Geekday: Googizon and the Empty Threat of Techno-Feudalism

2010 August 28
by Brian


My blog is worth $7,903.56.
How much is your blog worth?

Technorati’s very good at telling you what your blog is worth (it’s based on traffic, Google page ranking, trackbacks, and content volume); what they don’t mention is how to go about finding a buyer. The other intriguing question raised by that item is: what actually gets bought when someone buys a blog? Presumably all the content (the database and everything in it), the domain name, any advertising contracts, and I suppose copyrights. At 8 grand, that last one would be a sticking point for me, which raises one of the more ironic controversies of the 21st century: the rise of IP (Internet Protocol) has turned IP (Intellectual Property) into a roaring, hideously complex dragon, and the only winners in this scenario are the lawyers.

Yet as I’ve mentioned many times during discussions of capitalism in general, it is not money that warps and poisons people and their inventions; it is rather the Cult of Excess, which is itself fueled by a fundamentalist fear — the belief in Lack (I can never have enough because there never is enough). Greed may beget complacency, but its engine is fear.

The Internet began simply and in relative anonymity: a bunch of scientists and academics sharing notes over computers joined by telephone lines. Nothing that would attract the attention of corporations, magnates, media celebrities, or government. Or course, corporations and government were involved: Bell’s labs and Xerox’s research facilities, along with the US Dept. of Defense were either funding or providing space and bandwidth. But it was quiet, experimental — the product of lonely propellor heads in denim rather than MBA marketers in three-piece suits. The government knew that geeks had helped before in improving the arts of war and espionage; and the corporations knew that technology often made fabric containing golden threads with commercial potential. The Internet began as this quiet and tentative experiment: just a simple and effective new way for geeks to communicate. Nothing special or exclusive about it.

And now we have a situation where money, which already controls the access that site owners have to the public, is now threatening to make that control bi-directional. If Google and Verizon have their way, the public will be under the heel of money in its access to the Internet’s content. As always with such corporate-fed takeovers, everything is smiley-faced and loaded with complacent assurance: don’t be afraid, we’re not doing anything insidious here; the darkness is all in your poor, overwrought imagination. We’re just making layers — you know, like on a cake. And it will be a beautiful cake, as pretty and harmless as Chelsea’s wedding ($5M and no, you weren’t invited).

What Goog-izon wish to make feudal and exclusive is wireless access, which is where they see the future of computing and the Internet. They appear to think that the PC desktop and home laptop will go dinosaur in favor of smartphones and iPad-like devices. So let’s leave the question of whether preferred access to the rich is permissible in that airy realm, because if you’ve read anything at all here, you know my answer to that one already; and focus instead on Goog-izon’s guiding assumption. Are they right?

Goog-izon’s vision seems to be of a future in which folks with old, “wired” tech can have the same level of access to their plebeian content as the wealthy have to their exclusive content. Everyone gets what they deserve according to what they are worth, not according to who they are. This is the guiding principle of Feudalism, its public face, and it has been so since ancient times. The hierarchy is for everyone’s benefit; the guiding presence of the Nobility is there for the good of all. It is the golden shower vision of trickle-down economics, which existed centuries before Ron Reagan was a trickle in his Daddy’s member.

It is a typically corporate world-view, because it is pathologically myopic: it so narrows the focus as to make a private obsession into a public vision. It is the same myopia that defines the message of Wall Street and its investment bankers: of course we don’t need regulation; what, after all, have we done that would require regulation? Just leave this to us — we’ll manage it so everyone benefits (never mind that their view of both “everyone” and “benefit” is limited to about 150,000 people out of a nation of 300 million).

Here’s an alternative prediction: the PC and the wired web are not going away, not retreating — not in my lifetime, certainly, and probably not even within this century. For one thing, there is the EITR issue of our time (that’s Elephant In The Room), global warming. Johann Hari’s recent review of this issue, which I would consider required reading for anyone with the mildest interest in the future of humanity at large, reveals the fissile speed at which this catastrophe is moving.

