are we fighting against the plastic that ends up in landfills and in oceans, or the total energy used (global warming gasses expelled) to create the mult-iuse bags?

We’re probably not the first time there’s been a civilization in the universe,” states Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.

The idea that we’re destroying the planet gives us way too much credit. Certainly, we’re pushing the earth into a new era. If we look at the history of the biosphere, the history of life on earth, in the long run, the earth is just going to pick that up and do what is interesting for it. It will run new evolutionary experiments. We, on the other hand, may not be a part of that experiment. Source.

Damn, and I was just going to rattle on about why I am not making it to the Newport City Council meeting in an hour (6 pm, 4/15/2019) to see if the wise mayor and council vote for a single-use plastic bag ban. I have rallied around the ban for many more reasons than the negative effects of this throwaway bag on marine life, fish, reefs and the aesthetic value of not having a bag for groceries wafting high in the Sitka spruces around here.

I’m thinking a puny single-use plastic bag ban is the inch-worm step toward having a shitload of real conversations, action plans and paradigm shifts in how communities will attempt to weather the impending huge negative effects of climate change, food shortages, high cost of energy, pollution, lack of housing (affordable) and the lack of worthy employment, education, retirement, palliative care, and rehab.

If we can’t restrict one plastic item in the scheme of all the junk thrown at us by corporations and their chemical purveyors, then how are we going to have conversations about forcing all corporations to stop mindless over-production of junk and put an end to their Capitalism on Steroids of planned material-product obsolescence so they can continue to sell-sell-sell? How are we going to stop capitalism in its tracks, which is the ONLY solution to climate change, predatory wealth, and the resulting externalities of more and more pollution, toxins, wars, and death? That’s the only way to battle against what we have now, in 2019 as 410 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere continues to increase, ocean acidification continues to rise, and hypoxia and mindless-endless wars continue to spread; wars and war making/prepping/staging sucking an amazing 52 cents of each tax dollar thrown at war material/war profiteers/war enablers/ war side businesses?

Broken schools systems, broken lives, and broken spirits, in a country that calls itself Christian and then supports the most irreligious, blasphemous devil-loving man/woman/LBGTQ-hating, racist and sexist and imbalanced human shadow called Trump. All of those seven deadly sins he has dripping from his Big Mac lubricated jowl.

The reality is there is no simple approach to anything these days — to even getting to first base in regard to community participatory thinking in order to make way at rolling up our sleeves to begin to solve problem after problem created by that perverted business principle (sic) that any of the Fortune 1000 and all the sycophants embrace (all solvable). And the unintended and intended consequences of our individual, family, group and national/global decisions need to be weighed ahead of the game. The tipping points, the feedback loops, and lag time and tragedy of the commons and the overshoot of everything capitalism does for profit with no regard to humankind, wildlife, air, water, food, soil, aesthetics and so on, this is what we need to be working on, not all the flippant shit we express in our collective capitalist angst and superficial consumerism.

I am also colliding with some heady stuff, tied to the Great Filter, while teaching some dirt-poor children in this rural county and working on imbecilic plastic bag bans (when we should be banning all plastics and go back to a world where we do things in bulk — think reusable containers, streamlining packaging and working with the finite planet. These juxtapositions are the thing of my morning first cup of coffee:

Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?

Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should seek evidence of extraterrestrials, such as via signals, fossils, or astronomy. But contrary to common expectations, evidence of extraterrestrials is likely bad (though valuable) news. The easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.

[…]

Finally, we would do well to keep a in mind a few unusual aspects of this Great Filter puzzle. First, let us keep in mind the interdisciplinary nature of the this puzzle. While it may comforting for each discipline to claim that the Filter must surely lie in some other discipline of (in their eyes) lessor repute, such claims should surely be backed up by detailed analysis using our best understanding of that discipline. It will no more do for astronomers to simply claim, without further supporting analysis, that people will lose their tendency to colonize, than it would do for biologists to simply declare that astronomers could not possibly know that the universe is as big as they claim.

Second, we must be wary of the “God of the Gaps” phenomena, where miracles are attributed to whatever we don’t understand. Contrary to the famous drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost, here we are tempted to conclude that the keys must lie in whatever dark corners we have not searched, rather than face the unpleasant conclusion that the keys may be forever lost.

Finally, we should remember that the Great Filter is so very large that it is not enough to just find some improbable steps; they must be improbable enough. Even if life only evolves once per galaxy, that still leaves the problem of explaining the rest of the filter: why we haven’t seen an explosion arriving here from any other galaxies in our past universe? And if we can’t find the Great Filter in our past, we’ll have to fear it in our future. —  Robin Hanson

How can we not question the scheme of things, big and small and unknown . . . and the observable now and the predictable future in our collective predictive consciousnesses? Really, though, the crux of this blog is about how quickly words become, now, in 2019, the tools of incarceration and damnation by the powers. Words that repeat themselves and end up on the precipice of propaganda time, with realities only set for the marketers, billionaires and political class. Just look now at Julian Assange. We are all Julian Assange! That is, those of us who write, we all are Assange. Those of us who publish. And who report!

The big question today and from hereon is: How might I end up erased or un-personed, because I espouse anti-Imperialism and anti-Americanism and anti-Capitalism ideals, or posit a much more aggressive revolutionary zealotry or even ask for people to face fascism with chaos/disruption/ physical force against the powers that be. Rejecting to jobs, rejecting payments, fines, levies, fees, prosecutions, mortgages, indoctrination, taxes, mandates, tolls; or invalidating popular propaganda and its evil twin, marketing, well, that in itself is violence against the state, the corporation, the old-new global or community or group order.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sow the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast. — John Pilger 

Now, this mental state I am shaking out of is tied to the big picture/small picture thing, and while the plastic bag ban I have written about here recently in the past, and those few little bits that have been published in the local newspaper, well well, life does go on in terms of the big big scale!

Experts Paint Sobering Potential for Sea Change 

No Ordinary Fish Monger — page 1

Students Grapple with Plastics — page 4

This is how democracy doesn’t work — going to a small town city council, rural county locale,  trying to wade through the ineptitude of our representative government. Many in the city councils around the country get paid squat. Many are using it —  political service/disservice — to make connections, both business and political, which is the same Hydra in fact. Much on that later, too! Many small town council members are attempting to do some good for the community, don’t get me wrong. But the solutions are still mired in the fantasies of economic growth unchecked, a green light to the business community, and a belief that everyone in the USA can pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps and find his or her 40 acres and a mule — or in modern parlance, his or her own 2500 square foot rancher on 1.5 acres with 2.3 children and 2.7 vehicles in the 3 car garage while managing a string of drive-through coffee stands! Or variations on that theme!

Environmental concerns are just postcard thinking by the masses, that majority of people who have not yet suffered the fenceline communities’ environmental (pollution) racism.

Q. What are some people that inspire you?

A. The work of W E B Dubois has inspired me a lot. He was not only a famous sociologist but also someone who could be called a ‘change agent’. He was not only a good social theorist but also very interested in the application of his work. I saw his work to be directly relevant to influencing the life of ordinary people. His work made me believe that research, policy, and practice must go hand-in-hand.

Q. How is climate change a social and environmental justice issue?

A. Climate change is the number one problem of the 21st century. We sometimes forget that climate change is much more than simply parts per million (of greenhouse gas emissions). It is an equity issue. It effects some people directly. The most peculiar aspect of climate change is that the populations that contribute least to the problem of climate change are most likely to feel its impacts. Such disproportionality makes it a serious social justice issue.

Climate change is also a very complex issue to solve. It is a global issue, a national issue, and a local issue—all at the same time. At the local level, the population at the front line of the impacts of climate change are also at risk to other things. For example, usually the most susceptible to climate change-related impacts are those with greater food and water insecurity.

Hence, climate change intersects with vulnerable populations not only after a disaster but also before a disaster. Because of the complexity and uniqueness of the climate change crisis, we cannot continue to plan (climate mitigation and adaptation) for it using the tools of the past. I think that from a planning perspective, we cannot assume that a uniform plan can work for all in terms of ensuring social justice. Planning has to be sensitive to the fact that communities and nations have different levels of wealth, health, and education. The goal for planning should be to build community resilience and provide an opportunity for people to bounce back both before and after a catastrophic event.  — Robert D. Bullard,  the Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. He is often described as the father of environmental justice.

Look, I cut my teeth on environmentalism, and yes, we have disaster after disaster happening to ecosystems — wild, as in marine, and with homo sapiens, as in the average Joe and Jane, Lupe and Lorenzo! I put the human element in with the wild element, and, yes, there are huge issues tied to capitalism, population at 7.5 billion, corporate complicity (and its driving of other sell-outs and Faustian Bargain adherents) in driving the ecological crisis. There is no argument from me to say that the 2,700 billionaires (and their families) and the 36,000,000 millionaires (and their families) do not deserve the power they have buggered the world with, nor how the majority of their loot has been gotten at the expense of families, men and women and children, and entire communities, entire regions, entire countries, entire species. If I say lock them up, then, well, what a better solution that is, than what the 36,002,700 super rich and their thugs and sycophants and Little Big Eichmann’s have had in store for us, the 80 percent, and the ecosystems destroyed by each and every cargo ship unleashed to the world.

But, we also are a rapacious species, self-deluded into thinking we are above the rest of the animal kingdom, and that it’s winner takes all. That attitude is not the attitude of the majority of peoples. Yet, those people, those civil societies, those battlers for agriculture and water rights —  to hold their land as bio-intensive and organic components of the ecosystems around them —  they are battling overlords and societies that depend on perpetual growth: perpetual growth in profits, in interest rates, in population rates and replacement rates for each passing generation.

The unborn and the old and the ones who want to stay poor but completely able and subsistence centered   on their own land can’t even get past the evil of the corporation and the government unregulators working with the thugs. Death in he womb:

Glyphosate is the base chemical component for some 750 different brands of pesticides worldwide, in addition to Monsanto-Bayer’s Roundup. Glyphosate residues have been found in tap water, orange juice, children’s urine, breast milk, chips, snacks, beer, wine, cereals, eggs, oatmeal, wheat products, and most conventional foods tested. It’s everywhere, in brief.

In a long-term animal study by French scientists under Gilles Eric Seralini, Michael Antoniou and associates, it was demonstrated that even ultra-low levels of glyphosate herbicides cause non-alcoholic liver disease. The levels the rats were exposed to, per kg of body weight, were far lower than what is allowed in our food supply. According to the Mayo Clinic, today, after four decades or more pervasive use of glyphosate pesticides, 100 million, or 1 out of 3 Americans now have liver disease. These diagnoses are in some as young as 8 years old. (read old interview of great scientist exposing GMOs and Monsanto, who is now deceased,  conducted by yours truly here!)

I always feel as if a little bit of hope can creep up on me and assist me in my own sanity in the insanity that is now. Sure, everything that changes stays the same. Maybe, but much on that later. The fact this glyphosate story is just one of millions demonstrating there is no great filter running this society, though many believe we as a species will eventually get to speeds approaching FTL — faster than light — to help us explore, move away, become celestial pilgrims again and again!

Hope is like knowing sugar is bad-bad-bad for you, for the entire human physiology, the entire system of the homo sapiens regulating immune system, creating inflammation, gut issues, brain “fog,” and more. Not glucose for the body as the body breaks down veggie and fruit fructose to feed the brain.

Yet, we go out and eat a Reese’s peanut butter cup or down a soda or shot of whiskey. It’s all bad-bad-bad, but we have hope that just one scoop of Ben and Jerry’s or one margarita or that Lucky Charms binge is just a passing phase.

Wrong! Addiction and feedback loops and hungry insulin rushing through the body tricking it to want to eat more and more. And, alas, comes the single-use plastic bag ban. We want those reusable ones, those cotton ones, and, well, the bag ban — single use ones, that is (actually the single use wimpy bags are used as garbage liners and poop scoop receptacles, so they are actually disposable bags with a second use-reuse-repurpose tag) — seems like a win-win.

But, there are life cycle assessments, and the jury is pretty much in, out there — you have to look at the consequences of one action creating another action or one product taken out of the consumer stream but replaced by other products.

Life cycle assessments and embedded energy . . . and that fact that when you chew that mango on the Oregon Coast, consider how many miles it traveled from where it came; how many machines sowed it and harvested it; how many pesticides and inputs “protected” it and grew it; how much oil was used to build the transportation system that moved it and all the equipment to grow and harvest it; and how many more miles were expended to take it from point a to point b, and then to points c and d, as well as how much packaging after processing was used to bring that mango to you at the local 7-11 as dried sulfur-gassed chews ready to be trucked to the vendor selling them at the beach kiosk?

Life cycle analysis. Maybe we need to do the same life cycle (destroying) analysis of products. Or the life cycle enslavement cycle of freaky thinkers like Mister 9-9-6 man or Elon Musk!

One of China’s richest men has been criticized for endorsing the controversial culture of 12-hour workdays in the country’s red-hot tech industry, saying employees who worked longer hours will get the “rewards of hard work.”

Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA), has spoken out on social media in recent days in support of the Chinese work practice known as “996.” The number refers to working from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week and is said to be common among the country’s big technology companies and start-ups.

“If we find things we like, 996 is not a problem,” Ma said in a blog post Sunday on Chinese social media site Weibo. “If you don’t like [your work], every minute is torture,” he added.

Ma’s comments prompted criticism from Chinese social media users.

“Did you ever think about the elderly at home who need care, (or) the children who need company?” wrote a Weibo user with the online moniker stupidcan123, in response to Ma’s post. “If all enterprises enforce a 996 schedule, no one will have children” because of a lack of time, they added.

“It has become harder and harder to raise money recently,” Zhao said in his brightly decorated office located in a fancy Beijing office building. “I’m under a lot of pressure. Sometimes I’m awake from around 2 am to dawn and can’t stop thinking about my company’s future.”

Eric Tao, founder and chief executive of Beijing-based random video chat company Holla, feels the same pain as Musk and Zhao. “As CEO of the company, I can’t underperform this week and make it up by outperforming next week. It doesn’t work that way,” he said, adding that he works about 12 hours a day, so not as many as Elon Musk.

In the scheme of things, 996 or 797 — 7 am to 9 pm 7 days a week — is what will (is) burning up the planet. Busy bees, these slave masters are. What are their billions made doing for society.

I know I know — a plastic bag ban is a drop in the proverbial pond.

I sent this email below to the mayor and council to circumvent going to a meeting an hour away (one-way) from where I live. Also, to circumvent the hard stares directed at me, as I am the only one who doesn’t stand for the pledge of allegiance and I am one of the few who doesn’t take off my hat for councils and judges, inside or outside.  I am not afraid to visibly emote or enunciate my concerns when I hear something said. You know, I also do not like the constraints of gaveling fools looking down on us and three-minute time limits for public comments per citizen.

I also do not see the plastic bag ban as a win-win, since we have allowed the plastics and toxics and oil industries and other industries to dictate what we do, think, believe, purchase and invest in . . . with the dirty bidding of the elected officials behold to them.

Date: Monday, April 15, 2019 – 6:00 PM
TO: Council Chambers, Newport City Hall, 169 SW Coast Highway

Dear Council –

First, I have to say our form of shallow participatory democracy is not working when we have to spend so much time on a simple single-use plastic bag ban.

This may be an elected form of representational democracy, but the reality is you all do not have the collective IQ to drill down on much. We the people, for the people, by the people actually should be working daily and at night to determine how communities thrive, or survive or mitigate what many scientists and journalists like myself call the privatization of the external negative costs to the community, including air, water, soil, ecosystems, human and non-human health.

Corporations reap the profits but we the taxpayer and the tens of thousands of human communities and the ecological ones to boot pay for the clean-up and negative outcomes of rapacious capitalism.

Our collective IQ exponentially outshines those collectively of all the CEOs of those companies like Exxon or Georgia Pacific or Weyerhaeuser or Raytheon or Google or Wells Fargo, et al. The problem is in places like Newport, where livable jobs are scarce for the average person working in service jobs and warehouse and blue collar employment, families sometimes have to have five jobs between both parents to make ends meet.

Coming to City Hall for a Council meeting is both difficult and disconnected to their lives.

So, back to not just a low hanging fruit, one that is right there between your feet:

The average bag you pick up at the grocery store, or carry your takeout in, has a lifespan of about 12 minutes.

When discarded, they clog sewage and storm drains, entangle and kill an estimated 100,000 marine mammals every year, and degenerate into toxic microplastics that fester in our oceans and landfills for up to 1,000 years.

Despite this, shoppers collectively use around 1 trillion billion single-use plastic bags every year. That’s 300 bags per person, per year, for every single person on Earth — or enough to circle the globe 8,600 times.

One trillion plastic bags – single use – are used, equating to 2 million per minute.

Now how is the average child from a family of parents barely getting to each new paycheck before an eviction or foreclosure notice going to wrap their heads around JUST single-use plastic bag consumption?

How will we have conversations about the incredible and perverse ways corporations have fed them and their parents on habitual overuse of plastics in everything?

A bag ban is a micro-start to the bigger conversations around ocean acidification (CO2 release from fossil fuels – plastics are fossil fuels – cement factories, cutting down and burning forests) and fisheries depletion and microplastics inside their own children’s gut, blood and feces.

We are the throwaway society we all embrace and decry because corporations profit from that lack of durability.

