A Call To WPR

I called into Wisconsin Public Radio yesterday. I don't rememeber the last time I did this. The hour long program was about local governments in Wisconsin regulating the frac-sand industry. It had two guests: One from the Wisconsin Towns Association and the other a corporate attorney representing a frac-sand company down by Eau Claire.

Here is the point I made when I called in for all the listeners to hear: This is about Community Rights. A community should have the right to say NO to a frac-sand mine. Right now, in Wisconsin, this is illegal and considered unconstitutional for a community to do. When a community forms a citizen majority and tries to say NO they run up against a structure of law that clearly shows them that a corporation has more rights than their local governing body. In other words, corporations (a legal fiction) have more rights than they do. We do not live in a democracy.

They cut me off before I could make any follow up remarks. Both guests said that I missed the point.

It's also interesting to note that during the whole hour the words "rights" and "community rights" came up once in the conversation (It's not really a conversation), and that is when I called in.

If we want to live in a democracy we've got a long road ahead of us.

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Read the quote below to my 14 yr. old son this morning. He immediately got the dictionary out and looked up Eleusis and epitaph. Next we start reading "My Ishmael" to each other.

It's a good unschooling morning so far...

“Truly the blessed gods have proclaimed a most beautiful secret: death comes not as a curse but as a blessing to men.”- Ancient Greek Epitaph from Eleusis

Roosevelt and The Future

The other day I listened to an interesting radio program about Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. The guest made the point that Roosevelt understood well that industrialism caused a huge gap between the rich and the poor, and he did all that he could do within his presidential powers to save capitalism and lift people out of poverty.

I often wonder what a future President's rhetoric will sound like when most of the population comes to the understanding that civilization is the cause of poverty; that when civilization walks in the door poverty comes with it. Or will there even be a Presidential office when this is realized?

Insulted By 115

The other day I was insulted while doing the mail route. The sting of it still being felt like salt being rubbed in a wound. It arises every other hour or so. I return to it like a horse returning to a salt lick. The insult a number that won't go away. The guy spreading the insult is probably a pretty decent guy; he's got a job to do like the rest of us. But an insult is still an insult no matter the character of the insulter. 115 is the number. That's how many operational frac sand mines and processing plants are in Wisconsin. That's the insult that filtered through the car speakers that day.

Grocery Shopping

Awhile back, while sitting in the car in the grocery store parking lot waiting for my family to get done grocery shopping (Although rarely, there are times when I can't bring myself to go in push the shopping cart) I once heard author Thom Hartmann state that one of the reasons the right wing made war on the middle class is simply because when there was a thriving middle class in America the youth seek justice, and you get revolutions like you did in the 1960's. Some people on the right don't like that.

John Taylor Gatto and Wisconsin Public Radio

Yesterday, over the airwaves of Wisconsin Public Radio, I had the opportunity to ask John Taylor Gatto two questions: 1.What is the role of public schooling in keeping children and young adults off the job market? 2.What do you think about President Obama wanting to spend more money on education? You can hear his answers HERE.

After listening to John it's clear why compulsory schooling doesn't work for the majority of students.

Wisconsin Deer Hunting and Competition

This morning I listened to Joy Cardin's call-in radio show about deer hunting in the state of Wisconsin. One of the issues that was brought up during the show was that there are to many deer in the state, so hunters need to shoot more deer to bring the numbers down. The part of the show that caught my attention was Frank's (He was from Portage, WI) call at about 45 or so minutes into the hour long program. What I heard Frank saying in his comment is that part of the problem is that we're not letting the natural predators like wolves, bear, and cougars do their job of consuming deer because we have taken over their territories, therefore bringing their numbers down so they can't make an impact on the deer herd. He also mentioned that we keep taking from the land and its inhabitants, and we have been doing this since we decided to take the land from the Native Americans that lived here.

I was disappointed with Keith Warnke's response to Frank. Keith is a Big Game Specialist who works for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The main reason why is that he didn't mention our total dependence on agriculture to produce our food. And most importantly, because of this dependence on agriculture we are breaking The Biological Law of Limited Competition. The law simply states:

You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. Lions and hyenas will kill competitors opportunistically (as will other creatures, like baboons), but the law as stated holds true: they do not HUNT their competitors the way they hunt their prey. That is, they'll kill a competitor if they come across one (especially in conflict over food when food is scarce), but in the absence of a competitor, they won't go looking for one to kill. Such behavior would be evolutionarily unstable. (See THE SELFISH GENE by R. Dawkins.) As a strategy, it just doesn't pay off to use your time and energy hunting competitors that you DON'T eat (and that will fight back to the death) instead of using your time and energy to hunt prey that you DO eat. It's not a matter of ethics, it's a matter of calories.*

Spraying pesticides on fields, killing wolves because they kill whitetail deer, shooting deer because they eat our corn, are all examples of killing our competitors because we don't want them to have our food. That's breaking the Law of Limited Competition. The problem is that over time a species will go extinct from breaking this law. Experts and citizens alike, I think, really need to start talking about this more.

I would like to be a guest on Wisconsin Public Radio talking about this and other ideas brought up in Daniel Quinn's work. Perhaps there needs to be an organization started in the state that focuses on those ideas. Anybody out there with any ideas? In the ten years I have been listening to WPR I have not heard a guest voice the B Attitudes, but I have heard callers like Frank touch on them.

*Source

Derrick Jensen, Zoos, and Wisconsin Public Radio

Recently, I got lucky. Joy Cardin (Morning show host at WPR) accepted my request to have Derrick Jensen on her show to talk about his new book: Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos. The show went really well. It was related to the story about the tiger that escaped from the San Francisco zoo.

You can listen to an archive of the show HERE.

Public Radio and Global Warming

Thank you for your comments about my letter in my last post, Willem and Sonny.

This morning I called into another show on WPR (Wisconsin Public Radio) about global warming. This time the guest was Joel Rogers from the Apollo Alliance. What he basically was saying is that we can have a sustainable civilization, system of capitalism, and so on. He has an article in this months issue of The Nation Magazine talking about that.

I think it was in his book Welcome to the Machine where Derrick Jensen talks about how no government is capable of taming and controling the megamachine. Anyway, I called in and said that basically what the guest is proposing is impossible. Because any system that takes more from the landbase than it gives back is inherently unsustainable, therefore civilization has always been and always will be unsustainable. And I also said that since civilization has always been based on slavery, and the wage slavery that is a part of capitalism can never be fair or just.

Well, he started off his response saying he didn't agree with my premises. The rest of the response is what most of us have probably heard hundreds of times already, " there are many benefits to civilization. With the right restraints and management we can have our cake and eat it too, and so on. Of course, the response was more indepth. I just can't remember all of it right now.

I often wonder when guests are asked questions similar to the one I asked that after show they actually let them percolate into their conscious?

"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction". D. Jensen

You can listen to my question if you click HERE. The program is fairly easy to find on the archive list. It would be Joy Cardin's March 28th show at 6:00 AM. My question is about 35 minutes into the program, just after WPR's middle of the show newsbreak.