Daily Archives: August 15, 2013

Great Work, Politics, Sierra Club

How Can We Let This Happen?

Leave a comment

8/13/2013  Lughnasa                                                                       Honey Moon

To the EPA meeting in Chicago to discuss sulfide mining in the BWCA:

mining_exploration_map

You may not have been to the Boundary Waters, a magical part of America the Beautiful, filled with lakes and rocks and fish and silence.  If not, I hope you get the chance to go sometime in the future.  There you will find rest as well as a place to celebrate the wonder that is our planet.

Would you locate a landfill so that it drains its waters into the baptismal fount of a Catholic cathedral?  Would you site a noisy factory with its emissions of smoke and toxins next to a spot dedicated to meditation?  Of course not.

The argument from Polymet and other would be miners of copper and nickel and magnesium locked in sulfides near the Boundary Waters is that their technology will not pollute the three watersheds that send water from its site to Hudson’s Bay, the Pacific and the Atlantic.  The trouble is that there has never, NEVER, been a technology that prevented sulfuric acid runoff from these kinds of mines.  Never.

Can we trust them when the EPA says this claim is suspect?

GeekWorld

Hell

Leave a comment

8/13/2013  Lughnasa                                                                Honey Moon

Soon we’ll be back on the www.  We ran up against limits nested within limits which required changing hosting packages.  That’s done.  Now.  Except.

I had to spend 22 minutes on the phone cancelling a hosting package that I never ordered.  I think Hell might be a never ending loop of all the times you’ve connected with a technology company for any reason.  Just when you think you’re done, a new call will start.  Forever.  The horror.

( Limbourg brothers, or in Dutch Gebroeders van Limburg (Herman, Paul, and Johan; fl. 1385 – 1416)

1&1 folks are polite.  But not necessarily accurate when it comes to the sales side of their endeavor.  Their tech folks are very helpful.

Asia, GeekWorld

New History for a New China–a surprise

Leave a comment

8/12/2013  Lughnasa                                                              Honey Moon

Obviously Ancientrails remains down.  This form of instant communication has its pluses and minuses.  Big plus:  write it and publish it.  Right now.  Big minus:  when it’s down, everything going forward waits.  So it’s instant except when it isn’t.

Worked on various tasks like reorganizing files, finishing up to do list stuff from three months ago, watching the last of the New History for a New China lectures.

This New History MOOC has some startling things to say, if its data actually supports them.  For example, the lecturer today claimed that the justification for the Chinese Communist revolution, land distribution overwhelmingly in the have-a-lots hands, up to 90%, turns out not to have been the case.  The implication?  The Chinese revolution was a top down revolution engineered by a revolutionary organization, not a from below uprising.  This is definitely surprising.  Their use of data and their sources did not always seem to justify their conclusions.  Too few data points, or data supposedly used as comparative, but actually comparing unlike things.  Or, in a few instances, the data simply did not conform to the conclusions based on it.  Weird.

So, I’m loafing and inviting my soul.  To what?  Not sure, but it feels fine right now.  I have poked around in some of my short stories and other novels to see if I might start revising other work.  I could/can do that, just don’t know whether I want to start right now.

General

Fading

Leave a comment

8/12/2013  Lughansa                                                  Honey Moon

The Perseids are in the skies and the State Fair starts in two weeks with Labor Day approaching not soon after.  Cultural summer as well as meteorological summer has begun to fade.  The garden, too, is on its last big push with the tomatoes starting to ripen as well as green peppers, cucumbers and eggplants.  The leeks will come out last.  And, of course, those perverse garlic bulbs will get planted next month, right along with new tulips, hyacinths and other early spring bloomers.

(Summer’s End, art quilt by Linda Anderson)

Today though it is not yet gone.  And I’m glad.  I have sprays to put on the crops and all those stumps I’ve created over the last few weeks need painting with brush-be-gone to prevent suckers.  I’ve really enjoyed these last few weeks with the cooler air, the lack of pressure from Latin and the near completion, then completion of Missing’s third revision.  Those things have allowed me to work outside in the early morning without feeling guilty about inside work and without the heat.  I don’t like working outside in the heat.  Never have.

In fact, I’m going out right now.  It’s 65.  Dewpoint 59.  Perfect.

General
Aside Leave a comment

8/11/2013  Lughnasa                                                                    Honey Moon

I read the following paragraph in the Updraft Blog and wondered if we could just maintain this distinction, please?

What about 2013?

Sitting in chilly Minnesota this year, you might think 2013 is running cooler than average globally. You’d be mistaken. Through June, 2013 is running as the 7th warmest year globally. Most of the planet is running warm. The coolest region on Earth this year? Minnesota and the Upper Midwest into southern Canada.

Cinema and Television

Elysium

Leave a comment

8/11/2013     Lughnasa                                                            Honey Moon

Continuing in that vein but in a different medium:  Elysium.  A sci-fi movie with a hyper alienated working class inhabiting a desiccated earth while the .1% live a life of luxury in a space station floating high above the earth.  This is not great cinema, but it’s good cinema.  If you can’t make the connections with the immigration debate, the health care debate, the economic justice necessary for a humane society, then you’re not paying attention. It is, in some senses, a little too obvious in its treatment, but these matters of simple justice are so often glossed over that hitting us between the eyes with them is often the only way to make us see.   Marx said revolution was the only sure way to make people see and he was probably right, but Elysium is a step in that direction, if you get empowered to act after seeing it.  I hope you do.

