Monthly Archives: May 2008
Capitalism is a system that requires the majority to have no control over their lives and to believe that this condition is normal. Therefore, all reactions to inequality and deprivation must be viewed as signs of personal inadequacy, biological defect, mental illness — anything other than reasonable responses to unreasonable… Read more
First Fruits
Even though we got a late start this year on our planting, and even though I have been spending my time being a tradesman instead of a horticulturalist, we are still beginning to reap the fruits of our labors, at least in our spread out, makeshift orchard. Blueberries The property came with a large, well-established Tifblue bush, which is a mid-season variety that produces a lot of fruit. We added three more bushes over Winter, all Powderblue, another mid-season variety that is supposed to be slightly more disease resistant than Tifblue. Well, our new bushes have already given what fruit they will this year, which is not much given their small size, but it was a handful sufficient for making muffins. The Tifblue bush should come in in the next few weeks, and it will provide a nice harvest – enough for fresh eating, jam and maybe a pie or two. Strawberries We didn’t put in strawberries this year, having to make some hard decisions about what to plant and what to leave for… Read more
Utah Phillips caught the westbound last night – passing away around 11:30pm. As Utah was fond of quoting from Joe Hill: Don’t mourn,… Read more
We need to lead a national movement to demand that Congress and the states make requiring officeholders to wear a flag lapel pin the 28th Amendment to the U.S…. Read more
Engineers turn it on and off for the tourists and sculpt it to look like it’s paintings. Welcome to Niagara… Read more
Me, The Brand
We live lives so completely dominated by commercialism and monetary exchange that we think of everything, even ourselves, in the terms of the marketplace. Not content with turning time into a commodity (to be earned, spent, wasted, saved), we now endeavor to turn ourselves into commodities, brands, our own tiny little multinational corporations – Me, Inc. We fret over our corporate image, as reflected in our blog layouts. We design our Yahoo, eBay or Etsy stores to communicate the right message about ourselves as brands. We attend network marketing seminars where we learn to ‘sell ourselves first’. We wonder if our varied interests (if we have any left that are not market mediated or created) present a unified, sellable whole to the world. To help us maintain our fantasy world of individualistic isolated commercial success, we pretend to have relationships with people we do not know, people who do not even exist. We have relationships with other peoples carefully crafted… Read more
This is tactical gear for the spatial expansion of private… Read more
On May 3, 1978 Gary Thuerk, a marketer at the now-defunct computer firm Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an email to 393 users of Arpanet, the US government-run computer network that eventually became the internet. It was the first spam email… Read more
Me, Here, Now
My life, and all of our lives here in the “first world” are obsessed with, organized around, and circumscribed completely by the three words that make up the title of this post: me, here, now. Nowhere is this more true than in the United States, where we are famous for our collective national amnesia, and have been for multiple centuries now, not that anyone remembers who said that about us first. We are hyper-focused on ourselves, what we are doing at this very moment, where we are right now. Even our counter-culture, if you could call the self-indulgent me-fest of the 1960′s a counter-culture, exhorts us to Be Here Now, to over-develop our sense of self, our obsessive awareness of our surroundings (home decoration, clothing, etc) and our myopic devotion to right now, eschewing any past, any history, any story that does not star us, doing this, right now. Currently, one need to look no further than the fringes of right-libertarianism and lifestyle anarchism to find paeans to the… Read more