Bringing that down to the comparatively mundane level of our discussion here, it’s simple: wireless access will become ever more unreliable and sporadic on a planet choking on atmospheric carbon. I would bet a large sum that Russians with wired connections had a much easier time getting the word out about their disastrous summer than those braving the smoke-filled outdoors and its wireless currents.

The other factor here is about the devices: just because something is smaller does not make it more eco-friendly. Smartphones and iPads are throw-away devices, much more so than the PC. I have a decade-old PC and a four year old laptop which will perform virtually as well over a wired connection as the latest and hottest thing from Apple or Dell. To get them to do the same thing over wireless, I’d have to supply them with routers, 802.11n modems, and signal boosters, not to mention the necessary channels and ISP access accounts.

But that’s what it’s all about, you say: only those who can afford new tech and exclusive access to preferred channels can do wireless well. Again, there is more to that than meets the myopic eye. Which brings us to the second EITR, the global economy. As Krugman and others have pointed out in the past week, there is no recovery. People at large are spending less, and the wealthy (especially the corporations) are hoarding money. We are entering — environmentally, economically, and even technologically — an extended time of constriction, impoverishment, disparity, and revolution. There will be a broad rejection of the narrow consumerism that Goog-izon and its ilk wish to perpetuate, because experience will demonstrate all too clearly that we can no longer afford it, no matter how wealthy or otherwise we may be. Wordsworth’s famous protest — “the world is too much with us…getting and spending” — will be seen as prophetic.

The last factor is purely psychological: we can no more afford the psychology of a wireless technocracy than we can afford its Draconian and inevitably impractical economic and environmental demands. On my new assignment in academia, I’ve been to at least a dozen meetings and have yet to see anyone pull out a Blackberry and start spinning the dial with that blank stare that used to make me think I might as well have been in a padded cell as a corporate boardroom. I cannot express how psychologically refreshing and uplifting an experience this has been; to connect with people on the level of their human immediacy rather than their techno-distractions. I think people will realize — perhaps have already begun to realize — that being strung out on a smartphone or a pad is life-killing and demeaning of human dignity. I remain confident in the ability of human feeling and reason whenever these functions are allowed to co-exist in equality: people will reject being the slaves of these wireless devices just as they rejected the corporate pager in the 80′s.

That brings us back to Goog-izon’s obsession, which they style as vision: once you examine its assumptions, it is empty of all meaning and value except, of course, as an insular and solipsistic matter of material self-interest. These corporations wouldn’t recognize equality if it jumped up and bit their balls off (and again, it will).

So, shall we feel threatened or fearful over Goog-izon’s insidious assault on Net Neutrality, on equal access to the web? No: that would merely be entering their home stadium, playing on their turf. They want you to feel threatened and fearful: that’s their bread and butter, not yours. If the past three years of recession, economic collapse, and the continuing damage to the human ecosphere have not shown us, with unmistakable clarity, the depravity and heart-dead corruption of the market-obsessed mind that pervades both the corporate world and the palaces of the State, then they have taught us nothing. The Internet is a place where the supreme value of the unique individual is affirmed through his connection with the universal, with the global community; where that universal is revealed and extended through the principle of equality among individuals. Corporations and governments should have, as they did at the beginning of the Internet, a peripheral, supporting, and incidental place amid that greater reality.

If you can understand that inviolate reality, and affirm your own place within it, then you have nothing to fear from Goog-izon or its myopic vision of who you are or what the future will be like. A king can make a feudal realm out of a hamlet, a town, or even a great city or nation; but he cannot make the entire world his slave.

