Dispatches from the Abyss: Bleccch

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Howdy folks! Sorry for my absence for the last couple of days, the Abyss suddenly expanded for me and I fell into one of the outer circles, the circle of ‘flu-like symptoms.’ The last time I visited there was when I discovered Giardia back in the 80’s. One of those experiences that might be considered interesting if you could remember it. My brain and body are nearly back to abnormal at this point, but what a ride!. And speaking of sorry, sorry for the TMI!

In other, less gross news….

Well I really have no idea! The last couple of days are sort of a blur, lol! All I can say is e-mail Dennis with your support for impeachment, keep fighting the good fight, Run Al, Run, Fuck Bush and drinks LOTS of (purified) water….oh wait, that last one is for me!

Oh! And help OTB and notlightnessofbeing with the: [The Progressive Charter – 9 votes (28.12%)
Progressive Voices Project – 8 votes (25%)http://www.docudharm…]

project if you can!

I’ll be back to annoy you as soon as my brain starts to work properly again…..hopefully tonight, but soon!

I am NOT a “healthcare consumer”

I have health insurance through my employer.  I guess that makes me “lucky” in some respects.  I have also been fairly lucky with my health in general (knock on wood) and have not really had to navigate the hell that is Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Illinois.


Yet.


Every November, we receive a batch of information related to the “employee benefits open enrollment period”, which allows us to make any changes to our elections for the upcoming year.  Pretty basic and self-explanatory.  And while there is the usual bit of frustration when realizing that I have to choose between bad or worse versions of the same one insurance provider’s plans, this year was different.

The materials that we receive include the typical instructions, changes, deadlines and related information.  However, this year, there was a significant amount of “rah-rah fluff” that really, really rubbed me the wrong way.  And it is this fluff that really is indicative of the major underlying problem related to healthcare in this country – even for those who are fortunate enough to have some level of coverage.


It was one thing that I got a “2007 compensation summary” that included the “value of employer provided health benefits” (as well as the employer share of FICA tax – how generous of them) in my overall compensation.  As if I should be honored that I am being graced with the crumbs of coverage for which I need to (1) make 50 calls to try and find a doctor that actually takes my insurance, despite not knowing anything at all about his or her actual qualifications or getting any good solid reference information, or (2) pay $10,000 out of pocket each year for me AND another $10,000 out of pocket for the missus to go to a doctor that she actually trusts and is not skittish about. 


I say the above because my wife recently had her wisdom teeth removed and went to a “covered doctor” in our area, only to have them screw up and leave the right side of her face without feeling for a few months and now a dull pain that never goes away – all of which can’t be resolved other than by “waiting and hoping” or through surgery using a dental practice such as Bright smile dental in Brooklyn that would either not work or possibly leave her with no feeling on half of her face. Kind of makes you think we should have gone with a different medical practice to begin with.


But I digress.


What really got me is this blurb, one that was never in prior enrollment literature and really cuts right to the core of the healthcare situation in the US (text emphasis is mine):

How Do I Choose Which Medical Plan is the Best for Me?  During this year’s enrollment process, you are going to make some important decisions and selections on behalf of you and your family.  Just like any other purchasing decision, you want to be an informed consumer when selecting a health care plan and participating in tax-advantaged savings accounts

And therein lies the problem.  We are NOT “purchasers” of healthcare.  Basic medical care is not something that we should be “informed consumers” about.  Especially when we are only “informed consumers” about the few crappy plans that will give us half the coverage that we need.  As for those “tax-advantaged” savings accounts?  Well, my response is to please not piss on my head and tell me that it is raining.


Here is my “tax advantage” – as I said above, I have the privilege of going to a doctor that we are comfortable with and trust.  And as an “informed purchaser”, I get to set aside $2,700 on a pre tax basis to pay for things that the insurance company won’t pay for itself, before paying for the rest out of pocket on an after tax basis.  And as I said above, in order for the insurance company to pay for anything (which is only 70% or so), my wife and I EACH have to spend $10,000 before dollar 1 gets paid for by Blue Cross/Blue Shield.


What a great tax advantage for me.


Another headline in big bold letters in our literature reads Be a savvy health care consumer with these wellness tools.  The first sentence under this headline?  Fundamental to consumer-driven health care is arming you with information you need to make wise health care decisions.  What a farce.  How can anyone make “wise health care decisions” when they either have to pay through the nose to get the service that all Americans deserve or we are stuck with two or three crappy plan “options” from the same one insurance company? 


Which leads me to the heart of the matter.  In addition to the 47+ million who are uninsured, there are the millions of others who are underinsured.  These people pay thousands of dollars each year for maybe being covered, or partially covered for things that are the most basic of issues.  By taking small measures up front for preventative care – and not being forced to wait until a problem gets very dire and expensive to treat so much money would be saved, and so many more people would be healthier.


But until we change the discussion from “healthcare consumers” and making “informed decisions when purchasing healthcare options” to one where basic and affordable healthcare is available to Americans with the ability to actually go to a doctor that they trust without sacrificing a mortgage payment or other necessities, we will never begin to address this issue. 


You shop around for a car.  You make informed purchasing decisions for food, housing or other necessities – even for things that aren’t necessarily necessities.  Getting treatment for your health isn’t something that you should be treated as a “consumer” for.  Healthcare is not a commodity.  When you have an emergency health issue or if you are involved in an accident, you go to the hospital that is closest (or the one that is closest that you trust).  You don’t stop and think about calling all area hospitals to get the deal you are looking for, and you certainly don’t negotiate as you would over a car.


This is a basic right that Americans should be afforded.  We should not be treated as “consumers” and basic affordable healthcare isn’t something that should be “shopped around for” at the cost of proper care.

Dodd Leads On FISA Telco Amnesty

Against the odds, Senator Chris Dodd has led the fight against FISA telco immunity.

The first step is to make sure retroactive immunity doesn’t make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee — where it will be considered shortly.

If we can get it stripped there, it will have to be offered as an amendment to the overall bill where it will be a lot easier to get 41 votes against retroactive immunity than 41 to sustain my filibuster if necessary

This is a vitally important issue, as the Dodd campaign demonstrates in this video of the whistleblower Marc Klein, who told the story of the telco’s failure to respect the privacy of its customers that the law (the Communication Storage Act) requires.

My name is Mark Klein. I used to be an AT&T technician for 22 years.

[Former AT&T Technician Mark Klein Speaks Out on Retroactive Immunity and Domestic Surveillance]

“What I figured out when I got there is that they were copying everything flowing across the internet cables, the major internet links between AT&T’s network and other companies’ networks.”