The ban is just a small start to the conversation which we need to start attacking the external pain and pollution and quickening of global warming we have to have now. Do we change our habits significantly when we have almost no choice in the matter since corporations control legislatures, federal agencies, local communities’ will and will power and narratives?

No, we have to demand a new system of production, resource exploitation, and citizen consumption.

Good luck tonight. LCA’s are deeper ways to look at all our consumption habits and the goods and services we demand as a very consumerist-centered society. That’s life-cycle assessments!

This is no small matter. You all are lowly representatives of the small city of Newport who will have to deal with these facts when looking at other plastics and other products used in the city. Life-cycle assessments and embedded energy and the amount of calories of energy (fossil fuel burning) to get food from farm to plate are big issues you might not think affect city council business but they will!

Vote for the plastic bag ban, but then be ready for bigger fish to fry, to use a pun that is probably not so funny these days.

I teach youth here in the Lincoln County school district. I write social-cultural-environmental-economic-media justice issues.

I continue to study (and was a leader in) true sustainability discourse, planning and education.

While I support the plastic bag ban, I am smart enough to look at the leakage of bans toward other uses of plastic to make up the bin and garbage can liner issue — yes, more plastic bags of heavier gauge will be purchased to offset that 12-minute single use bag.

Ponder how complicated the world is now that we have given the rights to clear-cut forests, dump toxins in river systems, emit pollutants in small and large communities’ air systems, and limit affordable housing to the purveyors of profit without social-environmental-cultural-racial considerations.

Even knowing all of the so-called ins and outs and positives and negatives tied to a city-wide ban on single use plastic bags, we have to show some mettle and begin to start the larger conversations on how what we get from corporations actually determines our futures and the futures of more than just seven generations out – about 140 years into the future!

Not easy reading:Bag leakage: The effect of disposable carryout bag regulations on unregulated bags/i.e.  Life Cycle Analysis of Single Use Plastic Bags.

Sincerely, Paul Haeder, Otis, Oregon –

P.S. — I am committed to not adding to the road congestion and air pollution of my round-trip to Newport even in my 46 mpg 20 year old car by staying put this evening! (ahh, even knowing the energy footprint of typing on a computer and using an email system is significant unto itself!)

Here’s the leakage:

This means that 28.5 percent of the plastic reduction from Disposable Consumer Bags (DCB) policies is lost due to consumption shifting towards unregulated trash bags. The results also provide a lower bound for the reuse of plastic carryout bags, with 12–22% of plastic carryout bags reused as trash bags pre-regulation. In other words, a substantial proportion of carryout bags were already reused in a way that avoided the manufacture and purchase of another plastic bag.

If carbon footprint was the only metric of environmental success, the results in this paper suggest DCB policies are having an adverse effect, especially if we consider the effect on paper carryout bag use. However, if the unmeasured benefits with respect to marine debris, toxicity, and wildlife are great enough, they could outweigh the greenhouse gas costs.

LCAs of plastic, paper, and reusable carryout bags have been shown to be sensitive to assumptions made about the weight and number of trash bags displaced by the secondary use of plastic carryout bag, with the reuse of plastic carryout bags as bin liners substantially improving their environmental performance (Mattila et al., 2011). According to a UK Environmental Agency (2011) study, a shopper needs to reuse a cotton carryout bag 131 times to have the same global warming potential (measured in kilograms of CO2 equivalent) as plastic carryout bags with zero reuse, while that same cotton bag needs to be reused 327 times if all plastic carryout bags are reused as bin liners.

And, of course, plastic bags are a major threat:

The United Nations Environmental Programme (2014) estimates the environmental damage to marine ecosystems of plastic litter is $13 billion per year. This estimate includes financial losses incurred by fisheries and tourism as well as time spent cleaning up beaches. While plastic bags and films represent only 2.2% of the total waste stream (CA Senate Rules Committee, 2014), plastic carryout bags and other plastic bags are the eighth and sixth most common item found in coastal cleanups. Once in waterways, plastic bags do not biodegrade, but instead break into smaller pieces, which can be consumed by fish, turtles, and whales that mistake them for food. A survey of experts, representing 19 fields of study, rank plastic bags and plastic utensils as the fourth severest threat to sea turtles, birds, and marine animals in terms of entanglement, ingestions, and contamination (Wilcox et al., 2016).

I’ll be posting an earth day, Earth Day, article soon, since that’s occurring on 4/22/2019. All the intricacies of just how screwed the planet it and how screwed 80 percent of us are in the immediate future. Screwed if we continue business as usual and coming up with the same asinine solutions to solve bigger and more complex problems  —

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.

So minor good news is that Newport, on a vote of 5 to 2, passed the plastic bag ban!

NEWPORT — The City of Newport became the eighth city in Oregon Monday night to pass a plastic bag ban ordinance, outlawing single-use plastic bags often used at grocery stores and community events to carry out purchases. The council vote was 5-2 in favor.

It follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.”

Tomgram: Ann Jones, Our Veblen Moment

Remember this ratio — 567 to one . . . 567 to one. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Also think about how many sycophants and bootlickers are mired in the mess that is the MM or MMM or MMMM: Mass Media, the Massively Mauling Media, or the Masterful Meaningless Media, or, well — Masochistic Mentally Minor Media/ Marauding Mentally Minor Media.

IT is incessant, the number and breadth of the stories that are meaningless or drawn from the blood and soul of us, the 80 percent. In no way shape or form does the Mass Media care about the realities of us flagging, flailing, failing, floundering foot soldiers for Capitalism.

The real crimes occur daily — incessantly and recklessly but with the madness in the method and the method being the madness of the One Percent and their prostitutes. This isn’t outrage? We take this over and over, until this entire society — 280 million of us out of the 344 million Americans — is spiritually pummeled and colonized with fear and Stockholm Syndrome: relating to the masters of the madness that keeps the worker down like a dog in the gutter.

Another set of numbers: 8 million, $35,308, $1.2 billion.

Eight million. That’s how many U.S. middle-class workers will be left without strong overtime pay protections under the Trump administration’s weak overtime rule proposed on March 22.
In human terms, that means 8 million working people across the 50 states can be made to work up to 50, 60 or even 70 hours a week, missing time with their families, without receiving any extra pay, even if they make as little as $35,000 a year.

The problem is the salary threshold below which workers are guaranteed time-and-a-half overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week has been frozen for decades, with no adjustment for the rising cost of living. As a result, the share of salaried workers guaranteed overtime pay has plummeted from six in 10 in 1975 to less than one in 10 today.

Trump overtime regulation replaces a 2016 Obama-era Labor Department rule that would have restored overtime protections for more than 12 million salaried workers earning up to $55,055 by 2023. The Trump rule slashes that salary level to $35,308 — and treats workers earning more than that as if they were highly paid executive who don’t need overtime pay. All told, Trump’s decision to slash the salary threshold means workers will miss out on $1.2 billion in wages each yearthey would have received under the 2016 rule.

This all goes back to the flagging American, parents and aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, foster parents, grandparents. Work these children’s parents to death.Steal wages. Underpay. Expose kids’ parents to toxic work environments, air, water, chemicals, products. Force these children’s charges to vomit up fear, anxieties, paranoia, chronic pain, chronic disease, self-imploding thinking, and the lies of Capitalism.

Stealing wages, man, and these deplorables — and they are in many regards — people who defend a pedophile, a serial stalker, a felon, a mafia thug, a child incarceration zealot, thief, abuser, idiot, narcissist, S/M freak, a traitor, an anti-worker/anti-family billionaire — cannot get a pass, man.

The leisure class is so sheltered from inevitable changes going on in the rest of society that it will adapt its views, if at all, “tardily.” Comfortably clueless (or calculating), the wealthy leisure class drags its heels (or digs them in) to retard economic and social forces that make for change. Hence the name “conservatives.” That (re)tardiness — that time lag imposed by conservative complacency — stalls and stifles the lives of everyone else and the timely economic development of the nation. (Think of our neglected infrastructure, education, housing, health care, public transport — you know the lengthening list today.)

Accepting and adjusting to social or economic change, unfortunately, requires prolonged “mental effort,” from which the leisured conservative mind quite automatically recoils. But so, too, Veblen said, do the minds of the “abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance.” The lower classes were — and this seems a familiar reality in the age of Trump — as conservative as the upper class simply because the poor “cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow,” while “the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands.” It was, of course, a situation from which they, unlike the poor, made a bundle in an age (both Veblen’s and ours) in which money flows only uphill to the 1%.

Veblen gave this analytic screw one more turn. Called a “savage” economist, in his meticulous and deceptively neutral prose, he described in the passage that follows a truly savage and deliberate process:

It follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.

Thorstein Veblen, the greatest American thinker you probably never heard of (or forgot). His working life — from 1890 to 1923 — coincided with America’s first Gilded Age, so named by Mark Twain, whose novel of that title lampooned the greedy corruption of the country’s most illustrious gentlemen.

I can wack the average deplorable over the head with fact, with history, with illustration, with point after point, evidence after evidence to prove to him or her that Trump is a wimp, that he is a cheat, that he hates the common man, that he wants people in the 80 percent as the manure for his fields of dreams and buckets of gold. I can show people that Trump is afraid of combat and guns and soldiers and enemies (perceived) but he is so happy to send the boys and girls — those parents’ offspring — to countries where the ultimate product is pure hatred, and it’s deserved, of America, red-white-blue.

I can go out in a field and shot up tin cans, get on my big motorcycle and cruise down the coast, get out on the water and suit up and scuba dive for shark and octopus shots (photos). I can try and get them to hitch-hike in Mexico, hang out in Vietnam, live in Guatemala.

Unfortunately, the average deplorable is a paper tiger, or so broken from racism and white supremacy that they are shells of homo sapiens. White poor people with overweight kids and children on the spectrum and rotting teeth and rotting roof tiles; grandparents stuffed away in old trailers; beer cans and old sofas for landscaping; Jesus Duck Dynasty photos, rusting motorcycle frames, taped up window frames, piled up old 5 gallon buckets that once held Lucky Charms and Blue Bunny ice cream.

These deplorables think Trump cares about, knows, defends them because as we see above, it’s the reality that people’s jobs depend on them intentionally not knowing, or jobs that keep them from knowing, or jobs that they have to confuse others about truth, or those who depend on a job to never want to know the truth.

When the truth hits them smack in the face, daily, with perversions of Trump vis-a-vis his Tweets or his People’s Slime or the Media Midgets, they are like dinosaurs looking at the meteorite flashing through the sky and hitting off the Yucatan. Dinosaurs caught in the meteorite’s tail.

This economist, Veblen, saw the coming of the Trumps, the Kardashians, the Holly-Dirt and Betsy DeVos, the Sheldons and Soroses, the Gates and Bezoses, the entire rotten Elan Musk smell of rotten thinking and rotten being. Fascism of the market, fascism of externalities those parents and those children pay for.

Later in life, Veblen, the evolutionary who believed that no one could foresee the future, nonetheless felt sure that the American capitalist system, as it was, could not last. He thought it would eventually fall apart. He went on teaching at Stanford, the University of Missouri, and then the New School for Social Research, and writing a raft of brilliant articles and eight more books. Among them, The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1920)may be the best summation of his once astonishing and now essential views. He died at the age of 72 in August 1929. Two months later, the financial scaffolding collapsed and the whole predatory system came crashing down.

To the end, Veblen had hoped that one day the Predators would be driven from the marketplace and the workers would find their way to socialism. Yet a century ago, it seemed to him more likely that the Predators and Saboteurs, collaborating as they did even then with politicians and government lackeys, would increasingly amass more profits, more power, more adulation from the men of the working class, until one day, when those very plutocrats actually captured the government and owned the state, a Gilded Business Man would arise to become a kind of primitive Warlord and Dictator. He would then preside over a new and more powerful regime and the triumph in America of a system we would eventually recognize and call by its modern name: fascism.

Back to the number I started with — 576 to one. i got that Friday on one of my gigs substituting, this time for a PE instructor, in Lincoln City. I met the counselor in the gym, and we talked. He had gigged in Korea as a college teacher, and he had done other stuff, but came back to USA and got his counselor credentials.

We were managing students, elementary aged, in the indoor recess since this place rains all the time.. I also had PE classes to sub. In the end, the broken system I work in and write about and then also ground truth around with people like Wayne produce some strong reactions to the leisure class and the punishment class and the policing of everything in America, from womb to tomb or cradle to grave (and beyond and pre-birth as well).

Wayne is the only counselor in the school with more or less 576 students. That’s it, really, game over. Students coming from broken, breaking, chaotic homes; three job parents; homelessness, or near homelessness; victims of or observers of rape and assault; already held down at birth with various chronic illnesses. These children are in schools with 30 kids to the classroom, with bullies and highly sexualized fellow students. These kids are forced to eat shitty curriculum and standardized testing. Bad food, bad images, bad media, bad opportunities, no public spaces, no enlightenment, no mentors really.

Five hundred and seventy-six students with varying levels of trauma, PTSD, epigentics and physical challenges, and self image issues, and self-loathing, and fears, anxieties, problems, dysfunctions directly from caregivers and families and the family lines.

That in itself — 576 to 1 — says more than any white paper on the failure of education, on why charter schools are bad, why we need a new curriculum, and why the family is dead, authority and god need to come back to the classroom, and how spoiling the child is all about sparing the rod.

Do my readers get it yet? Five Hundred and seventy six students and they have one counselor to talk to, to help them, to hash out issues, to help diagnose, to help get the students help.

America, and capitalism, and the perversions of the Trump Class, well, when do we put the rapists and murderers into the prisons and having them face death row as they have put 576 students in harm’s way?

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free._

• Eugene V. Debs

I had a short confab yesterday with four elementary teachers after doing my substituting for a 6^th grade class whose teacher – 21 years at the same school – had to deal with her father who was placed in a memory care facility 60 miles away more than 10 years ago.

That in itself is one entire tome’s worth of discussion, how the elite and both money-drenched parties and their governors and round-table “movers and shakers” and the entire death machine that is Capitalism have put middle class people like a public school teacher behind the eight ball to figure out how to take care of a father with dementia.

That teacher – who has won awards for her science teaching, her classroom dynamics, and was gracious when handing off her class to me – is, believe it or not, in a much better position in her precarity and the entire false for-profit rigged system that is extracting money-money-money for a case of dementia that will/does hit people in this country every second.

What do small communities like Lincoln City or Newport, populations of 11,000 more or less, do when the old start or not-so-old begin to have infirmities that demand 12-hour care, or 24-hour care? Many people living in these cities are working in service jobs, serving meals to tourists, or packing crab and fish at the fish plant, or are in some of the county government jobs, and a few working for the hospitals, and schools.

This is the story that never makes the bubble butt and bubble head national news feeds, because, it isn’t what these millionaires want to juggle with, because, Americans, the top 20 percent (economically) – and “top” doesn’t apply to these 20 percenters’ intelligence, ethical standards, humanity, caring, humility, fairness – want the perversion of the cult of celebrity, cult of crime reporting, cult of money-money money.

We are up a shit creek without a paddle in every form possible as a community of group of communities. The endless traffic down 101 increases as more and more homes and apartments are taken out of the rental/housing markets, and put into the hands of these rental home criminal enterprise organizations. Rentals for a weekend at the beach.

Endless streams of tourists looking for crab cakes, some pipeline on the Pacific for a backdrop of drinking booze, gorging on food and then yammer on and on how backward and bumpkin we living in these communities are?

The reader can research how broken this country’s people are: more than 150 million citizens have a chronic illness/multiple chronic illnesses; the suicide rate in the USA is sky high; more and more people have dissociative disease; more children are chronically distracted, anxiety-heavy, physically deteriorated; more and more families will have one, two or more people in their circle that will need lifetime medical, mental, occupational, psychological assistance.

The chickens have come back to roost, but let’s be clear readers – blame the One Percent, the Prostitutes in Politics, the CEOs like the Boeing murderer who should be in shackles now, instead of making off with his $23 million a year theft while he bullshits his way in Seattle.

This teacher, 21 years in the profession, has seen many changes herself. She was not complaining, and I was probing. Children in her class – more and more each year – have specialized education plans, IEPs, for various issues tied to learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, behavioral issues, and even physical ailments. Many are having big issues of standing still, and learning. Many are so tied to the junk of consumer culture, the celebrity junk, the superficial junk, the digital dungeons out there, just more and more kids more and more focused on themselves – the me-myself-and-I angst that America manufactures every single minute in this Propaganda Madness.

I did the class, probed the youth about their projects – genius projects that include a 3 to 5 minute presentation on topics of their interest, their passions. At a time when the genius should be flourishing at age 12, these children for the most part are flagging, because even the stalwarts, they are being dragged down by the commonest denominators of superficial childlike Pavlovian reactions to life itself. These kids have no form to show gumption and to carry on with their un-bloomed genius because public spaces are almost degraded totally, and parents are working for the mills and paper product and timber processors and have been themselves degraded into work mules and consumer cows.

Parents who hand off kids to the schools, but have no interest in or abilities to assist the learning and critical exploration processes these little geniuses in the making need.

I talked with a 60-ish teacher, who came to the profession doing many things before getting credentials in 2011. She posits that all the behavioral issues she has seen spiking are attributed to the fact that children have no negative consequences for bad behavior. That the society in general has allowed that permissiveness, but also parents specifically. She sees the lack of respect to teachers as incredible, and she seems flummoxed by that fact.

