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.

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.

better red than post-modern

"the presence of a boundary or measure implies the possibility of exceeding it. the consideration of this leads to a dialectical conception of the finite according to which it may be understood only as the unity of its own being and its own nonbeing, as the mutual transition of one into the other."
-entry on the finite in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia

so...that's why communism fell...it was a sort of proto-post-modernism that ignored objective fact...concetrating on defining things by what they aren't and allowing that negative to subsume the reality of what is...the death of the real...and so the death of itself....an object lesson and no mistake....post -modernism is mindless crap engendered by those who want to deny personal responsibillity in events in their own lives...it isn't real so it doesn't matter...people have been trying to dodge that bullet for a long time..."shit happens"..."god's will"...all a deferral of facing up to what they are...which isn't an easy thing to do...you always find some facet of yourself that you really don't like but don't know how to change...sometimes denial is the best defense, but it leaves us vulnerable to being blindsided by characteristics that we repress but other see all too clearly.."what happened?" crops up alot...so tell me the truth about me as you see it...i reserve the right to dispute your interpretation, but i'll take your thoughts into consideration ( just don't expect any fundamental changes) it is, after all, your world.