“It struck me at the time that this was a massively unconstitutional, illegal operation.”

“It affects not only AT&T’s customers, but everybody because these links went to places link Sprint, Qwest, a whole bunch of other companies.”

“And so they’re basically tapping into the entire internet.”

[But isn’t the government only monitoring suspected terrorists and not ordinary Americans?]

“To perform what they say they want to do, which is look at international traffic, none of this makes any sense. These installations only make sense if they’re doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States.”

[Shouldn’t the telecoms trust that the Bush administration’s requests are legal?]

“These companies know very well what’s legal and illegal. They’ve been dealing with this for decades. And it’s a fact that Qwest refused the NSA’s approaches because they didn’t have, they weren’t shown any legal justification for it. And they did the right thing and said, “no.” “

“What I’m here for is it looked like a few weeks ago that the Senate bill which passed the Intelligence Committee would give immunity to the telecom companies and that would probably put an end to the lawsuits.”

[The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently reviewing retroactive immunity]

“So I came here to lobby against giving immunity to the telecom companies. Let the court cases proceed and Congress should not interfere in that.”

Tell the Senate to oppose telecom immunity

Chris Dodd, leading on the issues now and demonstrating the leadership we will need from our next President.

Now call the Judiciary Committee Senators now. Use this. Chris Dodd will pay for your call.

Sustainability and Prefiguration in a Couple of Acres: The Pomona College Natural Farm

This is a revision of an earlier essay I published on DailyKos.com, in preparation for its republication in the Environmental Analysis journal (and perhaps elsewhere).  Its major premise is as follows:


Sustainability is nowhere to be found, and so we appear to be groping in the dark when looking for it.  One of the ways in which we can proceed to build knowledge about sustainability, however, is in the community garden.  A conceptual guide to the idea of sustainability is located in the concept of prefiguration (as described by Joel Kovel in his book The Enemy of Nature), which describes the sense in which social institutions point to the possibility of a global, ecologically sustainable, society.  Community gardens have important prefigurative qualities, too.  The bulk of this diary, then, will be about one such community garden, one located on the campus of a college: the Pomona College Natural Farm.  The Pomona College Natural Farm will be presented as a place where sustainability, both in social and ecological terms, can be studied.  Its conclusion will attempt to speculate about the significance of the Farm and of community gardens as “prefigurations.”

Part One: The Farm


The Pomona College Natural Farm is an example of a community garden existing on the grounds of a college; what makes it especially interesting is its relationship to the goal of “sustainability,” expressed meaningfully in terms of a global, ecologically sustainable society.


Now, “sustainability” has many definitions, and many dimensions; these will be explored in detail in the second part of this essay.  First I will discuss how the community garden on a college campus has a unique role to play in promoting “sustainability”; second, I will suggest a theory of “prefiguration” which will allow us to assign importance to certain “more sustainable” aspects of everyday life without losing sight of ultimate goals; and, finally, I will address the importance of the Farm as a place where people can promote social change through prefiguration.


The Pomona College Natural Farm, like all human institutions, has a history and a political economy – so I would like to lay out, for you the readers, a short history of the Farm, as it is called here.


The Farm was begun in 1998 by a group of students who wished to grow their own vegetables, on a plot of land owned by Pomona College but historically used as a waste dump amidst a grove of protected California live oak trees.  Many of the students who participated in the creation of the Farm also participated in the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999.


The Farm was a self-organizing anarchist space which students built upon the land for the pleasure of having a space on campus in which food plants grew.  This lasted from the outset until some time in 2002 I think, when the campus administration was somehow informed as to its presence.  At first, the administration of Pomona College tried to circumscribe life at the Farm with rules as to who could do what, without really participating in the Farm itself.  Later, students and alumni of Pomona College established connections with Pomona College faculty to make the Farm into a place where classes could meet and which had academic “cachet” as part of the official purpose of the College.  Students persuaded alumni of Pomona College (such as made rather large yearly donations to the College itself) to pressure the College into incorporating the Farm into its long-term plans for the use of the chunk of land which the Farm occupied.  Students wrote senior theses on the Farm, its history, its status as a community garden, its history, and its politics.  Kovel talks about how the potentials of the future are “interstitial” — they will come from within cracks in the structures of the present.  The Farm was built as a development of this “interstitial” potential.  In short, the Farm came about (from within an otherwise integral part of capitalist life, Pomona College) through separate, uncoordinated acts.


In fact, there have been so many acts of planting at the Farm that the original area of the Farm is, today, largely a fruit orchard, with its growing space occupied with avocado, peach, nectarine, plum, apricot, apple, loquat, sapote, blood orange, and other fruit trees.  There is indeed also a good amount of space in the Farm for public celebration, for the massive cob dome which arises from the center of the original Farm area, and for small vegetable plantings.  But Farm arboriculture has grown significantly.


Today, classes are held at the Farm, faculty sponsors visit it often, and students, alumni, and community members are involved in its maintenance.  The institution which once merely occupied its land (land originally donated to Pomona College with the aim of preserving the oak trees arising from its surface) has recognized its importance, somewhat.


Community gardens such as the Pomona College Natural Farm are more, however, than places to grow food.  They serve as places where ideas about sustainability can be on display, and where people can be students of sustainability.  Neither community gardens nor colleges are, in themselves, “sustainable institutions” (as I will point out later in this essay).  However, colleges (like learning institutions in general at this point in history) tend to promote “learning for adaptation,” which is a sort of processing that leaves students with enhanced social status but without the ability to co-direct the society-as-a-whole as it moves forward into an uncertain mass future. 


Conversely, community gardens, in themselves, do not directly function as agents of “sustainability” because real sustainability is the measure of how thoroughly the society-as-a-whole (and not just the community garden within its bounds) is attentive to ecosystemic integrity.  For community gardens to be agents of “sustainability,” they need to be sites of “sustainable learning.”  Sustainable learning will have to mean both ecological learning and education in social organization.  Generally, however, sustainable learning will in each case mean that learners can observe their surroundings to discover practices which would be part of a sustainable society.  This type of observation depends on a quality which, following Joel Kovel, I will call “prefiguration.”  We shall see, below, how the Pomona College Natural Farm qualifies as a site of “prefiguration.”