A teacher in her late thirties posited that it’s the epigenetics of past trauma in the parents’ and grandparents’ and family circles’ that have added to the DNA changes in offspring. She mentioned the total war this country has been in since 1940s, and we talked about the war-like conditions at home and in the communities that children pick up in the womb with mother’s cortisol flooding them as fetuses and the same cortisol inside their tiny tot’s lives once out into gravity and absorbing the constant fear, anger, anxiety, chaos, discord, fracturing and yelling and possibly physical punishment in their lives as parents and fractured caretakers themselves are broken by the One Percent’s plan to gouge every last glimmer of hope from people that this democracy is, for, and because of THE People, and that systems will be there for them if they work hard.

No health care system for all, so instead, parents are paying exorbitant amounts for rents, for food, for the daily fees, tolls, fines, levies, add-ons, triple-taxations just to live in a community. Parents that are confused in this Psychological Torture that is Consumer-Predatory-Parasitic-Casino Capitalism.

The other teachers also see the disruptive children in a classroom – sometimes up to 8 or 10 out of 29 in the class – as not being properly worked with and educated, but also the others in the classroom who have to survive the barrage of those behaviors, outbursts, confusions, and special treatment for more and more children.

As I have written about many times, we need to dig up the parking lots, open up the classrooms, build learning garden-crafts-solar panel centers on the schools’ roofs. We need parents there for parents day every week. We need muralists, children out of the four rooms and a plethora of desks teaching environment. Gardens in the school playground, total Marshall Plan for pk12 youth so we, the aging farts, have safety nets.

Bring in people daily from the community, and get youth to do service learning in the community.

Talking circles, a la Native American tradition, salmon smoking sheds, pottery classes, writing and music learning yurts, and more, more, more.

Dostoevsky said that one can more or less learn about a society’s humanity or lack thereof, or in fact a nation’s ethos and goodness or badness based on how the prisoners in jails and prisons are treated. USA gets an F-minus there. Add to the same formula – How well are children and youth treated and taught in the schools with the zip codes that reflect the lower and middle economic zones, the sacrifice zones, the fence line communities.

We know Trump is perverse beyond all perversions. A bully with no biceps and a belly and zero cardio. He wimped out of military service because he was afraid and rich. This man should be shackled and put in the docks and studied until he flitters away. But so should all the Empire’s Hussies, the presidents since Washington, onward. So should all the politicians whose pockets are lines with CEO graft money, and that’s a good 90 percent of those slugs.

To have these conversations is enlightening, and as I have had many in Guatemala or in Juarez or Belize or Vietnam, wherever, it is amazing to see glimmers of hope from people who are beaten down so much by the powerful, the elites and their Little Eichmann’s.

That’s not all I have, seeing people rise, even in the most degrading situations. In the most dangerous situations. I have my own exit plan, and I know we need less pacificism, less cordiality, less respect for more people in our communities. I can’t say all the things that would work to bring this system down because then I would be completely blackballed from the Jail Keep’s game.

This blog today, a bit of a left field fly-ball, considering how messed up the world it, just looking at middle of the road but considered so radical Democracy Now’s headlines today:

• British Police Arrest WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange
• Sudan: Military Overthrows Pres. al-Bashir After Months of Protests
• Dems Demand Evidence After AG Barr Tells Senators FBI Spied on Trump Campaign
• ICE Acting Dir. Leaves Post in Ongoing Purge of Immigration Officials
• Politico: Trump Considering Ex-Head of Hate Group for DHS Role
• Dems Introduce Bill to Reverse Trump’s Muslim & Anti-Refugee Bans
• Israel: Netanyahu Declares Victory as Gov’t Moves Further to Right
• India: Elections Kick Off as Hindu Nationalist PM Modi Seeks 2nd Term
• EU Leaders Extend Brexit Deadline to Oct. 31
• Louisiana: Suspect Arrested over Fires at 3 Black Churches
• House Dems Pass Net Neutrality Bill, But Senate Fate Remains Bleak
• Bernie Sanders Unveils Revamped Medicare for All
• Israel: Netanyahu on Track for 5th Term in Office
• DHS “Purge” Continues with Deputy Sec. Claire Grady
• Reports: WH Wants to Put Border Agents in Charge of Asylum Interviews
• AG Barr to Congress: No Plans to Release Unredacted Mueller Report
• Mnuchin Says Treasury Consulted with WH on Trump Tax Returns
• Bipartisan Tax Bill Would Make Free IRS E-Filing System Illegal
• Airbnb Reverses Ban on Listings for Illegal Israeli Settlements

Tomorrow? Variations on a theme. More on prison industrial complex. More on the weather eating at the world. More on climate science. More on the stupidity of Wester Culture and Celebrity Politics. More on the white supremacists in the Oval Office, in the military, in the boardrooms, in the governor’s mansions, in the police-INS-BP-CIA-FBI-NSA mafia.

Sure, I can riff with those, and, well, poetry, since it is national poetry month, or climate change and the environment, since it’s Earth Day coming up. Yeah, I met with Governor Inslee while working for SEIU 925 in Seattle, and now he is being interviewed on all the billionaire networks by bubble butts and bubble brains as he has thrown his aspirant’s towel in the bowels of presidential politics.

Nice guy, former teacher, Seattle-guy, not a wall-flower, family guy, white, intelligent, a fighter of sorts, but still, DNCC all the way. He is the guy adding to the fodder in the Democratic race to go up against the Zionist-Jewish Enterprise, which is now the Stephen Miller show that Trump’s in law Kushner recruited years ago. How to go up against these Jewish guys like Elliot Abrams, and then these Christian Guys like Pence and Tribe?

In the end, though, life is about parents and loved ones getting care for Alzheimer’s and dementia, and about youth and babies being born already hobbled with any number of chronic illnesses and learning and intellectual disabilities. It’s about Baby Boomers aging out, and about Millennials Stuck in Perpetual Chaos.

It’s about our crab and salmon and rockfish “industries” dying off, about acidification of the oceans, about the rising theft in rental property agreement, the rising price of gasoline, because summer is coming up (arbitrary), and the rising tides and lowering public health.

I wonder about these fellows and females running for office. I really know that they for the most part are egotistical, megalomaniacal, and narcissistic. Maybe not Jay Inslee, but what chance does he have when he allows the handcuffs and ankle monitor of the Democratic Party guide his ethos and philosophy?

It is really about the youth, the chronically ill, the prisons, the schools, the rents, the public spaces, the holding the masters of corporate greed and corruption responsible for this society’s diseased soul.

Finally, without identifying the school I subbed at, the air, man, the air. Pulp mill stink. Poor community up in the mountains, and the children, adults, old and frail, that’s their reward for being born on the wrong side of the money. While the smell of burning sulfur is everywhere in America’s boardrooms, in the Senate, in the Congress, in the Supreme Court and other courts, I recall the smell in Powell River, BC, Canada, where my mom grew up and where her lungs were singed by the air coming from what was once (then, 1930s) the largest pulp mill in the world.

I subbed, smelled that hellish odor, and as a poet and environmentalist, my mind went back to all those years hearing and seeing my mother spit up sputum and eventually get hooked up to O2 tanks while she lived to the unusual age of 78 with both lower parts of her lung (lobes) cut out at age 21 as another sadistic western medicine “solution” to her lung issues.

Children and learning and air pollution! How’s that working out for intellectual and learning disabilities?

Pulp and paper is the third largest industrial polluter to air, water, and land in the United States, and studies show that it releases well over 100 million kg of toxic pollution each year.

The main components of pulp mill related pollution are chlorine and chlorine based materials, sulfur, hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide. Chlorine and compounds of chlorine are used in the bleaching of wood pulp, especially chemical pulps produced by the kraft process or sulfite process. Plants using elemental chlorine produced significant quantities of dioxins that are persistent organic pollutants that are one of the most toxic human-released pollutants.

The used process water from a pulp mill contains a lot of organic material such as lignin and other organic material from the trees, including chlorinated organic material. The presence of these organic substances results in high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC).

Sulfur-based compounds are used in kraft process as well as sulfite process for making wood pulp. The release of sulfur dioxide is of particular concern because it is water soluble and is a major cause of acid rain.

Air emissions of hydrogen sulfide, methyl mercaptan, dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, and other volatile sulfur compounds are the cause of the odor characteristic of pulp mills utilizing the kraft process. Other chemicals that are released into the air and water from most paper mills include carbon monoxide, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, mercury, nitrates, methanol, benzene, volatile organic compounds and chloroform.

Nitrogen dioxide(NO) sulfur dioxide (SO) and carbon dioxide (CO) are emitted during paper manufacturing. All of them cause acid rain and CO is a major greenhouse gas that causes climate change. These toxic gases contribute to air pollution.

how can poets fly outside the frame that holds humanity in the ecological balance of Taker Society**

I think poetry, if it’s going to be really engaging and engaged, has to be able to come at the issues of our lives from all kinds of angles and all kinds of ways: loudly and quietly, angrily and soothingly, with comedy and with dead seriousness. […] Our lives are worth every risk, every manner of approach.  — Tim Seibles

Part one of the DV tribute to National Poetry Month is here: A World is Right When We Learn to Preserve and Embrace the Word Like a Poet

The question always comes up: Does poetry matter? Better yet, does art matter? This in a time of cult of celebrity, cult of nothingness, the cult of instant fame and repetitive prequels and sequels.

Even though everything is new under the sun in the 21^st century, the way this country – Western Civilization, that is – rolls, more and more so-called  artists, and that includes poets, are the dust bunny kings and queens. We aren’t taking chances – the big chances we have to take to stave off predatory, parasitic capitalism.

So, true art counts. If you can’t figure out what true art is and have employ have some arbiter of style and humanities to do the interpreting and defining for you, then you are lost in la-la land.

These are, of course, cynical questions, possibly steeped in a Western mindset where business as usual is all tied to the economics of relationships, and that includes the co-option of everything in American society wrapped around the barbed wire gulag that is Capitalism. No matter how frail the artistic expression is, or nuanced or nascent, the cynic would ask, “Does poetry in a time of our doomsday clock one minute to midnight and with 410 ppm Co2 in the atmosphere, in addition to the reality we are surviving, barely, under the strafing toxic clouds of the of one warped super power advancing in every aspect of humanity’s lives, including art, for total control of every blink, click of the mouse, lifted hand in artistic disbelief or fealty, count, matter, mean anything?”

Doing the Math

by Raymond Nat Turner / August 19th, 2018

Knitting my brow, I’m
wondering whether we
have a word
Problem—
numerical,
mathematical,
logical,
or
political
Problem?

Scratching my head,
searching
for its formula I found:
Money Talks
to
our
representatives
Year-round and
Votes
boots, batons, fists, tasers,
Glocks, and cuffs cutting
off circulation—
24/7—
365…

Yet, I’m tutored,
3
minutes
2/4 Dance
is our
1
chance to
Advance…?

We are what we read, what we watch, what we think, what we discuss, what we believe, what we profess, what we say, and, then, what we buy, consumer, eat, build, destroy, create, throwaway, what we buy, sell, purchase, steal, take, give away, and what we drink – the Kool-Aid of Empire or the elixir of rebellion and revolution.

There will be a better day, and we have that thumb and toe hold inside, as poets – and as artists;  which in the end we call to them as our guides and our echoes, and the reflectors of universal humanity and chroniclers of struggle and celebration of glory in a human culture, in the individual. This planetary and spiritual life can sometimes be best reflected in and by and for “the poet.” Whether we see art as a song of the self, the poetry of creation and creativity, for those who create, show,  and then sometimes lucky enough to  live off of the stuff they create, somehow we/they have to have a more revered place in societies, and revered spaces for all humanity to partake in the action of being in-with-for-outside-inside the artist’s mind and heart, belly and soul.

But it’s poetry, no less, and we have this April as NPM, national poetry month. It’s not all razzle-dazzle in small communities where I live and work in – Oregon’s Central Coast, Lincoln City, Newport, Toledo, Siletz. Because in reality, a certain cultural critical mass has to cluster around so many elements to the humanities and arts as worthy of a cross-sectional interest in a community for those of us to put weight on the more lofty things like the arts, and in this case, the written and spoken word, poetry. Small towns or less populated communities and regions just don’t have the density of people who are willing to sacrifice a lot to try and be expressive artist. Poets are like monks, Tibetan monks, in a small place like where I currently live.

If you haven’t met a poet, then the unusualness of it might intimidate.

However, there is some poetry going on here, and some of it is celebrated, in very small and rare moments. Read the piece I wrote on Kim Stafford, Oregon’s poet laureate here. He came to town and had a standing room only venue at the local public library! Here, Flotsam Central Oregon. Then my poem about interacting with Kim Stafford: Somewhere in a Writer’s Workshop He Learns the Lines from “Oregon Trail”.

Think about how difficult it is to get the attention of small-town America when so many colluding forces of economic pain and retrenchment of services and erosion in the public good/health/welfare/safety  nets that really hit these 10,000 and 15,000 population communities that are tied to mostly servicing tourists and with timber and fish.

Then, when and where and how can we get overworked teachers and over-stimulated movers and shakers of a community to concentrate just a bit on the vitality of poets in their communities to exhibit that wonderful “business” of translating sight, sound, touch, taste and perception, philosophy, universality, psychology, intellect, joy, struggle, pain and transcendence?

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility  —  William Wordsworth

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great  —  Randall Jarrell

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.  —  Percy Bysshe Shelley

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. — Adrian Mitchell

Well, write poetry, for God’s sake, it’s the only thing that matters.
— ee cummings

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.  — Carl Sandburg

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.  —  Bob Dylan

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.  — Dylan Thomas

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.  — Robert Frost

The poet is the priest of the invisible. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life.  — Matthew Arnold

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  — Emily Dickinson

There you have it, “as if the top of my head were taken off,” that is poetry. What more of a graphic image do we need to follow the crumbs there? Poetry —   That process allows humanity to share the act of being, because without words, there are no ideas, nothing, really, to bring forth the passing of knowledge. Naming of plants, planets, porpoises, peoples, it all involves the art form of discovery and teaching. What better way than to draw people to it with a poem.

That brain surgery Emily Dickinson alludes to is the value of poetry, everyday – it comes to people in unexpected ways, a dance, inside, especially for those who never thought the poet would emanate from the soul of a biker or street walker or drug user or incarcerated man or high-falluten debutante.

All sorts of ways to study and express poetry, categorizing, throwing movements into timeframes, geographical locations, cultural, ethnic, racial, national, self-identity framing modalities. Think of a poetic movement or some other poetry foundation, and then there you go. In today’s parlance, should stave off the madness. Below are a few poems, challenging, possibly tied to what this essay is attempting to get at — is there a form for ecological thinking, deep ecology, psychology of Sixth Mass Extinction, a sociological consideration tied to an earth/Earth without ice?

Form as in poetry!?

Ecopoetics

Similar to ethnopoetics in its emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the making of poems—and the environment that produces it, ecopoetics rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns over environmental disaster. A multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, ecopoetics is not quite nature poetry. The influential journal Ecopoetics, edited by Jonathan Skinner, publishes writing that explores “creative-critical edges between making and writing” and features poets such as Jack Collom, Juliana Spahr, and Forrest Gander.

This is not enough, though, now is it?

What short stories and poems will arise from the intersections of heart, mind, soul, belly and the cascading realities of a world on the skids?

To that point, thousands of miles from Siberia, Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska/Fairbanks found freeze-ups of permafrost shifting from mid-January to as late as March, happening since 2014.

Additionally, from National Geographic: “It’s worrisome,’ says Sue Natali, a permafrost expert, also with Woods Hole, who saw an active layer not re-freeze recently during a research trip to Alaska’s Yukon region. ‘When we see things happening that haven’t happened in the lifetime of the scientists studying them, that should be a concern.”

The stakes in the Arctic are high. It’s common knowledge that if permafrost layers are consistently exposed to thawing, consequences can be hard, fast and not pleasant. Counter intuitively, once it’s unfrozen, permafrost can potentially release GHG year-round, not only in summertime. And, that’s a huge problem without a solution, unless well-beforehand Homo sapiens halt GHG emissions. No chance.

Dangerous territory, looking at climate, earth, raging tipping points, put into the prism of poetry. Many many Americans coming out of MFA schools, well, this is verboten, pushing themes or social conscious issues as the germination of poetry.

Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna County

By Jay Parini

The maples sweat now, out of season.
Buds pop eyes in wintry bushes
as the birds arrive, not having checked
the calendars or clocks. They scramble
in the frost for seeds, while underground
a sobbing starts in roots and tubers.
Ice cracks easily along the bank.
It slides in gullies where a bear, still groggy,
steps through coiled wire of the weeds.
Kids in T-shirts run to school, unaware
that summer is a long way off.
Their teachers flirt with off-the-wall assignments,
drum their fingers on the sweaty desktops.
As for me, my heart leaps high—
a deer escaping from the crosshairs,
skipping over barely frozen water
as the surface bends and splinters underfoot.

I can hear those MFA’s now — “Oh god, not more of this tripe. Poetry is about me, us, me myself and I, about angst and living hard, about my bi-polar disorder, about me in the system, me in the matrix, about me and my feelings and how I see the world.”

I have had argument after argument about the valueness of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a program that was borne of Cold War logic and the greatness of America (sic, sic).  Interestingly, the Workshop’s second director, Paul Engle, embodied everything the 1950s conservative mind embodied. Read this piece on the MFA program here, How Iowa Flattened Literature. With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing lingers.

