Synergy

There are several words that,when heard,  I  prepare my mental defenses: management consultant,  synergy, paradigm and workshop. I believe management consultants descend from the robber baron's coteries, those who used to servilely bring them coffee, cigars and provide handjobs. Now bereft of duties , they serve the masters by telling them and their workers what the boss wishes to hear in exchange for consultant pay and the right to hang out at hotels and write off meals as business expenses. With most consultants, I immediately reach for my pistol loaded with silver bullets and mallet and wooden stakes kept under my desk. Many workers of the last 20 years will recognize the word "synergy". The real translation is workers doing more with less so investors get more profit for doing nothing. "Paradigm", far from its natural habitat in epistemology, translates to "you can't do things like you used to with four workers and get paid; now you must do it with two and we are cutting your pay so I can get a third house on the Key's. By the way, coffee pots are banned to reduce overhead. You are now required to buy coffee from our machine."  Middle management loves workshops. They have a reason to still be employed as when asked what they do, they can reply "I am organizing the semi-annual workshop" and stay in hotels with their partner,shop and expense meals. They also get to use the words "paradigm" and "synergy", despite having missed them on a test in the lib ed critical thinking requirement class those years ago, in the age before online education when  students were forced to read and physics wasn't explained by an animated rabbit. The new paradigm is  talking monkeys watching screens and laughing at cats, spewing right wing slogans  and posting about gun rights while raging at the guy who just fired them and used the phrase "Under the new paradigm and to increase synergy, upper middle management has decided that to quiet worker dissatisfaction, we will decrease their pay and hire consultants to hold workshops and tell them how they can be happy by changing their paradigm".

Soon the new "paradigm" will be virtual weather, as climate warming will have made the world so inhospitable people will have to stay inside and "virtually encounter" the real world. Until the lightning hits their house and destroys their new paradigm, that is.

Yarnell Fire: A man made tragedy.

The overall incident map is here: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/map/3461/4/

The Yarnell fire and the Fire crew's deaths were a truly man made problem. Viewing the Glen llah subdivision, surrounded by a dry, rocky landscape, the vegetation is immediately against the houses, the entire area easily seen as firetrap in any fast moving fire.  A better name would be community based manslaughter, as these pictures show: http://goo.gl/maps/cqC2S.

The late Roger Kennedy, is his book "Wildfire and Americans"clearly explained the problem than I could ever hope to. 

The focus, most likely, will be on "safety errors" and "failures to follow protocol", rather than the underlying, fundamental question of " why is this community here?" and "what were its zoning requirements?", if any. Last, and never asked, of course, is "why were these people out fighting that fire in the first place?", other than to defend the undependable and get paid the relatively small amount they do.

The headlines already announce the tired shibboleth of "Community Mourns (add victim name here), but this case is an obvious absurdity. The place is in a firetrap, and the subdivision is a firetrap's firetrap. That is the real tragedy. These people were killed for no reason other than stupidity and development greed.

The Mythology of Destruction

Northeastern Minnesota's history is based on exploitation; the small cities are and contain monuments to both the exploited land and people. The now empty downtown's, populated by bars and empty storefronts, are the best symbols. The miserable poor, the addicted and the hapless drink themselves away in the past's shadow.  Some extol the benefits, of course; the exploiters themselves, the cynical self serving and the co-opted. The first group are the same as now, the distant wealthy, treating the land and water as nothing more than objects of wealth.

Whether the lumbermen, the now honored Merritt family, given silhouette memorials in the local school, or the seated ruler Jay Cooke in Duluth, those who destroyed the landscape are honored.  The history lessons ignore the original theft, the giveaway called "severed mineral rights", the rapacious logging and the earth scorching fires that resulted.

The self serving now range from local politicians or favored good old boys. The IRRRB, supposedly a government agency, but now one of gifted loans to former hockey players, employment to local favorites, subsidized golf courses, and giveaways to favorites, doles out the public's pittance share of the removed wealth, borrowing from the future for a lake home, a large truck, a gun and fatty steak. Then there are the managers, the servants of the corporate office, the contractors, and the lobbyists. But we expect the mouthed platitudes from them, as they owe all to the system. They would gladly sell the entire area as long their side of the lake keeps its view.

