Absolutely do not miss the Oregon State Fair this year for this alone.

Some of the most beautiful and yet most haunting, lump-in-your-throat, art seen in years will be available to us this year at the Oregon State Fair. August 26-Sept. 5.

DO NOT MISS THIS. Every child under the age of 90 needs to see and ponder these haunting art installations.

We went to Newport to see it at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and it has stayed with me since. There has not been a day gone by that I have not thought about that sad and poignant exhibit. And now we have the opportunity to see it here in Salem.

Before the pixels were even dry

The City's of Salem's Urban Development Quarterly puffery gazette included this as the top feature story in the most recent issue:

Vol 7, Issue 2, UDQ
Date: July 1, 2011 3:48:47 PM PDT
To: udquarterly@egov.cityofsalem.net
Reply-To: owner-udquarterly@egov.cityofsalem.net

AIR SERVICE RETURNS TO SALEM

SeaPort Airlines began serving Salem on April 25. SeaPort operates eleven weekly round trips between Salem and Portland with connecting flights to Seattle, WA and Pendleton, OR. For more information, go to www.flysalem.org.

But, scant days later, reality insists on breaking through. Ruh-roh!

Report shows SeaPort ticket sales were inadequate

. . . Last week, the airline announced it would not live up to a six-month agree for free use of the Salem Airport and would cancel flights starting July 17.

SeaPort president Rob McKinney said in April that flights would need to average three passengers per flight. The city reports flights averaged just 2.1. . . .

The bottom line is that no airline is or can be set up to cope with the future of energy prices. Air travel is the least efficient mode possible, and mass air travel is an artifact of the cheap energy blowout, recently concluded.

Now, average energy prices will destroy airlines year after year, with sharp volatile swings sometimes concealing and sometimes revealing a general, inexorably rising trend. The best thing to do with Salem's airport is to privatize it. Get the city out of it entirely and let the flight-dependent businesses pay taxes on what is being turned into a private facility for their use.

Instead, the city now proposes squandering of even MORE millions of taxpayer dollars on extending the runway in Salem -- even as downtown Salem is becoming quite noticeably pockmarked with vacant storefronts and more and more homeless haunt the street corners with their signs. Good going, folks! There's nothing quite like a $10 million runway extension or another $5 million poured down a drain to expand passenger and baggage handling capacity to really communicate total cluelessness about what our energy future portends.

Do or Die for community radio in Salem

If you want a locally-owned and run, community-powered, non-corporate radio station here in the Mid-Valley, better act now.

KMUZ has to either get on the air or lose the construction permit (that leads to a broadcast license) that they have worked so hard to get and fund. Get over there and help if you share the vision. Or resign yourself to the increasingly corporate-dominated KOPB.

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.

Oh, is hacking into emails a crime?

All the furor about Rupert (Sauron) Murdoch's latest crimes reminds a few of us what a phony tempest "Climategate" was . . . As Bob Park notes:

4. HACKERS: CLIMATEGATE REVISITED.

Two years ago, e-mail files of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and selectively posted on the web. Rupert Murdoch newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, expressed shock at the "criminal conspiracy" and "scientific blacklisting." The "gate" suffix was added to invite comparison with the infamous break-in at the Watergate by Nixon's goons, but the climategate burglars were treated as heroes. There was not one line of criticism about the only criminal offense in the whole sordid climategate affair of hacking into private files. It is ironic that hacking by the Murdoch papers is now threatening the Murdoch empire.

"We'll give you something to cry about now, buddy"

So, some interesting responses after a post about Salem's bizarre system of mailing expensive printed-on-expensive-paper and expensively mailed (at nearly 7/9ths full first-class postage) non-bills to those of us who are paying our water and sewer bills via auto-debit every month.

First, the day after that post, LOVESalem HQ got another bill, for seemingly the very same ending date but stretching back into April -- no reason given for a second bill, the overlap, the different amounts on each, or even a note to say that I will not be getting charged twice. Nothing but "here, we'll be taking this." Naturally it also came with another wasted #10 reply envelope to throw away, along with the waste envelope it came in and the bill itself.

Maybe I'll get one for $70 after this post . . .

