Exploring Reality's Edges

I’m seeing these “Do you remember?” posts on blogs, Facebook and any number of news-and-commentary sites, so here’s one for you all. It’s not official, or counted by any electronic gimmick. It’s just a little memory jogger.

Do you remember what it was like to live in a country without constant fear, without Homeland Security, secret prisons and three Middle East wars? Do you remember what it was like to travel freely, without having to keep proof of citizenship on your person or to submit to xrays or strip searches to board an airplane? Do you remember what it felt like to feel safe from your fellow Americans?

Do you remember what it felt like to BE an American?

If you’re reading this, you’re alive and you have Internet access.  That’s a good start.  A friend of mine who teaches high school math uses her wifi access at work and at the local McDonald’s to check her email and look for her next teaching gig. Libraries are another good option for free access, as are employment and teaching centers, if your town or apartment complex has them.  Even some hotels offer free cable or wifi, should you find yourself staying in one.  It never hurts to ask.

Now, if you’re at home and wondering if you can keep your IP, you have some options.  These vary from place to place, but the least expensive type of service — dialup — is still available anywhere in the U.S. that you find land-line telephone service. Installation fees can be broken down into three monthly payments, and you can save up to $30 on installation if you qualify for Link Up and Lifeline.  Lifeline service is a subsidy program available in all fifty states designed to provide telephone service to poor people who would otherwise be isolated from the outside world.  Lifeline qualification is income-based, and it can be set up on new or existing phone lines. At this writing it costs $10 per month for local service and $10 more for unlimited long distance. The annual paperwork is simple, and the processing time is less than a month as of this writing.

Once you have phone service, your next step is to find an inexpensive dialup provider.  Net Zero is probably the best known, and at this writing offers basic dialup is free for the first month and less than $10 a month thereafter; their accelerated service is $14.95.  Juno, a sister company, offers a similar deal, including the first month free.  While the service is slow compared to DSL or cable, it can be a lifesaver if you are making money online writing or selling goods on sites like Craigslist, Ebay and Etsy.

With basic or accelerated dialup service, the line is busy while you are online; no calls can come in or go out. This is fine if this serves as a dedicated line; if you plan to use the phone as well, your computer will have to go offline while you make or recieve calls. As your financial situation improves, you may want to look into adding DSL service, which frees up the telephone and provides a faster connection.  Either way, you’ll have affordable Net access.  Enjoy!

For those of us living on a fixed income, the wrangle over the national debt ceiling has been been beyond metaphor. I cannot think of anything to compare to watching the blood and thunder theater of the last week, knowing that my ability to pay my bills — to stay in the apartment I share with a long-time friend — depended on a game played between two sides bought and paid for by essentially the same interests. Now that my rent is paid and a pot of beans and rice is in the fridge, I’m feeling like I’d spent a week watching  a WWF cage match in very nice summer suits. My money’s still on the fast-moving skinny guy, but I’m wondering how much of it is just staged to give us something to watch while the real ax is being sharpened to chop what remains of the social safety net loose for good. You see, nothing really changed, except there is a new, more powerful committee that’s still looking to cut social programs over defense. Oh, and Standard and Poor’s downgraded the faith and credit of the United States just enough to knock Wall Street into a tailspin and send commodity futures into chaos.
So welcome to the Great Recession Depression 2.0. Very few living remember the first one — you’d have to be as old and sharp as Warren Buffett or Bernie Sanders to do so — but a few of us remember the stories our parents and grandparents told of living through those times, and some of us are lucky enough to know others from elsewhere who had their share of times at least as harsh as anything we’ve known in the U. S. in the last hundred years. There are all kinds of stories, all kinds of strategies for surviving and working together to make a better future, one in which government exists to benefit all its people. I’m going to get more into those strategies in future posts, but for now I’m going to quote T-Bucket, one of the most practical and brilliant men I know on the subject of surving hard times.  He posted this in late 2008; it’s good stuff to keep in mind.

T-Bucket’s Wacky Tips to Survive Being Broke in a Recession

1. Put an egg in your Ramen

2. Have sex ,alot. It’s free and it feels really good if you do it right. Heck, it even feels good when you do it ‘wrong’. Also, you won’t need the heat as high, afterwards.