This is the dome in the middle of the Pomona College Natural Farm.  This is the students’ second attempt at dome-building on the Pomona College campus: the first dome experiment was torn down by the administration’s hired hands after the Pomona administration decided that any dome on its property would need a City permit.  Both domes were cob domes, made from sandbags reinforced by concrete; much less resource-intensive than pure concrete.  This dome is much larger than the one that was originally built in a quick, impromptu fashion.  It will eventually be used as a classroom when work on it is finished.  (I make no promises about the eventual date when this will happen.  The “do it yourself” ethic that pushes things forward at the Farm today makes it somewhat of a hobby for those who must make a living within the System.)  Eventually the dome will be used as a classroom space.



When designing rock sculptures around the Dome, Allison Comet designed this “love seat” sign, and other students designed the seat itself.  If the Farm is to attract caring participants, it must have a robust variety of social functions, e.g. “love.”



The large structure in the middle of this picture is a trellis meant to hold three Armenian cucumber plants planted earlier this spring.  Growing activities on the Farm produce real food, but at this point serve mainly to help participants learn about growing food.  From this year’s Armenian cucumber crop I learned that Armenian cucumbers are fragile (and are vulnerable to spider mites and fungi), need to be planted early (in spring or early summer) even in southern California, and require plenty of sunlight and water.  Next year everything will be in the ground by the end of May.



As I’ve said above, a large portion of the Farm has been devoted to arboriculture, and I took this picture at the end of June.  Nectarine season was, and is, in full swing as of the time of this writing.  This tree has an interesting history, though, because the sheer quantity of fruit it was growing made its branches collapse several times.  It’s important to thin peaches and nectarines if the tree branches aren’t strong enough to support the fruit they are growing.  This tree suffered several branch-losses in earlier years before the Farm community recognized it as a pruning responsibility.  Otherwise, an advantage of arboriculture is its reliance upon stable, regularly-producing sources of food; trees.



These are several prominent amaranth bushes: amaranth, for those who do not know, is a rather nutritious grain that can be harvested from the flowers you see in this photograph.  When these flowers turn brown, harvesters shake them onto tarps or blankets, and a black grain shakes out.  This grain can be boiled and served with dinner or as a breakfast cereal.  The Farm community has (to my knowledge) yet to do a concerted amaranth harvest.



Before the Farm was a “regulated” institution, it was regularly visited by a wandering landscape architect who built kiva pits and cob ovens among other things.  One of each was built upon the Farm; neither of these survives to the present day.  He did, however, build this found-object terraced garden, which exists apart from the Farm on Pomona College land.  This is the only work of his which remains on Pomona college land.



This is an outdoor classroom under construction, on the site where the wandering landscape architect put down a kiva pit (now covered over).  Juan Araya, an agroecologist who also teaches at Cal Poly, Pomona and who comes from Costa Rica, will finish construction on the classroom space by adjusting the poles just right and attaching a cloth roof.  The floor will eventually be made of dried mud.



This is the Farm adjunct.  It isn’t contiguous with the original Farm site; the two sites are separated by a grassy sports field.  Rather recently, the College allowed this land to be part of the Farm (after students had used it for Farm plantings since the outset).  Juan Araya farms this land.  Last Fall Juan grew very large numbers of Serrano and jalapeño chiles on this land.  This summer it grew a small number of Armenian cucumbers.  This winter it will grow carrots, lettuce, and strawberries, and I will attempt to spread mustard greens throughout the Farm areas.


Geordie Schuurman, one of the original creators of the Farm, says that the extensive peach, nectarine and plum orchard on the Farm adjunct (in the area behind this photo) was created just as the College was planning a putting green on the land where students planted the peaches.



These fruit are sapotes, hanging from a sapote tree.  The Farm is the site of all types of trees and plants which count as “exotic” in southern California, of which this is one.  Sapotes have an interesting, unforgettable taste which lingers in the mouth for quite some time; I won’t bother to describe it here.



This picture, taken in funky late-afternoon light, serves to illustrate the diversity of crops growing at the Farm: here one can see zucchini, squash, corn, tomatoes, amaranth, nectarines, peaches, and California poppies.  In the background is a space under the California oaks where Farmers have deposited piles of mulch, and then beyond that is a curling field that some alumnus donated money to Pomona College to have built.



At the beginning of Fall semester ’07 the Farm was short of compost, as student participation had been quite low during the summer months.  So Michael Keenan and I brought in ten tons of compost from Vons, from money the campus allotted for the Farm.  This isn’t, of course, any prefiguration of sustainability; but, rather, an ad hoc move seen as necessary to keep the Farm going in light of uneven community involvement.

The Farm, of course, has a space for donated compost — the less reliable ingredient, of course, is people to actually do the composting.  Pomona College’s “Coop Fountain,” among other places, donates compost to the Farm.

Certainly one way to bring community involvement to the Farm is to hold parties there.  This is one such party, held at the beginning of November 2007.  Farm parties typically combine live music, food, art, and plantings (see below).

Part Two: Sustainability and Prefiguration


The primary goal of rational advocates of “sustainability” is that of a “global, ecologically sustainable society.”  Sustainability must be an aspect of planetary social and ecological reality, taken as a whole, if it is to be real.  People commonly talk about “sustainable businesses” or “sustainable organizations,” but when they do that they are really talking about something else.  So the creation of a future, global, ecologically sustainable society, as I’ve said before, is of paramount importance.  As John Dryzek says in his (1987) book Rational Ecology:

  The preservation and enhancement of the material and ecological basis of society is necessary not only for the function of societal forms such as economically, socially, legally, and politically rational structures, but also for action in pursuit of any value in the long term. (58)

Simply put: if, in the long run, we are to pursue any values at all, we will have to attend to ecological sustainability. 


But what is sustainable, and what would a sustainable society look like?  Casual use of the word “sustainability” would imagine it to be divided up into a cornucopia of strategies for “being green.”  O’Riordan (1985) describes the task of defining “sustainability” as “exploration into a tangled conceptual jungle where watchful eyes lurk at every bend.”  There are dozens of different definitions of “sustainability,” though many of the ecological definitions have in common the act of caring for the ecological balance in such a way as not to diminish ecological integrity for future generations.