To have read enough to feel the oceanic movement of events and ideas in history; to have experienced enough to escape the confines of a personal provincialism; to have distanced yourself enough from your hang-ups and pettiness to create words reflecting the emotional complexity of minds beyond your own; to have worked with language long enough to be able to wield it beautifully; and to have genius enough to find dramatic situations that embody all that you have lived and read, is rare. It’s not something that every student of creative writing—in the hundreds of programs up and running these days—is going to pull off. Maybe one person a decade will pull it off. Maybe one person every half century will really pull it off.

Of course, we live in an age that cringes at words like “greatness”—and also at the notion that we’re not all great. But ages that didn’t cringe at greatness produced great writing without creative-writing programs. And people who attend creative-writing programs for the most part wish to write great things. It’s sick to ask them to aspire but not to aspire too much. An air of self-doubt permeates the discipline, showing up again and again as the question, “Can writing be taught?”

Faced with this question, teachers of creative writing might consider adopting (as a few, of course, already do) a defiant rather than resigned attitude, doing more than supervising the building of the bases of pyramids. They might try to get beyond the senses. Texts worth reading—worth reading now, and worth reading 200 years from now—coordinate the personal with the national or international; they embed the instant in the instant’s full context and long history. It’s what the Odyssey does and what Middlemarch does and what Invisible Man does and what Jonathan Franzen’s and Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels try to do. But to write like this, you’re going to have to spend some time thinking.  — Eric Bennett

That’s a whole other story, MFA programs and the flattening of literature, fiction, and, alas, the same holds true of poetry. Maybe not, though, since how do poets learn to channel their voice and to develop writerly ways? Maybe in groups, sure, workshops in some senior center, right, but why not schools, i.e. community colleges and universities? I’ve taught a few writing classes in colleges, and outside colleges. Poetry is a tough one to get young and old to wrap their brains around, but, alas, poetry is where the immediate song of the person gets to lift off like a kite on a good windy beach day!

Poetry and the environment?

What does Jean-Paul Satre say about African poets? Black Orpheus: 

When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you–like me–will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen; he was only a look –the light from his eyes drew each thing out of the shadow of its birth; the whiteness of his skin was another look, condensed light. The white man –white because he was man, white like daylight, white like truth, white like virtue –lighted up the creation like a torch and unveiled the secret white essence of beings. Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind. A black poet –unconcerned with us–whispers to the woman he loves:

Naked woman, black woman
Dressed in your color which is life .. .
Naked woman, dark woman,
Firm fleshed ripe fruit, somber ecstasies of black wine.

and our whiteness seems to us to be a strange livid varnish that
keeps our skin from breathing –white tights, worn out at the
elbows and knees, under which we would find real human flesh
the color of black wine if we could remove them. We think we
are essential to the world — suns of its harvests, moons of its
tides; we are no more than its fauna, beasts. Not even beasts:

These gentlemen from the city
These proper gentlemen
Who no longer know how to dance in the evening by moonlight
Who no longer know how to walk on the flesh of their feet
Who no longer know how to tell tales by the fireside . . .

Formerly Europeans with divine right, we were already feeling our dignity beginning to crumble under American or Soviet looks; Europe was already no more than a geographical accident, the peninsula that Asia shoves into the Atlantic. We were hoping at least to find a bit of our greatness reflected in the domesticated eyes of the Africans. But there are no more domesticated eyes: there are wild and free looks that judge our world.

Maybe poetry needs some of that crumbling under the look of a new Anthropocene world!

There is Kickstarter, and an Earth Day 2019 goal of a book of poems that looks at climate, ecology, us inside the environment, Gaia.

Elizabeth J. Coleman’s new anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, published by Copper Canyon Press and live on Kickstarter now, is a collection of poems from over 125 authors — Pulitzer Prize winners, Poet Laureates, activists, emerging writers, and youth poets as young as six — that confront climate change. It has “an arc that bends towards hope,” says Copper Canyon editor Elaina Ellis, who worked on the book with Coleman.

“Poetry is moving and touching in a way that dry facts are not,” Coleman says. “You can reach people’s hearts. If you tell someone about the hell we’re heading towards, people just despair. They become indifferent. It’s too big. It seems very different when you talk about ‘the polar bear drifting out of history on a wedge of melting ice,’” as a poem by Paul Guest puts it.

Here is the long list of poets and translations of poems (125) in this collection.

A unique way to create activism at the end of the collection:

The Union of Concerned Scientists created a Guide to Activism just for this project, to follow the poetry in Here: Poems for the Planet. After the poems have helped you feel what’s at stake, the guide will help you take action toward a better future.

The guide walks through best practices for anyone who wishes to:

• Contact your Representatives and others holding governmental power
• Put pressure on corporations to commit to green practices
• Communicate with media about environmental issues and actions
• Connect with others in the community who are working for environmental justice, against climate change, or on an issue you’re passionate about

By mobilizing scientists and combining their voices with those of advocates, educators, business people, and other concerned citizens, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has amassed an impressive history of accomplishments. UCS scientists and engineers develop and implement innovative, practical solutions to some of our planet’s most pressing problems—from combating global warming and developing sustainable ways to feed, power, and transport ourselves, to fighting misinformation, advancing racial equity, and reducing the threat of nuclear war.

The editor of Here: Poems for the Planet has chosen to donate all royalties from the book (including those copies reserved through this Kickstarter campaign) to UCS.

Here you go, Earth Day coming up, and National Poetry Month in a time of despise, syphilitic tweets, uncompromising crass commercialization of humanity. A few picks, hodgepodge style.

Remember

Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Once the World Was Perfect

By Joy Harjo

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt ruptured the web,
All manner of demon thoughts
Jumped through—
We destroyed the world we had been given
For inspiration, for life—
Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.
And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a blanket.
A spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their children, all the way through time—
To now, into this morning light to you.

Nolan,

By Ed Roberson

The apparition of these faces in the crowd…)
riding the bullet train
the view passes by so fast
it is either a blur they say

or —like night lightning
strobes the raindrops
to a stop in midair

in that soundless moment—
maybe from the train you can glimpse
waiting there

one of those famous petals stopped still
in midair holding its wave to you
in place.        write us

and tell us if
this is so.

Storm Fear

By Robert Frost

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts the snow
The lower chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
‘Come out! Come out!’—
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,—
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether ‘tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.

Song of Myself, 22

By Walt Whitman

You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,
Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
Extoller of armies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.

I am he attesting sympathy,
(Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)

I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.

What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?

I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,
Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.

What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,
The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.

**

Early in the book, Ishmael (Daniel Quinn, 1992) a man, the narrator, answers a newspaper ad that says:

“TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.”

The narrator meets the teacher — Ishmael, a thousand-pound gorilla who communicates telepathically. Using the Socratic method, Ishmael implores the narrator to think for himself on “how things came to be this way” and to come to the understanding that our culture has been enacting a story from the book of Genesis: that Man is here to conquer the earth.

Ishmael separates humans into two groups — “Leavers” and “Takers.” “Leavers” formed cultures that thrived for thousands of years before the agricultural revolution — hunters and gatherers, herders, indigenous societies. Those cultures lived lightly and took only what they needed. “Takers” are us — the people who killed or annexed those cultures and continue to do so; logging and farming in the Amazon threatens some of the last uncontacted tribes on Earth.

“Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be,” Ishmael tells the narrator. “Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact [according to the mythology], and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself. … There’s no way out of it except through death.”

Unlike “Leaver” societies, which sustained themselves and the natural world for thousands of years, our “Taker” society will run out of things to kill and will die. Quinn likens the agricultural revolution to humans’ first attempts at flight. Those attempts failed because we tried to mimic a bird. Only when we discovered the law of aerodynamics did we learn to fly.

Through “Ishmael,” Quinn argues that no law or theory underpins “Taker” culture — and that’s why it has been in free fall since its adoption.

Quinn emphasizes that the natural world, which includes “Leaver” cultures, sustains itself through what he calls the law of limited competition. Under this peace-keeping law, he says, you may not hunt down competitors or deny them food or access to it. You also may not commit genocide against your competition.

“And only once in all the history of this planet has any species tried to live in defiance of this law — and it wasn’t an entire species, it was only one people, those I’ve named the Takers,” Ishmael tells the narrator. “Ten thousand years ago, this one people said, ‘No more. Man was not meant to be bound by this law,’ and they began to live in a way that flouts the law at every point.” Source: Pete Reinwald

Climate change’s ‘evil twin’ Ocean Acidification (and problem stepchild, Ocean Hypoxia)

People ask: Why should I care about the ocean? Because the ocean is the cornerstone of earth’s life support system, it shapes climate and weather. It holds most of life on earth. Ninety-seven percent earth’s water is there. It’s the blue heart of the planet – we should take care of our heart. It’s what makes life possible for us. We still have a really good chance to make things better than they are. They won’t get better unless we take the action and inspire others to do the same thing. No one is without power. Everybody has the capacity to do something.

Sylvia Earle

Note: I am helping beat the drum here on the Central Oregon Coast around climate change, pollution, development, plastics and the like, by writing small stories (that’s what I am limited to) for the local newspaper, Newport News Times.

This is an exercise in concision, as Noam Chomsky was once told by Jeff Greenfield of ABC. While the mainstream corporate media hold sway over the public’s lack of understanding of almost everything important to our communities’ and earth’s survival, small town news, this Newport paper I am writing for also holds sway over some of the Central Oregon Coast’s news: it’s owned by a conglomerate, News Media Corporation, which, according to the web site, has dozens of small-town newspapers in its stable — 43 Years in Business;  150+ Publications; 9 States; 600,000+ Subscribers.

Here, at the Columbia Review of Journalism (CRJ), another Poll: “How does the public think journalism happens?”

Is it any wonder why Americans do not trust the press? But, do they trust politicians? Or millionaires and billionaires? The US Military? Teachers? Doctors? Social workers? Presidents?

In reality, Americans are born delusional thinkers because of their lack of critical thinking and unwillingness to learn this country’s foundational history as a subjugator of other peoples, as possibly the biggest threat to world peace, and as the biggest purveyor of pollution, financial war and arms sales.

But, back to the topic — writing for free, cutting back on not only nuancing but depth, to make a small blurb in the local rag to try and bring attention to a topic very important to the fragile cultural and economic bedrock of Central Oregon coast — this place needs clean beaches, decent ways to control growth, a strong, healthy marine and near beach ecosystem, and some way to help old and young human residents to thrive economically, educationally and locationally.

Here, about concision:

As one of the most important scholars alive, Noam Chomsky has frequently been asked about his thoughts on his virtual blacklisting from the American media. He has long been regularly featured in international media outlets — yet, in his own country, he was often ignored. In a segment on the University of California program “Conversations in History” in the early 2000s, Chomsky explained that one of the ways media outlets justified this was with the requisite of “concision.”

Chomsky joked that he could never be on ABC’s “Nightline,” because “the structure of the news production system is you can’t produce evidence.” He recalled “Nightline’s” Jeff Greenfield, who, when asked why Chomsky was never featured on the show, said it was because the scholar “lacks concision.”

“The kind of things I would say on ‘Nightline’ you can’t say in one sentence, because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you’re expected to give evidence, and that you can’t do between two commercials,” Chomsky explained.”

“Therefore you lack concision; therefore you can’t talk,” he continued. “That’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again and that nothing else is heard.”

I’ve gone through J-school, in 1975, in Arizona, covering all sorts of emerging issues, and ending up in Tombstone on a lab paper, and then working for a small conglomerate of newspapers along the Southern Arizona Border. Cutting my teeth in El Paso for the two dailies, one of which went belly up (Herald-Post).  The same bellying up happened in Tucson, where I learned journalism — Arizona Daily Star won out and the afternoon paper, Tucson Daily Citizen died.

So, you have all these small newspapers being shut down or being bought up to promote advertising. Little towns can’t get the news from on-line forums or big papers in Portland or Eugene. No matter how much the public loves to hate the media, or the Press, or journalists, the fact is real journalists (come on, if you don’t know what a real journalist is, then, you haven’t been reading) are out there in the tens of thousands, and in other countries, they end up splayed on the streets, shot through the head, and disappeared. Check out Reporters without Borders! United States, ranked 45 for press freedoms!

Back to the little outing I made April 4, 2019, to listen to a PhD with the state of Oregon talk about Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia (OAH) and harmful algal blooms (HAB) and the how, why, what, where, when and who around the connected issues of culture, livelihood, marine health, resiliency, mitigation, adaptation.

Moreover, I know for a fact learning how to report on climate change — and ocean acidification is tied to the amount of CO2 the ocean absorbs (CO2 being a greenhouse gas and acidifier once it reacts to the chemistry of ocean, wave, air, organisms) — is not only vital in this day and age of dumb downing everything, but also because of the proliferation of the corporate PR firms and burgeoning corporate water carriers that the mainstream corporate media is (pressitutes).

A one-day conference, put on by the Nation and CRJ, titled:   “Covering Climate Change.”

A new playbook for a 1.5-degree world

How does the media cover—or not cover—the biggest story of our time? Last fall, UN climate scientists announced that the world has 12 years to transform energy, agriculture, and other key industries if civilization is to avoid a catastrophe. We believe the news business must also transform.

Why haven’t (most) news organizations been covering this story as if everyone’s lives depended on it? How can they craft stories that resonate with audiences? How do they cover this urgent, far-reaching story at a time when journalism’s business model is so precarious?

The Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation are assembling some of the world’s top journalists, scientists, and climate experts to devise a new playbook for journalism that’s compatible with the 1.5-degree future that scientists say must be achieved. Join us for a town hall meeting on the coverage of climate change and the launch of an unprecedented, coordinated effort to change the media conversation.

Tuesday, April 30 from 9:00am–3:00pm
Columbia Journalism School
New York, NY

As always, everything is centered in-around-because of New York City, East Coast. So, we have the west coast, from California to Alaska, and Baja, Mexico, that produces much of the seafood those diners in New York City love, yet, how many reporters from the West Coast will be there, and, should we be injecting kerosene soot and water vapors and CO2 directly into the atmosphere with all this flying/jetting around for one-day conferences?

Oh, the conundrum of it all, and yet, 4o people met on a glorious Thursday night to listen to one scientist try to do some jujitsu around the colluding topics tied to ocean warming, acidification, eutrophication, hypoxia, red tides, plastics, sedimentation and  declining oyster cultivation, declining wild salmon stocks, threats to the Dungeness crab industry and other fisheries threats. We didn’t even get around to how many impacts will befall cetaceans — the iconic grey whales (and other dolphins and whales that migrate and hang around) which are part of a growing whale watching tourism industry.

Here is the story for the Newport News Times. It hits around 1,120 words, certainly not reaching the expected concision of small town twice-a-week newspapers (600 words!). It might be cut so much (mangled is my term) that it will be a shell of its original self.

At the end of this read, I will insert a few elements I believe are more necessary to this story and the contexts, than the pure reportage and narrative flow I create, which I have been told are worthy of a read.  PKH

****

Climate Change’s ‘Evil Twin’ 

Ocean Acidification (and problem stepchild, Ocean Hypoxia)

In today’s changing world of climate change, it might not seem unusual to see a room with forty Lincoln County residents at the Visual Arts Center overlooking Nye Beach on a windless, rainless evening to talk about biochemistry, the atmosphere and oceanographic sciences.

It was a perfect Central Oregon Coast Thursday for tourists and residents alike – low tide and a sunset unfolding inside a cloud-enhanced blue sky. One fellow from Vancouver, Washington, with his family of four asked me where Café Mundo was, and then said, “Man, you are living in paradise. Absolute paradise.”

A few quick introductions for those attending the MidCoast Watersheds Council monthly meeting, and we were about to be schooled in pteropods,  pelagic snails, corrosive sea water, pitted and wonky oyster larvae shells, with large doses of talk about Newport’s and the entire Oregon coast’s economic threats caused by increased ocean acidification.

We are talking about $270 million annually the west coast oyster industry generates. “I love looking at critters,” said Caren Braby, manager for Oregon’s Marine Resources Program. “I love working on policy issues important to residents and the communities I love. I’ve lived here in Newport and the West Coast for over ten years.”

The biochemist/biologist with a self-professed passion for all invertebrates gave the listeners a caveat: “I’m going to relate some pretty gloomy things in this presentation, but I will end it with some bright spots, some hope, solutions.”

The attendees were introduced to the basic chemistry of ocean acidification and hypoxia with a 13-minute video: “Ocean Acidification – Changing Waters On The Oregon Coast” – sponsored by Oregon Fish and Wildlife, OSU College of Earth, Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, OSU’s College of Science, Sea Grant Oregon and the Turner Trust.

“The ocean may look the same, but the water is changing, especially on the Oregon coast,” said Francis Chan, an associate professor and senior researcher in Oregon State University’s Department of Integrative Biology. It’s all tied to the amount of carbon the ocean is absorbing largely due to fossil fuel burning and deforestation. “Carbon is changing ocean chemistry faster than it has the last million years.”

Tying the negative impacts of human development, consumption and resource harvesting on the environment, to lower PH in our waters is depressing and challenging. For Braby, who’s big on “focusing on Oregon … describing the problem” Ocean Acidification threatens the Oregon Coast socially, culturally, economically and recreationally.