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A Gift For Tom Friedman

2010 August 22
by Brian

A distant childhood memory: we were in the midst of a tense wiffleball game. The scene was old Ken Herrick’s big yard, which stretched a good 200 feet out into the Bergman’s yard in left field and toward the railroad tracks in center and right. It was a perfect wiffleball field. Some dogs were out in deep center near the service road that ran along the tracks, romping and yapping over something we couldn’t see, absorbed as we were in our game. Our team was at bat; I was standing behind home plate, figuring out when my next turn at bat would come. I was maybe 8, so this was a compelling strategic exercise for my mind. But I suddenly looked up, distracted by a new, harsher sound from the dogs in center field. They had a cat, a kitten, and were throwing it around a rough-hewn circle from mouth to mouth, each tearing the tiny body a little further as they tossed it among them. My older brother Scott, standing beside me, noticed it too, grabbed one of the yellow plastic bats and ran out into the field toward center, yelling. FUCK’N DOGS GODDAM IT!!!

He was too late. By the time he got out there, the dogs had dispersed, leaving the ravaged body of the kitten lying dead in the grass. Scott started yelling at the kid playing center, no doubt demanding to know why he hadn’t stopped the carnage that was happening right behind him the whole time, and then Mrs. Bergman came out. Scott made some motions of explaining what had happened and how he’d tried to stop it; Mrs. B seemed satisfied with the explanation and went back inside.

The game had stopped once Scott had run out onto the field with the bat. Everyone turned toward center field; most kids hung their heads as they realized what had occurred out there. I was sick to my stomach; this would be the stuff of nightmares for days to come. Mrs. B. came back outside with a roll of aluminum foil. She tore off a long piece, picked up the dead kitten with it, and wrapped the rest around the body. She went away and we started the game again, listlessly, as if we were getting around to an overdue batch of homework. The energy had been thoroughly drained from what had been, a few minutes before, a compelling drama. Well before dinnertime, the game gradually broke up, far sooner and more quietly than usual.

The story comes to mind as a metaphor on our media and their recent behavior in this repellent era of shrill complacency. Perhaps I should be grateful, because I really won’t miss writing about it all: it’s just like watching those dogs tearing a small body to pieces — not for food or out of any natural necessity, but merely for the joy of the blood sport.

A former baseball pitcher is being indicted for lying to Congress — WOOF! (not a single writer I’ve seen bite into this morsel has bothered to ask what to me is the obvious question: isn’t lying to Congress simply a social convention, an effort to relate to them on their own level and in their natural language — you know, merely a “when in Rome…” kind of thing?). This is headline news that trumps global wars, environmental disasters, and collapsing economies.

Next up, the Julian Assange rape charges, which started such a howling orgy of gleeful savagery as might have made a few tails at the Pentagon twitch and wag with rapture, followed hours later by the disappointing news that the charges had been false and baseless. Those damned Swedes, giving everyone the taste of blood without bringing the meat after it…

Meanwhile though, they lap up the oily lies told by corporate and government officials about what “science” has said about how much of the Gulf Coast spill has just disappeared like magic, leaving a blogger to go and find out the reality from…you know…the scientists.

It is all so far beyond disgusting, beyond vile, beyond petty, beyond repulsive — I honestly cannot do it justice with my poor verbal gift. Thus, it is again a matter of great fortune that, in a few weeks, our sputtering flame will have gone out. For those of you who seek meaning in coincidence, by the way, the termination date for the hosting is Sept. 21, which I believe is the autumnal equinox. You will be able to bid good riddance simultaneously — to another ugly global warming summer and to a tiny remnant of Tom Friedman’s “sewer of misinformation.” Can I expect any more of life than that I give old Tom something to celebrate?

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Exeunt Two Old Men

2010 August 15
by Brian

I think if I were allowed the proverbial 15 minutes of fame to teach my culture something rare and valuable, it would be about the essential value of silence, the ever-increasing dividend paid out to a regular investment of reflection and meditation. As I have learned time and again over the years — more often the hard way than not — silence is the light that disperses the noise of conflict, that cuts the fuse of confrontation. There is nothing so productive of growth and preventive of error as a clear, quiet inner space.