By a strict reckoning of the word “sustainability,” however, it’s easy to look outside one’s window and see a world of people who think and live for today, and to presume, then, that nothing is sustainable, and all is evanescent.  We have no ongoing, aggregate relationship with the environment.  The word “sustainability” has been corrupted: Josee Johnston’s essay “Who Cares about the Commons” complains that “sustainability has come to imply corporate profits as much as ‘saving the earth.'” (1)


Now when we talk about sustainability in the ecological sense, we are not talking about sustainable profits, but about keeping some sort of robust natural environment, with an adequate variety of living species of life and a set of ecological balances, which we might call ecosystemic integrity.  Ecosystemic integrity has been effectively defined as follows:

An ecosystem has integrity if it retains its complexity and capacity for self-organization (arguably its health) and sufficient diversity, within its structures and functions, to maintain the ecosystem’s self-organizing complexity through time. (http://www.fs.fed.us…)

So, here, saving ecosystemic integrity means “saving the earth” in terms of saving something on the Earth, specifically its ecological complexity.  How that is done is not really definable without involving ourselves in a thicket of ecological specifics.  But that’s precisely the point: if we wish to understand whether an activity is ecologically sustainable, we must know the environment well. 


The assumption behind the term “ecosystem integrity” is that an ecosystem that is sufficiently complex will be robust, and therefore sustainable.  It will be able to adapt to changing circumstances.  But the “sustainable profits” definition points to another definition of “sustainability” – sustainability by the profits standard means doing what we’re doing in a way that will allow us to do it for longer (before we can’t do it anymore).  In judging definitions of “sustainability,” we will want to take care to observe if the priority built into the definition in question is that of “doing what we’re doing,” or of an attention to the robustness of the natural environment.  Sustainability in the first sense is a concern that is typically “tacked onto” other priorities, such as profit, which are accepted as given.  In this sense, sustaining our practices means prolonging the moment of their eventual demise for as long as possible.


It’s easy to see, though, how such a definition of “sustainability” won’t preserve ecological integrity for future generations, and thus won’t be very sustainable.  Built into such a definition is an inattention to ecosystemic integrity.  The pursuit of profit often runs afoul of ecosystemic integrity (much as, say, mountaintop removal involves losses of environmental complexity if pursued vigorously enough).  Trying to do something “environmental” about it after the damage has been done can only be so effective.


By the same token, environmentally heedless strategies in any field of endeavor can only be “sustainable” for so long, and we can only correct for their environmental inattention (whether we conceptualize the environment socially, politically, biologically, or otherwise) to a limited extent.  We can see how this plays out in a great number of ways, for our society is (as a whole) environmentally heedless.  Our systemic activities are pursuable only so far, as an examination of each area of endeavor will show.  Transportation?  Our transportation systems will burn the world’s oil up, and then what?  Housing? Our society’s provision of housing is economically dependent upon the expansion of home equity.  But how high do housing prices have to go before nobody can afford it?  Human society?  Can the world really support this number of people indefinitely, never mind that human population is still increasing?  Architecture?  Our houses are designed to waste energy and water.  Economics?  How sustainable is an economy in which the United States government generates endless amounts of debt, imperiling the value of its Dollar?  Politics?  How can our political system be sustainable when the reigning doctrine of the current regime that drives it, neoliberalism, implies disbelief in the idea of the “public interest” that underwrites representational democracy?


All of these examples point to the problematic nature of “sustainability” conceived as “continuing to do what we’re doing.”  In each example, the problem is with what we’re doing: we could be doing something else.  Finding ecological sustainability, then, is a matter of learning how to pursue life beginning with an adequate attention to ecosystem integrity.  We might oppose this version of finding sustainability to the other version, which only means “doing what we’re doing” in a way such that we can do it for longer, or do more of it.


The question of how sustainable ecologies and human societies adapt to change is a question of rates of change.  As Teresa Brennan points out in Globalization and its Terrors, the currently-reigning social system is appropriating the natural world at a rate faster than its own rates of regeneration.  How to slow down the social system so that it consumes less, and at a slower rate, is thus a principal problem for advocates of sustainability.


Now, the US is a well-educated nation, judging from the sheer number of universities, colleges, community colleges, and public schools it has.  So certainly, one might presume, we Americans have the knowledge base to deal with our sustainability problem, thus to solve it.  But are we really that devoted to learning?


And, more pointedly, do we have a sustainable educational system?  Does the system focus on the problem of how to make civilization last longer, in the way described above?  The short answer is: no.  Our educational systems are designed to manufacture diplomas and degrees without purpose, in educational “production for production’s sake.”  The system empowers students to occupy enhanced strata within the employment market, without motivating necessary social change.  Our public schools are tied to the test-score-production regimes of the No Child Left Behind Act, and our universities are caught up in the “credentials race” described in David F. Labaree’s How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning.  The essence of this credentials race is described therein as follows:

When students at all levels see education through the lens of social mobility, they (the students) quickly conclude that what matters most is not the knowledge they attain in school but the credentials they acquire there.  Grades, credits, and degrees – these become the objects to be pursued.  The end result is to reify the formal markers of education and displace the substantive content.  Students learn to do what it takes to acquire the necessary credentials, a process that may involve learning some of the subject matter (at least whatever is likely to be on the next test) but also may not.  After all, if exchange value is key, then it makes sense to work at acquiring the maximum number of markers for the minimum investment of time, money, and intellectual energy.  (32)

It’s easy for learners to be caught up in market-based pandering, given the pressures to succeed and the increased costs of college.  The consequent devaluation of “school learning” in college life has been dutifully recorded in ethnographic studies such as Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year and Michael Moffitt’s Coming of Age in New Jersey.  Go to college because it’s fun; get a degree for social advancement.


At the very top of our university systems is the academic production process that Professor Ben Agger calls “Academic Writing as Real Estate.”  Agger’s argument is summarized in a sentence given on p. 123: “Where tenure is the prize, academic writing is governed by the same market logic as mass-market publishing or entertainment.”  At any rate, this, too, typifies the dilemma of educational sustainability: How do we re-orient our educational institutions to learning and away from systems of “academic production” governed by “market logic”?


To bring this back to my discussion of “definitions of sustainability” — education has, like all else, become a matter of the preservation of “doing what we’re doing” until we can’t do it any longer.  We “get educated” so we can have fun pursuing the “college lifestyle,” and to advance our careers.  In the end, we’ll be college graduates, with all the benefits that accrue.  But we don’t get the sort of learning that would place human activities in synch with ecosystem integrity.


We might conclude, pessimistically, that our academic institutions are as blind as the rest of our society to this one, necessary goal, that of a “global, ecologically sustainable, society.”  We want “sustainability” without really adjusting our practices.  Though even if our practices were mindful of ecosystem integrity, this would not in itself lead to a sustainable society, as the problem of sustainability is one of changing the social system as a whole.