The most painful, however, are the co-opted. Unlike the workers of a century ago, who, due to the near slave like conditions and pay, saw the system clearly, the workers now preach the corporate line in exchange for vehicles, large screen televisions and drugs. But, unlike the cynically self serving, they are Orwell's latter: "Circus dogs (who) jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip." The truth of the gifts of mining are as water is to the fish...one cannot describe the very thing that makes the world which one lives in. To say the truth, that we are all stealing, is to admit the end of the enterprise. We must pretend there is no world with air less we stop swimming.

A place destroyed and unliveable.

Green American Style

Today was Earthfest, the now annual spring gathering of all things environmental on the Range. Or, in truer words, what people want to think of as green. The Range would not be unique in this, as Homo sapiens americanus neo-suburbanus equates green with a hybrid SUV and a composting coffee cup with organic labeled snacks for the kiddos.

But the absurdity of having a mining company sponsor such an event, much less a company that also mines coal, shows the delusional co-option that is much of American culture. Most Americans are now largely trained as corporate robots, their thoughts controlled as much by commercial infotainment as doctrinaire education.

Where else, but on the Range, could one see a Lincoln Navigator with a mining company parking tag on the mirror? They no longer need company men, for the dogs roll over happily for a paycheck, an SUV and the possibility of a lake home.

The parking lot, half filled with half ton pickups, minivans and SUV's, had the carbon footprint of Sao Paolo, Brasil, sans sugar cane based ethanol and most likely happily fueled by Venezuelan heavy crude. Only here could something like "Earthfest" seem more a celebration of maximal extraction and resource use than an event encouraging us to conserve and preserve. Eat some local food and toss a wax lined coffee cup inside a plastic bag inside a pvc trash can grab some more glossy colored paper telling you how to save energy and step into your truck...you have done your duty.

It is why I long ago gave up any hope of America's culture ever changing, for, as one friend said " Americans have no culture". I realize that they do, but one devoid of history, attachments to place, or a realization that one day someone will have to clean up their mess, giant holes and all. It is a culture tied to boom, bust, gold rushes, real estate booms, oil booms, stolen land, railroad subsidies and the gratitude of nuclear missile silo construction as it "brings jobs". It is a culture of commercials, 'developers" and the hip new suburb with boulevards named after now destroyed landscape features and long dead native tribes starved into extinction. The Range is not unique in this, though it might be the only place on earth where some locals demanded an expedited process for opening a sulfide mine and fought against the opening of a new school. Yes, the area is aging, but unfortunately, age begetting wisdom is a fallacy. What we have here is the old and stupid, demanding the return of 1973 and the muscle car.

The charade is perhaps best seen, where the State Deer Hunters Association, supporting an animal whose population is so out of proportion that growing anything edible requires elaborate fencing and chemical defenses, had a booth where people could engage in virtual shooting. Its connection to sustainability so tenuous it is as if one linked the Japanese dolphin slaughter to humane animal care, the booth is a perfect example of the Range, and America, at its best. We pretend to be green, while we pretend to hunt, in a pretend country. Unfortunately, this time the dream will be real, and awakening will not bring sunshine. We cannot leave the earth. And we cannot live in a virtual world.

On Weapons

Setting limits or requiring registration or licensure is not "punishment". It is simply saying in a now very populated and complex society, having access to something very dangerous means we set some requirements or limits. That is not punishment. It simply means we live in a world with other people and some of us are stupid, incompetent, irrational or just plain dangerous. I don't want people having access to certain things, as my experience has taught me many people are just too stupid or irrational to have access to a car, antibiotics, pets and herbicides or legal alcohol. Why would I want the same people, who often delusionally believe in an afterlife and a nonexistent 2000 yr old legendary god,  not to have limits placed upon the weapons they can possess?

Things hopefully seen in the new year

1: Finally, we rid ourselves of Ted Nugent. He is drowned in an actual physical tub of stupidity; the collected and mashed brains of 100 tea party people.
2: A debate between Chuck Norris and a Bonobo for English language instruction at a community college. Chuck Norris is disqualified for not passing the TOEFL; the “Test of English As Foreign Language”. He is referred to the Strom Thurmond Institute for non-English speaking Americans remedial instruction program.
3: Mitch McConnell is replaced by a 100 year old Galapagos Tortoise. No one notices the difference.
4: Glenn Beck disappears; it is discovered the aliens who planted him found their attempt to infect the planet with collective insanity and stupidity a failure. However, the “Rush” and “Ted” implants have been modestly succesful.
5: All former hairband singers wearing cowboy hats and bandanas to cover their balding pate's are forced to remove them in front of troops of laughing japanese schoolgirls.