Facepalm of the day

Image by Potoman via Flickr

Advice to Statesman-Journal: Consider hiring copyeditors. Or reporters who know how to use The Google or the Wikipedia thingie:

The display at the library includes copies of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution Week dates reportedly [????] recognize the signing of the U.S. Constitution 222 years ago.

As Casey Stengel is said to have said, "You could look it up."

Word: Waiting for Rosemary's Baby

An apt metaphor for the kind of spawn we'll be facing if we keep this denial up much longer. Image via Wikipedia

Waiting for "conclusive proof" that human activity is permanently [a]ffecting the environment before acting is like waiting to see the baby come out before you'll agree with your wife that she's pregnant and take her to the hospital. I mean, she could just be gaining weight, right? - Ecohuman (PDX-area blogger/commenter)

Update: Earth's oceans (the acidifying pools of water upon which all life depends) reach their hottest temperatures ever. Which means they will be able to maintain less CO2 in solution, by the way. And so it goes . . .

Forget 9/11, the real attack on America will be remembered as 9-9-9

One of the execrable five who betrayed their oaths and all Americans to deliver the White House to George W Bush, precipitating the Cheney Misadministration and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Currently appears poised to turn elections into outright corporate auctions. Image via Wikipedia

As in Sept. 9, 2009, the day the Supreme Court heard more argument on whether the legal fictions of property known as corporations have a right to buy politicians outright, instead of having to tiptoe -- okay, waltz -- around the few and mainly toothless election laws we do have.

Note especially Justice (5th Vote for the Judicial Coup that installed GW Bush) Kennedy's fawning admiration for corporations . . . disgusting.

Read it and weep for the vast chasm between the justice and the rule of law and for the future of the country once known non-ironically as the Land of the Free.

UPDATE: Another great TomDispatch on the hugec -- nay, tidal -- river of corporate money flowing into Washington to defeat any public interests and to preserve corporate rule.

Word: Open letter to Amtrak

A nation of 300 million in a vast country served by "a railroad system that would make Bulgaria ashamed." Image via Wikipedia

An American conservative living in Ireland recounts a recent (mis)adventure on Amtrak:

Rail worked for us for decades, and today Third-World peasants can count on transportation freedoms that most Americans cannot. Public debate about Amtrak tends to focus on whether you will ever turn a profit, but we don’t ask when our asphalt will turn a profit, or our sewers, or our bridges -- they are infrastructure, necessary for an advanced society to function. Every surge in the price of fuel, every dire warning about the climate's transformation, every new plunge in the economy makes Americans’ constant driving more difficult and rails more necessary.

UPDATE: Great piece on why, despite the abundant and fast-mounting tidal wave of evidence that the age of automobility -- carburbia -- is over, our elected "leaders" and the opinion elites cling to the fantasy that it can be sustained:

September 25, 2009
Guest Speaker: David Withnell
The Auto Industry and the Great Recession:
How are we rolling in Salem?

What has it been like to be an auto dealer in today’s economic crisis? Our speaker, David Withnell, President of Withnell Motor Company, will give us a local perspective on doing business in an era of high fuel prices, foreign competition, bailouts, “cash for clunkers”, and rapidly evolving automotive technology.

A must-read by Flannery, author of "The Weather Makers"

Image via Wikipedia

Flannery wrote one of the top three books on climate change, "The Weather Makers." This excerpt from his latest work warns that "we're between a tipping point and the point of no return."

UPDATE: a nice piece helping to explain why, even as we test the living shift out of students, we're seeing more and more who are unable to reason and who are therefore prone to thinking that fears of runaway climate change are part of some sort of liberal conspiracy.

UPDATE 2: For anyone who thinks fears of runaway climate chaos are simply fantasies driven by computer models. Watch.

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.