$190 worth of justice

i’ve never really had a good lawyer til today.  Jeff was great in the Cville Occupy 18 case which was tried today.  At my favorite point in the trial, Jeff got the city manager to admit that the complaints about Occupy Cville were from representatives of the 1% in the ritzy housing around Lee Park and these got the Occupy protesters (representing the 99%) removed.

Jeff basically vanished the indecent exposure charge against co-protester Beyonce in several clear cross examine questions to lead cop at the arrest. After the cop got off the stand, it was clear that they had no idea about the relevant law and thought it was not simply “arrest all nude people”.  Tragically, Beyonce’s message about black youth in the Cville criminal justice system was completely vanished by the media.

Protesters immediatley after the trial

More generally, Jeff put forward a tight case that the supreme court had protected exactly the type of free speech against exactly the type of regulations that Cville has in place.  And unsurprisingly, the judge was having none of it.

Video from Newsplex coverage of Occupy Cville trial

And in the end the judge fined us $100, plus $80 in court fees plus $10 in community services fees.  Perhaps i will do mine with Cop Watch.

There is talk of an appeal, which definitely worked for me in the past.  Turns our juries can be fairer than judges.

“Well, that’s rude.”

Don is having surgery at the same time he is changing rooms.  This creates another complication in the elaborate chess game of commune room assigning.  Typically, members recover from surgery in Nashoba which is designed for convalescence.  So Jim (who lives in the infirmary in Nashoba) is getting bumped out of his room while Don is recovering.  Jim knew this was possible when he moved in and has chosen to stay in the building, even though several “unbumpable” rooms have opened up since he moved in, presumably because Nashoba is quite a nice building to live in and we have perhaps one recovery process a year, so he does not get bumped often,  this may be his first time.

Jim was excited about the prospect of moving into the old room of the member who was having surgery.  He got ready to move down there and then found that a neighbor in that building had decided to move into the room which was being vacated.  Upon hearing this Christina commented “Well, that’s rude.” knowing that Jim had been excited about moving (tho only for the period of recovery) to this room.  Bochie and Aubby quickly countered “No it is not”

Room assigning and room rights are somewhat complex here.  In this case, Jim’s status is that of a guest in the building (despite him being a full member of the community).  The person who wants to move into the room permanently is a member of the building (we call them SLGs for Small Living Group).  The rights of the SLG member supersede the rights of guests in the building, even if they were excited about it.  We choose to have these various control structures and agreement, principally to avoid the lengthy squabbles which we believe would ensue otherwise.

It gets more complex still.  Wren is interested in moving into Ta Chai, the building where most of this shuffling is happening.  If she decides she wants to do a 3 week guesting period in the building, she could bump Jim as well (in this case possibly  completely out of the building).  But they are both guests, right? Why does she have priority?  There are guests and there are guests.  Wren as a guest interested in living permanently in the building has priority over Jim who is just being placed there until his room is free again and could, theoretically at least, be placed in any free room.  Wren is interested in actually living in Ta Chai so her room rights are more important in this case.  In this case Wren will likely wait until the recovery period is over, so Jim can keep his Ta Chai room for a while, because Wren is nice.

So it is not rude actually, it is how we do things culturally around here.

My last tofu trays shift

“Do you like doing trays?” Sabrina asked me one night while i was making hammocks.

i laughed.  “Not really, but tofu trays is honest work and i dont do much honest work around here.  So i keep doing it.”

What i meant by that is i do a lot of lighter work: marketing, recruiting, managing, organizing, home schooling, child care, political work.  Work on the phone, work with keyboards or pencils or toys.   I get labor credits for these and the community recognizes them as important aspects of our collective economy and culture.

But when i got up at 6 this morning to put in 3.5 hours before 10 AM moving basically non-stop in the loud, hot, busy, wet tofu hut – it feels like real work, like some of the heavy lifting that keeps this farm crossed with several small businesses going.

me & curds in action

Sabrina was asking, because in this off winter season there were a number of people asking for additional shifts and she believed (i am somewhat flattered to say) that i was busy with other things (especially managing the hammocks business) and that i could stop doing early morning tofu trays for a while.

