Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Stories we tell ourselves

Things you think about in the middle of the morning:
Americans and fake images.
Marion Morrison, a.k.a., John Wayne, never served in the military. Ever. He didn't enlist in WWII because his career was taking off.
Clinton Eastwood Jr. was never a cop. Ever. He never walked a beat. He has been an actor since his 20's. In other words, he knows absolutely nothing about being a cop or ordinary life.

So why admire these people? They did or have done nothing for the world other than perform in fairly tales where they played something they're not. At least I knew as a child Bugs Bunny was a cartoon
.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Money as Fetish, Money as unreal.

Money is, in itself, a central problem. It isn't real, and instead it is an index for what you have access to, whether resources, political power or  the ability to co-opt others to do your bidding. It separates us from what we are actually doing in the real world, so a coal mine operator is justified in everything he does, no matter what, because of profit. The same is true with environmental and social destruction, whether mines, peat bog extraction, or pornography. When the central justifying reason  a society operates is money, then anyone can justify what they do by profit, or co-opt others with it. So, a mine, destroying thousands of acres for millenia, is justified by "economics". Miners get paid, the state gets tax revenue, etc..etc. The problem is this separation from what is actual, or real, does not account for the true cost of resource extraction, or what it does to human beings. We call it progress, but is it really progress to destroy 10,000 acres to create a false profit and livelihood, change the climate and leave a mess for the future? Our system, because it operates by an artificial index, does not account for the damage it does; it destroys several places for oil, several for other raw materials, then extracts fish from the oceans and protein from precious soil, and is able to ignore the long term consequences because it indexes money rather than resources. The same is true for pornography; money is the reason, but it is really about co-opting others to give the most intimate of human acts for access to resources. Another example is the conversion of rich soiled farmland to suburbia; it is done because it is more "valuable" at the time, but in reality it is an artificial value. Subsidized by other human activities, it creates an artificial "boom", separated from the physical reality of removing land from production and using resources from other places to create an artificial auto network and import resources from other places by using fossil fuels. In short, it destroys more and more. Economists have created more complex indices, incorporating the "externalized" costs. But until society itself creates a new central index incorporating the other more important values and makes them central, we will still suffer from the essential problem, the separation of the real from the consequences.

Sunday, August 05, 2012

The Fires of 2012

This summer, fires in both Colorado and now, Oklahoma, have burnt both landscape and homes. As is the norm with fires, they were declared tragedies. Drought and climate change are blamed for both, but there is another factor, and that is human behavior. We have allowed ourselves to build in fire-prone places, regardless of cost and without thought.  Last year, a somewhat unknown but very important Minnesotan died, Roger Kennedy. Kennedy, best described as a polymath, wrote many volumes, but perhaps one of his most important books with multiple lessons was "Wildfire and Americans", which examined fire policy and advocated changes in how and where we build. Fire, as he stated, is as naturally occurring as rain, but Americans choose to ignore it. We build in places the equivalent of floodplains out of materials that burn, then pay the cost and blame nature. And noone who chooses to do this ever pays the full cost; instead we all pay for their mistakes. Governments, namely us, instead pay for our own idiocy, whether directly or indirectly. Fire is a problem of human choice, and not a mistake of government or agency action. .

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Dispatches from the Gulag;


The Range, isolated as it is, is like all the worlds garbage dumps.

The modern world consists of destroying places, extracting everything as in  ripping teeth from its jaws,  to resurface other places. This, so we can sit  in front of electronic screens and pretend we enjoy what we are doing. Very few are human anymore. Somehow we let them take that from us.

The human capacity for social idiocy and fetish is what will kill us, not the dreams of meteors or planetary – galactic alignments, but our capacity to destroy the world so that we may look good in leather and have the proper deodorant. We are destroying the world for cheap shit from Walmart. And the worst of it is we know it all falls apart soon after we buy it.

