Big Brother Raids R-Own-Ranch & Condemns Property!!!

At Home On The Smith Family's

'R-Own-Ranch' in 1980 Click on photo to enlarge - ©1980/2010 jim otterstrom

Photo left to right; Thelma Smith, Edgar Smith (gramps), Karen Smith (Miller), Peggy Otterstrom, Jim Otterstrom, Ed Smith, Debra Smith, Clark Smith, with Boots & Chewbacca in front.

Just before Peggy and I moved to Big Bear this is where we lived, in that army surplus quonset hut, on the Smith family's 60 acre 'R-Own-Ranch', a secluded paradise two miles up a dirt road from Mulholland Drive in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu Canyon Road.

We moved here shortly after we were married, and the ranch is also where we started our own family, Jimmy came into the world during our time here.

We were quite happy living alongside this down to earth Old Calabasas family who welcomed us into their lives as if we were born & raised right there with them.

Most of us worked for the Post Office, either in Calabasas, or Woodland Hills, which is how we became friends, and we held many unforgettable postal gatherings up at the ranch---far from the rat-race---where people could relax and let their hair down without bothering the neighbors, because there weren't any.

At these large pot-luck get-togethers there was often live music provided by musician friends---from young rockers, to aging big band era players---the majority of whom were working at the Post Office too. The family also---long before my days there---had rigged up a fenced (with chicken wire), night-lighted (with salvaged flourescent fixtures), volleyball court, Ma & Pa Kettle style, where, old & young alike, would often play into the wee hours of the morning.

On more normal quieter nights, the family always gathered in the living room of the original old home-built house where four generations of Smiths would gregariously indulge themselves in hours of playing Scrabble, Monopoly, or any number of board, dice, or card games, until way into the night, and there was also a game room with a pool table off the living room overlooking the vegetable garden.

I loved sitting in on those games and listening to family tales about things like hiking miles to the old Calabasas School on a trail which led from the ranch, over the mountains, and down to the quaint little town of Calabasas. But, I don't believe I ever once beat my ol' buddy, Ed Smith, or his sister, Karen, at a game of Scrabble. Those two were just too damned sharp, but then again, they played the game almost every night for much of their lives.

That's the kind of thing families used to do when they lived in remote rural areas, far from the nearest neighbor, before cable or satellite TV, or computers.

I was absolutely charmed by this unassuming family of self-reliant old-fashioned folks who still lived---even during the 1970s, '80s, & early '90s---much as they had throughout the 1940s & '50s. I felt like I had come home, and I still think of them as family, and their 'R-Own-Ranch' as the country home I always longed for.

During our few years there most of the activity centered around the main house, which apparently came into existence around 1927---long before there were enforced building codes in those unincorporated areas---with several rooms obviously added on, maybe as late as the early 1950s. Also, of course, was the war surplus quonset where Peggy & I lived---which had been erected in 1956---35 years before the city of Calabasas was incorporated. And there were a couple of small trailers there too, available to family members who sometimes came and went depending upon their situations at any given time.

Living at the ranch was always an adventure, and definitely not for the faint of heart. The day we moved in was during the midst of a wet winter, and the private road leading up to the ranch had just washed out about a 1/2 mile down from the house, so Peggy and I had to trudge back & forth up that last muddy 1/2 mile with all of our belongings. That would've been late 1979, the year I bought my first 4-wheel drive Toyota, for obvious reasons.

The Smiths owned a tiny, ancient, rickety Caterpillar bulldozer which could, periodically, be patched into some semblance of working order to assist with road repair during washouts, which came in handy because the 1.2 mile dirt section of the road was almost completely wiped out twice during our 3 year stay at the ranch. Those are rewarding and memorable experiences in my life, working side by side with the Smiths to rebuild their road, and this is also when Peggy learned how to use a chain saw and I got to know her rugged hard-working side.

Then there were the fires. A couple of years before we moved to Big Bear a fire broke out to the north of us in the middle of the night, near highway 101, and we were awakened by a call from the fire department warning us to be prepared because it was moving in our direction.

There was a fire hydrant on the property near the main house---the cost of which was surely added to the R-Own-Ranch tax assessment, but the fire department would no longer allow their equipment up the narrow road to protect just one old house. They did however offer to provide us with some fire hose, a nozzle, and a bit of safety instruction if we wished to defend the place ourselves, an offer we gladly accepted.

Over that tense ensuing day the fire moved slowly toward us and some of the Smiths decided to drive down and talk with the firefighters stationed by the big fancy houses at the lower paved section of the road near Mulholland Drive, to see if they might change their minds about sending a truck up. What happened instead, was that a sheriff wouldn't allow the guys back up the road, which left me and Peggy, along with Thelma Smith, probably in her late 50s then, and her son Clark, in his early to mid teens, to defend the place.

