A must read for Memorial Day weekend

http://www.fark.com/go/8270846

A great insight -- if we want to claim the proud memories as belonging to us or saying something about who we are, we have to claim them all.

(A tremendous read and a perfect complement to the free "Color of Wealth" talk at Loucks Auditorium on Saturday, June 7.)

Jump on this! Free Home Energy Audit for You, $50 to an Important Cause, Your cost: $0.00

Loft insulation (Photo credit: Southend-on-Sea in Transition)

Autumn has finally arrived - it's a great time to think about your home's energy efficiency.

In partnership with Neil Kelly Company and Clean Energy Works Oregon, I'm excited to share an exclusive offer for [Oregon League of Conservation Voters] supporters that will save you money and support OLCV's work. Read on!

Thank you,

Doug Moore
Executive Director, OLCV

The Neil Kelly Company is excited to support OLCV in this important election year. (Voter registration deadline is today [October 16] - please check that you are registered to vote, and if you are new to Oregon or have moved since the last election, don’t forget to re-register!)

As a pioneer in design-build remodeling, sustainable materials, and residential energy efficiency, Neil Kelly Company is a strong supporter of OLCV’s efforts to protect our natural legacy.

Improving your home’s energy efficiency this fall is one of the easiest ways to reduce energy use, while offering you greater comfort and utility bill savings. Last year, we completed 211 retrofits for an average savings of 2.8 tons of carbon per home per year and an average energy savings of 30 percent.

Together with Clean Energy Works Oregon, we’d like to offer you a unique opportunity to save energy while helping OLCV.

Just visit Clean Energy Works Oregon’s website and apply with the special Instant Rebate Code CNNLK222, and Neil Kelly Company will perform an energy audit of your home for free (valued at $500), and give $50 to OLCV.

Clean Energy Works Oregon’s unique program enables you to undertake energy improvements with no out-of-pocket costs, and offers a range of financial incentives upon project completion in many areas of the state. Currently, homeowners in greater Portland qualify for rebates of up to $2,000, while homeowners in other counties (Polk, Marion, Yamhill, Lane, Deschutes) are eligible for rebates of up to $2,000 or $3,000, depending on the county.

We strongly encourage you to act soon, as rebate levels in some counties will change November 30! Just apply at Clean Energy Works Oregon’s website with the Instant Rebate Code CNNLK222. You'll receive a free home energy audit, and we'll give OLCV $50! (Don't forget the code!)

We look forward to seeing you at OLCV's 16th Annual Celebration for the Environment next year, and thank you for your commitment to furthering the work of OLCV.

Sincerely,

Tom Kelly, President
Neil Kelly Company

Related articles

• Conducting a Home Energy Audit - Insulation
• October is the Perfect Time to Lay Groundwork for Energy Savings
• How Energy Efficient Is Your Home? Worth an Audit to See Results

Remembering a better time

Time was, both major parties recognized that the best measure of the economic success of the country was how high the averages climbed on measures of prosperity, not how high the most extreme outliers could go.

If only we had that wisdom today.

A unique story about a unique Oregonian

GeerCrest Farm

Presents...

Vesper Comes to Portland!

Sunday, July 29th at 7pm. Clinton Street Theater
Come join us for the Portland Premiere of Michael Turner's Epic Film on the Life of our Fourth Generation Farm Owner- and learn about the spark that created GeerCrest.
We are so excited to share Vesper's life with our community in Portland. The film is 90 minutes and suitable for all family members. $5 entry goes towards film showing and production costs. Read about the film and see a trailer here.

Vesper Comes to Bend!

Tuesday, July 31st at 6pm. Old St. Francis School
(McMenamin's History Pub)
Join us on the other side of the mountain as we travel to Bend to spread the word about Vesper. Call the farm if you are here in the valley and want to carpool to the show! For those of you in the area, we can't wait to join you for a special Vesper evening!

Vesper at the Coast!

Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 7pm.
Cannon Beach History Center
In the fall, we bring Vesper to all our friends at the coast, and all who want to catch the film again - you will want to see this movie more than once, trust us. Join us at this amazing history museum complete with the original Cannon Beach Cannon- sure to be an amazing evening of Oregon History.

Vesper at home- hers and yours!

Saturday, July 28th at 7pm. St. Edwards Church, Silverton
St. Edwards was Vesper's Church and the community wants to share her legacy with all who wish to enjoy the film in Vesper's hometown. Come down for the evening to see the film and share an evening with our farmers.