I was reminded of this over the weekend because a pitcher on one of our local baseball clubs here in New York was placed in an “anger management” program after attacking an in-law and spending a night in the pokey for the assault. Given our culture’s monkeys-at-typewriters approach to the English language, the clumsiness of the term is no cause for surprise, but in the healthy psyche anger doesn’t need to be “managed,” merely acknowledged and released; and sometimes firmly, clearly expressed. Our problem is that we more often tend to express anger only after it has been twisted into ego-rage. Anger is not evil or unnatural; but letting it fester and rot into rage is dysfunctional. This is the meaning of the old Chinese poet’s advice, “Manage trouble before it becomes troublesome.”

In today’s American culture — particularly among our media — such advice, combined with $2.25, will get you a ride on the New York City subway. No one wants to hear anymore about the value of silence, the practical benefit of inward-turning. If you’re worth something to the society — as an athlete, entertainer, political figurehead, or media celebrity — then time and a few sessions with a cheap shrink ought to be enough to bring you back into the fold, whether you’re a racist who makes movies, a golfer or politician with a “sexual addiction,” or a baseball player who’s just rearranged his father-in-law’s face. It’s not really a matter of “anger management,” but image management. The real work of personal transformation has no use or meaning to our ego-drunk culture. We would sooner cover our errors with noise and smoke than listen quietly to the lessons they bear.

In our society, action — no matter how ill-advised, brutish, ignorant, or destructive — is preferable to reflection. Talk, and especially opinion — no matter how foolish, superficial, shrill, vain, or deaf to reality — is preferable to thought. If you’re proven to be wrong, that can always be managed — that is, forgotten — with time and a new pile of noise to drown the memory of yesterday’s errant bluster. Just turn on your television or peruse the day’s Politico, Time, or Washington Post and you’ll have a nausea-inducing pile of examples of what I’m talking about here. In fact, Greenwald recently found a sterling instance of this in the Atlantic.

Our culture’s lust-affair with noise and shrill melodrama has cost us dearly. Our government wastes precious energies, lives, and resources on wars and a vast cult of secrecy and tax cuts for the mega-rich while our infrastructure crumbles to dust, poverty rages through the cities of the wealthiest nation on Earth, and the trunk of the tree of democracy rots before our eyes. Our media waste their constitutional mission, not to mention the time and patience of the public, with mindless debates about mosques and gay marriage and whether the unemployed are social parasites — issues over which there should be not debate but laughter in a truly free and awake society — while real journalism is pushed to the most outlying margins of the Internet (Wikileaks).

Over the past six years, I and my co-writer Terry McKenna have tried to present an alternative to the prevailing reflex noise-response of our society, whose rule is only proven by its occasional and sporadic exceptions in our media and blogosphere. That is, we have attempted to provide opinion based on reflection, an occasional cup of insight drawn from the well of silence. As divergent as we might sometimes appear in our political leanings, Terry and I are both quiet, thoughtful fellows who have no use for the mental knee-jerk of bombast and aggression that dominates the punditry of our culture’s media kings and insiders.

From the standpoint of substance, I think we have succeeded in what we set out to do here. I invite any passing ghost or cricket (that is, our regular readers) to review our archives here and at the previous site to form his own impression on that point. But that hardly matters except to us, because, from the standpoint of “putting fannies in the seats,” to quote the late George Steinbrenner, we have failed. This 21st century Internet simply isn’t our venue, it seems. We might have done well in finding a large and appreciative audience a century or two ago in that lost era of ink, paper, and community; but here and now, we are like the sound of the Earth turning in space — very real, yet ignored by everyone.

Terry’s already made his decision — he’s an artist, a gardener, and a family man with better things to do with his non-working hours than blogging to ghosts and crickets. There is no price that can be put on what Terry has added to this blog — which is a good thing, because he hasn’t made a nickel from it. In fact, like me he’s spent a fair bit of his own time and dough on this poor flightless bird of ours. So Terry has wisely chosen sanity over blogging to the cyber-crickets.

Now it’s my turn. The hosting fees are due next month, and I had been leaning toward paying them and keeping this going, my excuse being that I use the host’s storage space for personal backup as well as for this blog. But that’s a lame, shallow excuse — I have plenty of backup options going already (I recommend Mozy, which offers unlimited storage at $5 per month), and I now realize that I have already said everything of any use that I have to offer the public in this space.

