Life in the Empire
Bo's Request (an Art Thread)
Where is home?
Moved twelve times in the last 16 years. The transient in transit. Pierce Transit runs through it. Before I came here I was in Rush Limbaugh’s home town before I was surrounded by corn fed Norwegian bred Lutherans singing praise in perfect four part harmony to that Home on the Plain before I’m taken Home – Praise Jesus. I grew up in Iowa, Little Town on the Prairie an island afloat in the ocean of corn. Lived in SoCal, in the Desert where golf and plastic surgery reigns, might have the grit to stay in rainy Tacoma, but, I always say I’m from San Francisco - though I rarely visit anymore.
Home, where is home?
Home is where you are. Correction, home is where you and the two cats are.
What is home? That safe place. That place with love. I love that old car, it always brought me home. The ’75 Westphalia could be home. Or rather, the place that used to be home. Too old, too unreliable to be trusted anymore. Baling wire and duct tape. Just like the U-Haul I drive to the next place, hoping for home.
Searching for home. Migrants with heavy furniture. U-haul. Our orange travois with wheels keeps getting bigger. Full of stuff. Heavy Stuff. Stuff that anchors us. To a home of nostalgia. Anchors to a home that never really existed. That place. This is the place! Well bully for you Brigham Young. Bring ‘em young. Not young anymore, with more stuff each move to stuff in the moving van and every move leaves behind anchors that are mourned in passing.
A house burns down and the anchors are cremated and the past has passed on.
The bubble is burst. The house is on the market. The anchor is weighed. The trees we planted are left behind. Do the new owners love that Japanese Maple we planted as our 10th anniversary gift to our dream of home? Have they maintained the landscaping? Have any of the plants, the dreams, the love we planted been cared for in our absence? Or have they been torn up by the roots to make room for the next owners’ dream of home?
Where are the anchors? Is there a home port? Adrift. Without a home. Drift wood is picked up for beach fires to warm the beach rats without a home. Their shacks have been bulldozed like West Bank ancestral olive groves to make room for more condos and home-loving dreamers blowing a bubble. Pop!
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by waldopaper on
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Gettysburg National Time Park
The idea is to create the first National Time Park like John Muir and TR created the first National Park at Yosemite. GNTP is a spherical time capsule. Begin with the Battlefield Park as it is today. Then within a spherical space encompassing the Park, everything below and above is kept as it was in 1863 as much as possible That means, all pipes, all wires removed, and no more people allowed inside the sphere than were present in July, 1863.
Remove the monuments. They were not present July, 1863. People allowed to live inside the sphere must maintain and preserve all states of infrastructure and technology in 1863 state as much as possible. No aircraft are allowed inside the sphere. No drilling. No electricity. No power tools. "Residents" are kept at 1863 level... about 2500, "Visitors" allowed one week per year, say 200, 000, "Union" and "Confederate." No internal combustion engines. No LiPo batteries. Livestock must be preserved and maintained.
A better idea would to freeze the sphere in time exactly as it is now and freeze the time technology and access restricted to July 4 1863 in perpetuity, keep the monuments where they are and let it all go wild. Like a nature preserve. Leave the wires there, let them fall down. Sort of like the difference between the preservation at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Preserve Gettysburg like Birkenau and let it fall down. Auschwitz was a work camp. Birkenau was a death camp. Auschwitz was designed to be permanent, Birkenau temporary.
Gettysburg was a death camp and it still is today. For a brief time, Birkenau land was used specifically to kill people, and so was Gettysburg. Mark off an area exactly the same size as Birkenau and let it fall down. Let the residents there practice. Let them decide what to do with the 200,000 visitors allowed inside the sphere for the next however-many-years-it-is since the sphere/capsule/Time Park is sealed July 1-3 1863. Germs killed as many in either place as gas or bullets did. Weapons killed for days, germs for years.
Memes from all those places are still killing us today, and we are no more aware of them then most residents of Gettysburg Pa., USA were of germs on July 1, 1863. Yet typhoid took Rosa more a decade after the battle because typhoid was as common as a collection call is today... and for a lot of the same reasons... among them: ignorance. That is why all the permanent residents of Gettysburg National Time Park should be memeticists. The objective is study of the Gettysburg meme evolution from July 4 1865 to date of seal.