Any time you wish.... dvd of film available for purchase at the farm and at every screening, $10 each

FACT: Republicans are the Borrow and Spend Party

That people think of Republicans as "conservative" or "fiscally responsible" is stark evidence of the abject failure of newspapers and the electronic media to do their jobs.

When did you first realize that the US lost the Cold War?

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/juan-cole-polish-pm-admits-they-tortu

     This story crystallized something that had been forming in my brain for some time, the sad realization that, contrary to popular image, the US had actually lost the Cold War, not Russia (then operating as the chief gangster in the gangster's USSR).

     Think about it:  since time immemorial, the definition of victory is that you get to impose your will on your defeated enemies in return for cessation of hostilities; they have to adopt your values and become like you, rather than the other way around.

     By that standard, then the US is the clear loser of the post-war period of paranoia and balance of terror called The Cold War, which is popularly misunderstood to have ended with the dissolution of the USSR.  With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the gangsters in charge of the old Soviet Union no longer had to bear the crushing burden of maintaining a military all out of proportion to their needs; rather, they could immediately shrink their military dramatically, with no loss in security, and set about spending on themselves rather than trying to placate a loose confederation of historic tribal enemies and victims of Stalinist repression. 

    So while they don't seem much like the winner, they obviously are when compared to us, because, by the end of the Cold War, the US had adopted every last one of the values of the old Soviet system, from a gigantic secret political police bureau (KGB/CIA) operating without any oversight, from an insanely overmuscled military whose care and feeding required ever greater sacrifice from the proles at home, and finally to the willingness to completely obliterate individuals through torture, all in the name of "homeland security."  Like the Soviets, we insist on being able to listen to phone conversations of the natives, we force the populace to undergo random searches before engaging in internal travels, we greatly fear anyone crossing the borders and subject them to intensely political scrutiny, barring dissidents with strange ideas like "freedom."

WORD

On Memory

Image via WikipediaAs we think back over our so-called exit from Iraq (tens of thousands of mercenaries remaining behind, paid for by taxpayers who know own the largest "embassy" in history) and eventual departure (we can hope) from Afghanistan, and the crime that was somehow turned into a pretext for that invasion.

OCCUPY SALEM TODAY: You say you want a revolution, well, you know ...

Image by Goldiefexify via Flickr

This crap keeps up and you might see some heads on poles soon.

Then there's this summary of our woes.

Combine those two pieces with the other recent reports showing banks and mortgage servicers have changed NOTHING and continue to fabricate documentation and commit frauds on courts when foreclosing people out of their homes and you wonder just how clueless these people are.

I am certain that the elites of Bourbon France sniffed that the message from the masses nearing the Bastille was incoherent.  Given Americans' propensity for violence and extremely well stocked gun racks, I pray that the elites here understand something about history, such as what happens to a society when the middle class is destroyed and impoverished.

High tech information processing and the globalization of trade, with the concomitant insecurity for all but the elites creates conditions conducive to tremendous and self- reinforcing inequality, like the positive feedback cycle that drives a microphone into a painful squawk of noise. The destruction of communities by the banksters and the corporate chieftains who insist that Henry Ford was misguided to care whether the people who built his cars could afford them is at the point where even relatively or apparently well-off folks are without any resiliency and cannot withstand any reversals, such as a serious illness or job loss.

Given that most people of a certain age played Monopoly as children (a game created during the Great Depression before this one), it's a wonder that more people don't remember that the game is a lot more fun when all the players have enough money to make deals and exchanges interesting and beneficial to both sides. Once someone establishes enough dominance to make the outcome a foregone conclusion, the fun stops and the grinding down starts, often right before people quit, often by turning over the table and scattering the game pieces to hell and gone.  It's not fun when it's a board game, much less when it happens in real life.

Lest we forget

Image via Wikipedia 71% of national debt happened during GOP presidencies; 28% under Dem presidents
By John Aravosis

GOP Presidents Dem Presidents
$9.5 trillion $3.8 trillion

Total debt is $14.3 trillion.

$1 trillion of debt comes from before Reagan; $13.3 trillion accumulated from Reagan to Obama.

71% of the $13.3 trillion was under GOP presidents; 28% of the $13.3 trillion was under Dem presidents.

Time Travel: Historic Oregon Newspapers digitized and available for you

Image via WikipediaJason Stone of the University of Oregon will provide information on the new
Historic Oregon Newspapers database on:

7 p.m., Tuesday, July 19,
Anderson Room B at Salem Public Library,
585 Liberty St SE.