I suggested to Peggy that she should leave and told her I was going to stay and fight the fire. She said, "I'm not going anywhere without you"! So, Peg and I followed the fire department advice, wrapping our heads & faces in wet towels as the fire advanced over the hill and moved in upon us. We kept the house and everything around it soaking wet, and when the smoke got too thick we'd adjust the nozzle to a fine spray over our heads and breathe, through the wet towels, the oxygen that was emanating from the misting spray of water falling around us. A few times I had to leave Peggy in charge of the hefty fire nozzle so I could run back to the quonset and use the garden hose to extinguish small fires that had ignited in knot-holes of the leafless deciduous 'Trees of Heaven' growing along the side of the metal building, which was otherwise rather impervious to fire. That's when I discovered how strong and courageous Peggy is.

The fire burned around us for a couple of hours but eventually moved on and the Smith homestead was spared for the time being. Then, in March of 1983, just a few days before Peggy & I moved away, another fire headed toward the ranch, and we were prepared to man the hoses again, but the previous fire had cleared most of the underbrush so this one just burned on past us.

Sadly, in 1996, a third fire finally burned the original family home to the ground while the Smiths stood by helplessly at the bottom of the road where the police, once again, wouldn't allow them up to defend their uninsurable property.

The quonset hut and trailers survived though, and members of the family, including Thelma's now 70 year-old brother, Lloyd Smith, and his son Gary, continued living on what was left of their scrappy beloved ranch, until, completely unannounced and unexpected, "on July 8th, 2010, the Calabasas Community Development Department, its building officials, code enforcement officers, other employees, personnel and agents, Los Angeles County Animal Control, and armed Sheriff’s deputies — a total of 14 people, eight of whom still remain unidentified despite requests for the City to identify them — descended en masse on one of Cold Creek’s founding families in the heart of undeveloped upper Stokes Canyon, 1.2 miles off the beaten track"*.

*Excerpted from the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation August, 2010 newsletter. Read the whole creepy story about the raid here.

In more decent times and places, in an America once striving toward democracy, these human beings---long-time historic pioneering residents of their community---would've been treated with a modicum of courtesy and respect, instead of like common criminals. Their old non code-compliant homestead would've been considered grandfathered, and partially exempt from today's strict regulations, and they would've been officially notified as to whatever health & safety issues required immediate attention and given some time to come into compliance.

But no, 11 days after the raid the Smith family's electricity was cut off, and 7 days after that the water too, leaving 70 year-old Lloyd, and his son Gary, homeless. The bastards even came and capped off the fire hydrant!!!

Because, as you can plainly see, the Calabasas of today is a miracle of modern Capitalism, where destructive profiteering defines progress, and appallingly ugly subdivisions of enormous disgusting "mansions" are smeared all over the once lovely hillsides that the Smith kids wandered on their way to school.

There's no room in Calabasas any more for down home folks like the Smith family, or in the rest of the Santa Monica Mountains for that matter, it's all gone to shit now! And the robber barons who run the world these days don't even have the decency to come in and make the family a fair offer for their land. They just send in a bunch of lackey bureaucrats to do a little dirty work, raiding, condemning, and evicting elderly life-long residents, probably figuring they'll be able to get what they want for almost nothing, while these people are suffering under duress. And I sorely suspect they may well succeed, because ordinary folks just don't have the resources it takes to fight powerful monied interests.

Interestingly, this raid was conducted around the same time an out-of-state owner of 300 acres somewhere in the vicinity of the Smith property, was inquiring about having his land incorporated into the city of Calabasas for development purposes, and would it surprise anybody if the Smith acreage just happens to lie between his land and the rest of what is already contiguous to Calabasas?

Whether this turns out to be the case or not, you can bet your ass that somebody's got an eye on making big bucks off the corpse of R-Own-Ranch, where generations of Smiths, through their labors of love, toiled away for 60 some years on their remote little plot of paradise, enlarging their home, one room at a time, planting gardens, building ponds, repairing roads, paying taxes, and raising their kids, all by themselves, without the need for pre-schools, playdates, or ritalin.

As for the people who live in all those sterile new giant Calabastard enclaves---those anti-coyote, anti-clothesline, anti-cesspool civilized newcomers whose filth & excrement flows through a nasty maze of pipes to some oft malfunctioning sewage treatment plant before being dumped into the Santa Monica Bay; whose countless Hummers, Escalades, and Navigators foul the air above the sacred mountains I once called home---I feel sorry for you and can't even imagine living in one of those oversized crapboxes and calling it a home.

In my eyes R-Own-Ranch is a victim of the same corporate driven oppression which has subverted democracy all across America by buying off the government, rewriting the rules to benefit the rich, and redistributing the wealth of a once thriving middle class---who were the backbone of the country---to a small percentage of the population, which is why the gap between the rich & poor is wider today than ever before, and growing by the hour. Pure raw evidence of the class wars the entire world is in the midst of.

