Ever wonder what kids in Siberia do for fun?   

Building Nature

 The horrors of blemish:

Mushrooms, sometimes called toadstools, are the visible reproductive (fruiting) structures of some types of fungi. Although the umbrella-shaped fruiting body is the most common and well known, mushrooms display a great variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. Some other fruiting bodies encountered in lawns include puffballs, stinkhorns, and bird’s nests, descriptive names that reveal the diversity of forms among mushrooms. But regardless of shape, the purpose of all fruiting bodies is to house and then disseminate spores, the reproductive units of fungi. ...

Because mushrooms are merely the fruiting bodies of fungi, removing them doesn’t kill the underground mycelia from which they are growing. Picking mushrooms, puffballs, stinkhorns, or other reproductive structures soon after they appear might prevent their spores from spreading to new sites. However, because most spores are windblown long distances, they can easily come into a lawn from neighboring areas. The primary reasons for removing mushrooms from lawns are to keep them away from children and pets and to improve a lawn’s appearance.

Of course there must be a fix for this.  How can anyone suffer a lawn without a consistent and vigorous green glow:  well watered, precisely mowed, weedless, dog-shitless, without anthills or gopher burrows, no grazing sheep and no loud children shouting and playing -- a barefooted joy reminding us of freedom and the fourth of july.

We will have it all no matter what gets in our way.

This is how we build our earth.

But sometimes nature ruins things for us:  inconvenient, multifarious, sloppy, ugly, fickle, dangerous, sly, uncaring, uncomfortable, filled with bugs, always sinister, who can stand it?

Worse, come creeping these malcontents:

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

Just as bad as subversive fungi, actual living insentient creatures who cannot be threatened and intimidated or driven to despair and suicide plot to destroy your healthiest aspirations.  These creatures: beetles/ants/worms/grubs/roaches/shrews/flies/bugs/snakes/newts/toads/birds/spiders/ticks/mice/chipmunks/ ...  sometimes we must wonder what that mangod was thinking to give humans dominion over all this!   Who can manage it?

But don't worry.  There's a fix in the air, (you can smell it when it has been applied) a certain chemical soup that can be applied to ensure a healthy look to your lawn.  These creatures that do not count, all but us, cannot be considered as meaningful, certainly not sentient, have no right to destroy your happiness, do they?  Mosquitoes and moths, gnats and bees, stinging flies and gluttonous caterpillars, ladybugs and aphids, wasps and snails ... how do we tolerate them?

Nowadays, fortunately, modernity brings us safety:

So the old dangerous primitive insecticides have been replaced with modern ultra-safe insecticides that are safe for you, your children and your pets. The insecticides have changed dramatically over the past 40 years - but nobody changed the law for posting signs. And that is why I post your property with a warning telling you to stay off until dry - because of an outdated law.

Those good-doers don't realize how safe our chemicals have become, (thanks to science and the virtue of commerce) -- so, besides all other living things, we must endure antiquated laws reminding us of a time when chemicals weren't so safe for us.  Annoying, neh?

This is how we build a world, one lawn at a time.

The linguist studies language as the astrologer studies stars.

As the astronomer studies stars.

Stars, unlike language, don't influence actual events; stars have no more meaning for humans than they have for clams or dragonflies.

This is to say, our specific perceptual structures -- eyes, ears, skin, brain -- have no evolutionary need for stars.

Yet stars have significance -- meaning -- to humans. From constellations that carry mythical names and religious meanings to specific stars that act as navigation aids to speculative objects of romance and culture, the patterns of stars we perceive in the night sky give us something ineffably human -- something which, lacking, feels less human. The jailed prisoner, the miner, the modern city dweller all function at night -- as living creatures -- despite a lack of stars. (For comparisons, consider a world without trees ... consider a world without water.)

The linguist treats "language", or "langue", as a phenomenon as separate from humans as the stars from the earth: something that, lacking, would feel less human but which, given, defines humans as a species. That is, language is treated as simultaneously separate and essential; both meaningless (who needs language to eat, drink, breath, shit?) and yet the very quality that sets humans apart from the birds and the bees.