For instance, the Dungeness crab industry is Oregon’s single most valuable commercial fishery at $75 million last year. While the sea snails are the building blocks for salmon and other marine species food webs, acidification effects all shell-building species, including the iconic crab.

Those four threats Braby listed, plus the fact lawmakers are concerned with the state’s rural communities, are driving the legislature to follow the lead of marine scientists and stakeholders such as Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua & Siuslaw Indians, the shellfish industry, commercial fishing groups, conservation organizations and others to create in 2017 the Oregon Coordinating Council on Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia (SB 1039).

Both holders of doctorates, Jack Barth, director of Marine Studies Initiative-OSU, and Brady are the OAH Council’s co-chairs.

Unintended consequences should be the lesson of the century when teaching young people how to tackle all these problems scientists like Brady, Barth and Chan are “describing.” For Caren Braby, acidification, hypoxia and harmful algal blooms are a triple whammy of not just alphabet soups – OA, OH, OAH, HAB —  but could be the tipping points in this coast’s livelihood, lifestyle and environmental, economic and cultural longevity.

“Even if we stop releasing carbon dioxide today, there will still be a thirty- to fifty-year increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean upwelling from deep within the ocean,” Braby told the audience. This lag time will affect the ocean’s PH level, causing more acidification. How much, we don’t know.

The deep-ocean conveyor belt brings to the Oregon coast cold water, called upwellings. That water comes from deep in the ocean and carries more nutrients that sustain ocean life. However, bad comes with the good – that water has less oxygen and tends to be acidified. Taking decades to travel to the West Coast, this water last touched the atmosphere decades earlier, when CO2 levels were lower than today. So future upwellings will carry the “memory” of today’s annual increases in CO2.

Ice core science is now giving us an atmospheric earth snapshot that goes back 800,000 years. Today,  atmospheric carbon dioxide is well over the maximum level during this long span. The rapid increase in fossil fuel burning and other man-made carbon dioxide emitters paints a gloomy picture for the past six decades – 1958 at 310 ppm versus 2018 at 410 ppm.

The hypoxia – dead zones – is basically less oxygen in large areas of the ocean. Much of the oxygen is displaced by harmful nutrient runoff or sedimentation, as well as algal blooms. However, OSU is looking at complex climate change elements, including wave and eddy action in the oceans.

Brady emphasized that biotoxins in several algae species – commonly known as a red tide — closed fisheries in 2015. Again, HAB’s are tied to acidified conditions in the ocean. The state’s scientific and commercial fisheries are looking at not only the predictive tools for HABs, but how to mitigate the impacts to clams, crabs, oysters and other commercial species along the food web.

“A massive hypoxic event caused the halibut to go away in both Washington and Oregon,” Braby stated. Add to that acidification’s effects on young salmon.

“Research shows ocean acidification could affect salmon’s ability to smell, which the fish rely on to avoid predators and navigate to their natal rivers.”

This is a global problem, but Braby and others caution Oregonians to not take the “we can’t do anything to solve this because India and China are causing it” approach.

Again, back to our sandbox: Oregon’s coast and watersheds. Braby admits there is not enough money allocated to both study and mitigate the ocean acidification and hypoxia issues we are facing. The Sept. 15, 2018 report she helped write posits five immediate next steps:

1. continue the science and monitoring
2. reduce causes of OAH
3. promote OAH adaptation and resiliency
4. raise awareness of OAH science, impacts and solutions
5. commit resources to OAH science

For us overlooking Nye Beach, Brady emphasized the fourth step – socializing these issues through outreach, communication. She admits that scientists haven’t always been good at talking to the public, but Braby is armed to continue these sorts of public outreach events to get the message out about OAH and HAB.

Climate Change Mollifiers and Great Balls of Fire CO2 Deniers:

We Can Play the Game of Wack the Mole, But Think Hard: Ocean Chemistry

The realities around acidification and hypoxia and biotoxicins and algal blooms will continue, continue, continue no matter how many reports are filed, agencies are created, scientists deployed, and public comment periods extended. Talk is very cheap, almost delusional, without action.

So, the great yawing world of pacifism and passive hope focused on lobbying our warped political system and constant pleas with lawyers to assist environmental groups and then looking to technological fixes and active geo-engineering “things” to get the climate back on track, well, it’s what makes white civilization so-so flawed.

We are Nero fiddling while the planet burns. We intellectualize when things are deeply tied to a deeper level of spiritual thinking.

At the event written about above, during this incredible waning night, one big final ending struck me — people in the audience (mostly fifty years of age and upwards of 65 and older) wanted to discuss what the scientist and state bureaucrat, Caren Braby, had presented.

The gentleman (MC) with the MidCoast Watershed Council wanted the room cleared and questions quashed at a certain “acceptable” moment in the evening. However, people gathering and listening to a PowerPoint, wanted civic engagement — then and now. They wanted to hash out issues, to arm themselves with better ways to confront deniers and business owners and politicians.

This so-called choir needs more tools to discuss the conjoining issues of climate change, resource depletion, food insecurity, growth (human & development), true sustainability, what energy in and energy out is, and so-so much more. They need narrative framing tools to defeat the growing number of do-nothings and capitalists who will take the Titanic down with one life boat for themselves.

In fact, one of the active members of the Council wanted a deeper discussion on how insincere the state’s political will is; wanted to confront how flawed any movement on ocean acidification and hypoxia is without strengthening watershed rules; and he seemed to have info on how a regional approach is the only real way to move ahead, not just a state to state baby step approach. He did not get too much time to discuss before we were dismissed like good little middle school students.

There are many natural climate solutions tied to land stewardship that are not in place to help mitigate this huge problem for coastal communities and the marine life around them.  This fellow wanted those topics broached and discussed. Alas, in American white species time, we had to clear the room like good little Eichmanns.

While I am not a big proponent of harvesting the seas for food as a source of 20 percent of the globe’s protein, right now, the earth is criss-crossed with four to five times the number of fishing fleets than the oceans can sustain if fisheries are to stay robust and healthy. Many fisheries are in deep decline or near collapsing.

For Oregon, 37 percent of all greenhouse gasses originate through bad land use. Planting timber is the real solution to carbon sequestration, clean watersheds, protecting terrestrial and avian species and for the so-called coastal economies. Trees, what a simple solution.

Unfortunately, these green solutions are not high on the table of scientists looking at chemistry and the invertebrates tied to specific fisheries. Planting trees means rethinking what “private land ownership” means in a collapsing world.

Then, you can get so mired in the blue carbon and green solutions that are not high on the scale of bringing down global carbon dioxide levels. 

The solutions, unfortunately, are all tied to really wrecking “lifestyles, growth rates, consumption patterns, me-myself-and-I ego-centrism, recreation desires, class inequalities” Business As Usual ideals, from the Western Civilization’s (sic) perspective.

It’s all about human survival, very Homo Sapiens focused, to the detriment of all other natural ecosystems — not really about the honoring of the millions of other species, or protecting wild-lands or mountain tops and corals, even geological formations, not only for their right to exist, but their beauty and their connection to earth health which is Homo Sapiens health.

Take a look at this article by Dr Phillip Williamson. He’s an honorary reader at the University of East Anglia and science coordinator of the UK Greenhouse Gas Removal from the Atmosphere research program, which is coordinated by the government-funded National Environment Research Council (NERC).

All the options, therefore, need to be on the table – not just the land-based approaches, such as planting new forests and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – which have dominated conversations to date.

This week, myself and colleagues attempt to address this gap by publishing an analysisof 13 ocean-based actions to address climate change and its impacts. The study considers the effectiveness and feasibility of both global-scale and local ocean-based solutions using information from more than 450 other publications.

Each potential action was assessed for a range of environmental, technological, social and economic criteria, with additional consideration given to each action’s impacts on important marine habitats and ecosystem services.The study assesses seven ocean-based actions that have the potential to be deployed on a global scale. For the analysis, it was assumed that each technique was implemented at its maximum physical capacity.

Each technique was rated for its “mitigation effectiveness” – which was defined as how well the technique could help move the world from a high emissions scenario (“RCP8.5”) to a low emissions scenario where warming is limited to 2C (“RCP2.6”) – for a range of problems associated with climate change, including temperature rise, “ocean acidification” and sea level rise.

Here, sanity one and two:

1.  protecting coastal areas from floods and nurseries for inshore fisheries
2. planting new forests and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)

Here, the insanity of where we are at in global outlooks and how to cut carbon emissions while still having everything hunky-dory:

1.  “solar geoengineering” techniques such as, “ocean surface albedo” (the reflectiveness of the ocean) and “marine cloud brightening”, which would work by using ships to spray saltwater into the clouds above the sea to make them more reflective.
2. “assisted evolution” – defined as attempts to harness the power of evolution to make species more tolerant to the impacts of climate change: 

• One example of this could be to make coral species more tolerant to heat stress.
• The last technique is reef relocation and restoration. This can involve transplanting healthy coral into a degraded reef following a mass bleaching event, in order to aid its recovery.

Source

For Caren, submitting public comments is one action. More research is her mainstay, and as she stated, she is euphoric looking into a microscope at invertebrates. She states: “If we don’t understand what’s happening, we can’t change things.”

Of course, we have shifting baselines, so what Caren and her team work on, well, the predictions of acidification of oceans have been around for decades (a baseline for action 30 years ago), with the predicted breakdown in shelled species losing their ability to delivery calcium to make shells. We can study and research the problem until corporations have finally cut every last old growth tree or culled the last blue whale.

The partnerships tied to OAH and HAB are impressive, but we are not in a climate where these blocking steps should be allowed — more science, more studies to delineate the problem and more monitoring; and then, the proposed lunacy of iron shavings in the ocean and sulfur dioxide spewed into the atmosphere to dim the sky? Madness!

The average citizen wants to stick his or her head out the window and say: “So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!” Howard Bale, from the movie, Network.

Here on the Oregon Coast, hypoxia events during summer months are growing in size and duration, and seeing more and more of these biotoxic algal blooms (phytoplankton) making it to the smaller fish like sardines and anchovies, and into oysters and clams, well, the bio-accumulation and bio-toxicity carry up the food chain.  Many warnings to “don’t eat the clams/oyster/fish” will be sent out as we move into the next decade. This is the future.

Caren Braby also talked about pyrosomes, sea pickles (each is technically a colony of other multi-celled animals called zooids), that are not normally seen on the coast but are a result of hypoxia. Warming seas. What have you.

We are in some really bizarre times — people like Caren Braby have their laurels and positions with the state and other agencies, but in reality, they are making their incomes off of collapse, the sixth mass extinction, and local communities (both human and not) demises. 

How’s this headline: Box jellyfish will destroy future oceans by gobbling up the food

The reality is many thousands and thousands of out-of-balance changes are occurring at the flora and fauna level, let alone at the chemistry level. So, the most abundant animal on earth, zeroing out because of ocean acidification? Not a fairy tale you want to repeat to your five-year-old for bedtime story telling. Insanity.

As the oceans become more acidic, box jellyfish may start eating a lot more. Their greedy appetites could have a huge impact on marine ecosystems.

Some of the carbon dioxide we release is dissolving in the oceans, where it becomes carbonic acid – making the oceans less alkaline and more acidic. Scientists are scrambling to identify which species will be most impacted.

They are particularly concerned about organisms that play pivotal roles in marine food webs, because if they disappear, entire ecosystems may collapse.Copepods are particularly critical. These tiny crustaceans are the most abundant animal on earth by mass. They swarm in vast numbers in some regions of the ocean, where larger animals feast on them.

What happens to copepods affects all that depend on them, “which is pretty much everything,” says Edd Hammill of Utah State University in Logan.

Previous studies have found copepods may be fairly resistant to ocean acidification. However, these have largely focused on single species, so community-level effects may have been missed.

So these powerful swimmers, halibut, take off when they end up near a hypoxic zone. Entire coastlines (WA and OR) then have had halibut fisheries completely shut down with no halibut to be found.

Maybe the oceans are an allusion to what we have already done to the soil and air and freshwater on land. Not one place on the planet can you take a handful of freshwater and be safe from bio-toxins and deadly amoeba. Every person on the planet has mircoplastic in their feces and many compounds like flame retardant in their blood. 

“Pteropods are the canary in the mine shaft,” Care Braby stated. 

How many canaries in the coal mine comparisons are there now on planet earth in terms of specific species crashing and ecosystems degrading? 

Even one of the businessmen as part of the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery said the hatchery’s chemistry manipulations were just “scratching the surface” in terms of how big and far-reaching ocean acidification will be.

It was here, from 2006 to 2008, that oyster larvae began dying dramatically, with hatchery owners Mark Wiegardt and his wife, Sue Cudd, experiencing larvae losses of 70 to 80 percent.

“Historically we’ve had larvae mortalities,” says Wiegardt, but those deaths were usually related to bacteria. After spending thousands of dollars to disinfect and filter out pathogens, the hatchery’s oyster larvae were still dying.

Finally, the couple enlisted the help of Burke Hales, a biogeochemist and ocean ecologist at Oregon State University. He soon homed in on the carbon chemistry of the water. “My wife sent a few samples in and Hales said someone had screwed up the samples because the [dissolved CO2 gas] level was so ridiculously high,” says Wiegardt, a fourth-generation oyster farmer. But the measurements were accurate. What the Whiskey Creek hatchery was experiencing was acidic seawater, caused by the ocean absorbing excessive amounts of CO2 from the air.

Source: YaleEnvironment36o.

Now is the time (30 years ago, really) to get communities to talk, to come up with collective solutions, to challenge business as usual, and science as usual.

And a flat-lined media, or so-called liberal press will not be benefiting anyone in terms of getting community conversations going and action started. If a rag or network is around just to sell junk, then, we have no hope.

One restaurant and seafood market owner I talked with in Newport is aware that her five-star restaurant and local sourcing of seafood is “small cookies” in the scheme of things.

“There are so many forces beyond our control. I am worried about long-term food security. I want us to be looking at food systems, and to teach that in academic settings,” said Laura Anderson of Local Ocean Dockside Grill and Fish Market.

A World is Right When We Learn to Preserve and Embrace the Word Like a Poet

Riffing off of Aldo Leopold’s: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

by Paul Haeder / April 1st, 2019

Special for Dissident Voice and LA Progressive, part of National Poetry Month, 2019

*****

I’m thinking a lot about creativity. About young people, 6 or 7 years of age, so ripe for learning and how we as mentors and teachers should not only respect how their inner voices count, but allow them that exploratory space.  Words as expressions of rebellion. Empathy. Rage. Regret. Laments.

Words, sold now as marketing tools, have less and less power as we have devolved into a country of business-speak, unheralded words of death-ray politicians, tweeting twats and Tweedledum’s and Tweedledee’s. Words even in creative writing programs are branded, marketed and sold as, hmm, a type of group think. MFA (masters of fine arts) programs are destructive to the outsider’s realm of seeing, hearing, touching and his or her own consciousness and subconsciousness.

Poetry, of all the practices, seems the least understood and many times destroyed the most by instructors and teachers attempting to over-analyze or over-classify what it is they think poetry – and a poet – is.

Here, early on, I’ll forward a big slash to the market of the MFA – creative writing programs, their in-house literary journals, and the bourgeoises siphoning off any remarkable revolutionary thought in creative writing.

Rebellion, and Nicaragua, and the Sandinistas fighting against the dirty and perverted capitalist dictator, Somoza. Here, first, revolutionary, Gioconda Belli.

What Are You, Nicaragua?

What are you—
a little triangle of earth
lost in the middle of the world?

What are you—
a flight of birds
guardabarrancos
cenzontles
hummingbirds?

What are you
a roar of rivers
bearing polished, shiny stones
leaving footprints of water in the mountains?

What are you—
A women’s breasts made of earth
Smooth, pointed and threatening?

What are you—
Singing of leaves in gigantic trees
Green, tangled and filled with doves?

What are you—
Pain and dust and screams in the afternoon
“screams like those of women giving birth”?

What are you—
Clenched fist and loaded gun?

What are you, Nicaragua
To cause me such pain?

Thinking like a kid is what the credo should be for adults, especially in this lobotomized world of consumption and endless war and digital dungeons. Dreaming like a child. Sketching worlds and fantastical dreams like a youth.

Instead, many MFA programs are like buttoned-down harbingers of the generalized professing: “Believe us professors and grad students as we are the key to creative writing, and do not stray, as we are the arbiters of fine arts, the word, poetry, life.”

John Steppling:

The practice of writing, the philosophy is, Firstly, a resistance to formulas and solutions. Writing and art pose questions, and if the mystery leaves the work, leaves the process, then usually, the work has died. Institutional forces demand standardized steps and conditions in their creative writing programs … because the institution knows, deep down, that art is there to destroy it. Even the word “creative” is probably suspect, but such are the conditions under which writing is taught. It is an intuitive and unconscious process, and even if done, for some film work, in partnership – it is still solitary.

One cannot write outlines and then follow them. This is what CPAs do, or insurance salesmen preparing their district conference sales quota speech. If one were to know where a narrative was going, one would have a stillborn project on one’s hands. The play or screenplay has within its narrative, an idea of itself. Narrative provides a space for character. The truth of a character is at once indelible and totally opaque. This idea is the reason, I suspect, we have art at all.