Historic Oregon Newspapers is the culmination of more than two years’ work by staff at the University of Oregon Libraries, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a number of state agencies and stakeholders.

Anyone interested in Oregon history will be pleased to learn of the launch of the University of Oregon’s Historic Oregon Newspapers website. Through this new internet resource, the public has unprecedented access to “first draft” historical materials originally published by Oregon journalists between 1846 and 1922.

The website includes more than 180,000 pages of digital content drawn from historic newspapers that include the Salem Capital Journal and the Portland Oregonian.

This presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Information/Reference Desk at 503-588-6052, or visit the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project’s website.

Visit Salem Public Library website.

A great Sunday experience: Thompson's Mills State Heritage Site

Image by Koocheekoo via FlickrI'm kinda partial to entertainments that you can walk or bike to from within Salem, but there are times I'll make an exception, such as the always amazing Oregon Garden. And this one. Here's what I wrote to a friend after our visit last Sunday to "Thompson's Mills," in what was (briefly) Boston, Oregon.

Went to above named state park yesterday just south of Tangent, Oregon (near the booming metropolis of Shedd, formerly Shedd's Station, named after the station built after the railroad bypassed Boston, causing most of the town to be moved about a mile west to straddle the tracks, leaving nothing but the Mills behind, necessarily unable to move while dependent on water power).

Fascinating tour of the world made by hand. Mill established in 1858, run to produce human food (flour from local wheat) until about 1940 or so (unclear date) then they shifted to making animal feed mixtures and pellets (which uses steam, I forgot to ask what they made steam with). They were processing soy at the end, when in 1986, they converted to making just electricity (100 kW) for 20 years under contract to Pacificorps. The state bought it in 2004 and has made it a park.

They employed 12 men at peak. They first electrified in 1906, when the owner put a generator on the mill so he could run power to his house. The land originally was bought for $50 and the water rights for $75, and those rights essentially made them kings of the valley and enemy of the neighbors during summer months of no rain. It had to have been a hellish place to work in some respects, pleasant at other times. I imagine they were all deaf as posts after a few years.

The millstones were from France, the machines from Chicago and Saginaw and such places. You get the idea that we will soon be looking at those machines the way the south sea natives looked at airplanes, wondering how they worked and what magic we could call on to get them to work again.

With some money, the mill could be rebuilt to work, but the state is selling the water rights to ensure more water for salmon in the Calapooia River, which I didn't even know salmon could reach, since it ties into the Willamette above Oregon City, and I didn't think salmon got above the falls there.

Anyway, next time you come down, you should come down to Salem and we can go see it. It's worth a trip.

Doubtless there is no amount of money you could pay to get the Amtrak Cascades to stop in Shedd -- too bad, it would make a great day trip if you could buy an Amtrak ticket, go up and down the valley and walk from Shedd to Thompson's Mills with your lunch.

More on Minto (of Minto-Brown fame)

Image via WikipediaEnrich and Beautify the Earth

From the book titled John Minto: Man of Courage 1822-1915:

John returned jubilant from the 1849 gold strike with enough 'yellow dirt' to make it possible to buy the finest in rare fruits and flowers to plant on his acreage. When a Methodist minister came upon him three years later as he was loosening the graft bands of a crabapple tree on which he had worked six varieties of popular apples and he was singing at his work, the minister remarked: "You seem happy, Brother John." Yes, Brother Roberts," he answered. "Just now I would not swap with Adam before his fall," the preacher made no reply.

"Perhaps he thought me irreverent," John remarked later, "but I had no such thought, and that had been the experience of my life when working to enrich and beautify the earth."

John Minto lived to 93 and he was a poet who wrote the following to fill a need for songs for the Salem Grange:

A GRANGER'S LOVE SONG

Come to the grange with me, Love
Come to the farm with me
Where the birds are singing and the flowers are springing
And life is happy and free.

To thee, Ceres her bounties shall bring, love
Promona and Flore shall give
Of their fruits and their flowers, to crown the hours
Of the life on the farm thou shalt live.

While the bread-grain is in the field, Love
And the fuel is cut from the grove,
Neither cold nor want shall thy night dreams haunt;
Only plenty and comfort and love.

We'll build our home by the hill, Love,
Whence the spring to the brooket flows;
On the gentle slope where the lambklins play
In the scent of the sweet wild rose.

In the labors, joys and cares of the grange, Love
In the shelter and shade of the grove,
Life's duties we'll meet in companionship sweet,
And there rest from our labours in love.

John Minto was an innovator in agriculture with some firsts in grafting fruit trees and sheep ranching, and served prominently in the Oregon Legislature.

