Oregon Landscapes

The Oregonian's Terry Richard leads this photo album of some of Oregon's remarkable landscapes.


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O Where?

It was when he mentioned climate change that I figured he had to talk about the military industrial complex, because after all that is the pot of gold that has to be tapped in order to pay for building the new vision of America that Bernie so eloquently laid out.  But nothing was said about the metastasizing Pentagon budget nor a mumbling word was spoken about foreign policy.  Nothing about Russia (Sanders does support sanctions on Moscow), nothing about NATO expansion, nothing about Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza (Sanders has publicly supported Tel Aviv’s attacks on Palestinians), nothing about negotiations with Iran, nothing about waste, fraud, abuse at the Pentagon, nothing about our endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, etc, and nothing about conversion of the military industrial complex to peaceful production.

Sanders needs to talk about war and peace, armaments and foreign policy.  Is he avoiding the issues?


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The Meaning of Hunger

Sergio Cruz photo

Yet these days more and more artists are challenging the bohemian stance that artists should shun economic capital in favor of pursuing art for art’s sake. Artists and creative workers increasingly lick their low-income wounds publicly and vent about the elaborate dance of self-reinvention in the digital age. It’s become trendy to discuss and even quantify exactly how little money is being made from creative projects. Mathematics has never looked so hip.

These confessionals stem from a desire to raise awareness about artist livelihoods and draw attention to the contemporary challenges of earning a living from creative work. Stories like Grizzly Bear’s bring immediacy and detail to broad and harsh economic realities and can be vehicles for empathy, building bridges for the reader to commiserate with their fellow human.

To starve or not to starve.

Here is how it worked for me time after time.  I sat down with pen or crayons and tried to become an artist.  In the meantime I killed time and my soul (since regenerated) by going to dead-end jobs that did nothing for me but keep a roof over my head (most of the time). Occasionally, I had fun working these lousy jobs, more occasionally I avoided my art and drank and kept the good times flowing without being serious, because I didn't like serious. I had a family, but I fucked that up as well. Suddenly I was behind schedule.  I was like neither Henry Miller nor Picasso.  I was a lackadaisical wannabe, or so I seemed to myself and those brave enough to tell me to my face. Except on the inside I still felt like I could do something.  I've done something, though not nearly as much as I wanted to. It is what it is. There's a little time left, with luck.

X number of years.  X number of works.  X amount of love.

Then it all ends.


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Just Because, Man

The kids are alright!


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Buh bye

The Dead wave goodbye.


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Persistence

My best investment of the year was two more pairs of shorts to lounge around in in my stuffy pad during this heatwave.

Sandals, sans shirt, an overhead fan moving the air just enough to provide some small relief.

The week ahead, in case you're planning to visit Portland.  Cooling on Thursday.


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Start Talking, Bernie

Many people want to know more about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' foreign policy agenda. Yes, they say, we like what Sanders is saying about reducing extreme inequality, about reducing the political power of the billionaire class. But what about U.S. foreign policy? Yes, they say, Bernie voted no on the Iraq war; yes, they acknowledge, Sanders supports the Iran deal. But we're spending more than half of our federal income tax dollars on the Pentagon's empire, money we should be spending on rebuilding our nation's domestic infrastructure. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," Dr. King said. What's Bernie going to do about that?

Bernie must step up to the dais and talk about the IMF and global economic justice, says Robert Naiman.

His domestic side.


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Beyond Incarceration

Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.

Mr. Hedges is relentless, the way it should be.


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Charade

The right-wing attacks on Obamacare were always about attempting to delegitimize the president rather than the actual substance of a pro-corporate health reform law. Indeed, Republicans long ago suggested similar reform proposals, such as the health exchanges, to those at the heart of the ACA. “Had anyone else proposed this,” said Song, “I think the Republicans would have said, ‘Wow this is a great idea.’”

The GOP’s relentless attacks on the ACA left progressives in the awkward position of having spent the last five years defending a pro-corporate law that the right would have ordinarily salivated over. As Michael Moore wrote in the New York Times, “Obamacare is awful. That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies.”

Makes sense to me.


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Thanks, George

The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.

Highfalutin' language from everybody's rich, white, grandpa.  The indigenous and imported excluded, of course.

His ruminations halted dynastic rule as he knew it.  After that it was open for interpretation.

All history is tragic, this we know.

Thanks to CD for this, a nice find in the U.S.'s shared time of celebration.


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TomDispatch

Take a slow train -- that is, any train -- anywhere in America, as I did recently in the northeast, and then take a high-speed train anywhere else on Earth, as I also did recently, and it’s not hard to imagine the U.S. in decline.  The greatest power in history, the “unipolar power,” can’t build a single mile of high-speed rail?  Really?  And its Congress is now mired in an argument about whether funds can even be raised to keep America’s highways more or less pothole-free.

A bevy of well-selected words.


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Clear-Cut Guilt

Listen, I grew up in Oregon.  I've lived here most of my life, and about 3 years ago I revisited my home town in the Cascade foothills for the first time in many years when I was working on a video project.

It was an appalling sight.  As my collaborator and friend TC drove us into terrain in the lower Cascades above my town I realized I'd  taken too much for granted when growing up in the area.

I was born in Cascadia. Look it up at Google, examine the scars around its belly.

Along the mountainous road that Spring, clearcuts were visible at every turn in the highway.  That was not the way I remembered my old turf.  I was devastated, affected in a way that I could not even describe to TC as we sat in a logger's bar late one evening after our shoot.

I'm from a family of loggers, settlers in the Linn County region of Oregon.  My father logged, his father logged, and his father logged; my older brothers toiled in the wood-products game, everything from green-chain puller to log truck driver to management in the plywood industry.

For my part, I went into the woods for two summers during high school and thinned trees.  My weapons--an ax and a bottle of poison. It was hard work, scaling ridges all day, humping gear up and down, a sack lunch in the crummy parked at the end of the road, cutting notches, spraying the overgrowth, surviving.

All of it geared to the future, when the tall firs would burst through to maturity and be cut down by the man-created standards of harvest.

I was already in my sixties that season, a witness to ugliness.  I'd done my part and so had my family.

Take a close look at the map.  Google the Earth.

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HST

I've put aside the Joe Mitchell for now and dug into some Hunter S. Thompson for kicks--The Kingdom of Fear.

Pretty crazed, laugh-a-page prankster stuff that was supposed to be an autobiography.  I guess it is that, and more...

Always liked HST, from the time I read his saga of the Hell's Angels.  Sorry he went the same way as Hem, but...


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Essay

They say that if you can remember Woodstock, you weren’t actually there. It is therefore with some trepidation that I invite readers to cast their minds back to America, circa 1970.

The Essay of the Day, by David Michael Green.

It does grow rhetorical, but what the heck!


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Picture of the Day

from Tom Clark's blog...


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