Art is not about communication, nor is it about moral instruction. It is about awakening. But it is also a discipline, and a practice. Those Neanderthal cave paintings, found in places where only one person might see them, at a time, is worth keeping in mind, at least when audience questions arise. You don’t write for an audience. Nor do you write for yourself. That is the paradox and the riddle.

Being able to recognize the truthful from kitsch is the basic foundation for starting on having a practice.

I’ve been a poet a long time, since, of course, virginal youth, and then into my teens, until death do me part. My journey has been, as Steppling states above (referencing story and play/screen writing), a series of awakenings.

The shadow of lamentations, too. Nothing heroic is happy and set upon a political or moral frame without first forcing us all to ask primal questions – questions about self in a world that’s insane. At least now, from pre-Industrial, or I imagine, starting with the ripping of tribal tides with so-called conquest societies, colonizers, we have to ask those age-old questions how to live through the mother and father haven been ripped up by superstitious and perverted religious and economic principles (sic). Insanity now, but our own relocation of the disconnected, by artists, is our sanity in an insane system, capitalism.

Words expressed – poetry – is the shaping of the amphora on the potter’s wheel. That wet healing clay, squished between fingers and synapses. The remarkable lifting of sediments from earth into the shape of creation, imagined first, then reimagined with each pump of the pedal of the wheel, each turning, each fingering and palming of clay into a work of art. Poetry.

This month, April, has been generally deemed as National Poetry Month. In the schools I’ve taught at. In some of the libraries I’ve perused, the posters and highlighted books are prominent. In many ways, pushing the word, and celebrating this form of creative expression is both herculean in the sense that almost everything in the USA has been co-opted by consumerism and blatant crass middling thinking and presentation; and it’s worthy of effort to have people leave the business world, the world of making money, into one of making stanzas. In addition, many slam poetry or spoken word events have been tied to the National Poetry Month, started almost a quarter of a century ago in the USA.

Here, National Academy of Poets has the month branded:

National Poetry Month each April is the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, bloggers, and, of course, poets marking poetry’s important place in our culture and our lives.

While we celebrate poets and poetry year-round, the Academy of American Poets was inspired by the successful celebrations of Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March), and founded National Poetry Month in April 1996 with an aim to:

• highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets,
• encourage the reading of poems,
• assist teachers in bringing poetry into their classrooms,
• increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media,

I’ve had some good opportunities to be around poets and live with them and their words. Heck, just a few weeks ago, here I was, in the Central Oregon coast, with Oregon’s Poet Laureate, Kim Stafford, whose own skin is tattooed with the words of his famous poet father’s literary gravitas – William Stafford. Here, my piece in LA Progressive and elsewhere, including the literary journal, Cirque, “A Poet, the Pacific Flyway, and a Sonora Flash Flood Memory.”  And my poem about reconnecting to Stafford’s son, Kim, here on the Oregon Coast, a new home for me: “Somewhere in a Writer’s Workshop He Learns the Lines from ‘Oregon Trail’”

Over the years I have front and center cajoled with poets, seeing myself as one of their peers while living in precarity and calling forth lamentations as a poet. It started seriously when I was an 18-year-old in Tucson hanging out with poets and fiction writers, as part of the University of Arizona’s poets/writers series. I used to hang out at and take classes in rooms at the Poetry Center at the U of A. I’ve helped out poet Richard Shelton with his writer’s workshop at the Arizona State Prison, and he wrote a book about his big project that involved many different cohorts and writers with some tough-living inmates: Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer.

Here I was, still a youth in 1975, when Shelton taught me in poetry classes and started his trips up to death row at the Arizona State prison. I got to be a part of that, Richard’s prison workshops. Not so ironically, shortly after graduating and becoming a journalist and part-time college faculty, I started incorporating that “prison workshop” ethos in so many other of my writing gigs with my own students in a federal prison, La Tuna, NM. I’ve done writing workshops, including poetry, with gifted and talented students in Austin, TX, and with gang-influenced youth in Segundo Barrio, El Paso. I’ve carried through with writing workshops in a life-long learning program at the University of Texas—El Paso, where I had, as an example of some of my students’ histories,  survivors of Dachau write about their lives, and women who knew Pancho Villa, and other interesting older folk, write poems while we worked on their memoirs. Writing workshops for just-released inmates in a homeless program in Portland, and writing projects with homeless veterans and their families, and poetry workshops for fourth graders, and more, have cascaded into my life.

Poetry teaching was always the razor edge way to get people to open up that creative and deeply drawn area of their humanity that is more etched with meaning than their own epigenetics or more fluid of their self-worth than the corpuscles flowing inside– the embedded humanity and horror of being alone in this world. Poetry, as Sapphire shows, can be triumph, momentarily, over evil and the scars evil produce in us all.

Here, though, some quick turn of words to express what poetry is from poets themselves:

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. —Audre Lorde

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. —Pablo Neruda

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness. —Alice Walker

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. –Rita Dove

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor – those great tools of thought – and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world. —Naomi Shihab Nye

Luckily, Angie with Dissident Voice and Dick with LA Progressive and Hollywood Progressive are opening up the digital venues for my limited standing column (in the month of April), as a format for some musings and personal and monumental ideas around the power of the word, poetry. Call it a cry out for something more real than the echo chambers of modern America.

More real than all the stuff I end up writing about in LA Progressive’s Terminal Velocity – Man Lost of Tribe or for Angie at DV which usually is tied to the politics of negotiating our own humanity and community and self inside the war that is killer capitalism. The most creative and psychologically real and satisfying things come to me as people I’ve touched and who have touched me, and, of course, learning to think like a mountain, as Aldo Leopold calls it in his Sand Country Almanac – imagine the poetry in this excerpt by Leopold, one of the fathers of conservation and environmental sanity:

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.

It’s not a quaint thing, this poetry. Actually, many people do write poems, and see themselves as poets. Really, not just MFA students or older ladies waxing religious rhymes, but plumbers, construction workers, nurses, bookkeepers, and every form of human life.

The poem is a distilled world, as Rita Dove says. Neruda also has it right – it’s where you are from, inside the body of the world, as in forests, oceans, inside rain: that’s the germination of a poem. And, poetry should be rebellious and about revolution as Alice Walker states, and lived, as she told me twice when I’ve been to her readings and workshops.  That poetry is a bridge over fears, as Lourde states, makes so much sense. Bridging humanity over the troubled waters of the inhumane.

The direct line to human feeling . . . . and making our lives deeper in confidence, so much so there is transformation, even for the oppressed and imprisoned, giving meaning in the world and life is meaningful, no matter the circumstance, as Shihab Nye states.

I remember talking with Czeslaw Milosz at a reading in Austin, Texas. I was trying to drill down what poetry was, how I could parachute into the lives of gang members, spooks (inhalers of volatile compounds like gasoline), homeless war vets, young adults with developmental disabilities, survivors of sexual assault and invoke some solid concepts on why the poem – no matter what form it takes – is what Naomi states: imaging life as it can or should be or is honoring the word and creative practice of language in the art of detailing.

He was near the end of his life when he told me, In reality, whatever the poet attempts to say, all words are a type of lamentation. Despair, maybe, colored by something else that pushes down the blackness of humanity in this age of destruction.  Something like that. He went deeper, though. As seen in this interview in the Paris Review:

Of course, it’s true that people talk too much and without restraint. But poetry imposes certain restraints. Nevertheless, there is always the feeling that you didn’t unveil yourself enough. A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling. And then your life ends, and that’s it.

Two poems by Czeslaw Milosz to start the month:

In Black Despair

In grayish doubt and black despair,
I drafted hymns to the earth and the air,
pretending to joy, although I lacked it.
The age had made lament redundant.

So here’s the question — who can answer it —
Was he a brave man or a hypocrite?

A Felicitous Life

His old age fell on years of abundant harvest.
There were no earthquakes, droughts or floods.
It seemed as if the turning of the seasons gained in constancy,
Stars waxed strong and the sun increased its might.
Even in remote provinces no war was waged.
Generations grew up friendly to fellow men.
The rational nature of man was not a subject of derision.
It was bitter to say farewell to the earth so renewed.
He was envious and ashamed of his doubt,
Content that his lacerated memory would vanish with him.

Two days after his death a hurricane razed the coasts.
Smoke came from volcanoes inactive for a hundred years.
Lava sprawled over forests, vineyards, and towns.
And war began with a battle on the islands.

Next: Poetry as environmental sanity and rebellion!

Look, ground-truthing is always going to come from someone like me who has taught in a whole hell of a lot of schools, from Newport, OR, to Vancouver, WA, from Seattle to Spokane, El Paso to Austin. And many more. Taught in prisons, in military compounds, homeless shelters, halfway house, and, shoot, more places.

This attack on the 50 percent of Americans who need their lives heralded and supported by their hard work, the work that we do for the 2,400 billionaires in the world and those 36 million millionaires, all loaded because they are at the heart of exploiting and polluting.

We need more SNAP benefits for Americans, more TANF for families, more food programs in the PK12 schools — gardens, canning centers, kids learning how to smoke salmon or grow all those salad fixings. How to bake gluten free bread, and sour dough buns.

Instead, we see the duopoly of Demon-Can’ts, or Repube-crats, whatever you want to call for parties of donkey and elephant manure, killing their own people, and eating their children.

Farmers and food purveyors in the schools, man. Kids learning how to grow permaculture gardens, how to milk a pygmy goat, how to make goat feta cheese, and more. Youth need so much more to impregnate them with real tools to fight the oppression, stupidity of their elders and the tipping points coming down hard tied to global warming.

Instead, we have these white devils in their dervishes of insanity and narcissism destroying all communities.

It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky who said: “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”

So, these idiots are at it again — not enough kids get good food in a day, let alone food period. I have written about the fries, pizza, full-fat chocolate milk, and ketchup diet we force onto youth. This is the latest in another white devil’s view of the world he doesn’t live in or come from —

6 states and DC sue over changes to school lunch rules

Six states and the District of Columbia sued the Department of Agriculture on Wednesday, saying it weakened nutritional standards in school breakfasts and lunches when it relaxed the requirements affecting salt and refined grains last year. The lawsuit in Manhattan federal court asked a judge to overturn the changes, saying they were carried out in an arbitrary and capricious manner.

The government “significantly weakened” nutritional standards for sodium and whole grains, according to the lawsuit, without giving the public a chance to comment on them and in opposition to nutritional requirements for school meals set by Congress.

The states and D.C. said the standards should be based on recommendations of the U.S. government’s “Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” the National Academy of Sciences and scientific research regarding children’s nutrition.

The USDA school lunch program provides low-cost or free lunches and breakfasts in public schools and other institutions. Last year, it served an estimated 30 million children.

An email seeking comment was sent to the Justice Department.

New York Attorney General Letitia James led the multistate civil legal action, saying in a release that over a million children in New York depend daily on the meals.

“The Trump Administration has undermined key health benefits for our children – standards for salt and whole grains in school meals – with deliberate disregard for science, expert opinion, and the law,” she said.

Note: I am on the Central Coast of Oregon where I have undertaken rooting myself somewhat in the culture, in the history and in the future of this place. I’ve been working with students in K12 as a substitute for all levels, all categories of teaching. I’ve joined Surfrider and the American Cetacean Society. I’ve interfaced with the Newport city twice-a-week newspaper to get some insider news out around teaching and environmental issues.

There is irony here: writing for free, and, I cut my teeth when I was 18 working for the Tombstone Epitaph in Arizona, and then small dailies and mid-size city dailies — Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Spokane, Seattle — then some news organizations like the LA Times Syndicate and Gannett.

Here I am, sending in copy, to this small newspaper, part of a small conglomerate of newspapers owned by News Media Corporation, with background on them and the owner here and here. My piece below has been hacked up, per the small newspaper business, but alas, sometimes it’s about getting the basic message through. It’s on page A-5, April 3, 2019.

What gets cut, unfortunately, are the guts of the story, about a woman who owns a restaurant and is for a proposed single-use plastic bag ban for the city of Newport, not a baby-step, but an inch-worm’s step. Here, below, the original copy turned into the newspaper.

Plastics are increasing every year, and if we know anything about petrochemicals and how and where they are produced, then this is yet one of a thousand humanity and ecosystem cuts of death. Here, from another venue where I publish, for free, again, for free — Why Recycling Is a ‘Pseudo-Solution’ to Reducing Plastic Waste

Omelets and Pancakes and Every Day Learning How and Where to Cut Back on Waste

Café Nye Beach owner is a strong proponent of the Newport City plastic bag ban

By Paul Haeder, special to the Newport News-Times

Putting her mouth where her heart is, Judy Buchko sees her Nye Beach eatery as something more than an all-day breakfast joint with a hundred culinary options.

“To tell you the truth,” said the 62-year-old owner of Café Nye Beach, “I’ve been in the restaurant business since I was thirteen.” She was cracking, whipping up and storing a few dozen eggs (five dozen) when she showed this writer the ins and outs of her business.

We talked about the deep history of her work as a restaurateur, but also what it means to be a responsible member of the community. Buchko’s ethos is about protecting her workers, and in that regard, she pointed out that she pays above the minimum wage considered average in Newport.

Some of my employees get fifteen dollars an hour, on top of tips,” she stated. “It’s only fair they get a higher wage, with all the work they do to make this place successful.” Judy has 11 employees, half of whom are full-time. If there was an affordable small business insurance program, she says she’d surely like to offer health insurance under some group health insurance model.

She is in favor of a single-payer health care system, something she knows personally. Almost five years ago, after six months of pain she attributed to a hernia, she was diagnosed with cancer. After an 8-hour operation to take out a five- pound ovarian cancerous tumor, she was on medical leave. Soon, she had part of her intestine removed because of the scarring the malignant tumor had done to her insides.

Straddled with both debt for remodeling the restaurant and the hospital bills, Buchko understands the precarity of the average American when something goes wrong medically.

She’s been at the current location for over eight years, and when asked what she might be doing in five years, Judy stated, “I will probably be winding down from the business.” She stated she’d like to travel, to places like Kenya or Nairobi: “Just to experience a place where I do not know the language and learn how to adapt.”

She was in full-on tongue-in-cheek mode when she implied her travels might start sooner as the upstairs apartment dweller upstairs wasn’t too keen on the eating establishment below, complaining about the normal noise coming from a diner. “She’d like to see my place closed.”

The eatery has a deep menu, with homemade breads, many gluten-free and vegan/vegetarian option, and she sources her produce, beef and other products locally. While she was discussing the history of the business and her own personal narrative, Lorne from the egg place arrived with a few cartoons of eggs from he and his wife’s chicken and egg operation, Emerald Hills Farms.

Lorne’s proud of his 89 years on planet earth, having originally come from California more than 8 years ago “with a much younger wife, who works at Oceana.” He delivers the free-range and antibiotic-free eggs daily to Café Nye Beach since the operation goes through 15 dozen or more eggs a day for their 8 pm to 3 pm daily restaurant.

Like many of the Nye Beach establishments, the owner of Café Nye Beach supports the Newport City single use plastic bag ban. Judy stated she went to a City Council meeting where she spoke for the ban and listened to a young Sam Case student she knows, Anders, “eloquently speak on the harms of plastics on ocean life.”

I’ve always cared about all the little children, and my support of the ban and putting that up that sign in the restaurant as a show of solidarity is out of my love for kids . . . my voice is speaking for them, those who can’t vote.”

Ironically, she talked about having many sleepless nights mulling over plight of the planet and global warming, but more specifically about the waste that is part and parcel hitched to the restaurant business. She estimates more than 50 percent of the food people order gets tossed. She talked about so-called “green cups” she used, which Judy said after two weeks soaking in water at home in an experiment she was conducting the cups had not even begun to biodegrade.

She’s always willing to talk to anyone interested in her stand for a plastic bag ban and other environmental measures, adding that she is not going to win any arguments with people who are already convinced climate change isn’t real or that plastics restrictions won’t work.

Her setting down roots in Newport occurred thirty years ago, when she hitchhiked from Wisconsin and fell in love with the place. She opened up a restaurant in the Bay Front, but moved over to Nye Beach more than 13 years ago. “I love to cook, and I realized when I was recovering from surgery — after this cancer the doctor said I wouldn’t survive — that I had to get back to work, back to the restaurant.”

Work and being connected to people, she states, are healing qualities she can count on. Her tenacity she attributes to growing up in a poorer section of Milwaukie, with a single mom. “I remember our dirty coal burning heater, and we’d have to clean out our nostrils every day from all the soot.”

She repeated several times, “I try to do the best in terms of environmental awareness at my age.”

He hero includes her now deceased older brother who fought against unjust prison sentences and police brutality in Milwaukee. He also was part of a “free Angela Davis” group, and eventually, he succumbed to AIDS in 1992.

The activism and social and environmental justice awareness were sparked young, she stated. “My uncle, mom, brother and myself and some other kids went to the A & P to protest them selling Gerber baby food.” It was a campaign started when journalists revealed Gerber sold infant formula to undeveloped countries without sufficient warnings about using clean water and refrigeration. “Many thousands of babies got sick and many died because of Gerber’s bad policies.”

Many of her employees were rushing around her as she was shredding potatoes for fresh hash browns. Claudia, a 42-year-old from Puebla, Mexico, said she appreciates the work and her boss’s attitude. We spoke at length in Spanish, discussing her 15 years in Newport and five years in Arizona after leaving Puebla with her husband. Judy pined in stating she wanted a friend of hers who is a linguist to help Claudia and others to learn English so they can make more money out front waiting tables.