Capitalism is packed in that meme... along with war, nationalism and technology.. complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units. So John Muir pointed out to Teddy Roosevelt, would you care to see Yosemite "preserved" the way Niagara Falls has? That idea became repulsive to TR, which is amazing. They saw the difference between Paris and Las Vegas before Vegas ever existed. Both people understood memes before the word even existed. What happened in the next 50 years between Gettysburg and Ypres?
Livestock. We still call them livestock. Cattle and horses bought, sold, worked and consumed... but with far greater cruelty, compartmentalization and disassociation in ways shaped by cultural selection pressure. Sounds kind of like slavery, doesn't it? Yet in the Gettysburg Address, slavery was not specifically mentioned once... but everybody knew it was there... and most people still do. That's how memes work... similar to germs. Toxins produced by bacteria are spandrils, incidental to the programed purpose of the organism.
Let the monuments stay. Let them fall down. Let the 2500 resident memeticists practice permaculture and watch the forests return. Doctors in 1863 could barely tell the typhus and typhoid. People were about to emerge from the Middle Ages. Typhoid, typhus and terror are have similar root causes: parasites and eating shit. We know the pathology of the germs now, but we are just now able to see the memes. To a memeticist, the parasites are political and the shit is in most of the processed food we eat: advertising.
The tourist industry was starting to hatch at Gettysburg before the battlefield stopped stinking. Peter Thorn had a go at it in 1880 with the Battlefield Hotel that was the Wagon Hotel before the war. Everybody had to come and see the Big Fucking Thing. That was after Peter and Elizabeth moved to town and Rosa died after Rosa saw what Elizabeth saw. They had to quit the cemetery. They abandoned the portal, and the Queen is angry. Elizabeth transformed free will to cause-and-effect. Resa could transform to a raven as she learned to walk.
There are no snack bars that were once a delousing stations like today at Auschwitz. There are no toilets at Birkenau except ruins of concrete septic tanks. Old dogs of each regiment pissed stone and iron to mark their territory at Gettysburg. Visit Las Vegas, visit Paris. Visit Yosemite where the big fucking thing is the big fucking thing. Memeticists and permaculturists will probably isolate and detoxify the gettysburg meme in about 200 years and develop an inoculation long before that. This inoculation could prevent war and famine.
The most important thing is to occupy the portal until Rosa passes though again with capital letters.
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Permalink Reply by stonefruit on
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An Indian filmmaker friend of mine. Check him out
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Permalink Reply by Mouse on
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You have both had me in tears today with your dancing and dances, beautiful.
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Here we are inside the "...village where everyone has dementia." Still waiting for the collapse. Jimmy Carter hands John McCain hid ass.
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Permalink Reply by BO on
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Krugman...what a dick. Why the fuck is Truthout running his editorials? He's totally crooked.
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No hope? Whachu talking about?
Here's a little performance art from ferguson.
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We interrupt this holiday for a reality check...
Are You Better Off This Thanksgiving Than You Were Last Thanksgiving?
By Michael Snyder, on November 21st, 2014
Are you in better shape financially than you were last Thanksgiving? If so, you should consider yourself to be very fortunate because most Americans are not. As you chow down on turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce this Thursday, please remember that there are millions of Americans that simply cannot afford to eat such a meal. According to a shocking new report that was just released by the National Center on Family Homelessness, the number of homeless children in the U.S. has reached a new all-time high of 2.5 million. And right now one out of every seven Americans rely on food banks to put food on the table. Yes, life is very good at the moment for Americans at the top end of the income spectrum. The stock market has been soaring and sales of homes worth at last a million dollars are up 16 percent so far this year. But most Americans live in a very different world. The percentage of Americans that are employed is about the same as it was during the depths of the last recession, the quality of our jobs continues to go down, the rate of homeownership in America has fallen for seven years in a row, and the cost of living is rising much faster than paychecks are. As a result, the middle class is smaller this Thanksgiving than it was last Thanksgiving, and most Americans have seen their standards of living go down over the past year.
In 2014, there are tens of millions of Americans that are anonymously leading lives of quiet desperation. They are desperately trying to hold on even though things just keep getting worse. For example, just consider the plight of 49-year-old Darrell Eberhardt. Once upon a time, his job in a Chevy factory paid him $18.50 an hour, but now he only makes $10.50 an hour and he knows that he probably would not be able to make as much in a new job if he decided to leave…
For nearly 20 years, Darrell Eberhardt worked in an Ohio factory putting together wheelchairs, earning $18.50 an hour, enough to gain a toehold in the middle class and feel respected at work.