This morning i did what might well be my last tofu trays shift before the big upgrades are finished.  The job wont at all be the same and i have already watched it change dramatically.

When i started working in tofu in 1999, Hawina was managing the business and she needed more workers.  She made a pitch to me that she thought trays would be the job i would like.  Really what she was saying was, since we needed all hands on deck, there was not really a “not interested” option, so trays would be the best of the available options for me.

There are no good images of hydrolic tofu presses

When i started with trays we pressed the tofu in metal boxes which had cinder block weights hanging on chains running thru pulleys.  It was rustic and rusty. In retrospect i am surprised it passed health inspection.  We have come a very long way from there.

Trays is one of the two hard jobs still left in the tofu hut.  When i started there was quite some danger that you would get burned if you worked in packaging, but these problems have long been fixed.  Now the other job besides trays which is hard is kettle, where you have to carry buckets of wet beans up a short set of slippery stairs and load them into a grinder which is over your head.  If trays is harder (and there is certainly no consensus) it is because there is more and heavier lifting involved.

If Sabrina (who assigns the weekly tofu schedule) does not give me another shift in February, since i will be gone in March and April, by the time i return my job will be unrecognizably different.  All the heavy lifting will be gone, instead it will be about juggling 7 sets of trays instead of 3, with giant hoses of tofu coming in from overhead.  The kettle job will simply vanish after this million dollar upgrade is complete.

So i am not quitting tofu, but the job which i have done for over a decade will be dramatically easier, which is good for workers, good for our income and hopefully will still feel like real honest work.

Halloween 2011 Photo Essay

Random Character Line up

Queen and baby bee

i was the MC in my '80s bag lady jacket

Willow had a flaming sword

Zadek with different weapon

Hawina read a pirate shanti

Luuk in mysterious bug outfit

Out tofu battles it out for market superiority

Brenda reminds us we invented the flame war

History of our development of the Flame War

Louisa and Benji go native

Weird, sexy and wrong

Southern Exposure Seed Catalog models go on strike for gnomes rights

After the costume parade the band heats up

And there was much dancing

MC chased from stage by quality control

Most of these photos were taken by Ezra.

The lies from Japan and success in Netherlands

If the on-going Fukushima nuclear crisis is to teach us anything, it is that even after these multiple meltdowns the government would rather lie to its own people than risk loosing the nuclear option.  Here are a couple of examples.

Because of the long tradition of local governments needing to approve reactor restarts, the number of closed reactors in Japan is now 49 out of 54.  By this summer, unless some local governments change their minds or the national government changes its policy all the reactors in the country will be idle.  The central government issued a report saying that this would result in about a 10% shortage in electricity during the summer.  Which of course sounds reasonable, you close 30% of your generating capacity, presumably there will be shortages, right? wrong.

According to a recent report by English edition of the Mainichi Times, even with no reactors operating and assuming record high 2012 summer heat there will be no electricity shortage in Japan.  A key piece of this report is that renewable sources will make up 7 full reactors worth of power, a point ignored in the initial government document declaring the shortage.  The recalculated report shows there will be a 6% surplus in electricity, even without the highly successful energy rationing program from last summer.

After the meltdowns of last year, PM Kan asked the head of the of the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission to report on the worst case scenario for Fukushima.  This report described the situation in which continued hydrogen explosions released radiation intermittently for a year and would require evacuations from a radius of between 170 and 250 km, which includes Tokyo, according to a little reported story in the Japan Times.  These findings were so shocking PM Kan decided to pretend the report did not exist and  classified it as a personal communication to avoid having to release it under Japanese law.  Only after parts of the document leaked, did Kan admit that the document had been drawn up.