She’s working everyday to cut down on waste and throwaway items: she’s got cardboard instead of Styrofoam takeaway boxes; hemp straws; cup lids made out of sugar cane.

One day she’d like to travel to the Galapagos Islands, but even that keeps her up at night: “I will have to research that and make sure I am not just adding to all the pollution with all the tourism on those incredible islands.”

“The…truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.” — Michael Parenti

Goddamn, this is one messed up country, one messed up freak show! The serious nature of America’s collective insanity covers both dangerous species who toilet paper themselves either in donkey or elephant manure.

This society runs on madness, on the collective chronic disease that defines the United States of Amnesia. We might think we are grounded, plying away on our special projects. I of course write about education and about environment, a lot, but the discourse goes deeper, really, as the philosophy and spiritual core of someone like me go way beyond the chatter and amazingly consistent looniness of the Homo Sapiens Consumopethicus Retailopethicus. Here, from the controlled opposition, Democracy Now, just the headlines:

*Israel Continues Airstrikes in Gaza Amid Fragile Truce
*U.S. Officially Recognizes Golan Heights as Israeli Territory
*Trump Suggests Probes into “Traitors” in Wake of Mueller Report
*Pentagon Authorizes Diversion of $1 Billion to Build Border Wall
*Father of 6-Year-Old Sandy Hook Victim Dies by Suicide
*Parkland Survivors Urge Senators to Pass Background Check Act
*DOJ Backs Full Repeal of Affordable Care Act
*Mexico: Radio Reporter Killed Amid Spate of Journalist Murders
*Venezuela: New Power Outage Hits Residents Amid Political Turmoil
*Suspects in College Admissions Scam Plead Not Guilty
*Green New Deal Goes to Senate Floor, Dems Call Out GOP “Stunt”
*Michael Avenatti Charged with Extortion and Fraud
*SoCal Mosque Vandalized, Graffiti Cites NZ Christchurch Massacre
*Mexican President Calls on Spain, Pope to Apologize for Colonial Past
*Special Counsel Finds No Collusion btw. Trump & Russia; Dems Call for Release of Report
*Cyclone Idai Death Toll Rises as Officials Warn of Health Risks
*Brexit: 1 Million Take to Streets to Call for 2nd Referendum
*France: Protesters Take to Streets for 19th Week Amid Gov’t Clampdown
*Thailand: No Clear Election Winner as Pro-Military Party Takes Lead
*Gaza: Israeli Forces Kill 3 Palestinian Protesters Over Weekend
*Netanyahu Cuts U.S. Trip Short After Rockets Hit Israeli Home
*Somalia: At Least 15 Killed in Gun Battle at Gov’t Bldg
*Mali: 134 People Killed Amid Mounting Ethnic Tensions
*Afghanistan: 14 Civilians Killed After Week of Attacks

Now, go to any lefty web site — Truthout, Truthdig, In These Times, Mother Jones, The Nation, Democracy Now, et al — and there is this wave after wave of anxiety, an almost frenzied point of view on subject after subject:

• March Madness
• college entrance scandal
• Mueller report
• Green New Deal
• Israel-US fornication
• Boeing’s killer jets
• health care
• school shootings
• 2020 list of wannabes
• the rich ripping off more and more
• no affordable housing
• Mafia Military
• Mafia Border Patrol
• Mafia Police departments
• Mafia Banking System
• Mafia Fed
• Mafia Prez
• Mafia Christians
• Mafia Jews
• Mafia Media
• Mafia Fossil Fuel
• Mafia Mining
• Mafia Big Pharma
• eroding schools
• eroding children
• eroding middle class
• eroding workers
• eroding old people
• one paycheck away from poverty
• Mindless Climate Change Chatter
• Massive Collective Madness
• China-Russia-USA  

The list is not comprehensive, but if we look at the news, at the public discourse, at the coffee shop and Wendy’s chatter, we have so-so much confusion and disembodied discussions. All of this speaks of mindlessness, a blatant disregard for the human brain’s capability to think-be-live in a systems thinking world. The millions of words I could galvanize here in this blog would be an endless stream tied to how insane our systems of oppression are when it comes to the struggle we all have within our own contexts and our own eroding sense of community. Now, families are eroded, and in my years as a teacher, social worker, case manager, and journalist, the family under attack and denuded of roots and in constant fight or flight mode, I can see that that core, that basic unit from which to figure out how to raise youth and care for the old, it’s gone belly up.

News headline after news headline, drawing more and more blood from the souls of Americans. Drawing attention away from HOW to destroy capitalism. Then the Project Censored headlines, the most put aside or under-reported stories for 2017-2018. Most of it is negative, with some solutions in the mix. All of it is the blockade of sanity and solutions by the great wall of Capitaism:

25 –Sheriffs Using Iris Recognition Technology along US–Mexico Border

In April 2017, the Southwestern Border Sheriffs’ Coalition (SBSC) unanimously approved use of new biometric identification technology as a defense against “violent unauthorized immigrants,” George Joseph of the Intercept reported.…

24 –More Than 80,000 Stolen Guns Worsen Crime in Florida

Over the past ten years, more than 82,000 guns stolen in Florida remain missing, Laura Morel reported in November 2017 in joint reports for the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for…

23 –New Restrictions on Prisoners’ First Amendment Rights

On November 1, 2017, the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) implemented strict changes to its prison mail policy that discouraged inmates, their families, and friends from using the US Postal…

22 –Big Pharma’s Biostitutes: Corporate Media Ignore Root Cause of Opioid Crisis

At least 64,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2016, with more than 80 percent of those deaths attributed to opioid drugs, according to an August 2017 report from the…

21 –Parkland Shooter’s JROTC Connections Spotlight Militarization of Schools

Public officials have offered their thoughts and prayers to the families of some 141 children, educators, and other people who have been killed in the dozens of school shootings in the…

20 –Extravagant Hospital Waste of Unused Medical Supplies

Hospitals in the United States are wasting millions of dollars’ worth of sterile and unused medical supplies, practices that impact the cost of healthcare, as Marshall Allen reported for ProPublica…

19 –People Bussed across US to Cut Cities’ Homeless Populations

An investigative report by the Guardian studied homeless relocation plans in major cities and counties across the United States. Released in December 2017, the 18-month investigation recorded 34,240 journeys made by homeless…

18 –Adoption Agencies a Gateway for Child Exploitation

As the Epoch Times reported in March 2018, “Global adoption is a big business, fraught with loose regulations and profit incentives that have made it a target for kidnappers, human…

17 —“Model” Mississippi Curriculum Omits Civil Rights Movement from School Textbooks

Inadequate textbooks used in the Mississippi school system are affecting civil rights education, Sierra Mannie reported for the Hechinger Report in October 2017. In 2011, Mississippi adopted new social studies…

16 –$21 Trillion in Unaccounted-for Government Spending from 1998 to 2015

Two federal government agencies, the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), may have accumulated as much as $21 trillion in undocumented expenses between 1998…

15 –Digital Justice: Internet Co-ops Resist Net Neutrality Rollbacks

More than 300 electric cooperatives across the United States are building their own Internet with high-speed fiber networks. These locally-owned networks are poised to do what federal and state governments…

14 —FBI Paid Geek Squad Employees as “Confidential Human Source” Informants

New documents released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Louisville field officers have been paying Best Buy Geek Squad employees as informants for…

13 —The Limits of Negative News and Importance of Constructive Media

Historically, journalism has highlighted social problems in order to expose wrongdoing, inform the public, and spur reform. This “watchdog” role is vital to a democratic society. However, as Christopher Reeve…

12 —ICE Intends to Destroy Records of Inhumane Treatment of Immigrants

In recent years, numerous news reports have highlighted illegal or inhumane actions committed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in their attempts to expel illegal immigrants. Despite the…

11 —US Air Force Seeks to Control Seventy Percent of Nevada’s Desert National Wildlife Refuge

“More than 32,000 people have submitted comments opposing a military takeover of most of Nevada’s Desert National Wildlife Refuge,” the Center for Biological Diversity reported in March 2018. In order…

10 —FBI Racially Profiling “Black Identity Extremists”

In August 2017, the counterterrorism division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued an intelligence assessment warning law enforcement officers, including the Department of Homeland Security, of the danger…

9 —Indigenous Communities around World Helping to Win Legal Rights of Nature

In March 2017, the government of New Zealand officially recognized the Whanganui River—which the indigenous Maori consider their ancestor—as a living entity with rights. By protecting the Whanganui against human…

8 —Congress Passes Intrusive Data Sharing Law under Cover of Spending Bill

Hidden in the massive omnibus spending bill approved by Congress in February 2018 was the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act of 2018. The CLOUD Act enables the…

7 —Regenerative Agriculture as “Next Stage” of Civilization

Regenerative agriculture represents not only an alternative food production strategy but a fundamental shift in our culture’s relationship to nature. As Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association and…

6 —Russiagate: Two-Headed Monster of Propaganda and Censorship

Russiagate, which began as a scandal over Russian efforts to sway the 2016 US election, has since proliferated into a drama of dossiers, investigative councils, Russian adoption cover-ups, and an…

5 —Washington Post Bans Employees from Using Social Media to Criticize Sponsors

In June 2017, Andrew Beaujon reported in the Washingtonian on a new policy at the Washington Post that prohibits the Post’s employees from conduct on social media that “adversely affects The Post’s customers,…

4 —How Big Wireless Convinced Us Cell Phones and Wi-Fi are Safe

A Kaiser Permanente study (published December 2017 in Scientific Reports) conducted controlled research testing on hundreds of pregnant women in the San Francisco Bay area and found that those who had been exposed…

3 —World’s Richest One Percent Continue to Become Wealthier

In November 2017, the Guardian reported on Credit Suisse’s global wealth report, which found that the richest 1 percent of the world now owns more than half of the world’s wealth. As…

2 —“Open-Source” Intelligence Secrets Sold to Highest Bidders

In March 2017, WikiLeaks released Vault 7, which consisted of some 8,761 leaked confidential Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents and files from 2013 to 2016, detailing the agency’s vast arsenal…

1 —Global Decline in Rule of Law as Basic Human Rights Diminish

A 2018 survey conducted in response to global concerns about rising authoritarianism and nationalism shows a major decrease in nations adhering to basic human rights. As the Guardian reported, the World Justice Project…

Ahh, just go back into the archives of Project Censored, and then we can understand how deep the cognitive dissonance is in regard to the hard truths of living in the perverted carnival of Casino-Parasitic-Predatory Capitalism, which unfortunately for those capitalism lovers, no matter how hard they try and rationalize how great it is, all capitalism is about destroying the environment and people:

This video of Michael Parenti explaining the fundamental differences between a liberal and a Marxist analysis of capitalism is a valuable pedagogical tool for understanding the limits of liberalism and the power of anti-capitalist critique.

Marxist Analysis of Capitalism in Six Minutes

So, no matter how spiritual or connected to one’s self one is, unfortunately, none of those stories and topics above can be tackled without first tackling a giant reformation. Not baby steps. Not enlightenment of the self or individual or small group. But revolutionary change. This is vital to know and then to fight, and the fighting is the big WHAT, HOW, WHERE, WHO, now is it not?

Build the Revolution: Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 21st Century”

The global 1%, comprised of over 36-million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, employ their excess capital with investment management firms like BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase. The top seventeen of these trillion-dollar investment management firms controlled $41.1 trillion dollars in 2017. These firms are all directly invested in each other and managed by only 199 people who decide how and where global capital will be invested. Their biggest problem is they have more capital than there are safe investment opportunities, which leads to risky speculative investments, increased war spending, privatization of the public domain, and pressures to open new capital investment opportunities through political regime changes.

The global power elite are aware of their existence as a numerical minority in the vast sea of impoverished humanity. Roughly 80% of the world’s population lives on less than ten dollars a day and half live on less than three dollars a day. Concentrated global capital becomes the binding institutional alignment that brings transnational capitalists into a centralized global imperialism facilitated by world economic/trade institutions and protected by the US/NATO military empire. This concentration of wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation have reached levels that threaten humanity’s future.

This is not only bullshit but the crime, the real crime, and I have to tell my climate change greenwashers, bullshit to all of that Titanic deck chair rearranging. We are bombing people as a First World collective. We are stealing land as a collective. We are polluting the earth as a collective. Wherever capitalism goes, cancer follows. Can we look at this — Eighty Percent of the global population lives on less than $10 a day. And then from that 80 percent, 40 percent lives on less than $3 a day!

Wrong, wrong, wrong, no matter how puffed up anyone gets when talking about how they do this or that for their local community. It is our fault for this global shame. It is the rich people’s conduit that creates poverty. And, in this “first” world country, if you and I are doing “well,” that wellness is at the expense (deadly) of the people we eviscerate, whether in Gaza or the Amazon. And, look hard at the military industrial complex, and how much we pay dearly for the trillions spent on killing people. Every American is guilty. Read this newsletter, and look at the varying tentacles that grab our futures — war-war-war infects everything. Read the article on page 4, “We must demilitarize to decarbonize.” Space Alert:Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

Go to, THE SIPRI TOP 100 ARMS‑PRODUCING AND MILITARY SERVICES
COMPANIES, 2016

Connect the dots, readers! No climate change mitigation or quasi FDR-like democratic socialism will get off the ground without stopping war and war lords and all the millions of college educated folk who make money from the lords of war.

My sanity comes from so many sources, but for now, it’s this benediction for a good friend, someone who was born with a disadvantage, cerebral palsy, who turned life into his own goodness, and his lightness of being, and parlayed the physical disability into his own ability to have fun and be a part of disability rights organizations and movements. I met him while working as a slave laborer for United Cerebral Palsy, working as a case manager for adults with disabilities. He was the board president, and as such, he wanted to know what shenanigans were going on in the department I worked for. Oh, we talked on and on about the reverse sexism of women managing social services. Oh, we talked about the inability of management to break out of nannying people or what trauma-informed management/supervision should be and how it should be utilized as more than just mumbo-jumbo PC-ese.

But we went beyond that rickety non-profit, which he very much was still a part of right up to his unfortunate death at age 65. Here’s my dedicatory poem to him. Sanity cutting through the miasma of the insane nature of USA and the headline eaters of our time! My sanity is balancing the insane Perverted Carnival that is USA, and my inner/outer poet. Enjoy! Others have.

rebar-to-super sleek wheelchair: he’s always on the other end of the line

for Jerry Pattee, RIP

by Paul Haeder / March 24th, 2019

storyteller he teeters on crutches
shows Ma Bell books, Bakelite phones
switchboard wired up, front door
in Sellwood rigged with pay phone
pick up handset, ringer tells Jerry
more visitors, misbegotten souls
he’s always on the other end
of the line

life defined to receive words
upside down lives, delineated
he lived political action
rights for disabled, flash of smile
he showed up for everyone, always open
to disaster, lives came
with tattered spirits, Jerry defined
by CP, always gave shelter

stories unfolded, details like chronologist’s
bowing legs young, his old man
in Payette, Idaho, fashioned
rebar, pulled young Jerald’s legs
come-along so boy might walk

he did, drove his fancy car
second male at Pacific Bell
early days of all-female switchboard
operators, from small-town
to Portland, Jerry figured
life was no bowl of cherries
yet he captivated hundreds, fought
good fight for disability rights
worked his spiritual magic
even with me, atheist, rabble-rouser
two men gathering
matching stories

people live in a bubble, head
in sand, praying for one-drop
rule passing family line
roulette wheel drinking
in pregnancy, child culled
with fetal alcohol syndrome
or, tough pregnancy, delivery
Cerebral Palsy, another throw
of dice spastic, tremors, slurred
or no speech, Jerry, seemingly
neuronormal on phone
radio caster’s voice

the age of CP moves rapidly
swallows difficult, more tremors
spasms, muscles atrophying
internal organs sprayed
a difficult aging process
Jerry let all of that go
joked on crutches, eventually
wheelchair
lamented when young
found healthy woman
married knowing she would
take care of spider-legs
failing faculties, yet life’s
boomerang, wife fell hard
robust one day, multiple sclerosis
the next, as Jerry spent decade
salving her until her death

irony left, me, storyteller
crow stealing shiny things
Jerry always there listening
my trials tribulations
high-strung artist, he colluded
with literary arts, until that
day of one thing after another
CP-breakdown
like old Ford, rusty
leaky, electrical system
frazzling, Jerry had helping
hands till the end, wry humor

the story about LA aunt
husband lawyer to the studio
stars, a mix of Blanche Dubois, Rita
Hayworth, young Jerry
in dressing rooms, lingerie fittings
even met Rita, other starlets
stories, people
held in his twinkle, dashing
face, young boy still

chiseled fading face
his life adopting
houseless, his heart
always on the other end
of the line
old phones ringing

Note: I substitute teach in Lincoln County, Central Oregon, on a magnificent coast that is going downhill quickly: clear cuts up to the beach, more and more development blocking natural estuary systems, biohazards (solids) spread throughout the farming community, more people, more plastic, more crab pots, more whale and pinniped entanglements, no more sea stars, fish full of microplastics, and hot compounds floating from Fukushima nuke explosion.

There is a plastic grocery bag ban being proposed, and it’s not hard to believe many residents write into the local rags how banning toxic bags is akin to taking their .357 magnum away from their cold dead hands. I am writing a book on the PK12 education system in the USA, and, well, what better ground truthing than teaching it. The names of the students cited below are pseudonyms. Everything else is fact!