Language as a communication system is thought to be fundamentally different from and of much higher complexity than those of other species as it is based on a complex system of rules relating symbols to their meanings, resulting in an indefinite number of possible innovative utterances from a finite number of elements. Language is thought to have originated when early hominids first started cooperating, adapting earlier systems of communication based on expressive signs to include a theory of other minds and shared intentionality. This development is thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative functions. [among the multitude and variety of academic descriptions for language, this serves as well as any -- as does wikipedia as a source.]

Historical institutions develop around language that neglect accurate and comprehensive definition and description of language while relying upon it as pathway, vehicle and destination (see, for instance, religion, law, science, academia, politics, business ... almost any traditional aggregation of meaning.)

We've agreed, apparently, that since we can't truly know meaning, we'll assume we do.

What does it mean to "mean?"

This is the task I attempt to address -- not as an academic or as a linguist, nor as an anthropologist or psychologist, nor even as a philosopher or poet, all (among many other ways of structuring understandings) legitimate, if self-limiting ways of giving meaning to life. Perhaps I hope to discover within chaos, order.

If we are to save ourselves from everyone else ("them"), we must understand our own place in the universe: which is to say, we must understand how our meanings destroy us in very real ways.

Sometimes it feels to me like you are all over the map. It's not the State, it's not the mouth pieces, it's not the advocates for the Brand™, it's not the individual effectors of policy, it's not the abstraction, but instead the two megacorps (Are you really so sure there are two?).[bystander]

I have hoped (for some time) someone would ask this question. It's the right question.

Without getting into academic details (often ego driven), I subscribe to a structuralist view of culture.

the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture

I would amend the above statement to replace the words "constant laws" with the word "regularities" (perhaps a piffling distinction, but if academics don't piffle, then tenures are lost and reputations destroyed.)

Over the years (since, say, de Saussure [also see previous link]) the renaming/rebranding project continues as each objection to prevailing orthodoxy falls to newer, more persuasive, more adaptive or more fashionable labels for essentially the same analytic process. Recently I've been drawn to the word "unbuilding" as a label.

I'm not an academic though and I don't keep current on the most recent trends. I simply use a structuralist approach to specifics.

Further I try to distinguish between structures and "agency": that is, between those analyses of cultural architectures that demand this or that doorway or this or that height and the meaningful decisions and actions taken by real people in actual situations despite structural obstacles and facilitating pathways.

For instance (an extreme to be sure) the structures of the Army demand obedience and ruthlessness -- the ability to kill humans without consideration or remorse. Yet these same military structures demand restraint in certain situations (displayed, perhaps, through such concepts of "just war" or the protection of civilians.)

In actual fact people can and do act in direct contradiction to the structures of their culture -- they jump out a window because they decide (for whatever reasons) they cannot leave through a door ... or they take the stairs because there are too many bodies and too much blood in the elevator.

Often (as in this morning's post) I try to describe the cultural structures -- the regularities of cultural thought -- so that one may better negotiate the maze of signs, designs, mood music, plastic plants, and even smells that make the cultural mall so confusing and seemingly inescapable.

With an eye on maximizing quarterly profits, privately run facilities are even less inclined than state-run prisons to treat their involuntary customers humanely, skimping on health care and anything else that could hurt their bottom line, particularly programs aimed at reducing recidivism. As the ACLU noted in a report released late last year, “Not only is there little incentive to spend money on rehabilitation, but crime, at least in one sense, is good for private prisons: the more crimes that are committed, and the more individuals who are sent to prison, the more money private prisons stand to make. [Charles Davis -- source]

Exactly.

Humans have been turned into commodities. We are assessed and then operated on by an institution which by design destroys all notions of humanity and the common good.

Prisoners adjudicated by an industrial "justice" system (enriching judges and lawyers to be sure) lose hope.

All prisons should have Dante's words inscribe in stone above the entrance:

Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.

All hope abandon ye who enter here.

But these institutions -- corporations -- also treat patients needing medical treatment, children needing competent education, communities needing electricity, or dependent adults as simple disembodied numbers on a balance sheet (which they forward to the NYSE.)