Speaking of the Grange, don't forget tonight's dance to benefit the Grange!

And the Place to Be March 12: Macleay Grange Hall!

For "The Oregon Valley Boys"
Farewell and Good Riddance to the Great Recession Grange Tour

A series of concerts to benefit to support Willamette Valley Grange Halls. JUST $5 a head!
Dinner available.

Macleay Grange Hall is at 8312 Macleay Road, Salem, 97317.

A Historic Opportunity to Reconnect with Salem's Past . . . and Future

Dear friends and community members,

A number of community residents recently attended a presentation about the Sustainable Cities Initiative plans that were presented by University of Oregon students for Minto Brown Park.

We were excited about many of the students' ideas. In particular, we would like Salem residents and park users to think about renovating the Cherry Orchard,and adding an organic community garden at that site.

We invite you to come see the orchard. The attached flyer has information on Cherry Blossom tours of the orchard planned for April, and work parties scheduled for March. The city has volunteered to provide some gloves and tools for the work.

This idea fits well into the existing Master Plan for the park, which calls for organic gardening at that site. City Council is considering designating $100,000 of the recent Federal payment to replant the historic Minto orchard with native habitat. We think that with all the farmland that is to be planted with natives, saving the orchard and providing for organic community gardening is a better use of that little corner of the park.

Ok then! Cherry City sounds great.

From the Salem Public Library newsletter, sponsored by the Friends of Salem Public Library:

Q. Salem is sometimes called the Cherry City. How did it get this nickname, and has Salem had other nicknames as well?

A. According the Salem History Database (www.salemhistory.net), cherries have been grown in and around Salem ever since Henderson Lewelling introduced the trees to the area in the 1850s, and the first Cherry Fair, sponsored by the Salem Elks Lodge, took place in 1903.

Over the years, many other nicknames have been bestowed, but none have had the sticking power of The Cherry City. Joseph Nathan Kane’s Nicknames and Sobriquets of U.S. Cities, States and Counties (R 910.3 Kane) lists The City of Orderly Growth, The Charmed Land of Unequalled Beauty, and The Happy City Life as just a few of the nicknames Salem has held.

The City of Autosprawl Blight and Rapacious Developers just doesn't have that same ring . . .

Graphs worth 1,000 words to the 1,000th power

So terribly telling. Via Jack Lohman.

To be ignorant of history is to remain forever childlike

Image via Wikipedia

A LOVESalem field correspondent sends news of this delightful citizen-powered community building project:

Local historian Virginia Green and the Salem Heritage Network (SHN, pronounced "Shine") are proud to present "Shine on Salem 150." This project will highlight 150 years of Salem government, culminating on Oct. 22, 2010: the 150th anniversary of Salem's city charter.

Join us each day on the SHN blog as we highlight one year in Salem history. Each day, we will also provide a different event, meeting, visit or other activity for Salem residents to learn and participate in their city.

Visit the Salem Heritage Network blog every day starting Monday, January 22, to learn new tidbits about the City of Salem and find interesting things to do: http://salem-heritage-network.blogspot.com/

A press release follows below. For more information, please contact Virginia Green at vagreen9@gmail.com or (503) 581-6221.

Thanks!
Stephanie Matlock Allen
Salem Heritage Network
samatlock@gmail.com

**********
SHINE on Salem 150

Beginning on January 22, 2010. Salem Heritage Network will begin highlighting each of the 150 years of Salem’s municipal history, one year each day, continuing for 150 days.

Each day’s feature will be headed by the year, followed by a notation of two or three important world events of that year.

Next will be an illustration of a local event in that year. The black and white historical photographs are from the Oregon Historical Photograph Collections of the Salem Public Library, administered by volunteers led by Don Christensen. Tom Green, Jr. took the contemporary color photographs.

The historical event will be described in a brief paragraph.

The feature will conclude with the location of the photograph and an invitation to visit the present-day site or to attend a civic activity associated with this event.

Since this is an internet blog, there is opportunity for comments by any viewer. It is hoped that this will become a community effort, with many new events and personalities added.

The purpose of this feature is not only to recall local historical events, but also to introduce the city government itself. Several Departments, as well as Boards and Commissions, have offered information about their founding and their activities.

Both our cultural heritage and the present organization of our city government are very much part of our daily lives. This online feature can suggest ways to participate in our current community services and help direct the course of our city’s future ~ perhaps for the next 150 years.