3. Don’t pout, make survival an adventure

4. Get rid of cable . It’s a rip-off, and there’s nothing on it worth a shit ,anyways. A good antenna will get you 15 -20 stations once we go HD in February. ($80 savings per month)

5. Oatmeal,instead of boxed cereals. Better for you and one/tenth the price ($4 per box savings x 2 per month)

6. Get a “Magic Jack”, and never pay a phone bill ,again . I know you have a computer.($60 savings per month)

7. If it’s not at a Redbox for a $1, don’t go to Blockbuster. ( $4 per movie savings x 4 times a month)

8. Mark West Pinot Noir ,$8.99 per bottle

9. You only have two feet, how many pairs of shoes do you really need?

10. Buy regular unleaded.Your car needs to make sacrifices ,too.I guarantee it will still run fine.

11. Chunky Soup got me through college,pretend you’re 18 again, and eat some Chunky Sirloin Burger

12. Dump the Gym membership. Last time my membership expired , they had to give me directions to the gym , so I could renew.

13. It’s a great time to diet, and no one will know you’re really just plain ol’ starving

14. Invite friends over to play cards. You’ll reconnect , realize what’s most important, and all have a great evening

15. Beanie Weenies

16. Time to be a ‘coupon weirdo’

17. Invite friends to your house. You don’t have to spend the gas to drive, and you can get as drunk as you want , since you’re already home.

18. If you can’t pay cash, you can’t afford it. Cut up the cards.

19. Announce that your “going to let your hair grow out”, and save on haircuts for a few months ($20 x 3 months)

T-Bucket’s blog is under the link on his name up above.  While you’re there, drop a tip in his jar if you can.  I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.

I recently came across this sign while looking into The Other 98%, a very clever and vociferous Liberal website.

It’s clever, but no.  I am not going to call for violence against our political opposition.  We are, after all, Americans.  These are our own people whether we like them or not, whether they wish such things on us or not.  Are we to forget that our own inspired and inspiring leaders such as Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy died by assassination?  When we call for the death of others — especially at the hand of a government hit squad — the sociopaths, whether we call them the Tea Party, the KKK or Fox Crazy Fuck of the Week — win.  In their fear and rage and bottomless hungers, the sociopaths have forgotten what it means to be human, to pause and breathe the quiet of the day, to sleep quiet at night.  The sociopaths want only to spoil and destroy the things that frighten and enrage them, and the most tragic thing of all is when one of us becomes so terrified and angry, so bitter and desperate, that he or she takes up the call for violence and so becomes a sociopath as well.

Every one of us carries his or her inner sociopath, and these are times that make the crazy thing squirm and squeal to get free, but stop and think when you or your friend or a talking head scores a good one on the opposition.  Take a moment to consider what gives you that nasty laugh and whether you really want to let that thing loose.  Never in the history of humanity have sociopaths built anything of lasting benefit; never have they failed on their own to reduce everything around them to rubble, given enough time and power.  Hold off on loosing your inner sociopath and find another way if you can.  Nothing good can come of setting it free.

I opened my email today and found two separate messages from Democratic Party organs asking me to send three dollars to their respective campaigns.  Three dollars is way under the popular latte unit of worth, but in this case the emails were sent to a retired Liberal who’s been waiting for better than a month to find out if she’s going to have rent come the first week of August.

As it happens, I do have exactly three dollars — the price of a Sacramento Regional Transit disabled day pass — on hand and about thirty cents in the bank. I admit I had some expenses this month that might be considered luxuries by more conservative folk, such as a tap-mounted filter to take the poolside smells of chlorine and petroleum out of the household drinking water, but I figure I’m entitled to one vice like fresh food and water since I’m not buying tobacco, alcohol or firearms with my check. Heck, I even bought an heirloom tomato at a regular grocery store instead of the outlet and saved the seeds to have fruiting houseplants next summer. A girl’s gotta have something, after all, and Facebook just isn’t enough to keep a real body alive and functional.

I’m not really angry with the pols who want my three dollars to keep the machinery running. It’s like being angry at the family cat when she’s hanging from the parakeet cage. Still, I am fed up with the debt ceiling drama, and I am deeply, fervently angry at the truth it forces me to face every time I read or see another news story about it. There are millions of Americans of all ages, ethnicities and religions who are waiting for something they can no more control than they can the tides and the direction of the wind and which will, inevitably, hurt them.  The only question is how much.  If we — not our money, not our ‘entitlements’, but WE — can be held hostage like this while our captors decide how much they will cut us down so their corporate employers will keep their tax loopholes and offshore money, then we must face the fact that the individual American human is become less of a person than the soulless corporation that pays no taxes, yet collects its own subsidies and devours irreplaceable natural resources the rest of us need.

I may change my mind if it turns out I can pay my rent on time, but for now I think I’ll keep my three dollars. It’s enough for a pound of beans, an onion and some rice if I walk to the outlet. Good times.