He is still working with his hands, assembling seats for Chevrolet Cruze cars at the Camaco auto parts factory in Lorain, Ohio, but now he makes $10.50 an hour and is barely hanging on. “I’d like to earn more,” said Mr. Eberhardt, who is 49 and went back to school a few years ago to earn an associate’s degree. “But the chances of finding something like I used to have are slim to none.”
Of course you can’t support a family on $10.50 an hour.
You can barely support one person on $10.50 an hour.
But there are many men out there that would absolutely love to switch positions with Darrell Eberhardt. At this point, one out of every six men in their prime working years (25 to 54) does not have a job. That is an absolutely crazy number.
And of course just because you “have a job” does not mean that things are going well. The number of Americans that are “working part-time involuntarily” has risen by over 50 percent since the beginning of the last recession. There are millions of hard working Americans that would love to get a full-time job if they could land one. But these days “decent jobs” are in short supply.
For example, CNN recently profiled the story of college graduate Meghan Brachle…
Meghan would love to be a music teacher or play full-time in an orchestra. She studied music at Loyola University in New Orleans and plays the flute.
Instead, Meghan works a slew of part-time jobs and receives no benefits.
She is a cashier at Whole Foods, a substitute teacher, a flute tutor and an administrative assistant at a non-profit.
Even with all of her hard work, Brachle and her husband often really struggle to pay the bills…
With inconsistent hours, Meghan monthly income fluctuates between $1,000 and $3,000. Even with her husband’s teaching salary, the couple sometimes struggles to cover the $3,600 of monthly expenses they have.
“It’s very stressful,” Meghan, a college graduate, says. “I think about all the job applications I’ve turned in and all the interviews I’ve been on and all the other people who are in the same situation, looking for those same [full-time] jobs. It’s frustrating.”
Sadly, a lot of these part-time employers know that their employees desperately need these jobs and are using that leverage to treat them very poorly.
For example, it is being reported that any KMart employees that do not show up for work on Thanksgiving will be automatically fired.
What kind of nonsense is that?
And around the country at Wal-Mart stores, food drives are being held for “needy employees“.
So why wouldn’t Wal-Mart just pay their workers enough so that they could afford to take care of themselves in the first place?
Most people don’t realize this, but approximately one out of every four part-time workers in America is currently living below the poverty line. Many of them are working as hard as they can and still can’t make enough to take care of themselves.
Meanwhile, our paychecks are getting stretched further and further with each passing month.
When you don’t make much money, every dollar is precious. And when food prices go up substantially, it can be very painful. Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening right now…
-From September to October, the price of a pound of Turkey rose from $1.58 to $1.66. That represents a 5.2 percent price increase in just one month.
-The price of a pound of ground beef has just risen to a brand new record high of $4.15 a pound, and more price increases are on the way. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is projecting that U.S. beef production will drop by another 1 billion pounds next year due to a variety of factors including the horrific multi-year drought out west.
-The entire planet is bracing for a huge chocolate shortage, and this threatens to push the price of chocolate beyond the reach of many American families…
Start hoarding those Hershey’s Kisses and stockpile your Snickers: The world could soon experience a chocolate shortage.
Mars Inc. and Barry Callebaut, two of the world’s largest chocolate makers, say that’s the path we’re headed down. They cite a perfect storm of factors: Less cocoa is being produced as more and more people are devouring chocolate.
In 2013, consumers ate about 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than was produced, The Washington Post reports, and that deficit could go up to 1 million metric tons by 2020. The Ivory Coast and Ghana produce more than 70 percent of the world’s cacao beans, and both countries are experiencing dry weather that limits growth. To make things worse, a fungal disease called frosty pod has destroyed 30 to 40 percent of global cocoa production.
As a result of all of the things that I have just discussed above, more Americans than ever are being forced to turn to the government for assistance. Today, the number of Americans getting a check from the government each month is at an all-time high, and at this point Americans collectively get more money from the government than they pay in taxes. For much, much more on this, please see my recent article entitled “21 Facts That Prove That Dependence On The Government Is Out Of Con...“.
So if things are going well for you this Thanksgiving, you should be truly thankful.
For most of the country, things just continue to get even worse. And if the next major wave of our economic crisis arrives next year like many are projecting, this may just be the beginning of our economic pain.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/are-you-better-off-this...
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