Meanwhile, life is intervening — the boss has me on notice that nights and weekends will be de rigeur for a while as the deadline on the university’s new website nears, and my kid will soon be returning to school. Trigonometry was never a subject dear to my heart, but I will need to re-acquaint myself with it well enough to tutor in this discipline. Add to this the fact that I need to keep looking for work: the gig I’m on now may take me through October, and I doubt the economy will have improved much by then.

Then there is that silence: she calls me back; a certain quiet urgency is in her voice. When you’re not working, she is right at hand, easy to find and explore, to rest beside when friends and acquaintances of better times have all become too busy or distant for your company. But amid the workaday world, another change occurs: that reflective presence, that eye within the storm, becomes more compressed and elusive. I cannot allow myself, least of all at this time of life, to become estranged from that presence and its sure and gentle leadership.

Writing reviews or opinion of any sort and in any forum — yes, even in the cheetohs-stained keyboard universe of the blogosphere — is not a piece of cake (nor, in fact, a bag of cheetohs). To do it correctly, as we have frequently done it here, requires preparation, research, self-examination, work, and re-work. Your first response to events is rarely your best one. In fact, you would be perfectly justified in saying that to do this stuff for as long as we have done it, utterly without remuneration, borders on the insane. At best, it resides well within the territory of folly. We offer no defense of ourselves on that point. We may learn late, but we do learn.

And anyway, as I have mentioned before, I can no more stop writing than I can stop breathing or defecating. I have two unfinished books that have been lying around for months, and they, too, are calling for some attention. Granted, selling a book in this culture and this economy is, even for an accomplished author, to play blackjack odds. For one like me, it’s more like trying the one-armed bandit. Nevertheless, that still beats the prospect of making money on a blog, which is the statistical equivalent of a dollar on the $100M Powerball.

I think I speak for both of us, however, in maintaining that there are no regrets. We have accomplished something substantive and meaningful here, even if it lacks both popular appeal and temporal duration. The successful life faces its accomplishments as it does its errors: you learn from them, let them go, and move on.

………………………………………………….

I recently renewed the domain name, so I’m willing to sell that to anyone interested for $20, which is the price I paid for a fresh year’s renewal. As for our content, it will disappear once the web host terminates their service next month. I have database backups, so nothing will be lost, but only made inaccessible to the public. I am reminded in that respect of Stephen Hawking’s metaphorical description of the apparitional “loss of light” at the event horizon of a black hole: he compared the phenomenon to the burning of an encyclopedia — no data are really lost, but they are so transformed as to become impossible to read, inaccessible to the consciousness that could once understand and appreciate the encyclopedia before it became a bundle of ash. This, incidentally, is how I often think of death. As Chuang Tzu once said, “the wood is gone but the fire burns on, and we do not know when or how it will all end.” Or if it will.

Farewell then, blogosphere: these two old men leave you in head-scratching wonderment, but with best wishes nonetheless. May you evade the death-grip of corporate Power, Orwellian lockstep, and big media control; and continue to sing, gravel-throated and usually out of tune, to the freethinking plasma universe.

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Racism and the NAACP. Let’s Try this approach.

2010 July 31
by terry mckenna

The right has long been suspicious of civil rights groups.

Frankly, American conservatives were slow to accept civil rights in the 50s and 60s when such support would have been courageous.  That conservatives no different from the rest of white America may excuse them for not standing out from the background, but there’s the rub.  Conservatives remain mostly white, as is clear from the Tea Party ruckus.  Even the presence of Bobby Jindal among the ranks of conservative politicians does not change the overall whiteness of conservative opinion makers.  To the extent that conservatives comment about civil rights at all, it is to remind us that civil rights activity is a Zero Sum Game, where one side (blacks, Hispanics etc) is advantaged at the expense of another (usually white males).  Recently, they have added the pretense of concern for poor whites (look up a recent opinion piece by Ross Douhat about college admissions – Ok Ross, yes affirmative action is a zero sum game, but the point of affirmative action is to bring minorities into the ruling class – no matter how poor rural whites are, none of them see a picture of the president surrounded by mostly white political leaders and feel that they are excluded from this group by virtue of their background).  Conservatives may pretend concern for the poor of all races, but show no interest in policy changes that might bring more good jobs to either urban or rural America (all they offer is more of the same free market that destroyed urban manufacturing centers, and replaced small town lifestyle with Walmart).