As for the much discussed “stress tests” going on in Japan now, this good Business Week article report that these tests are being done using the pre-Fukushima mentality described as “The tests are nothing but an optimistic desk simulation based on the assumption that everything will happen exactly as assumed,” Goto said, adding that they don’t include margins for human error, design flaws or combinations of both.

only 11 human human residents in 12,500 square km around Fukushima

In other news from Japan, shareholders of TEPCO (which owns and operated Fukushima) have filed suit for 5.5 trillion yen (US$71.5 billion) for failure to prepare for the predicted tsunami and earthquake.  For the purposes of comparison, this is 1 trillion yen less than the compensation for all Fukushima victims over the next two years.

The 20 km radius around Fukushima used to have 78,000 residents.  It now has 11.  This handful of residents, between ages 50 and 90 refuse to leave citing caring for friends in poor health, caring for pets, and a desire to remain in their homes as their reasons for staying.  The government is not forcing them to leave and they are not permitting others to return.

Meanwhile the Netherlands has in effect joined, Mexico, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Venezuala, Switzerland and Japan in phasing out reactors.  This is because of the delay of  the Dutch utility Delta and the withdraw of German utility RWE from the second reactor at Borssele.  Delta’s pro-nuclear president resigned last month when the company announced the delay, which is recognized as the likely death knell for their nuclear program.  Good riddance.

While the Dutch government is excited to fund an additional reactor, they have stressed all the funding must be private, which kills any chances of new reactors because nuclear is such a terrible investment and there are no private reactors anywhere in the world.

But if you want to talk about what the end of the nuclear era looks like.  It is depressed world opinion, multiple industrial powers stepping away, Siemens ditching nuclear completely and RWE being in retreat.

If we are brilliant, we might just shut this poison down.

Scuba Steve’s new digs

So what you cant tell from this photo is that the old aquarium for Scuba Steve was so small he had trouble turning around in it.  This was my big Xmas present this year and it seems like a perfect choice.

i would not wear it if anyone else had made it

Red is teaching Willow how to weld things with the shouldering irons in the hammock shop.  Willow made all manner of presents for people he cares for, including the polypropylene rope one for me in the picture below.

The simple truth is the thing is not beautiful and had anyone else made it and had anyone else given it to me i would not even consider wearing it.  But Willow is not anyone else and he likes it that i wear it and i am proud to show off his handy work.  Tragically, he burn his hand on an iron shortly after making this one, so it might be the last of this for of artwork for a while (Bochie is encouraging him to “explore other medias”).

“The meatloaf is terrible.” Willow says to be as he hands me his plate.  Perhaps 90% of the meat i eat these days is food he has decided he does not want.  Perhaps 20% of my overall diet is food he does not want.  I am a political vegetarian mostly, some small amount of it is for health reasons (inspired by Forks over Knives)  but it is more about climate change and energy use than it is about animal rights and careful nutrition.  Dumpster diving is more important to support as a cultural practice than it is to be strict in ones dietary practices – at least as far as i am concerned.   As a clever digital nomad once said “We can live off the waste of western civilization.”

And if we are clever perhaps we will.

 

What existing communities teach us about new ones

When i first came to Twin Oaks, my plan was to learn how communities worked (or didn’t) and go back to eastern Europe and start an activist community with my lover Alyson.  Of course, it worked out nothing like that.

What i knew going in was that if you wanted to start a community you should learn from the people who are already doing it, by living in an existing community, so you dont unnecessarily recreate the wheel or other devices.  What i thought i was coming to learn about at Twin Oaks University was the decision models and how communities make money.  i figured, if i understood these two things i would have the most important aspects of community down.  As is so often the case, i was completely wrong.

Artist rendition of campus of Twin Oaks University - not

What i learned was that the Twin Oaks decision model was hopelessly broken and that the businesses earned well below the minimum wage.  And i discovered that this was not the most important stuff of community.

What is important is how you handle gossip and the type of culture you create.  Gossip?  Really?  Oh, i could fluff it up and say “interpersonal communication techniques”, but gossip is actually the most important part of this larger field.  What i discovered is that Twin Oaks had actually been thru a couple of different sets of agreements around gossip.  For the first many years of the community is was, as we say, “not okay” to gossip about anyone in the community, unless you were willing (and planned to) deliver this message to them directly yourself.

