Vision Circle

The Purse-Seine - Robinson Jeffers (1937)

I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible. I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net Is being hauled in.

Where are Black Bloggers located?

I've found out about a tool called Frappr (don't ask me where they got the name from). It is based on Google maps (as an aside, damn but I wish I'd have invested in Google when it was "only" $85). I've been interested in the spatial distribution of the black internet for sometime, and this tool may give me some purchase on the question.

So here's the deal. I've created a map for black bloggers. Do me a favor. Send the word out to folks and sign up.

Future in Our Hands

Bennett's awkwardly disclosed bigotry and the insipid apologetics offered in its defense - got me thinking long and hard about our social ecology and how the future is stolen from many of our best and brightest. We live in a society governed by a collective mentality that routinely and systematically - at worst - conflates blackness and criminality, and which - at best - conflates blackness and athleticism. This power wielding mentality, which is broadly and institutionally implemented throughout American socieity, early corrupts or destroys the potential of many of our very best and brightest.

It is encumbent upon us to act communally and institutionally to counteract the malfeasance architected by folks like Bennett, who as Drug Czar and Secretary of Education made a career out of devising and implementing policy harmful to our youth. So much of what passes for conservative discourse nowadays consists of little more than cheerleading for policies and programs that harm black folks. I have enclosed an excerpt from Leon Dixon's book, Future in our Hands which serves as a discourse on the motivation and approach of the Dubois Learning Center in Kansas City.

Future in our Hands is a treatise on why and how it is imperative that we architect our own self-interested institutional approach to supplementing the education and acculturation of black youth so as maximize their potential to both themselves and to our communities.

Be The Media

Lynne continues structural meditations on being the media. The angle of approach is waaaay steep for my preferences, see, I believe all the enabling technology required has been around for a while but that the bottleneck is the rate of grass roots adoption. Seems etherially interwoven with the notion of a community systems group.., necessity being the inflection point for essential communal adoption and repurposing of existing technology.

Hugo Chavez

Though it's written all over his face, seeing it in writing was very gratifying indeed;

Chávez comes from the provinces of Venezuela, from the vast southern cattle lands of the Llanos that stretch down to the Apure and Orinoco river system. Of black and Indian ancestry, his parents were local schoolteachers, and he has inherited their didactic skills. His talents first came to the fore when he joined the army and became a popular lecturer at the war college in Caracas. He is a brilliant communicator, speaking for hours on television in a folksy manner that captivates his admirers and irritates his opponents.

Richard Gott writing in the Guardian is the author of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. I want to take this opportunity to remind each and every one of you what Dr. Sonja Ebron wrote in the Black Commentator concerning the actual threat posed by Sadaam Hussein - why the U.S. felt compelled to take him out - and why black folks ought to oppose that war.

Mastery Culture vs Corporate Civilization Redux

Temple jogged my memory with the following comment;

The question of obtaining an effective foothold or control of an industry - from production through distribution must be resolved in the affirmative...and it won't be settled by anything other than black folk being excellent at activity x. And, in most cases, it will certainly require excellence.

Summoning to mind Dr. Oba T'Shaka's commentary on mastery culture vs corporate civilization. On the spectrum of knowledge-power-freedom - it is necessary to realize that the way things are is not the only way for them to be - and sure as hell not the best way for them to be. For example, the industrial development of Japan, up until comparatively recently, was not in fact due to emulation of Western capitalist methods, but to a much less hierarchically organised structure based on a different kind of relationship between local industry and the capitalist sector. In the light of the economic destruction being wreaked at present by the proponents of crude corporate globalisation, this is interesting to say the least....

Urbanization and Agriculture

Education and identity have been critical factors in the transformation of Cuban agriculture in the 1990s. They have provided a framework within which new policies, new actors, and new agricultural systems gained acceptance and were implemented. Cuban agriculture is something very different and the extent to which its model is applicable elsewhere is unknown. Conclusion: Given specific factors embedded in the Cuban paradigm, more research – certainly comparative research evaluating agroecological efforts in other countries – is necessary before universality questions surrounding the Cuban model can be adequately addressed.

Full Monty

Alternate History

The nation as we know it would not actually BE a nation if it had not been for the action of enslaved and freed Africans during the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment besides giving citizenship to black men and women, actually created the "national citizen." Before the passage of the 14th, one was a United States citizen through being a citizen of a given state. Afterwards? The nation came first and foremost.

But few have considered the Corwin Amendment. I've begun to think about an alternate timeline beginning with the passage of the Corwin Amendment.

Green Jobs Not Jails

In reverse:

I've been reading the entries at Worldchanging.com on the regular. In a word, I find them visionary. The June 5, entry was particularly so:

The connection between social inequality and environmental destruction isn’t one made easily by most environmentalists. Sure, they may see a connection between a perceived lack of concern among politicians and corporations about both people and the planet. But that’s usually about it.

Van Jones tells another story. For him, the two are inextricably linked. “Both problems are reaching crisis points,” he writes in the Summer 2005 issue of Yes! magazine. “We act as if they are separate. But they are linked -- economically, politically, and morally. The solutions and strategies for each must, therefore, be one.”

Last week, during the World Environment Day festivities in San Francisco, the Ella Baker Center, the Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit Jones heads, launched an initiative that attempts to link the two: Reclaim the Future. RTF is envisioned as a think tank and advocacy group representing and empowering ecologically sound, urban entrepreneurs and their local communities. According to the Ella Baker site:

Our goal is to push for public-private-community partnerships endorsing clean, healthy, and economically developed urban environments. The project is devoted to fostering the creation of dignified, clean-energy job opportunities for de-incarcerated individuals and those at risk of encountering the punishment industry.
Or, as Jones puts it: “Green Jobs, Not Jails.”

More here.

The Real Sh*t

Craig Nulan introduced me to the concept of "peak oil" and for that reason alone I would be eternally grateful. But here's an interview with James Howard Kunstler that bears reading. Here's the central question: how should we live in the next forty years, when the oil runs out?

So we've all been talking in various ways about rebuilding the ties that bind. But as far as concrete stuff? Create co-ops. If you live in large large cities, don't plan on being able to survive there. If you live in the suburbs and commute to work? Move back to the city (unless the city is large large). If you live in a place like Tuscon? Move. Vegas? Move. Want to make money? Invest in urban housing.

Other ideas?