Some history

Salem began in 1842 as a classroom, the Oregon Institute, now Willamette University. The pioneering Methodist missionaries founded the school. In that year their settlement near Wheatland was moved to Mill Creek.

In 1844, the church discontinued the mission and appointed William Willson as agent to sell off lots to "worthy individuals" in order to raise money for the Institute and attract settlers to the new town, which they named Salem. Willson drew up the first plat of Salem, covering an area thirteen blocks by five blocks, bounded by the Willamette River and Mission, Church, and Division streets. The Marion County Clerk recorded the plat in 1850.

Salem became the capital of the Oregon Territory in 1851. The Oregon Territory became a state in 1859. The process of Salem’s incorporation as a city began in 1857, but was a controversial issue, and the charter was not granted until October 22, 1860, 150 years ago. This is the date we are celebrating on the website as the feature “SHINE on Salem 150.”

WORD: Pundita commits truth in print -- on the way out the door

Sad to see her go, but there's no way she can stay in the obese media after she dares to write stuff like this:

Longing for a middle class

WASHINGTON -- The challenge of our time is to re-create America as a middle-class nation.




The idea does not find voice in the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle. It has no place in the media’s daily digest of gossip, false controversy and ideological cant. It is barely mentioned in the halls of power, where the very officials who capitalize on the economic angst of working people to win election forget that this raw anguish -- not the sophisticated arguments of lobbyists and campaign donors -- is supposed to motivate them every day.

It is easy to blame the financial crisis, Wall Street’s breathtaking bonuses or the culture of excess that glittered until we found ourselves on the precipice of a second Great Depression. In truth, we’ve been dismantling the economic foundation of the middle class for more than three decades.

How many of you, having previously held a presumptively secure job with a solid company, are now working as a “contractor” or “consultant“? The trend toward taking employees off the payroll only to hire them again as contractors -- without health benefits, pensions, sick days, vacations -- began in the 1970s with janitors, construction workers and truckers. Now highly skilled technology workers who helped transform the global economy are among the downsized, the outsourced, the contracted-out.

When IBM was an icon of American enterprise, I could not imagine that I would one day follow veteran IBM workers through the halls of Congress as they buttonholed lawmakers. They’d been stripped of their promised pensions and told to make due with a less generous “cash balance” plan that effectively reduced benefits for the most experienced and loyal workers. Nor could I anticipate that after a fatal airline accident we would learn -- as we did after the crash of a Continental Connection flight near Buffalo last February -- that overworked pilots on regional carriers earn $20,000 a year or less.

No one could have foretold that eight years after 9/11, hundreds of thousands of rescue workers and residents of Lower Manhattan would suffer serious, chronic -- and often deadly -- diseases from their exposure to the hazards at Ground Zero. Many are unable to work and have lost their health insurance. Others have fought for workers’ compensation in a system that offers none to independent contractors -- or to those whose labor was subcontracted to so many companies that no one firm is held responsible. Some are now impoverished.

“While you’re waiting for your workers’ comp, and you’re waiting for your Social Security disability, you have no money,” says John Feal of Long Island, an injured 9/11 construction worker who started a foundation to help others. “You don’t even have gas to get to the doctor.”
They were heroes, we said. But now they are just cogs in a new economy in which business seems to have unilaterally rewritten the rules of the workplace.

Example: Hundreds of companies stopped making contributions to employee 401(k) retirement plans in the wake of the financial crisis. There is no way to force a resumption of funding when the economy rebounds.

The government has abetted all this with decades of hands-off regulation. Example: At current staffing and budget levels, it would take the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 133 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction one time, according to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project.

Soon the political discussion will shift from the need to keep propping up the economy to the need to reduce the deficit and debt. Then we are certain to hear that Social Security and other “entitlements” are the problem and must be curtailed. In fact, Social Security has sufficient funds to pay full benefits through 2037 -- a cushion no other government program can claim. Medicare, while under financial strain, has done better at containing costs per beneficiary than private health insurers, according to government studies.

The myths that led us to this pass did not materialize by chance. They were conjured up by conservatives intent on dismantling the New Deal society that reigned through the 1960s -- a society that produced the world’s most robust middle class. They are fed by lawmakers in both parties who depend on campaign contributions from powerful interests.

Fight the myths. Break the back of the corrupt campaign finance and lobbying systems. These are hard political tasks. But being pushed further down is harder, still. Because no one knows where the new bottom lies.

--0-- --0-- --0--
This is my final column. Thanks to my loyal readers and dedicated regional editors who have kept a place in their papers and in their minds for the kind of journalism I have worked to provide.