By Paul K.Haeder

Having fourth graders at Taft Elementary ask me how the children of Houston are doing as the petrochemical plant burns inspired me yet again to continue my substitute teaching for Lincoln County.

We’re looking at nine-year-olds who already want answers and are passionate about connections.

First, we went on a plastic treasure hunt in the classroom. Low hanging fruit were all the plastic bins, totes and folders. There were keyring gizmos on their backpacks. There were youth with lunches wrapped in holey Safeway bags.

We got creative, eventually agreeing that almost everything in the classroom has plastic, and everything inside and outside the classroom has fossil fuel markers on it. Children looked at the “contains 100% polyester” on clothing tags, then realized that anything with paint on it had polymers derived from oil, i.e. plastic. Desks and white boards and light protectors – plastic!

Then one of the students with his Chromebook (90 percent plastic) pulled up an article about plastic compounds in human feces. We got through that discussion okay, but the fourth graders were perplexed on how everyone on earth has plastic in their poop.

The study, which now will be replicated in almost every country, discovered subjects (humans) with microplastics in their feces – both polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET).  All the volunteers had consumed food or beverages stored in plastic wrapping, bottles, or containers. More than 70 percent had eaten fish from the sea, not plastic fish but real fish.

The Taft class then did a poll – how many had food in plastic containers, and how many had eaten fish of any kind the past week. One hundred percent of the 25 students raised their hands, lifting up the plastic lined milk cartons and the Lucky Charms cereal containers they had just consumed.

Young people want real answers, and they understand that at 9 years of age, they have on average another 60 or 65 years left on the planet (we looked up life expectancies for Americans in different parts of the country).

They asked what affects do all the plastics have on their own personal health, both now and in the future. One student, Ronny, found the five-legged frogs and double-headed fish science story on the internet. We talked about hormones and PP, PET, and the other members of the dirty dozen chemicals – mostly come coming from petrochemical plants found in Houston, Texas. All are hormone disruptors so we had to talk about the endocrine system.

They asked why the government wasn’t looking after their health and safety. They wanted to know why scientists weren’t working on ways to reduce these chemicals, polymers, many of them plastics. They went onto the internet, ended up finding peer-reviewed journal sites, and lo and behold, in one student’s own words:  “It’s like Frankenstein’s children they are making, on purpose.”

Tying that “everything is made up of plastic” to a simple single-use plastic bag ban proposed for Newport and then the state of Oregon was a no brainer.  

“We shouldn’t have plastic in our bodies. Fish shouldn’t have plastic in their muscles that we then eat. Whales shouldn’t choke to death on all the plastic. Will I get cancer because my mom microwaves all the leftovers in plastic containers? Why are these companies doing this to us?”

Their words of frustration.

 The beauty of teaching is a great facilitator can throw out a kernel of information and with some flair for engaging youth, the young people can teach themselves about the how, what, why, when, where, who of things they need to know to critically think about problems.

They wanted to know what dirty dozen were, so I listed the chemicals/ metals on the board (see below) and assigned pairs of students for each one to research. The principles I deployed in the science session included math (percentages, values), rhetoric (compare and contrast, formulating processes, cause and effect) and narrative (finding personal stories around each dirty dozen).

As a substitute, I started them to really think, and alas, we ran out of time, because school today is set by bells, breaks, snacks, shuffling from one end of the hallway, to the playground, and sometimes (which occurred the day I subbed), a drill of an active shooter in the school, a Code Red.

Runny eyes, sneezing, coughing, tightness in the chest, heart beating rapidly, fainting spells.  The pairs listed many symptoms as a result of young and old breathing in the smoke from the Houston petrochemical fire.

They discovered that, yes, compounds for single use plastic bags are cooked and chemically leeched into the stretchy polymers that make those grocery bags what they are.

One student read off the lede from one story on the internet: “The latest blaze erupted just hours after a wall holding back almost a million gallons of toxic, flammable liquids collapsed, and just two days after the original conflagration was suppressed. Intercontinental, a unit of Japan’s Mitsui & Co., said three tanks and a drainage ditch were alight before firefighters suppressed the flames after more than an hour.”

Students were upset that the following dirty twelve are in their cookware, storage containers, on their vegetables and fruits as pesticides, in their salmon, in their drinking water, in paint thinners, on their carpet and lawns.

They asked how this has happened, and, then, bam, the bell rang and it was recess. The day ended, and that fourth grade class asked me when I was coming back to Taft finish up the science section. They asked me if they could go to the City Council meeting in Newport in April to speak on why a simple single-use plastic bag ban is not even a baby step on the road to a healthy community.

“It’s at least a start,” Liliana said, after telling the class about her father who is on sick leave because he was exposed to pesticides at a Christmas tree farm. “His body aches all over all day and all night long.”

Sad news for her family but the class got the connection – David read out another Internet finding: “’Grocery bags are made from polyethylene, which consists of long chains of ethylene monomers. Ethylene is derived from natural gas and petroleum.’ The bags we use today come from the same place where those kids in Houston are being let out of school because of the toxic killer clouds.”

BPA – breast and other cancers, obesity, early puberty, heart disease

Doxin – carcinogen, affected immune and reproductive systems

Atrazine – breast tumors, delayed puberty, prostate cancer and turning male frogs into females

Phthalates – hormone changes, lower sperm count, obesis, diabetes, and thyroid irregularities

Perchlorate – thyuroid imbalances, impeded brain and organ development

Fire retardants – imitate thyroid hormones, lower IQ

Lead — permanent brain damage, lowered IQ, hearing loss, miscarriage, premature birth, increased blood pressure, kidney damage and nervous system problems

Arsenic — skin, bladder and lung cancer, death

Mercury — the metal is known to concentrate in the fetal brain and can interfere with brain development been shown to damage cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, which is critical for the body’s ability to metabolize sugar.

Perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) — decreased sperm quality, low birth weight, kidney disease, thyroid disease and high cholesterol, among other health issues

Organophosphate pesticides – disrupting brain development, behavior and fertility

Glycol Ethers  — shrunken testicles, blood abnormalities and lower sperm counts. Children who were exposed to glycol ethers from paint in their bedrooms had substantially more asthma and allergies.

Note: Names of students have been changed to pseudonyms.

Second note: How many students’ parents and family friends would read me the riot act if I distributed this publication? Dirty Dozen: List of Endocrine Disruptors

Third note: The youth of today are being not only ripped off education-wise. They are not only being dumb-downed education-wise and within the home. They are being polluted, part of a huge chemical experiment perpetrated by the Fortune 500 chemical companies, industrial agriculture thugs, petrochemical heathens, auto and airline industry felons, and food purveyors. One giant human experiment around GMOS, hormone distruptors, cancer-causing compounds, pesticides, EMFs, you name it. I tell the climate “activists” who want carbon trading or the New Green Deal to shut up or put up: killing people in other countries with USA-made and lead military hardware; killing and maiming people worldwide and in this country with the chemicals and by-products and products of capitalism? If we can’t keep killer chemicals off the children’s veggies and fruit, how are we going to shift to a “green economy?” Or on personal products like shampoo?

Final note: I’ll be writing about the beach clean up, and about how the Mayor of Eugene is a big rah-rah for carbon trading, but that in itself is not any way out of mitigating climate change. Really. I also will be putting up my Op-ed in response to the Eugene Mayor’s, and I doubt very much it will get into the Register-Guard. The reason is that in America, for decades, speech at schools, in non-profits, within the movements like environmental or climate change, and on and on, it has all been gatekeeped into oblivion and mush hell. More and more people I meet who do beach clean ups know squat about ecosystems, whales, all the hormone distruptors in the foods they eat. They will come to a beach clean up with Starbucks coffee! Imagine that with local coffee shops struggling and we get Starbucks.

The framing in this country is so off kilter that it’s no wonder youth have no leaders, empty promises, idiotic City Councils and Mayors and State Reps. Imagine, Oregon on a highway building frenzy, and then we try and get a statewide plastic bag ban, and it’s the paper/timber companies who are lobbying against the ban citing paper bags being a huge waste and environmental problem. This is how these thugs work — timber-paper lobby working with the plastics lobby.

This final note is about people who are fearful that the column below, which discusses why we need to let children know why Exxon or petrochemical companies or Starbucks or any of the players out front of these outfits, or the actors selling the crap, or the baseball stars, all of them, HATE my students. Hate means a company will site chemical production companies near poor communities; hate is releasing toxic byproducts in the air at night. Hate is a governor of Texas approving these petrochemical companies to run roughshod over entire communities, across many county lines.

Hate is a politician against universal health care, or another group of idiots who hate my students’ parents by putting them in termination harm’s way if they miss too many days of work because of their own illness or children’s illnesses.

Hate is the bank that forecloses on a family, or a property management company that evicts or raises rents to gentrify.

Bad hombres that the hateful Trump Klan talk about, well, that’s just hate speech, calling Mexicans rapists, murderers, terrorists, criminals. Now, fair play would allow me to say how Trump Klan and all those like him or those not like him but with him, that they are criminals, murderers, rapists, and criminals. I could easily cite factual story after story outlining just how criminal the big hombres are, and even with facts, I’d be called out on it, probably banned from teaching here.

Teaching young people to know why “they” hate them and their families is not teaching them to hate, but how to rebuff it, or fight it, or nip it in the bud. But again, fighting some fires with fire is the only way to put out the raging, homicidal, home-destroying wild fires. Billionaires and millionaires and police forces and military forces are the wild fires that have for centuries kept my students and their families down.

People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are colored indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are.
— Terry Eagleton

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
— Edward Said

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born
— Antonio Gramsci

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
— Paulo Freire

Paul K. Haeder is a certified substitute for Lincoln County Schools living in Otis. He has been a newspaper reporter in Texas, Arizona, Washington. He was a faculty member for several colleges and universities. He completed a job as social worker for homeless veterans in Portland. His short story collection is coming out in 2019. He’s working on a book about US’s PK12 education system.

Below is related to my blogs on the environment and on teaching and learning. First, we have the mayor of Eugene writing a simplistic Op-Ed for the Eugene newspaper (sic), the Register-Guard. It’s pretty scary stuff considering this is 2019, and global warming will suck the rivers dry, even up here in old mossy Oregon. It’s a naive attempt at placating, and the bottom line, if Eugene wants to get serious about climate change, then all the governors have to get on board with region planning.

Instead, we see more and more highways expanding, and if you read the latest “hot” spots to move to, i.e., the fastest growing cities in the USA, many are in Florida, you know, that bastion of climate change mitigation and protection.

So, when you are a mayor, or congress person, or head of a governmental agency, or president, or anyone, how serious can we get about “climate change” when the fossil fuel/extraction industry is turbo charge, thanks to the felons and murderers in the banking/financial system:

A report published Wednesday names the banks that have played the biggest recent role in funding fossil fuel projects, finding that since 2016, immediately following the Paris Agreement’s adoption, 33 global banks have poured $1.9 trillion into financing climate-changing projects worldwide.

The top four banks that invested most heavily in fossil fuel projects are all based in the U.S., and include JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America. Royal Bank of Canada, Barclays in Europe, Japan’s MUFG, TD Bank, Scotiabank, and Mizuho make up the remainder of the top 10.

Ahh, the wet paper bag, and this mayor, as you can read here (Vinis: City is meeting urgent call to climate action), is saying nothing, which means she and her city politicians will do nothing, as well. Here, another point of view on just how green greenwashing is!

“Green New Deal” is a great slogan. Unfortunately, the campaign ignores inconvenient facts.

We are beyond the limits to growth of non-renewable fossil fuels and of “renewable” resources such as forests, fish, soil, fresh water and food. Find details about overconsumption, overpopulation and overshoot at peakchoice.org.

Using unprecedented levels of energy does not mean there are equally sized alternatives to power the American Way of Life (AWOL). I have used solar panels since 1990; they are great but not as concentrated. It takes fossil fuels and mineral ores to make, move and install them.

Claims we could have 100 percent of current consumption without fossil fuels don’t describe how to heat cold cities during a “polar vortex.”

We will live radically differently on the resource downslope, but the end of economic growth doesn’t poll well in Democratic Party focus groups. Greenwashing and wishful thinking are popular but unable to sustain social safety nets.

Democratic politicians profess concern for climate while promoting highway expansions, urbanization and industrial clearcutting.

As the fracking bubble subsides (due to geology) we will enter the new world of permanent energy rationing, which will collapse the exponential growth economy and fuel scapegoating of whom to blame.

We are damned if we drill because of toxic pollution and climate chaos.

We are damned if we don’t because fossil fuels power food supplies, keep cities warm in the winter, and run electric power grids.

Mark Robinowitz

Real Learning, Healthy Lunches, Safe Drinking Water and Hands-on Teaching Leads to Surviving Climate Change Chaos

By Paul Haeder

“Why can’t we have that school system you always talk about, Professor Pablo?”

I have the luxury of being a substitute teacher, here in Lincoln County, parachuting into classes, from 1^st grade to high school, from special education to science, and everything in between.

I use the shallow and not well-developed ideas, such as that of the Eugene Mayor’s who doesn’t say much in her March 19 Op-ed for the Register Guard. (“City is meeting urgent call to climate action”)

The bottom line, for youth, is we need to build resiliency in the PK12 system. Now. These youth want to learn how food is grown, how it’s preserved, and how it’s cooked. These students want to have a school system that teaches them about solar power, micro-home building, xeriscaping, permaculture, and how to build a life tied to durable goods and the Indian way.

Now, at school, with the parking lots ripped up and playgrounds transformed into hands-on learning environments for all the community to learn from and help sustain.

How many times have I taught here in Lincoln County, then up in Vancouver, and elsewhere, to include Seattle and Spokane and El Paso, and felt the heavy pall of housing youth in prison-like schools? Then there’s this image: Here in Lincoln County the children are served pretzels, French fries, ranch dressing, canned peaches and slabs of meat on puffed up buns washed down with chocolate milk. This is one lunch session.

Any talk about mitigating through a capitalist framework — which includes business as usual, planning for what, three, five, seven percent annual growth – to work on collapsing marine systems, desertification of arable lands, the shrinking of aquifers and draw-down of rivers is letting that proverbial big old fox guard the hen house.

Oh yeah, these PK12 students also want to know how to build ponds and raise catfish and grow corn alongside hen houses and how to construct corrals holding goats for milking and cheese making.

They want to learn how to become wise by holding talking circles around fires, and they want to know how to live like a mountain and learn from our Indigenous people who are the only true experts in so-called sustainability on Turtle Island.

Global warming will only be mitigated with youth who can live well with less and in a world of retrenchment.  

The mayor and cronies working cap and trade are part of the greenwashing shell game embedded in colonized minds who can’t recognize their positions of power and status in the communities are based on protecting their own special interests.

Students want the power to grow – personally, learning construction, learning how to collect rainwater, how to do passive solar and how to create the arts that count. Learning how to make marketable craftwork out of cedar or discarded but still usable scraps of building materials.

Students need enterprises, like building hoop gardens and growing tomatoes, herbs and flowers: to sell to local businesses. They want leaders and mentors to show them the way of pedicabs, and how to learn sharing, communitarianism.

Students want learning but not Google Chromebooks, nor the constant dumb-downing of common core and standardized testing. Students wonder how an education system at the national level, under a billionaire extremist like Betsy DeVos with zero classroom time, allows such hateful and anti-teacher and anti-student people to hold such an office.

Students wonder why their schools are run down versus those in rich neighborhoods which look lie private colleges.

Students want to know why a high GPA is even necessary  in a time of extinctions and an earth with no ice.  

We read Lucy Vinis’ shallow Op-ed and parsed her conclusion: “The challenges of climate change are opportunities to make our community more resilient — to provide better housing for our more vulnerable citizens, cleaner energy, better parks and a stronger economy. Daunting? Yes. Promising? You bet! This is an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ moment in human history and I am confident we will meet this urgent call to action.”

The students know this is all smoke and mirrors, that having even little things of great harm stopped is what counts: Like recent findings that show 70 percent of all vegetables and fruit kids consume in the USA are spiked with heavy traces and residuals of pesticides and, in some cases, polluted with 18 Capitalist Approved Compounds.

They know that parents working three jobs and one paycheck away from eviction is nowhere near where their own student universe should be. “How can we keep growing and building roads and pipelines in Oregon and then stop global warming?”

Think about generational changes, more and more graduating classes of youth who can not only conceptualize the entire system of growing food, producing products and sustaining life in their community but who are actively part of their communities helping everyone learn how to take care of their neighbors and elders.

They know what an offset is, whether it is carbon offset or the offsets they pay for dearly in the form of their own mental and physical health degraded due to the true definition of offset – trade-offs and externalities. They know nothing around climate change talk, this “all hands on deck” rah-rah, will even get out of the dock when children in Houston suffer for days as refineries and chemical processing plants burn and burn and burn.

Children see through all of this, and if we allow for collective learning and calling a spade a spade instruction, then just maybe hands on learning with bring us to hands-together resiliency.

Paul is working for Lincoln County Schools as a substitute teacher after being a college English faculty in several states, social worker in Portland and Beaverton, newspaper reporter in El Paso, Bisbee, Spokane and Seattle.  He’s working on several books, including one on the US public school debate: Conjugating the World: Lessons from a Freeway Flyer Who Taught Himself How to Learn with Studen

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