And then there's this from the assistant city manager, Sean O'Day, who is a very nice guy but who seems to have been listening to the IT Dept. whinge about "It's too haaaaaaaaaaard" for too long:

Thanks for sharing your views. By law we are required to provide a billing statement (even for those with automatic payment) and I understand your point to be that we should do so electronically. We agree, and this is something that staff has been working towards. Although electronic billing sounds easy, it is not as simple as it might seem given our current billing infrastructure. Nonetheless, we continue to work towards electronic billing because the City is indeed committed to both sustainable practices as well as keeping our operating costs as low as we possibly can for our residents.

Sorry, Sean, not good enough. Governments all over the world have been singing that song about why this and that stupid thing has to remain stupid because fixing it would require a massive overhaul of the computer system forever, and it doesn't fly any more.

In this day of Mac Minis more powerful than the mainframes of yore, telling me your computer is too stupid to print a bill to a pdf file and email that to a citizen's email address is the same as telling me that you have way too much deadwood in the IT dept and you need to clean house there and hire some high-schoolers.

If necessary, hold a contest to get it done. Go to Borderlands, tell the first five geeks you see that winner gets a case of beer, a case of Twinkies, and three decks of "Magic" cards for the first one to write an app that would allow any Salem citizen to manage the format of all their city communications using their cell phones. The law says you have to provide a billing statement. The law does not say you have to waste my money to do it.

Mark your calendar for Rythm at the Mill, Sunday afternoons

Looks like a very nice concert series coming up at Mission Mill starting July 24 and continuing July 31, August 7 and 28, and wrapping up Sept. 11, with all shows starting at 2 p.m., just $5 for Willamette Heritage Center members, $10 for non-members.

It's good to see these dates at that lovely venue -- it's difficult to keep a place fixed in an earlier time without making it a place people forget to make time for. Come check them out. They'll let you bring your comfy lawn chair and sell you some good local brews -- what better way to while away a summer Sunday afternoon?

No city actually serious about sustainability would do this

Salem's official flirtation with sustainability -- or at least the language of sustainability -- is one of those mixed bags.

On the one hand, it's basically at least a micro-step in the right direction. Anyone who really engages with the concept of what it means to be sustainable -- living so that the life chances and choices of people in the future are not degraded as a result of your own choices -- quickly recognizes how vastly different that would be from our automobile-dominated world and our foolish thoughts that we can continue "growth" forever.

The downside is that, once you start stamping a corporate style logo about sustainability everywhere and congratulating yourself for merely having gassed about it in enough big meetings, you make people who are actually concerned about it crazy when you do things like:

• Allowing corporations to spam doorsteps with littervertising, like the weekly coupon dump that the Statesman-Journal spews out each week, and the tons and tons and tons of worthless "yellow pages" that get vomited all over town each year, only to go directly into recycle bins;
  
  
• Willfully acting irrationally and wastefully as a government, showing that you really have no clue about sustainability or even smart governance.
  
  Case in point:
  
  Each month for three years now, the City of Salem has spent 34 cents to send me
  
  (A) a paper bill every month that is marked "DO NOT PAY" (because I have my water and sewer/stormwater bill automatically debited from my checking account)
  
  (B) Another piece of blue paper begging me to give a little extra money for people who have problems with their bills,
  
  (C) AND a spanking new return envelope.
  
  (D) In a business envelope.
  
  Every month, the entire thing goes straight into the recycling.
  
  In other words, even as budget troubles force Salem to cut back on essential services, there is apparently nobody in the entire city bureaucracy who both cares enough and is sentient enough to ask "Hey, if we're going to be all hot for sustainability, why don't we stop wasting money by letting the people who auto-pay their utility bills to opt-out of the paper bill?"

The real trouble with this kind of nonsense isn't just the huge wastes it represents.

It's also that it absolutely demolishes your credibility as far as concern for the environment, concern for smart use of the taxpayers' money, and concern for organization credibility.

That's a lot of damage from a single, stupid mailing each month, but there it is.

On the other hand, once in a while, when I'm in full rant mode about this, someone says "Hey, ease up, it's just a stupid little thing, don't get so upset."

Naturally, this about doubles my rpm, because if it's such a little thing, then why isn't it fixed yet? Why do I have to keep posting this same damn rant every year? There are so many easy ways this could be fixed, and the fact that it isn't just says volumes about Salem's priorities. We have a whole city agency devoted to the fantasy of bringing airlines to Salem, but we're not even smart enough not to pour money down the drain mailing non-bills to people who don't want them and don't need them. Pitiful.