And, for the record, these are my own opinions, and neither my thoughts nor my memories were verified, approved, or authorized by any member of the Smith family.

My anger and indignation over human beings subjected to this kind of treatment is my own, and I'll speak my mind about it anytime I damned well please, especially when it hits this close to home.

Finally, to all the members of the Smith family; to Ed & Cindy, Karen & Dan, and all your kids; to Thelma, Lloyd, & Gary, and all the rest of you. Peggy and I hope you will find a way to get 'R-Own-Ranch' untangled from this nightmare. We will always feel like a part of your family and this is very painful for us too.

Edgar Smith in 1980Click to enlarge - © 1980/2010 jim otterstrom

The late, Edgar Smith, patriarch of R-Own-Ranch who bought the place in the 1940s.

'Smitty' in 1980Click to enlarge - © 1980/2010 jim otterstrom

The, late, 'Smitty', son-in-law of Edgar, husband to Thelma, was the sole rural letter carrier for Calabasas, delivering the mail to every residence for several decades.

Peggy in October of 1981 Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

A very pregnant Peggy, with our goat, in front of the R-Own-Ranch vegetable garden in October of '81.

Peggy on Friday, November 13th, 1981 Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

Peggy, in front of the quonset with Smith family dog, Chewbacca, about 16 hours before our son Jimmy was born, and check out the cat on the tin roof above the door.

Quonset Bathroom - 1981Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

The quonset bathroom during a facelift I was doing on the place while we lived there.


Remodeling Our Bedroom - 1981
Click on photo to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

Ed Smith, grandson of Edgar, son of Smitty & Thelma, helps me (in the middle) with the drywall in our bedroom while, Debra Smith, looks on from the doorway to the bathroom.

Peggy - 1981 Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

Peggy, just days away from motherhood, poses for me in our newly remodeled bedroom in the quonset hut at R-Own-Ranch.

Postscript

If you think this post simply describes an unfortunate isolated incident please follow this link to see a short audio slideshow about ex-Marine & Viet Nam vet, Joseph Diliberti, a stunningly creative human being who may lose his 4 acre property in San Diego County, as well as his magnificent hand-crafted ceramic home, under somewhat similar circumstances.

This kind of stuff happens every day, to good people all around the world, who are victimized by the thievery of empire builders who are now beginning to run out of resources to steal; and by classism, elitism, racism, and sexism.

If you lived along the Yangtze River in China, they came and took millions of your ancestral homes for a huge dam to power the industrialists factories, an engineering monstrosity which, at best, will silt over in a dozen decades or so. If you live in Tennessee, they may soon come for the coal under your feet---if they haven't already done so---removing the mountian tops around your home, destroying the landscape and displacing the wildlife who live there, while ruining the watershed and poisoning your water and your air. If you live in Sumatra, and survive a tsunami, they will come and confiscate your land, replacing your fishing villages with luxury resorts. If you live in Central America, they will come and confiscate your homeland for banana or coffee plantations and put you to work in sweatshops making designer shoes or T-shirts for a few bucks a week. If you were a Native American, they might have brought you gifts, like blankets intentionally infected with smallpox, to kill off your people and take over your land with much less resistance. If you live in Iraq, they will come and destroy your country to procure the oil you're sitting on.

And the list of victimization goes on forever, from East Timor, to the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of America; from the brutality of the British, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, & American empires, to the murderous history of religious fanaticism; from the Crusades, to witch burning in America, and the horrific radical muslim fundamentalism of the Taliban.

I believe, as Dan Quinn wrote in his best-selling novel, Ishmael, that some humans are takers, and some are leavers, and for the past 10,000 years or so, the takers have been winning big, but I think they are running out of time. The planet can't afford them anymore...

'MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS!' I'm Trapped In A Psychotic/Psychopathic Civilization Of Serial Killers...

Click on photo to enlarge - photo credit unknown, image courtesy of Erv Nichols

Warning!

Rant Ahead!

~

"Take the rag away from your face, now is the time for your tears"

from 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' © 1964 Bob Dylan

~

It's way past time we took the rags away from our eyes and looked directly into the horrific reality of our petroleum addiction.

Ours is an insidious addiction, mostly hidden from us beneath layers of lifelong denial, which enables us to mindlessly murder our mother, the living earth, with the sick vengeance of a deranged serial killer.

We talk a good line though, like so many addicts in denial do, claiming to care most deeply about our families and the environment, about freedom, democracy and the quality of life. But our actions speak much louder than our words, and those actions prove us to be hopelessly dependent upon the destructive extraction and consumption of the world's ever more scarce resources, a cultural co-dependency created over a dozen or so decades by mixing great quantities of oil with our short-sighted desire for comfort, convenience, self-gratification and security.