There are, simply, too many of us. Too many of us wanting flames painted on trucks, shoes with the proper colored laces, the freedom to wear plastic bunny ears with miniature batteries and mercury switches, soon to be left on the street and later swimming in the air and water as plastic film and organo-chlorines. We are poisoning the earth and ourselves for the right to be drunk and pose to each other. America has long since reached its zenith; it is now scraping the bottom of the outhouse pit. The country of Lincoln's literacy now watches Snooki.

The Range is like any other place we want to destroy. The people, five generations into the proud process, hope that they and future generations will advance civilization by mining sulfides, from whence we can create more mercury switches and electronic screens projecting delusional images and pictures of dogs with clothes. This absurdity is most poignantly displayed from last year; the very same people battling the building of a new school demanding the quick opening of a sulfide mine. Unlike the supposedly backward inhabitants of the Amazon, the co-opted, well trained dogs that pass for humans on the Iron Range know that progress means destroying the place for the benefit of foreign investors; since they will receive a pittance of the profits, this thus means all of mankind will benefit. Anything for an ATV and a new gun.

The Range was once a place of progressive activism; it has now become a caricature straight from Orwell. Earthfest was sponsored by a mining company; it refused money from an environmental group so as to not anger the mining companies, generous benefactors that they are. Its meaning is now perfectly Orwellian: The numbers of over-sized vehicles inhabiting the parking lot marked a carbon footprint rivaling a small Nascar event. Sustainability has arrived Iron Range and American style, in a Ford F 150 with aluminum rims and a plastic imaged travel coffee cup given as advertising; the ATV has today remained at home. The population is split into the haves and have nots, or better, the co-opted and the desperate. Some fit into both categories, ingesting methamphetamine, alcohol and weed to numb the savagery. The lucky receive theirs by legal prescription and avoid the possibility of jail. The truly co-opted kiss the boots of the corporate masters and destroy the world for a lake home and a new vehicle. Some are concerned for the future and plant the occasional tree; the truly honest get drunk and drive their trucks off the mine's cliff edge as symbolic gesture. At least they are not pretending.

Like all of America, we have reached a cultural tipping point. The decades of mind numbing rants from the extreme corporate right wing are reaching the masses who have  long since forgotten the emptiness of the  co-opted Democratic coalition. The unions often now consist of old white guys determined that any new subsidized project, no matter how absurd, is a gift to be given to them. Daddy needs a new Harley. We live in a fake world, use fake money, eat fake food and live in fake cultures. Nothing this unreal can survive for very long.  Someday it will all end.


The local festival, Land of the Loon, is perhaps the best example. A giant artificial loon is placed on a lake so worn from its industrial past and altered landscape  it is resupplied by  enormous pumps from a mine pit. The beach, opened last year, provided many with the joy of swimmer's itch. People walk around an asphalt roaded park, looking at trinkets and eating local delicacies such as hamburgers. An early morning parade, replete with drunken clowns and marching bands. In the evening, a fine debauchery as  the laws are forgiven and alcohol is served. Most of the outdoor audience is young; like most Range cities this place is beyond old, the active cohort long since moved on or avoiding the delusional, confused state that is the reality of a half shuttered downtown and filthy bars.

That perhaps best describes the Range; since we have destroyed it, we might as well drink ourselves to oblivion and burn the place down. That is the truly proper way to end it. 

Saturday, June 02, 2012

The Papacy at Avignon

This news: Catholic churches in Minnesota have donated more than $350,000 to Minnesota for Marriage, a group that supports the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage.

A brief list of other initiatives this organization has supported throughout the years:
1: Known by many words, and covered up by the current white robed lunatic and chief pederast: organized pedophilia, pederasty, sexual abuse etc...
2: A couple of fun excursions called the Crusades: In the First Crusade, they slaughtered the noncombatants and ate human beings. This was forgiven by  papal indulgences.
3: A truly spiritual and holy period  when headquartered at Avignon.
4: The Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation
5: Concordat with the Nazis and Mussolini and assisting Nazis and other fascists escape to South America in secret after World War II.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Sustainable Earthfest?


Earthfest: And how is this sustainable?

