A worthy cause: Open Up Oregon

Image via Wikipedia

Not that many people have occasion to need information from local or state government -- but those that do often find themselves in a weird Alice-in-Wonderland type world where the laws that are supposed to provide open government have been so twisted, constrained, and riddled with exceptions that even the simplest request for the most mundane information is treated as an attempt by foreign terrorists to spy on government rather than an opportunity for a public employee to provide fast and helpful service to a member of the public.

One of the weirdest and most costly results of the present, sad and overly-formalized state of affairs is that information that you once could have gotten with a phone call now is invariably greeted with "You'll need to submit a public records request for that," which is just the first step down the rabbit hole.

The comic strip "Dilbert," about an engineer in a tech company, occasionally features an IT guy who is actually a demon and who is called "Mordac, Preventer of Information Services." Salem seems to have adopted some of this attitude as well, judging by some very non-responsive responses to requests for public information during the recent snafu concerning the hurry-up-quick-before-anyone-notices sale of easements in Minto Brown Park.

Luckily, there's a UO prof who has made opening Oregon public records to the public his cause.
Consider LOVESalem a spiritual comrade site to Open Up Oregon and post a comment here if you've had any problems getting public information or public records requests filled by any branch of government around here. This is something that really needs constant public emphasis.

Self-education for the coming era

Very good book. Schools have long since stopped worrying about numeracy, what with the cash cow of testmania that dominates the industry formerly known as education, thanks to idiots like Arne Duncan. But it's going to be increasingly crucial for your well being to understand the numbers that are being spun out there for your amusement, bemusement, and confusement.

Maybe when we get KMUZ going we can do a show with a similar theme as these guys.

(Digression: Note that the design-a-better-logo-for-KMUZ-contest has been extended to October 20, so get cracking folks.)

One more thing to do before closing the book on summer

Become a Friend of the Salem Saturday Market.

The latest newsletter alone is worth the price of a low-end membership, with recipes for Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookies, Zucchini Patties, Zucchini & Summer Veggie Casserole, tips on freezing zucchini, a recipe for Caprese (aka: The Essence of Summer Salad), Tomato Bruschetta, Marinated Tomato Salad, Tomato and Zucchini Fettucini, Ratatoulille, tips on freezing tomatoes, and enticing recipes for Peach Salsa, Peach French Toast with Peach-Pecan Maple Syrup, the recipe for that Peach-Pecan Maple Syrup, Peach-Blueberry Cobbler recipe and, finally, a recipe for Chilled Peaches in White Wine -- along with tips on freezing peaches! Typical of how much membership in the Friends of the Salem Saturday Market helps you enjoy this wonderful aspect of Salem's all-too-brief summer season of incredible local bounty.

And your tax-deductible contribution to this worthy 501c(3) group more than earns its way in terms of making your community better.

There's an upcoming "members only" tour of Salem's own Minto Island Growers on Sept. 26 that you can enjoy too.

This is it: Council to decide urban hens this coming Monday, Sept. 14

Home of the terrifying urban hen. Image by dj denim via Flickr

Well, this is it, at least for now. The unelected Planning Commission members voted against recommending that Salem revise the zoning ordinance to exempt hens kept as pets from the definition of livestock, but the Council is free to ignore that advice and to do the right thing by exempting hens from the zoning code and drafting a hens ordinance under the regular city health code.

There appear to be five votes on the Council in favor of allowing most people in single-family homes to keep a few hens, but they definitely need your encouragement and support this coming Monday night.

Please plan to attend and to speak up first thing (since the item, 4.3a, is not a public hearing, your opportunity for comment is at the beginning of the meeting [pdf warning] -- that will be at roughly 6:30, so plan to be there and sign up for comment by 6:15 in City Hall council chambers).

Scalding dose of reality noticed

McMansion complete with "lawyer foyer" and all the other trappings of wealth suitable for an end-stage empire. Sadly, a species of "home" not entirely unknown in Salem. Image via Wikipedia

This "Nature Bats Last" blog is something else. A choice excerpt from his latest:

We're driving slowly and stopping often, primarily because the Obama administration's Keynesian approach to saving the industrial economy necessitates throwing money at the highway departments of every state in the country. The attendant "shovel-ready projects" are clear examples of the lengths to which industrial humans will go to sustain the unsustainable, maintain the immaterial, and generally restore the irredeemable for a few more months.

