were very considerate people who did their best...i wouldn't want to leave you with the impression that i thought poorly of them as people...or the lawyers, witnesses, and even the defendant for that matter...i really don't know them...but the entire system is an exercise in truth avoidance and dissembling for a purpose...so plainly obvious that i felt insulted and used...i am smarter than that people.