But alternative practices can still show us what a sustainable society would look like, and we can still “get there.”  The concept of “prefiguration,” elaborated by Joel Kovel in his book The Enemy of Nature, can help us understand how to “get there.”  For Kovel, prefiguration is a quality one can find in practices, objects, or institutions.  Specifically, Kovel defines “prefiguration” as “the potential of the given to contain the lineaments of what is to be” (218).  Prefigurative qualities are qualities that hint at the future, now.  In anticipation of a sustainable society, we can look for prefiguration in the degree to which an institution, human construct, or social entity points to the potential for a future, global, ecologically sustainable, society.


Of course, if prefiguration is to work, aspects of the present society must work toward the anticipated future.  The question of a global, ecologically sustainable society is not one of whether it will happen; but of how.  Will the world arrive at sustainable life by disaster, by design, or by a combination of both?  Positive prefiguration hints at the possibility that a sustainable society can be designed.


Now, to be honest about “sustainability,” it’s a category to be applied to entire societies, in a wholistic way.  Either a whole society is sustainable, or it isn’t.  Aspects of a society may change, but sustainability is the measure of whether the whole society sticks around, or doesn’t.  But “prefiguration” is a quality that can be applied to individual aspects of a society.  In The Enemy of Nature, Kovel suggests that communal and democratic institutions are especially “prefigurative,” because in them he sees the possibility of a “free association of producers” that will be necessary if we are to share the rights and responsibilities of a sustainable society:

A free association implies the fullest extension of democracy, with a public sphere and public ownership that is genuinely collective and in which each person makes a difference. (199)

With the ideal of a “free association of producers,” Kovel asserts the primacy of the concept of “use-value,” in which people use things to directly satisfy their needs, ahead of the concept of “exchange-value,” in which people produce in order to meet an accounting-ledger “bottom line,” without regard to direct expressions of human need.  But, to a certain extent, we should also be looking for prefiguration in physical institutions, for social get-together places and institutions that approximate the “free association of producers.”  As an example of a prefigurative physical space, I would like to suggest a type of physical space I have suggested in previous diaries: the (collegiate) community garden.


One of the primary advantages of community gardens is that they are attempts to overcome the dichotomy of city and countryside.  The city, as Paul Prew points out in his essay The Twenty-First Century World Ecosystem, is a center of accumulation, and so it tends to suck the life out of the zones of extraction, which include the farms.  However, the community garden uses the extractive powers of the city to put resources back into the land, for the sake of producing sustainable food sources within urban communities.  In such a way, the slower rhythms of rural life are re-introduced into hectic urban settings.


Another good thing about community gardens is that they can be attached to urban educational institutions.  As opposed to farms, which are typically some ways out in the countryside, urban community gardens are convenient sites for whole communities to learn about the ecology of crop-growing: agroecology.  A community garden, then, offers a prefiguration of the “sustainable education” which we will need to have if we are ever to reach a global, ecologically sustainable, society.


Conclusion: The Farm as Prefiguration and Physical Space


Now, neither the Farm, nor community gardens in general, will save our society’s problems with sustainability.  Nor will such institutions prefigure everything that needs to be prefigured.  But community gardens do offer urban residents places from which to reconnect with rural thinking, but from a more socially-conscious standpoint.


The Farm puts out a meaningful amount of food – but largely it exists as an academic experiment in farming rather than as an organized community garden because it is on the Pomona College campus itself.  (The adjunct, arranged by Juan Araya as an individual plot, is more like an organized community garden than the original plot of the Farm.  But it exists as a production space, even though the distribution of its output is so far not being organized in any capitalist manner.  Nobody pays for Farm produce.)


Food production under conditions of American capitalist agriculture typically sets out economic privileges for large corporate businesses.  Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma explains concisely how the distribution scheme of American corporate agriculture favors large businesses.  Community gardens, however, can be spaces where food production is studied in public, in search of a better, more empowering way for publics which are now dependent upon “the market” for daily subsistence.  In many places community gardens exist in tandem with Food Not Bombs agencies, which also combine DIY (do-it-yourself) action with socially-meaningful goals (feeding the hungry) and ecosystemically-meaningful goals (recycling “unmarketable” food).


Of course, the Farm is a significant distance from being an “association of free producers.”  There is not much that is “communal” about the Farm in any organized way.  But in taking advantage of DIY labor, the Farm allows for a public (as opposed to a private) space for “free production” in Kovel’s terms.

Community garden projects like this can bring communities together as signs of education about sustainability, as well.

Clearly the survival of the Pomona College Natural Farm required a lot of good old-fashioned direct action in order to maintain it, though.  This essay serves as a proposal to create more community gardens, and not as a business proposal.  If community gardening were to spread throughout urban Earth, a lot more direct action, and a lot more guerrilla gardening, will have to take place.  We will need a Food Not Lawns initiative, to replace our grass-growing habits with better plant activities.  And we will need to operate the resultant gardens, farms, and small spaces for mustard greens as institutions of education about real sustainability.  There is no political class or set of financial institutions lining up to make this happen.  It will just have to come together from within the cracks in the current social set-up.


Works cited:


Agger, Ben.  “Academic Writing as Real Estate.”  The Decline of Discourse.  New York: Taylor and Francis, 1990. 122-147.


Dryzek, John.  Rational Ecology.  New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.


Iverson, Dave, and Zane Cornett.  “A Definition of Sustainability for Ecosystem Management.”  Eco-Watch 7/20/94.


Johnston, Josee.  “Who Cares About The Commons?”  Capitalism Nature Socialism 16:4 (December 2003): 1-42.


Kovel, Joel.  The Enemy of Nature.  New York: Zed, 2004.


Pollan, Michael.  The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  New York: Penguin, 2006.


Prew, Paul.  “The 21st-Century World Ecosystem.”  http://sharepoint.wo… .

Is this guy ready to be president?

I admit that I never understood the premise of Barack Obama’s presidential run. He’s very smart, very articulate, and very charismatic, but he’s never done anything, never led on any issue, never made clear why he’s different than any of the other candidates. He’s good at raising money. He has the rock star thing going for him. But what makes him presidential material?

I never bought into the whole Purple thing, either. I love the color, but this is not a time to be compromising with a Republican Party that that has gone from red to infra-red. This is a time for reestablishing what the Democratic Party is about, and what America is about. The Purple thing doesn’t do that. When he was elected to the Senate, I thought Obama would learn, grow, get some accomplishments under his belt, and eventually become president. Plenty of time. Plenty to learn. Plenty of room to grow. When he decided to run, this time, I thought his ego and ambition had gotten ahead of him.