The government of Hungary recently announced the destruction of transgenic (GMO) maize found growing on almost 1000 hectares — roughly 2,500 acres — of farmland in Baranya county since the beginning of the year.  So far the plants have been plowed under and no pollen has been released to the air.  Hungary, a major regional exporter of  maize and other seed crops,  has banned the use of genetically modified seeds of any species, and since March seed sellers have been required to have their seeds certified as GMO-free before releasing them for sale.  The free flow of goods within the Union precludes tracing the sources of the seeds, identified as Monsanto and Pioneer products, but buyers of the seed will have their crops tested and, where GMOs are found above the 0.1 percent considered clean under European Union regulations, those plants will be destroyed in an effort to prevent spread of the modified genes to the wild.

Farmers complain about the losses of this year’s crop, as it is now too late in the growing season to replant with unmodified corn, but the company which sold the contaminated seed is currently in liquidation.  In the unlikely event of the distributor collecting damages against Monsanto or Pioneer — Monsanto in particularly notorious for its zero-liability contracts with its growers and distributors — any damages paid for GMO contamination will most likely paid its creditors rather than compensating growers.

Maize modified with genetic material from Bacillus thuringiensis produces a toxin (Bt) which kills the European corn borer.  Pollen from these modified plants has been shown to also be poisonous to Monarch butterfly larvae, and rats fed on grain produced containing the Bt gene for 90 days suffered liver and kidney changes when compared to a genetically matched control group.  Despite these and similar findings, 88 percent of all maize grown in the United States is genetically modified to produce Bt, to increase herbicide resistance or both.

The debt ceiling talks continue, after a fashion, and it looks like any deal is going to end up with no new revenues — read none of the loopholes for the wealthy, much less actually changing the tax structure so that they pay even 1% more — and those who depend on Medicare and Social Security will lose even more benefits. I wonder how long it will be before we can actually calculate the death vs profit ratio of this move. Of course, we already trade the lives of young, healthy Americans in the Middle East for oil, so I suppose it’s time for those of us who are old and unable to fight back to pack up and go home, too. Clearly our lives, like those of so many others, are worth far less than corporate profits.

I’m not ready for this.

It was a pleasant weekend in Sacramento. The sky was clear, the temperatures in the 80s, and the air was dry enough for ice water and a breeze to make being outside very tolerable. Even better, this was the weekend of the Fair Oaks Tudor Faire, and I was fortunate enough to spend the day with friends. Some, such as the steampunk League of Proper Villains, were new friends made online, and we had a wonderful time ‘invading’ the 15th Century transposed to Fair Oaks on a Sunday afternoon. I wore out fairly quickly, but the Villains were supportive, and I made it back to the open-air ale house where my friend Mike was selling drinks to a hot and thirsty crowd.

Once the Villains went pillaging I found myself surrounded by faire folk, some of whom are friends going back to my earliest gaming and SCA days here in Sacramento. I spent hours listening to Renaissance music and catching up on some of the threads that entangle us all in this odd extended community. These are my gaming and Pagan family, and I’ve missed them in that way that comes from being marginal in the lives of people you care about. I admit it’s a state of being for me, but the feeling of loss doesn’t lose its poignancy by being pervasive. I don’t know if anything will come of the afternoon’s talk and plans — there was talk of being recruited to an old friend’s ‘fringe’ house in the SCA — but it was good to be with friends again for an afternoon.

I guess it had to happen. Reuters is running a story tonight that the government has issued a flood warning for the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant near Omaha, Nebraska. Reports vary as to whether the plant is offline for repairs or still online.

Officials at Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) deny stories of a meltdown and claim that the pictures from two weeks ago illustrate an ‘aqua berm’ put in place to reduce risks of flooding. That’s their better picture of the locale, and you can see the lower dry area around the buildings.

Whatever the backstory, I’ve been reading an article from St. Louis Today on what’s going on and what these poor people are dealing with. The flooding is due to record snows in the Rockies and ongoing heavy rains throughout the region. The high water volume is expected to last into August.

The Midwest flooding has caused a good many of us who know where food comes from a lot of concern. Friends of mine in Kentucky have written about the alternating floods and triple-digit heat that have tried to drown and boil their gardens and livestock. Now things are a lot more complex. Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) reports that the Obama administration has ordered a news blackout regarding information about a meltdown and fire June 7, 2011 at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant about 20 minutes outside Omaha, Nebraska. This report is based on information provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The details are here, but the quick and dirty is this: there is a meltdown, with gas venting, and a fire after the Missouri River flooded the plant. The Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) has issued a no-fly ban over the area. So far the news ban seems to have worked for the most part, but information just wants to be free, even when it’s bad news. Maybe especially when it’s bad news.

Remember, ignorance kills. Read, do your own digging and pass the word.

Many thanks to A Green Road at Care2.com for his article that got this story to a wider audience and to Philip Posehn who told me about it.