This weekend was Iron Range "Earthfest", ostensibly showcasing  and encouraging "sustainability".  This picture shows the United States' primary problem; its fundamental building structure is the unsustainable use of fossil fuels.It is the problem most Americans cannot understand; the way we live and do everything in the U.S  can never be sustained as it is now. 

Despite the good intentions of the organizers, the Iron Range itself is the perfect example of non-sustainability. Ignoring such obvious signs such as the oversize vehicles popular here, one  needs to ask some really fundamental questions. Why are people here? Why do the communities exist? What are they based on?  The answers are fairly obvious, of course. There is only one reason these communities exist and that is resource exploitation. And no, taconite lasting another century or so does not make it "sustainable". All the fossil fuels, food and other material feeding the great bloated cow  called modern America is built on over-exploitation.  Hauling the average pound of food 1500 miles by truck automatically makes it non-sustainable. But basing local income on resource exploitation is by definition non-sustainable. The Iron Range, is in fact, an example of the very definition of non-sustainable. It exists to tear a resource out of the ground and send it elsewhere and for nothing else. In this case, placing a band-aid over an amputation doesn't work. 

The Earthfest board also turned down money from the Sierra Club so as not to anger the mining companies. This, of course, is called co-option, and it undermines the meaning of Earthfest as a "grassroots" organization. It is no longer grassroots when it must show allegiance to the most rapacious organizations on the planet. It is having Ratko Mladić  sponsor a human rights event. It also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of  sustainability; like most Americans, they assume that life can and will go on the way it has since the 1920's...consuming more and more. Now, of course, if we just recycle and compost the world will be saved. This simply is not the case and it is especially true for the range.

Earthfest should choose another name.


Sunday, April 08, 2012

Happy Easter
As my child once said while telling the truth only the youth often speak, Easter is a holiday where people eat chocolate bunnies, paint eggs and eat ham. So this morning I wish to say this: I don't want to hear imaginary stories of a vaguely known Yeshua of Galilee rising from the dead. What we have is a story, repeated and never seen, where a couple ladies go back to a cave, see a rock removed, see no body, and then start spreading the rumor the person has risen from the dead. Somehow this tale, told by a stone age desert cult of fanatics, passed down repeatedly and  becoming the official truth by a committee vote of the late Roman Empire, has meaning for mine and other's lives. As the holiday has become an excuse for purchasing more plastic crap, processed sugar, smoked pork and marketing to children, we now get the cliched pictures of praying hands and myths.

I sit this morning in a city, surrounded by skinhead methheads, SSI receiving addicts medicated by drug dealing psychiatrists,redneck drunks with oversize trucks, harley riding baby-boomers dressed like gay leather porn stars, groups of children looking for hidden plastic containers filled with crap and the occasional devout cult member tottering off to church to worship the imaginary deity. I am  obligated to enjoy the holiday.

I am not.

The culture, a seething mass of commercial trained, tv watching happy robots who buy things they don't need to fill the emptiness of their souls, is at its zenith of freedom as we hand 10 year olds cell phones and flat-screens to watch psychologist designed marketing campaigns aimed at forcing parents to buy more plastic crap to fill the landfills of the world.

The supposed adults destroy the world to gain an adrenaline rush driving large metallic objects, fueled by hydrocarbons which might end this great destructive circus we call civilization. They proclaim freedom, wearing overpriced commercial products, sold to them in a marketing campaign designed to implant delusional images in their passive minds and hold them in an eternal debt cycle.

So here are some numbers for everyone to think of:

Around a minimum of 16,000 children will die from starvation today.
About 1.5 species it took eons to evolve will be killed off today; this will be forever.
America has around 5% of the worlds population and uses around 30% of the world's energy; most of it is wasted.

Happy Easter.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Hell is....

Still having nightmares that hell is a rotating karaoke contest; the playlist consists of bad hair band music and hiphop sung by out of tune drunks. The host is a Great Pyrenee named Francis who channels an air headed blonde I went to college with. Holding eyes open with toothpicks<...