So, I have to be open about the fact that I was always skeptical about this run. Then came the Donnie McClurkin disaster. At first, I assumed it was a clumsy staffing mistake, and I discounted those who took a more cynical view. I assumed Obama would fix it. His subsequent actions have convinced me the cynics were right. I now believe Obama is just another craven, calculating politician. Throwing gays under the bus may give him a boost in South Carolina, and it probably won’t hurt him in Iowa or New Hampshire, so why be principled when there are votes to be had?

Now comes this, from the New York Daily News:

Barack Obama sparked a generational fight Wednesday by trashing White House rival Hillary Clinton for being too old to unite America, saying she and others her age have fought the same tired fights for too long.

“I think there’s no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Sen. Clinton can’t deliver on, and part of it is generational,” Obama, 46, said on Fox News. “Sen. Clinton and others, they’ve been fighting some of the same fights since the ’60s, and it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done.”

Experts and opponents pounced, saying Obama’s remarks could offend the most reliable voters, people older than 50 – especially in early-voting Iowa. “You are counting precisely on an older group of Democrats in Iowa,” said Iowa State University’s Steffen Schmidt. “You can’t tell them they’re backward-looking. Somebody should be fired in his campaign.”

It’s just stupid. Obama keeps demonstrating that he doesn’t get what it is to be on the big stage, and that he doesn’t understand how to retain his own political framing. Older voters matter a lot more than gay voters, to someone making cold political calculations, so I expect Obama will actually do something, this time, to make amends. The contrast between how he handles this and how he handled the McClurkin situation will only further demonstrate why he didn’t bother to make a serious effort, that time. But these stumbles just further demonstrate that his premise of being a unifier is nothing but political babble. He plays the game, and he doesn’t even yet play it well. And he has still yet to take an original stand that differentiates himself from any other candidate on any major issue.

Many Obama supporters try to make the race a binary: it’s him or Hillary, so we’d best get on board. Frankly, at this point, I’m not sure he wants to force that choice.

Pony Party, this ‘n that

According to Yahoo!News…

Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenager sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of mil lions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies….

…The study found that while abstinence-only efforts appear to have little positive impact, more comprehensive sex education programs were having “positive outcomes” including teenagers “delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use.”

Ummm…..duhhhh!!

The least caffeinated cities are San Francisco/Oakland, followed closely by Philadelphia, New York, Detroit and Baltimore. The survey considered numerous caffeine sources, including coffee, tea, sodas, energy drinks, chocolate, pain relievers and caffeine pills….

…Here’s the buzz on the most and least wired cities:

  Most Caffeinated Cities:  Least Caffeinated Cities:
  1. Chicago  1. San Francisco/Oakland
  2. Tampa  2. Philadelphia
3.  Miami  3. New York
4. Phoenix  4. Detroit
5.  Atlanta  5. Baltimore

The Yahoo!News story also contains a breakdown of caffeine consumption by source.

And, finally, the Artist formerly known as ‘the Artist formerly known as Prince’ is apparently suing his 3 largest fan sites, insisting they remove his likeness, lyrics, and ‘anything linked to Prince’s likeness’ from their websites.  Yep, he’s suing his fans.  He has also apparently threatened to sue various video and image-hosting sites for the distribution of his work and image. 

Prince’s representatives claim that the website owners are spinning the story to make themselves look like victims, calling their claims ‘incorrect and misleading’.

Be nice!
~73v

Docudharma Times Thursday Nov.8

This is an Open Thread: All languages welcome



four people in Karachi have been charged with treason for alleged comments against emergency rule.

‘Hundreds held’ in Bhutto raids

The party of Pakistan’s former PM Benazir Bhutto has said more than 700 members were arrested overnight ahead of a planned mass rally on Friday.


Activists were taken from their homes in the latest crackdown under emergency rule measures brought in on Saturday by President Pervez Musharraf.


The raids came hours after US President George W Bush told Gen Musharraf in a “frank” phone call to hold polls soon.


Mr Bush told Gen Musharraf he could not be both army head and president.

Four charged with treason in Pakistan crackdown

Four men have been charged with treason by the Pakistani authorities for making anti-government speeches in the southern port city of Karachi, a court official said today.


The treason charges against the three politicians and a union activist, which carry a maximum sentence of death, came in the wake of mounting political unrest since General Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency on Saturday and suspended Pakistan’s constitution.


The four were arrested on Monday and interrogated by police before being formally charged yesterday, said the court official.


USA

How Blackwater Sniper Fire Felled 3 Iraqi Guards

Witnesses Call Shooting From Justice Ministry Unprovoked, But State Dept. Cleared Its Security Team After a Brief Probe


By Steve Fainaru

Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, November 8, 2007; Page A01


BAGHDAD — Last Feb. 7, a sniper employed by Blackwater USA, the private security company, opened fire from the roof of the Iraqi Justice Ministry. The bullet tore through the head of a 23-year-old guard for the state-funded Iraqi Media Network, who was standing on a balcony across an open traffic circle. Another guard rushed to his colleague’s side and was fatally shot in the neck. A third guard was found dead more than an hour later on the same balcony.


Eight people who responded to the shootings — including media network and Justice Ministry guards and an Iraqi army commander — and five network officials in the compound said none of the slain guards had fired on the Justice Ministry, where a U.S. diplomat was in a meeting. An Iraqi police report described the shootings as “an act of terrorism” and said Blackwater “caused the incident.” The media network concluded that the guards were killed “without any provocation.”

House Approves Broad Protections for Gay Workers

WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 – The House on Wednesday approved a bill granting broad protections against discrimination in the workplace for gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, a measure that supporters praised as the most important civil rights legislation since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 but that opponents said would result in unnecessary lawsuits.


The bill, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, is the latest version of legislation that Democrats have pursued since 1974. Representatives Edward I. Koch and Bella Abzug of New York then sought to protect gay men and lesbians with a measure they introduced on the fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, the brawl between gay men and police officers at a bar in Greenwich Village that is widely viewed as the start of the American gay rights movement.


AT&T gave feds access to all Web, phone traffic, ex-tech says


By Ellen Nakashima


The Washington Post

WASHINGTON – His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002, when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency (NSA) to an AT&T office in San Francisco.


“What the heck is the NSA doing here?” Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.


A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, show the agency gained access to massive amounts of e-mail, Web search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecom providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.


Middle East

Court convicts 32 al-Qaida suspects

SAN’A, Yemen – A Yemeni court convicted Wednesday 32 al-Qaida suspects of planning attacks on oil and gas installations in the country, sentencing them to prison terms of up to 15 years. Four others were acquitted.