Civil rights has been primarily a victim’s movement.  Starting with Black Americans, the civil rights community has added women, Hispanics and various Asians to the roll of victims.  And as the roll expanded, the conservative movement has remained suspicious of civil rights institutions and solutions, even when ordered by the various courts.  Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush II actively worked to reduce the importance of civil rights enforcement within their justice departments and now that we have a Democratic president again, the right is agitating from the sidelines to make civil rights leaders appear to be no more than minority bigots.  The recent flap over Shirley Sherrod is just an extreme example of what the right wants to do.  And here, I wish someone with a staff and more resources would document the entire story – but since no such person has come forward, here is my blogger’s suggestion for what happened.  Mr. Breitbart published and publicized an edited video meant to tell an outright lie, that an Obama administration official with ties to civil rights and the NAACP was caught on tape showing favoritism to blacks.   Whether Breitbart did the editing or not (I wouldn’t believe him regardless of what he said) the bottom line is that the tape was edited to tell a false story.  As the truth emerged, the right has come forward with a new explanation of events.  The following story from the Baltimore Sun sums up current right wing spin:

By now, most people have heard about the Shirley Sherrod-Andrew Breitbart-tea party-NAACP-racism scandal tape. In short, two parts of the tape were exposed at different times. It was a tape that allegedly disclosed racism within the NAACP. The Baltimore Sun claims that the racism charge was against Ms. Sherrod, and that if only the whole tape was disclosed it would show that she was explaining her transformation away from racism, and not that she was pleased with her previous actions of reverse discrimination against a white farmer (“Running scared at the USDA,” editorial, July 23). Fox News and other news agencies also came to this same conclusion. The Obama administration fired her after seeing the first part of the tape out of fear of being upstaged and embarrassed by Fox News.

Everyone missed the point.

The reason the first part of the tape was emphasized wasn’t to demonstrate that Ms. Sherrod was a racist but to show that there were members of the NAACP in the audience giving her their approval when she expressed her discriminatory intentions toward this white farmer; it showed the racist attitudes of some of those members, not of Ms. Sherrod. The second part of the tape had no bearing on the intentions of putting out the tape. Ms. Sherrod was only the stimulus; the audience was the focal point of the intentions of this tape. This is what Mr. Breitbart said he was trying to expose.

Wow – utter nonsense.  I listened to all of the edited tape and much of the full tape and rather than hearing evidence of black racism, all I hear from the audience is sounds of acknowledgement from the audience to the speaker, similar in style to  the call and response that occurs in the black church (if not familiar with the style, Google Dr Martin Luther King and listen to one of his speeches to see a more fully developed example).

So why does the right do this?

What is conservative about the mean-spiritedness that Breitbart and Co. exhibit.

What is conservative about Fox News’ brief period of glee upon having caught the NAACP in the act…  of what?

Sure, groups like the NAACP are first and foremost advocacy organizations, and whatever they do or produce must reckoned as being promulgated in the service of reaching their goal.  That the goal of civil rights advocates has been both necessary and noble does not change the need for the rest of us to scrutinize current activities.  Had this been Andrew Breibart’s primary, that would have been fine – of course, the Sherrod tape would not have been the correct vehicle for reasoned criticism.  But I folks like Breitbart don’t look for reason.  Of course, he is 18 years younger than I am, younger even than Barack Obama.   I doubt he has ever had the experience of seeing a young black boy ride through a middle class neighborhood on a bicycle quickly and ever so carefully, while the boys from the neighborhood shouted out, “Nigger, Nigger …”  and chased him down the street and away.  I grew up hearing such taunts – not very often, but often enough.