A second, urgently needed Declaration of Independence for a new time

The Unanimous Declaration
of the Human Beings of the United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for humans to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

• That to secure these rights, humans institute governments among themselves, which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

• That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
  
  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
  
  
• Such has been the patient sufferance of the humans living in the nation born of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present United States, Inc. is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny of corporations over the humans in these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

• The Corporations have refused to suffer the passage of critical laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

• The Corporations have has forbidden governors and would-be human overseers to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till corporate lobbyists' can eviscerate them them entirely; and when unable to defeat such laws through outright bribery in campaign finance, have utterly neglected to attend to them.

• The Corporations have refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

• The Corporations have called together legislative and judicial bodies at places unusual, fantastically opulent and comfortable, and exceedingly distant from the media who might create public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into complete ignorance about their measures.

• The Corporations have improved their methods over the clumsy ones used by prior tyrants, for instead of dissolving representative houses repeatedly, the corporations permit them to exist, while drowning any authentic human representatives in campaign contributions, negative advertising, and phony "Astro-Turf" psuedo-grassroots campaigns, all designed to further invasions on the rights of the people.

• The Corporations have refused for a long time, to permit any but corporate vassals to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have been captured by the Corporations and used against the people at large; the state remaining thus exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

• The Corporations have endeavored to prevent the creation of unions by the human population of these states; for that purpose shipping entire factories overseas to destroy the livelihood of the humans here, while obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of work that would create jobs.

• The Corporations have obstructed the administration of justice, by a decades-long campaign to gut the independent judiciary and to appoint only those judges and justices who will not question the Corporation's capture of the judiciary powers.

• The Corporations have wielded campaign funds in the billions to make judges dependent on their will alone, for their ability to hold any tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

• The Corporations have erected a multitude of new "public-private partnerships," and sent hither swarms of semi-private police forces and prison companies to harass our people, and eat out their substance through public subsidies.

• The Corporations have kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of humans, by buying Congress.

• The Corporations have affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power through such criminal conspiracies in corporate form as Xe (formerly Blackwater) and other monstrosities.

• The Corporations have combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws known as the World Trade Organization, devoted to the immiseration of humans and the enshrinement of corporate control throughout the world; giving their assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us and in thousands of bases overseas, turning actual Americans into corporate mercenaries:

• For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states (see, Xe/Blackwater, Halliburton/KBR, and the entire CIA):

• For cutting off our human right to travel to and meet with people in all parts of the world:

• For imposing taxes on us without our consent by ruthlessly and criminally evading taxes while demanding unceasing public subsidies:

• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury by turning the former Supreme Court into Supreme Court, Inc., hostile to all but corporate interests:

• For countenancing the practice transporting humans suspected of terrorism beyond seas to hell-holes like Bagram and Guantanamo be tried or not:

• For abolishing the free system of American laws throughout the nation, establishing therein an arbitrary government:

• For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

• For usurping the power of our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

The Corporations have abdicated government here, by declaring us second class citizens to themselves and waging war against us.

The Corporations have plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, destroyed our environment, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

The Corporations are at this time contracting for the funding, training, and equipping large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of a civilized nation. (See, bin-Ladin, Osama, & the CIA)

The Corporations have promoted the impoverishment of the people such that they fight against unions and become the executioners of their friends and brethren.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our corporate brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their boards of directors and CEOs to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common human kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the humans of these United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people, solemnly publish and declare, that we humans are, and of right ought to be free and independent of corporate control over our institutions; that we are absolved from all allegiance to absurd and abominable doctrine of corporate personhood, and that all political power residing in corporations, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent humans, we again have full power to govern ourselves as free peoples, free of interference from the fictional persons known as corporations, who must and shall be returned to their rightful status as legal conveniences for managing property only, with limited charters and without any of the rights of persons to participate in political affairs.

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Clean out your old linens and head to Marion-Polk Food Share this Saturday!

Maybe the most-important nonprofit organization in Salem, Marion-Polk Food Share, has teamed up with Sunnyside Organics and Women Ending Hunger to bring us a plant sale this coming Saturday, July 9, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Go find those old sheets and fabric odds and ends you're saving for "someday" and turn them into something useful now by bringing them with you to the sale, where you'll not only see beautiful plants that are perfect for transplanting, you'll also be rewarded with a free 4" herb start.