They demand that actual people serve them without conscience, sacrifice their dignity and their autonomy, waste their resources and have their voices muted or drown out. Corporations demand individual people relinquish the very essence of their humanity: their ability to make the world a better place.

The sole justification for these and other grotesqueries?

A healthy revenue stream.

That's it, the entire raison d'etre of a corporation. Products and services are merely the means to that end.

We -- citizens -- have a simple choice.

We can demand an end to corporate rule.

Or we can allow them to continue to exploit us using these "legal" institutions able to direct more resources than a small city to accomplish a financial or political goal (including the "election" of suitably compliant representatives).

These institutions can drive out competition, spend fortunes for positive legal outcomes (for shareholders and managers only), poison their products, dump waste and refuse in otherwise pristine areas, or even massacre human beings with impunity.

Yet people continue to advocate further empowerment of these monsters raping and cannibalizing the body politic. Still people insist that more "freedom" for these behemoths, less tax burdens (they don't pay anyway) to fuel the economic engine of capitalism, fewer regulations so they can unleash their worst depredations, and rewarded with obscenely extravagant incentives for overseers and managers all for these so-called "job providers."

They've even nominated Gordon Gecko for the presidency.

Corporations not only aren't people, they're legal fictions operating as amoral cartels. They eviscerate the common good and, worse, destroy even the earth itself, piece by piece.

Enough!

On Ron Paul

People -- politicians -- attempt to embody and reflect people's hopes and aspirations. As an embodiment of a nebulous set of opinions, feelings, facts, discounting, etc -- all the words and images the campaigner offers in exchange for votes -- the candidate must, above all, appear driven by principle and passion.

Yet government isn't about principle or passion; it's about the day to day creation, interpretation and implementation of a common set of rules.

The disconnect between candidate and official, between the qualifying and the job, increases exponentially as votes increasingly depend upon image over substance.
You can hear this sentiment expressed (for instance) when pundi-people tritely claim that legislation is like "sausage-making".

I voted for Barack Obama in 2009. I would have voted for anyone not named George Bush and not affiliated with the party which hoisted him upon their shoulders and carried him through 8 years of lies, carnage, incompetence, more lies, and Karl Rove's expressed desire for a "permanent Republican majority". (We can be grateful, I suppose, he didn't say "One thousand year Republican rule.")

I expected a return to some semblance of legitimacy and common sense in government. Instead, but for some smoothing of Republican domestic policies, Obama supports and advances a primarily Bushlike Republican agenda -- in some cases taking credit for implementing pre-existing Bush policies like withdrawal from Iraq or TARP, even claiming them as his own.

So the question uppermost in my mind isn't which Hope™ version to support. Indeed we should -- must -- identify the unseen hands pulling the levers in this modern age of callous disregard and oppressive diktats perpetrated by Corporate hirelings masquerading as "public servants" dedicated to Truth and Justice as they trample the US Constitution.

Dr Paul's failing isn't that he's a hireling; quite the contrary. He's a Republican -- a true believer in returning to an idealized and bucolic past as if, by wishing or legislating away a hundred plus years since before Teddy Roosevelt, industrial cartels (corporations) would suddenly stop being driven by money and, therefore, government regulations and laws are unnecessary.

(Besides, civil rights legislation discriminates against the white man in theory, and oppresses the white man in practice. Shhhh ... we better make it about the Fed.)

He succeeds as a politician because he doesn't have to "sell out"; he supports and explicitly advocates this Holy Grail of Republicanism (as glibly expressed by Grover Norquist): I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

I'm in favor of a government that serves the collective interests of all Americans -- and of humans in general. Government should not be outsourced to capital interests or coopted to act as agent for corporate enrichment and governance.

In a mediated and fractured world, we cannot know the consequences of our actions.

We live blindly, despite almost infinite information.

We can trust but we cannot verify.

That which we can verify, we rely upon more steadfastly than a train between cities because we've lost the ability to walk -- to experience for ourselves our simple movement from point A to point B.

We rely upon others to know ourselves.

That is our terminal flaw.