The community bylaws have directives that member of the community are supposed to be “kind and fair” and understandably, this was interpreted to mean that gossiping was outside of our agreements.  Then perhaps a decade or two into the communities life there came a crowd that objected to this restriction, claiming that this was a restriction of free speech and that members should be able to talk about anything (or anyone) that they wished to.  The young Turks prevailed and the community culture shifted.  While members are often encouraged to express their critiques or dissatisfaction with other members to them directly, it is not the cultural expectation that they will do so.

But the bigger cultural question is one of what does the community value.  Does it think parenting is important? How does it embrace kids in public spaces?  What is the work ethic?  How important are parties and holidays?  Does the community make up its own holidays (in this Twin Oaks excels actually)?  What is the spirit of cooperation like?  Do people share well (here again we excel)?  Do members strive to resolve their differences?  What is the policy/cultural norms around members in conflict needing to resolve (this Twin Oaks is a disaster in and Acorn took a totally different approach because of it)?

There is lots to say about all these things in the context of my current community and ones we might like to build, good material for pending posts.  Stay tuned  – or better yet, throw your two cents into the comment section of this blog.

 

 

 

Anonymous strikes back – whitehouse.gov and DoJ.gov shut down

The day after dozens of websites protested proposed government censorship of the internet, the Department of Justice (DoJ) shutdown subscriber based upload site megaupload.com.  The next day in direct retaliation the hacktavist group Anonymous shut down whitehouse.gov, DoJ.gov and FBI.gov in what Russia Today is reporting as the largest strike against US government websites ever.

Taking credit for a giant illegal attack US government sites makes you a target for the nations law enforcement agencies.  But we have to wonder, is this even a real person we are watching.  My guess is that these cyber-geniuses who can take down sites which are designed by very highly paid computer consultants to block exactly these types of attacks, can also generate a video image (albeit a grainy one) which can interview with Russia Today in real time (complete with smirk in mid interview) in a convincing manner.

But as my fellow communard dh points out, some quick google searching will point out that Barrett Brown is indeed a real person, multiple interviewed, on the run, has a 6 figure book deal with Amazon, is a former heroine addict and curiously has no Wikipedia entry (it was deleted).

It’s getting hot in here.

Keystone and Spin

The Obama Administration just shot down the proposed extension of the giant Canadian-US pipeline called Keystone XL.  This is largely a symbolic measure, since the deadline was set arbitrarily by Republicans in an effort to make political gains and Obama has said they can refile the permit application again next year.

What is interesting is looking at the lies told about this project and why the Republicans, especially the political candidates for president, think they will stand.

The first big lie is that Keystone XL will create lots of jobs.  Gingrich parrots recent oil industry numbers of 20,000 jobs.  House speaker Boehner today is claiming 100,000 jobs will be lost  Turns out when TransCanada submitted their original application for the project in 2008 they estimated “a peak workforce of approximately 3,500 to 4,200 construction personnel” in temporary jobs building the pipeline.   It actually takes very few jobs to run (as opposed to build) a pipeline, for Keystone XL it would be in the hundreds.   Fox News reports that the number of lost jobs could be as large as 1 million.  [It is worth noting that nuclear power, which is the most capital intensive way to produce electricity is often "sold" on the grounds that it creates jobs]

The second lie is that Keystone XL will help US energy independence.  Again TransCanada has said that most if not all the oil thru this pipeline will go to China.  It is actually too dirty, the original source being tar sands, to be sold in the US.

The third lie is that this will help the US economy by delivering cheap oil.  In fact, according to a surprising article in Fox News, this pipeline will actually likely increase oil prices by permitting Canadians to transport their oil currently stranded in the mid west back to Canada more cheaply.

We are not surprised the Republicans are lying to benefit big business.  We are not terribly surprised that they are being stupid and bumbling their political capital (see this excellent article in the Red, Green and Blue blog on GOP Keystone Follies).

i am surprised that Fox News seems to hiring liberals to report the news.  But i have to wonder if the rest of the mainstream media will give the Republicans a pass on all the lies needed to make this project sound reasonable.