The many miles and frequent pauses reveal to any sentient animal the sheer lunacy of the living arrangements we've built for ourselves. Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels. Then we ratcheted up the madness to rely on businesses that use, almost exclusively, a warehouse-on-wheels approach to just-in-time delivery of unnecessary devices designed for rapid obsolescence and disposal.

Simply ingenious, wouldn't you say?

The entire region, formerly abundant with a multitude of edible crops, currently is brimming with a single commodity: #2 corn. It's Roundup-ready, at that, just to throw a bucket of insulting acid into the face of reason. Roundup-resistant weeds are popping up throughout the region as we bring Farmageddon to the heartland and eventually to the world. Most of the corn, which is essentially inedible until it is processed (i.e., pummeled with inordinate quantities of fossil fuels), is watered with the last remaining drops of the Ogallala aquifer, brought to the surface with the same finite fluid used to power our trucks and cars. Verdant fields of ethanol dreams are interrupted occasionally by a field of soybeans; without rotations of legumes, the soil would be so depleted of nitrogen by king corn, it wouldn't support even the great corn desert. The corn fills our bellies with death-inducing faux sugar. But we willingly trade some of that "food" for fuel because the associated dependence on automobiles allows us to burn off the final inches of life-giving topsoil to promote our culture of death in rapid-transit, individualized death-traps. Who could pass up a deal like that?

Obnoxiously ubiquitous cell-phone towers line the edges of the cornfields adjacent to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System ("Celebrating 50 Years, 1956-2006"). Each of these completely unnecessary towers of mortality -- which serve only to duplicate extant infrastructure -- kills 5,000 to 15,000 birds each year. Yet every imperialist has a cell phone, regardless of the death to songbirds. Don't even get me started on the col-tan in the cell-phone batteries mined from the Congo, because I'd rather not think about the brutal lives and tortuous deaths of the Congolese women and children we treat as collateral damage along our imperial path.

Seemingly every tenth cell phone marks a casino, yet another ubiquitous structure we'd be far better off without. These businesses extract money from the poor as they pursue the something-for-nothing goal upon which our culture has become based during the last few decades.

If it's not a casino, it's a distribution center for this country's rapidly waning commercial sector. We no longer make much of anything in this country, but we move around ton after ton of cheap plastic crap to the Targets and Wal-Marts that have displaced family owned businesses in every town and city in the country while exporting disaster capitalism throughout the world.

Finally, then, we come to the most ludicrous part of the entire endeavor: suburbia, filled with McMansions. This not-quite-country, not-quite-city living arrangement requires people to buy one of everything for every house -- except cars, of which we need at least two -- to live far from work, far from play, and far from the things we "need" to buy. Hundreds of acres of shoddily constructed, castle-like symbols of self-indulgence are separated from equally coarse-scaled places we use to grow "food," conduct "commerce" in our "service" economy, and otherwise live civilized lives. As has often been the case, today's symbols of gluttony are tomorrow's death traps.

As usual, I'm quick to point out the silver lining in this otherwise disastrous narrative: Better days lie ahead. How could they not?

In the near future, we'll return to a durable set of living arrangements. Since we need about 50 million additional gardeners to support the 300 million people in this nation, and because nearly everybody in the industrialized world would rather push electrons in a cube farm than push a shovel in a garden, I don't foresee us voluntarily returning to the agrarian age. Not only are a majority of people unaware of the predicament we face -- thanks to the media, every level of government, and our own self-absorbed preference for the bliss of ignorance -- but there's simply no leadership in the industrialized world as we face an inevitable but unprecedented economic contraction. As a result, I suspect we'll bypass agricultural pursuits and plunge right back to the post-industrial stone age. Once again, daily life will be characterized by a finely textured, life-affirming, durable set of arrangements characterized by respect for each other and reverence for the land, and accompanied by a solid dose of self-sufficiency.

Happy Labor Day

Image via Wikipedia

Read.

Gather all these mournful numbers -- the millions of Americans unable to find work, the 70 percent of workers under 35 who are unable to set aside any money, the nearly two out of three Americans approaching retirement age who fear they won't be able to retire, and the sub-nation of low-wage Americans routinely cheated on the job -- and what emerges is a picture of a country in decline. The first nation in human history to create a middle-class majority looks increasingly to be losing it. The economic security that was common, though by no means universal, in this country when the institutions created by the New Deal were strong, often provided by unionized corporations that felt compelled to offer insurance and pensions to their workers, is as dead as the dodo.