And all of us who could read and write before 1960 will harbor some of the same experiences.  So the occasional reflexive suspicion of whites, even outright anger (as seen with Rev. Jeremiah White) that emerges on occasion from civil right circles must be placed in the proper context.  Yes, times are changing, but not all of us are on the same part of the timeline.  Sean Hannity can be excused (a little) by his age, but Rush Limbaugh cannot be.

But civil rights is still a zero sum game.  Even as it has been useful for US institutions to bring in outsiders, and as US civil rights policy has been very effective at doing this and stands as a contrast to what has occurred in European nations with their outsiders (in their case Muslims), the question remains how long special efforts need to be taken, and over what concerns.

As blacks have entered the main stream (at least middle class young black Americans), when do we as a society stop interpreting all differences as illegal discrimination.

Here is an example of concerns from a current day civil rights policy group,  Policy Link.  The audio comes from a radio interview with two associates (from The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC):

Make all neighborhoods stable, healthy, and livable. In every part of the country— cities, suburbs, rural areas, and tribal nations— some communities face long-term decline in their economies and housing markets. Community builders have been working across traditionally siloed sectors such as housing, education, health, and economic development, to implement catalytic strategies that renew and rebuild distressed communities.

Link people to opportunities and supports spread across regions. Many lower-income residents, and particularly people of color, live in neighborhoods located far from job centers and services: what economists call the “spatial mismatch”. Practitioners and policymakers are implementing several strategies to bridge this gap: mobility strategies that improve transportation access to jobs; land use strategies to co-locate jobs, transportation, and affordable housing; economic development strategies to generate job growth in distressed communities; and human development strategies that provide education and training opportunities that lead to good jobs.

Enable all to live near regional opportunity. Some neighborhoods already have safe parks, grocery stores, good schools, and job centers— but they rarely include an adequate number of affordable homes or apartments. Public officials, housing advocates, and nonprofit developers are working to open up these opportunity-rich neighborhoods to lower-income families and non-white residents through inclusive development practices, legal strategies, and supportive land use policies.

I agree with their goal.  All conservatives should hope for ideal neighborhoods and circumstances.  And, we should recognize that the isolation of poor neighborhoods is in part the legacy of race bias in both jobs and lending which allowed middle and working class whites to flee to the suburbs, while blacks had access to fewer good jobs, and even then could not secure mortgages.

That much of this started to end after the 60s does not change the long term consequences.

But what to do?

My fear as a conservative is that no simple policy ideas will work.  I am especially concerned about how many children raised in urban ghettos are virtually damaged goods (and here I am not implying a race cause, but the end result of the lack of the sort of stimulation that occurs in middle class white homes.)

My anger at conservatives is that instead of helping us understand why government may not be able to help solve the problem, instead they condemn the messenger.

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My First Harvest of Tomatoes. The Tasty Tomande!

2010 July 25
by terry mckenna

I just picked my first batch of tomatoes from this year’s crop.

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We have planted tomatoes for years and most of them went in the same bit of ground.  Sadly, if a food source is always found in the same place, organisms will take advantage of the location.  Various funguses did a few years ago, and gave my tomatoes a destructive blight.  Because I can’t rotate my crop at all (too few sunlit spots), I turned to blight resistant varieties.  But most blight resistant tomatoes have no flavor.  Desperate for a tasty homegrown, I contacted  Burpee and asked them to suggest a tasty hybrid, they suggested the Tomande.  I bought three plants this year (also from Burpee) and the resultant fruits are great!

I planted one in the ground, in a new spot and have thus far avoided any pest or blight, but I also planted two in rolling planters that I purchased from Gardener’s Supply. The planters use a non soil planting medium and based upon this year’s harvest, next year, we will get one or two more planters.

Nothing is tastier than biting into a tomato that you grew yourself.  And a tasty one is that much better.

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