Six of those convicted remain at large and were tried in absentia.


The prosecution had charged the group, all from Yemen, with forming an armed gang and planning attacks against oil installations with rocket-propelled grenades in September 2006.

West Bank settlements ‘expanding’

Construction is continuing in dozens of Jewish settlements in the West Bank despite Israel’s pledge to freeze their expansion, an campaign group has said.


Peace Now says Jewish population growth is three times higher in the area occupied in 1967 than in Israel itself.


It says settlers are bypassing a ban on using caravans to expand settlements by erecting pre-fabricated homes on site.


Europe

Emergency in Georgia after unrest

The first full day of a state of emergency is in place in Georgia after clashes between police and opposition protesters in the capital Tbilisi.


All demonstrations are banned and only state television can broadcast news.


President Mikhail Saakashvili imposed the 15-day emergency after six days of opposition rallies, saying “Russian special services” were behind unrest.

Putin dictating agenda to EU, thinktank report says


Ian Traynor, Europe editor

Thursday November 8, 2007

The Guardian


Europe has lost the plot in trying to cope with a resurgent Russia under President Vladimir Putin, who is dictating the agenda in his dealings with European capitals, according to a study published yesterday.


The west’s post-cold war policy of promoting democracy and westernisation in Russia has failed. “That strategy is now in tatters,” said the 65-page report from the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Today it is Moscow that sets the pace for EU-Russia relations. Russia [is] more powerful, less cooperative, and more intransigent. Russia’s growing confidence has transformed the EU-Russia relationship.”


Latin America

Canadian detainee faces Gitmo hearing

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – The U.S. military is reviving its long-delayed prosecution of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay with a court hearing Thursday for a former child soldier accused of killing a U.S. Green Beret in Afghanistan.


The tribunal system set up by the Bush administration following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has yet to bring any of the men held at this U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba to trial. One detainee, an Australian, was convicted in March in a pretrial plea bargain.


The case against Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was 15 when he was captured in 2002, presents a new hurdle for the military as it attempts to try him on charges including murder, conspiracy and spying.

Shooting intensifies in Rio slum – and the locals love it


Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

Thursday November 8, 2007

The Guardian


At some point this week a grimacing, muscle-bound colossus wearing skin-tight purple jeans will charge into a hilltop shantytown in Rio de Janeiro and send locals scattering for cover.


In a city where heavily armed drug gangs engage in frequent turf wars this might not seem so strange. In this case, however, intruder in question will have fluorescent green skin and will go by the name of the Incredible Hulk.


Africa

Zimbabwe police arrest, charge attorney general

HARARE (Reuters) – Zimbabwe’s attorney general faces corruption charges after being briefly detained over allegations he promised to help a fugitive banker who had fled the southern African nation avoid arrest, police said on Thursday.


Attorney General Sobusa Gula-Ndebele was arrested on Tuesday and then released after a statement was recorded, chief police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena said.


“So far we don’t know when he will appear in court, but we have finished everything, including the investigations, which meant taking statements from witnesses,” Bvudzijena told Reuters


Asia

Myanmar’s Suu Kyi meets UN envoy

YANGON (AFP) – Myanmar’s detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi met Thursday with UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari, a Myanmar official told AFP.


“They are meeting,” said the official, who requested anonymity.


The meeting at a government guest house in the main city of Yangon was a rare trip outside her home for Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has spent 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest.


Gambari arrived in Myanmar on Saturday on his second mission to the military-ruled country since the junta violently suppressed pro-democracy demonstrations in September.

Boy ‘killed by teacher for doodling in book’

Ashling O’Connor in Bombay


Police are investigating the death of a 14-year-old Delhi school-boy allegedly beaten by his teacher for scribbling in his notebook.


Ajay Kumar collapsed in class on October 23 and had been kept alive in hospital by a ventilator. He died on Tuesday, according to Delhi police.


Officers opened an inquiry after a complaint by the boy’s father, Satya Prakash, who claimed that Ajay’s hands and legs “became motionless” after he was hit by the teacher, Shyam Lal Raturi.


“My son’s fault was that he was scribbling in his notebook and writing over his teacher’s signature,” he told the Hindustan Times.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

In 1992 I learned to speak my truths.  They were tentative at first, hardly more than notes about the reality of my life.  Later some of them became poems.  Still later, more poems were added to add the view of hindsight.  I’ve tried to arrange them into a cohesive whole.  Maybe it works.  Maybe it has more meaning this way.

The title of the poem was from an email .sig one of my transsexual friends used to use.  A shout-out to you, Allison, wherever you may be.

A Transition through Poetry XIV

Art Link

Incompletion

Unfinished Woman

Some assembly required.
Includes non-factory installed equipment.
Read instructions completely before beginning.
Mistakes are not correctable.
Insert tab A into slot B.
Batteries are not included.

–Robyn Elaine Serven
–June, 1993

I know you have talent.  What sometimes is forgotten is that being practical is a talent.  I have a paucity for that sort of talent in many situations, though it turns out that I’m a pretty darn good cook.  🙂 

Let your talent bloom.  You can share it here.  Encourage others to let it bloom inside them as well.

Won’t you share your words or art, your sounds or visions, your thoughts scientific or philosophic, the comedy or tragedy of your days, the stories of doing and making?  And be excellent to one another!

Why Do You Hate Hillary Clinton?

There is a recommended diary at daily kos which epitomizes to me how ridiculous the blogs have become. It is all about, well nothing, not about issues at all. Consider these “points.”

I can’t understand what she believes in, really believes in. Other than being the first woman president; other than playing the ultimate post-menopausal “it’s my turn” role, why does she want the job, and what is she going to do if she gets it?

Besides being incredibly vacuous (my earlier diary on clammy c’s diary about “why you want to be President” explains why), isn’t this absolutely incredibly sexist? “POST MENOPAUSAL?” And yet this casual sexism raises nary an eyebrow. Even Daily Kos FPer Hunter endorses this drivel. Pathetic.

I don’t represent corporations in my practice. A lawyer has a duty to zealously represent  her client. That’s really hard to do if you don’t like what your client has done, or does. From everything I’ve read, Senator Clinton was able to do this, and do it quite well. I have talked to other corporate defense attorneys, people who I like, and they often feel terribly conflicted. They have to teach their children right from wrong, but then they pay their tuition bills by representing polluters or companies that knowingly sell dangerous products.  I’ve never read that Senator Clinton felt any angst about this conflict, and it appears that she is extremely proud of her work on behalf of her former clients.  Maybe she’s managed to completely compartmentalize it. I don’t think I like that.

