So it is not surprising that we attract with some regularity some amazing personalities.  I co-manage recruiting here (the self-proclaimed Minister of Propaganda) so i watch with interest most of these extraordinary characters as they consider living here.  Often i can tell it wont last, these are the shooting stars.  We get them here for a while, they shine their light on us, we enjoy them, and then they whisk off to another adventure or romance.

One such shooting star was Raven.

He was extraordinary in a number of ways.  He was the only practicing Muslim in my 14 years at this commune.   He was mercurial – One month he would do all tofu and scheduled work, the next he would do all hammocks and unscheduled work.  He was a bike racer who took that haste into almost everything he touched.  And i knew from before he became a member, we would only have him for a while before the next amazing opportunity caught his eye and he flew off.

Raven and the infamous Cardin

Raven told me a story, which captured some essence of him for me and it is tangled in one flavor of this shoot star identity.  It goes something like this.

Raven had saved up money from the bike messenger job he was working in some random urban area.  He took his $500 to the fancy clothing  store with the intention of getting a leather jacket.. The store was having trouble figuring out if they had the jacket he wanted or could get it.  They left my friend waiting for a while during the time they were trying to figure it out.  Big mistake.

Raven was looking out the window at the travel agency across the street.  He got up walked over placed his money on the desk of the travel agent and said “If you can get me a round trip ticket for Italy, leaving in the next week for $500 i will buy it.”

The travel agents started by saying “I probably can’t, but i will check for you.” They looked through various computer listings and actually found one.  “It is $490 and it leaves tomorrow, back in 3 months.” And Raven was on his way.

He had no plans for what to do in Italy.  He had no contacts, did not speak the language, had no money.  He also had no worries.  He is a charming, charismatic, wildly handsome and funny man.  The world opens for this type of shooting star.  On the flight to Rome he sat next to a woman, who was interested in his stories and situation.  At the end of the flight she gave him 2K Euros (about US$3,000).  Which Raven happily accepted.  She offered him her phone number, which he respectfully declined.

Prof Black and burning down the house

“Live like you are trying to keep the reader of your autobiography engaged.”

Jellyfish 1103 hits – An article about naming July 2011 after Jellyfish, because they had shut down three reactors world wide thru clogging
Babylon 868 hits – This is about finding yourself on TV when you barely participate in the mainstream culture (which i enjoy calling Babylon). And about homeschooling about the ancient hanging gardens.
Bart map 780 hits – This is a short article praising subways
Akashic Record 750 hits – This is my favorite successful post.  A short one on how you should feel encouraged to readily delete poor choices of comments on social networks like Facebook and how these medias are more like a graffiti wall and not the Akashic Record (saving all knowledge)
bdsm 638 hits – A post from about 18 months ago asking if BDSM is violence? – which people are still commenting on as recently as today

Can anyone explain why most of my search traffic actually seems to come from image searches?  And most of them from the UK, Canada and India?

Jerry Mander goes further in his brilliant book “In the Absence of the Sacred”.  In it he identifies the Eleven Inherent Rules of Corporations and this fiction’s key effects.

Amorality: Not being human, corporations do not have morals or altruistic goals. So decisions that maybe antithetical to community goals or environmental health are made without misgivings. In fact, corporate executives praise “non-emotionality” as a basis for “objective” decision-making.

Corporations, however, seek to hide their amorality and attempt to act as if they were altruistic.. Corporate efforts that seem altruistic are really Public relations ploys or directly self-serving projects.

It is a fair rule of thumb that corporations tend to advertise the very qualities they do not have in order to allay negative public perceptions. When corporations say “we care,” it is almost always in response to the widespread perception that they do not have feelings or morals.

If the benefits do not accrue, the altruistic pose is dropped. When Exxon realized that its cleanup of Alaskan shores was not easing the public rage about the oil spill, it simply dropped all pretense of altruism and ceased working.

Or as so cleverly and concisely put by Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary:

Corporation: n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.