The Reaganite ideology of the past 30 years insisted that if Americans were freed from the constraints of government and unions and made responsible for their own economic security, a golden age would come. Sure enough, American businesses have eluded regulation and cast off their unions -- but they've left their workers in the lurch. If we fail to enact universal health care and laws that truly make it possible for workers to form unions again, each of our Labor Days will be grimmer than the last.

Sweet and on-target: Surprise Hit on YouTube

"The Best Health Care System in the World"

(For the rich. n/a for all others.) A very telling chart of comparisons:
From “Health bills might not protect needy Americans,” McClatchy, Sept. 4, 2009



Update: Bill Moyers: Mr. President, We Need a Fighter to Take on the Deranged Right-Wing

This health care thing is make or break for your leadership, but for us, it's life and death. No more Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. President.

Where's the Salem version?

How sadly fitting that the most prominent front features of our city hall are parking garages that obscure the parts where the people are. Image by Jason McHuff via Flickr

SustainEUGENE

The Sustainability Commission works to create a healthy community now and in the future by proposing measurable solutions to pressing environmental, social and economic concerns to the City of Eugene, its partners and its people.

Sustain Eugene > Eugene Sustainability Commission

Eugene Sustainability Commission

The Sustainability Commission was created in March 2007, following a recommendation from the Mayor's Sustainable Business Initiative taskforce. The commission focus is on all three aspects of sustainability - social equity, environmental health and economic prosperity.

The first meeting of the commission was held in late November 2007. The commission meets on the third Wednesday of each month, usually in the Bascom/Tykeson rooms of the downtown Public Library, 100 West 10th Street. Meetings generally start at 5:30 pm and end at 8:30 pm. Sustainability Commission meetings are always open to the public and include public comment time where you may offer comment or suggestions to the commission.

The commission acts as a policy advisory body to the council and city manager in the initiation or development of programs that will create or enhance sustainable practices within the community. The commission will advise on policy matters related to:

• Sustainable practices;
• Businesses that produce sustainable products and services;
• City building design and infrastructure; and
• Related issues that directly affect sustainability efforts considered by the city council

As outlined in the Ordinance that established the commission the commission shall:

1. Make recommendations to the council and city manager for the programs or actions designed to implement the recommendations contained in the Sustainable Business Initiative Task Force report as accepted by the city council on October 23, 2006;
2. Create and present an annual work plan to the city council;
3. Meet annually with the city council to secure approval of the work plan;
4. Provide a forum for addressing public concerns related to sustainable practices;
5. Work on sustainability related policies as directed by the council and city manager;
6. Provide input on sustainability policies and practices that reflect community values; and
7. Assist the city council and city manager in balancing community priorities and resources by advising them on sustainability issues.

The first appointees to the commission will serve various terms of 2, 3 or 4 years. After this first term all members will serve a four year term, with the exception of the councilor who shall serve during the term of office. All members are limited to serving two consecutive terms.

Community Requests

The Sustainability Commission receives many different requests for endorsement, sponsorship or participation in projects. In order to be able to fairly evaluate these requests the commission asks that you provide a brief summary of your request, answering the questions in the community request form in no more than two pages. The commission needs the completed forms two weeks prior to commission meetings so they can review the requests. Requests received at commission meetings will be considered at the following meeting, to allow time for review.

For more information about the commission and past meeting agendas and minutes visit the City of Eugene website www.eugene-or.gov/sustainabilitycommission

Salem police officer shoots, kills pit bull running amok

Reading this story we can be thankful that Salem has its priorities straight and freely allows dogs that terrify and sometimes maim or even kill people while protecting us from the terror of urban hens!

Police responded to a report of the dog running loose and charging passers-by near Liberty Elementary School at 7 p.m., Salem Police Lt. Keith Blair said.

Officer Jacob Pratt found the pit bull at its owner's home in the 4900 block of Liberty Road S and called for backup and an animal-control stick to contain the dog, Blair said. While he waited, the dog charged Pratt, who fatally shot it, Blair said.

Investigation led police to determine that the dog had lunged at several people and that one woman had to dodge out of the dog's way to avoid being bitten, Blair said.