Of course this is personal for me. But standing apart from that, wtf does this mean? She does not represent corporations? How about rapists? Child molesters? Does she wonder about her good friemds who represent evil corporations? Do they go out of there way to impress upon her how conflicted they are? Again, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that this drivel is recommended and praised demonstrates just how stupid Daily Kos has become.

I hear her supporters  gushing about her accomplishments. Maybe I’m jaded because of what I do, but I don’t get it. . . .

Now THERE is a good reason to hate Hillary. Sheesh. Again, recommended and praised as a great diary. How stupid is Daily Kos now?

The fait-accompli attitude really rubs me the wrong way. We are having more debates and forms than ever, and the Clinton campaign is acting as if it’s all a mere dress rehearsal, and they’re going through the motions.

Again, wtf? Is Hillary skipping debates? Fait accompli attitude? One more time, this is a highly praised and recommended diary? Daily Kos sucks.

I don’t know much about Iowa, but I know that New Hampshire is not very much like Texas or the Carolinas. There’s a visceral hatred of all things Clinton in the south, and I don’t see us picking up any ground with Clinton at the head of the ticket.

Now there is a good substantive reason to hate Hillary – the South hates her. Hell, on that reasoning, give up being a Dem. Okay, this is supposed to pass for strategic political thinking I suppose, but this is a praised and recommended diary at daily kos. Not a poll is cited to buttress this.

Conclusion, Daily Kos sucks. Now, a test for Docudharma. I am sure many of you dislike Hillary Clinton. Please explain to me why. And please do a better job than this awful diary. 

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Well I hope we all remember what it was like to vote, it was only yesterday.  For me the experience was somewhat new.  Connecticut has used lever machines all my (voting) life.

This time there was a station to answer questions about the new procedure (and of course I stopped and let them explain because I have NO intention of going uncounted) then the usual “Show me your license”.  This year, there was some confusion because Kirk the clerk was on the wrong page, but I gently corrected him.  Someday I’m afraid I’ll be disenfranchised just because I prefer to use initials, but it’s not that big a town and everyone knows ek because I am such a character.

At the next station I was handed a big paper ballot that looked exactly like the sample ballot they used to give us in school (they also had mini training machines), the type they normally paste up outside the gym just before you enter in case you haven’t been paying attention.

They have brought back the party lines which were banned some years ago in hopes on making our elections more “non-partisan”.  I’m glad that now there is a clear distinction between the party that actively promotes torture and the party that merely tolerates it.

When I took my AP history exam the one question I “blew” was, “What electoral invention was imported from Australia in the late 1800’s?”

My answer was “kangaroos” which was not really wrong because the “secret” ballot is also called a “kangaroo” ballot because of the origin of that innovation.  Even today if you vote in a small place like Dixville Notch at the Town Meeting you do it in public.

Now that’s Democracy.

In the current case though, it was easy to see that I had voted straight party line Democratic because the ballot was so big that it really didn’t fit in the plain manila (another location name) “privacy” folder, and besides you had to feed it face up through the ballot reader so it was clearly visible to the two election monitors, one from each party.

I don’t mind.  I’m proud of my vote.

Outside the polls I ran into Tom, my elementary school friend from the Democratic Party and I asked him, “Why don’t we have someone running for every available office?”

“Not enough candidates.  You should run.”

Alas I am unelectable.  How about you?

I’m beginning to lose all hope

No. Really.

I again have a temp job at our County Elections Department. I was there for the last election, but this time it’s the BIGGY…the Presidential year.

And, I’m losing hope for our society. Our Democracy. Why you ask? Well…where do I begin.

People have no idea how to fill out a simple voter registration card. No. Really. They can’t remember where they live. They often have no idea what county they live in. Good Buddha, they can’t even remember if they are registered or the last time they voted!

Sometimes, you know, it’s not all the computer’s fault. Sometimes it’s just pure, plain ignorance that bumps people off the voting rolls.

People don’t understand what a Primary is. They are upset to be told they can’t vote for just anyone they want to in any election they want to. The customer feels that they are always in the right. Retailization, I call it. Retail outlets are forever saying their customer is always right…and the customers are buying into it.

Many folks refuse to re-register to vote because they are fearful of being called up for Jury Duty. Now, what does that say about our judicial system that people are refusing to participate in it. They’ll watch it on the TeeVee on Law and Order, but they won’t go near it in real life. “Too inconvenient” they say.

Some folks won’t even be bothered with voting. They don’t have time they say. It doesn’t matter they say. Politicians are all the same they say. What’s in it for me they say.

I don’t know. I try to put on bright smile and trudge off to work but with the morons in Sacramento who wanted to have their little Presidential Primary in the “spotlight”, they have created 3 elections to be confused about next year.

I’ll give you 5-2 that most people are going to be so sick and tired of the whole shebang by next November, most won’t want to show up.

Your Caption Here

 

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.

The picture was taken by Doug Mills of The New York Times, after Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer voted to approve Mike “Torture” Mukasey nomination for Attorney General. Or, as the NY Times reported Senate committee approves Mukasey nomination. “The vote, 11 to 8, with two Democrats joining all of the committee’s Republicans in supporting Mr. Mukasey, all but assured him of final confirmation by the full Senate. The Senate’s Democratic leaders are expected to schedule a vote by next week.”

While the focus on Mukasey has been his “refusal to label a harsh interrogation technique used on terrorist suspects as torture.” The real concern, I think, is this from the Washington Post:

[Mukasey] said it is “an open question,” for example, whether a U.S. citizen seized on U.S. soil can be detained indefinitely after the president declares that he is in an enemy combatant. He also reiterated his view that the president can ignore surveillance laws if they infringe on his powers as commander in chief, and said a Justice Department prosecutor cannot enforce a congressional subpoena if the White House has asserted a claim of executive privilege.

Of course that little nugget has been scrubbed from WaPo‘s website, but Truthout has up the original story.

So, that leaves the picture and your caption. From the look on Sen. Russ Feingold’s face, I think he knows that Feingold and Schumer just sold out the United States. His expression matched my own and reminded me of the old Stealer Wheel’s song — ‘Stuck in the Middle With You‘. 

Well I don’t know why I came here tonight
I got the feeling that something ain’t right
I’m so scared in case I fall of my chair
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs

Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you

What’s your caption?

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