 

Politics, Third Phase

Reverb

Leave a comment

8/11/2013 Lughnasa                                                                         Honey Moon

Having an intellectual experience with a lot of reverb right now.  I read the Communist Manifesto as I said above, but I also read estranged labor, also by Marx.  The two together make for surprisingly contemporary and trenchant critiques of our political economics.  A key point Marx makes is the problem for the working class is that their labor becomes, literally, objectified.  That is, the thing they make, whatever it is, contains their effort and energy but belongs to another, usually, too, becoming unavailable to the ones who made it.  I thought of workers on a Cadillac assembly line or LPN’s working in hospitals but not having adequate health care.  The object, the product of labor, leaves the hands of the worker and his/her life, then becoming estranged from them.  Thus, labor is an act of self-estrangement from the product of your labor.

Marx believed that labor should reveal and reaffirm the who that you are, make you more of, better than, the you were before your work.  In this case the work is subjective, or the subject of the laborer, not an object.  Here is an article from the NYT yesterday about the arguments over raising the minimum wage.  And another about worker deaths in Texas.  And, most tellingly, this one:  U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind.  These are from just this last week.  I never immersed myself in Marxist thought so I don’t know the objections to his analysis, but from my cursory look at it, it explains a lot of the headlines.

Here’s the thing.  In the third phase I have been promoting the idea of doing the work only you can do.  Does that sound like work that reveals and reaffirms who you are, work that makes you more of, better than, the you before the work?  It sure does to me.  And that congruence feels fine to me, reinforcing.  But.  What if the third phase of life, life after formal education and life after full-time work, is the first time you can take up the work that only you can do?  Doesn’t that mean you engaged in alienating labor that estranged you from the product of your labor?

Art and Culture, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality

Doubled Vision

Leave a comment

8/11/2013   Lughnasa                                                             Honey Moon

Rigel, who weighs about 120/130, likes to come up to my chair while I’m reading, then put first one leg, then another in my lap.  Her head, now close to my chest, looks up at 2012 05 01_4255me, then she rests it there.  Not long.  But for a bit.  How long she stays in my lap varies, usually not more than a minute, if that.

In years before I might have shrugged her away, wanted to get on with my reading, not realized the precious moment that was happening.  With Tor, our great yellow Irish Wolfhound, a true sweetheart, much like Vega, Rigel’s sister, I began to have a doubled vision. No, not double vision, but doubled.  I would see Tor, smiling at me from the carpet, and I would see Tor dead, lying stiff and lifeless.  This may seem gruesome, and perhaps it is, but it comes from having experienced the deaths of so many dogs.

The phrase, how terrible it is to love something that death can touch, had become a present reality for me.  This doubled vision, a long and painful lesson taught to me by so many dogs, has changed my life.  When Rigel comes to visit in my chair now, I see the moment for what it is.  A time that will never come again.  A time that means everything, all of it, right in that instance.

In the way of tea the Japanese tea-master takes unbelievable pains to ensure that the tea ceremony you attend is a once in a lifetime experience, ichigo ichie.  The tea-master chooses art, flowers, tea cups, fresh water vessels, waste water vessels, foods and candies all with you in mind.  The Japanese tea-ceremony reminds in an elegant way, that every moment has the potential to be a once in a lifetime moment.

With the giant breed dogs, whose lives are so short, each moment is so clearly once in a lifetime.  They have taught me to cherish those ordinary moments, a dog crawling in my lap, as a time of unique tenderness.  This doubled vision, though I don’t encourage it necessarily, has taught me that it is this moment, this time, right now that is the time we have together.  Much better to embrace it than wish for it after death has already come.

Bees, Our Land and Home

The Honey Moon

Leave a comment

8/11/2013  Lughnasa                                                    Honey Moon

BTW:  I don’t change moon names mid-month but when I realized this was the honey extraction moon I decided to go ahead.  Honey Moon is too good to pass up.

Finished moving limbs in the prairie grass area this morning.  In matters related to trees I have experience.  I learned long ago that if you line up the limbs in the same direction and pull them all together so that their branching parts follow the cut ends, moving them is easy.  If you don’t do it that way, you’re in for a frustrating time.  Of course, chipping them is the usual practice, but I like building up brush piles for critters and I’ve done that as the default option for years.  Not to say I haven’t chipped.  I have, but only when the amount was considerable.  Wasn’t the case this morning.

This project involved cutting down several ash trees and saplings that I had let grow up in the prairie grass area.  They had begun to shade the orchard and it was time for them to IMAG0746come down.  Past time, really.  I cut the trees down with the felling axe and limbed them with the limbing axe, but I used the chain saw to cut the trunks into logs.  The big pruners, 2 foot plus handles, allowed me to take out the amur maple saplings, too.  That area is now back to its original purpose, prairie grass and wild flowers.

Still plan to loaf today.  Sort of.  In my loafing I’m reading Madame Bovary and I finished the Communist Manifesto yesterday.  They’re both for my Modern/Post-Modern MOOC.  The guy who’s teaching it, Michael Roth, is the president of Wesleyan University and a scholar of French thought.  That makes the bias French thought, the touchstone he keeps coming back to in his examples and the source of several of the readings.  Though I took French in high school, I’ve not kept up with it and matters French have not figured significantly in my education, having a more English/German bias myself.  Gives this course a different feel for me and I like it.  But.  It’s not convincing me so far.

Feelings

Loaf

Leave a comment

8/10/2013     Lughnasa                                                 State Fair Moon

Caught up on my e-mails.  Walt Whitman said of summer that he would “loaf and invite his soul.”  That’s what I want to do for a few days now.  Missing 3.0 is out of my hands at the moment.  Loki’s Children has not started up again, Latin’s in abeyance, most of the garden chores are caught up.  A rare moment between.  Loaf, I like the word.  For now.