unpaid ( corvee?) labor

it snowed a bit here yesterday and i just came in from about an hour's worth of work clearing the walks, digging out the driveway , and uncovering my son's car...the municipality did what passes for a fair job of plowing last night but they still left me with some work if i didn't want to rip the exhausts off the vehicles...admittedly the fact that my son's car was parked on the street had something to do with the volume of snow i had to move...but still it had to be done if, for instance, i wanted my mail delivered...this is a yearly process since there have always been more vehicles than driveway space here ( what's that say about ecological footprints? i did, however, use a shovel to clear the snow...no more mechanical crap than necessary...a sort of physical carbon offset...along with my perennial's root systems [but that's a different blog]...and i have driven only 742 miles since i changed the oil in my pickup on december first...a 14.8 mile a day average...not a complete sinner )as i was removing the pile the city left me i began to ponder on unpaid labor here in bitch daniels' state of emergency...services that the state used to provide have been offloaded onto the public wherever possible...corners cut...and bureaucratic thinking ( if not the actual size of the bureaucracy ) has taken root with a vengance...have a go at renewing a driver's license...or consider that the state used to print and mail tax forms but ( unless you are filing the simplistic form )you have to expend your paper and ink to print the forms and tax schedules yourself...and that's just the state...how much of what i do in what is commonly called "spare time" is relevant to my direct needs and desires and how much of it supports the government or economic entities ( read corporate interests)? i mean nipsco and the criminals at j p morgan chase represent on-line bill paying as a convenience but the reality is i have to do the legwork to establish the links that actually save those entities hard cold cash...and i have to do it monthly...is that convenience for me or for nipsco? there's more to this than appears on the surface and it's something i will be thinking about as i go about my daily routine...how much unpaid labor in support of someone or something else's interests have i been enculturated to take on a s an unconscious matter of course? it bears looking into.

conventional wisdom

"as societies modernize and become richer, their networks become more complex, interconnected, and faster. they...increase the number of links among the nodes, and they boost the speed at which stuff moves from node to node along the links...the first cost of greater connectivity is that damage or a shock in one part of the system- the failure of a machine, the release of a computer virus, or a local financial crisis can cascade farther and faster to other parts of the system."
"the upside of down: catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization" thomas homer-dixon


"yet disaster researcher benjamin mcluckie hypothesized ( in 1977 ) that 'the higher the societies level of technological development, the more vulnerable it would be.' that is because people in industrialized countries live in major population centers and rely on sophisticated technologies, increasing their vulnerability to a large scale collapse of interlocking systems of transportation, communication, water-supply, and food distribution."
"peak everything: waking up to a century of declines." richard heinberg

http://www.usdebtclock.org/energy.html

so collectively the world is using more energy than energy producers are supplying by hundreds of thousands of btu's...the energy that drives the "sophisticated technologies" and powers the inter-connectivity of "advanced" societies...oil is up to $101 a barrel last time i looked...the iranians are making noise ( and it's probably just noise...they have significant energy contracts with the chinese and that is a relationship they most likely don't want to screw up)...and the stock market has started the new year as schizoid as it ended the last...economists still insist on reducing basic resources ( like energy, food, water, etc.) to terms of dollars so they appear to be interchangeable for purposes of economic rationalizations of greed and exploitation of anything that promises to turn a profit ( always a shot-term activity...profit is about what's going on now ) no matter what future costs that exploitation may incur... since the reality is that dollars are an abstract representation of real things and basic resources are not fungible anything an economist says should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism...like all professionals they are not as knowledgeable as they would care for you to believe...full of human frailties and as readily mistaken in their beliefs as anyone...there are a lot of humans out there and all of them are making decisions on a daily basis...billions of variables and , no doubt, millions of loose cannons, creating a world so vastly complicated that even the most "educated" amongst us can have only the most general idea of what's really going on...since politicians of substantially inferior intellect rely on the "educated" to brief them on issues that they should at all costs avoid discussing in any election cycle the cachet of leadership ability that these bozos are trying so desperately to portray themselves as possessing in quantities that should entitle them to roles of leadership is, in my mind, a matter so deeply shrouded in doubt as to render politics absurd...in the end they and the "educated" that serve as their handlers have a vested interest in portraying a return to "normal" as a viable possibility...that a host of programs have failed ( despite the questionable evidence of statistics cooked as a political expedient ) should be an indication of their inability to wrap their pea brains around the enormity of the dilemma the last two hundred years or so of industrialization have been building towards...i will vote in 2012..i always do because it makes them nervous when larger than usual number of people vote and i can't think of a class of people that deserves to be more uncomfortable than politicians...i would encourage you to do so as well if for no other reason than that...then stop and think a bit about how you might be able to find ways in your locality to help yourselves and your neighbors...when leadership fails ( and they have in manifold ways) you have to lead yourselves.

a nest of vipers

"here an observation forces itself upon me: that, in general, the further any measure is carried from the people, the less their interests are attended to."
"the journal of william maclay 1789-1791" 23 may 1789

twenty-nine days into the first congress and already it was becoming clear that "his littleness" and "that damned ass hamilton" had created a government by and for special interests that had no reason to take the interests of the public at large into account to justify its existence...what sparked this epiphany in my good friend bill was the "debate" over a tariff bill that was intended to afford the new federal government some income...its passage was being delayed by "those new england men" who had some reservations about the tariff proposed for molasses...john lawrence, elbridge gerry, and some guy bill only identifies as "williams form baltimore" were holding up the bill's final presentation to congress, allegedly hammering out a compromise between the house and senate versions...but, significantly, many of the proposed tariff rates had been leaked to the mercantile class and, " the merchants have already added the amount of the duties to the price of goods. in this point of view the impost is levied, but not a farthing goes to the treasury of the united states; and all the difference between the state duties levied and the proposed duties is clear gain to the merchants...and the devil of it is that the sum will actually be paid by the consumers."[entry for 21 may 1789]...so with the connivance of some allies in congress the mercantile class in the fledgling united states was bilking consumers out of ready cash for a tariff they were not yet obligated to pay...that folks is in the true spirit of the constitution and a pretty good example of the decision-making process over issues that impact them being taken out of the hands of the public at large and decided in a venue where they have little control and whose decisions they are forced to live with as fact...the subversion of "the interested and overbearing majority" made plain and a good indication of why things will never change with the constitution in force...old bill loathed these bastards and i can see why...fuck these people and all their generations