Our habitual dependency upon this ever more frenzied oil-driven civilization of reckless consumption has undermined democracy and freedom at home and around the world. It's destroying our environment and ruining the future, not only for our children, but for every species on earth. So we lie to ourselves when we say we care about these things above all, because it's obvious that what we really care about is stuff.

We want a continual fix of stuff; more, bigger, cheaper, labor-saving, convenient, stylish, sexy stuff!

Americans are fond of the term, "Put your money where your mouth is", and we do exactly that. Just look at the billions of dollars you and I have squandered on the destruction of Iraq in our country's futile attempt to monopolize their oil.

Our former president said, "the American way of life is not up for negotiation", and we've forcefully demonstrated that anyone who gets in our way is totally screwed.

As we display increasingly antisocial behavior in our relationships with the other people and species we share the planet with, we reveal that, in fact, we have become a psychotic/psychopathic civilization, a species of sociopathic ecocidal maniacs to put it bluntly.

Yes, I mean all of us! The symptoms of psychosis are clearly defined; a loss of contact with reality, grandiose delusional beliefs, paranoia, defensive aggression, thought disorders, hallucinations and antisocial behavior.

Our disease is systemic throughout society, a classic substance-induced psychosis resulting from our 150 year addiction to petroleum and its associated derivatives.

We can no longer imagine living without our daily fix of oil even though every shot we take further destroys the world which made our lives possible in the first place.

Through our addiction to this cheap abundant (although quite temporary) energy packed substance, we've fooled ourselves into believing we're super-beings, exempt from the laws of nature and the limits to growth. In other words we have lost contact with reality.

Under the influence of the happy-juice we call oil we've experienced a euphoric rush that has kept us obliviously stoned for a century and a half, which by comparison, leaves the high from any other addictive substance paling to utter insignificance.

The manic hyperactivity induced by that rush of oil into the arteries of our society allowed us, in very short order, to transform our primal insecurities, and our creative wet dreams, into a monstrous civilization whose monolithic edifices will stand for centuries as eroding monuments to the ostentatious arrogance of a narcissistic species gone mad with self-absorption, over-consumption, and obsessive compulsive disorders.

We have deluded ourselves into the grandiose belief that this pile-of-crap civilization we've plastered across the planet is a modern miracle, evidence of our manifest destiny as masters of the universe.

We Americans make up only about 4.5% of the world population yet we consume 25% of the world's resources. We are the world's number one trash producers, generating 40% of humanity's trash, and we're number two in climate altering CO2 emissions (just recently displaced from #1 by China), responsible for over 20% of global atmospheric accumulations.

We are---and have been for over a century---the development model for a civilization that has spawned the 6th greatest extinction episode in the 4.5 billion year history of earth and it is estimated that we are now losing around 200 species a day, or 70,000 species a year, through habitat loss and the pollution of ecosystems.

You and I are the ones responsible for this latest round of extinctions; for the climate change happening now; for the melting of the polar caps and glaciers; for the coming rise in sea levels, and the subsequent displacement and homelessness of billions of human beings.

We may also be primarily responsible for the very existence of those unsustainable billions of people because of increases in the world food supply created by our development of an international industrial/agribusiness model.

A model completely dependent upon the petrochemicals used for fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, a model which also requires the production & maintenance of gargantuan fleets of farm equipment and transportation networks to produce those agricultural products and get them to markets around the globe.

All of this has unleashed global-wide opportunities of unprecedented magnitude for greedy profiteering by a select few at the expense of everyone and everything else. So, as a matter of course, the world economy is now managed by a gang of legalized thugs & racketeers, rivaled in greed and ruthlessness only by illegal drug cartels, fundamentalist religious fanatics, and an emerging flotilla of Somalian pirates.

~

"Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"

from Sweetheart Like You - © 1983 Bob Dylan

~

Capitalism is a Ponzi/Pyramid Scheme which robs the larger populace of the commons to benefit a handful of elites, where obscene profits perpetuate unlimited growth on a finite planet. One of the results has been the contemporary hallucination that our destruction of the planet somehow makes us wealthy.

The wealth of America is now nothing but an imaginary bubble kept aloft by the printing of money, which becomes ever more worthless by the moment. Before long that debt bubble is going to burst into flames like the Hindenburg Blimp, as we might gather from the precedents unfolding in Iceland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain (not to mention California---the 5th largest economy in the world---which is essentially bankrupt).

The perpetual wars we're now waging have deepened not only our national debt, but our national paranoia as well, resulting in over 6,700 military installations--- bases, warehouses, or support facilities in nearly 150 countries (under the guise of defending freedom & democracy)---all to enforce our world dominance and gain control of dwindling resources in the interest of "national security", or what I call our assumed national supremacy.

Meanwhile, here in the "land of the free, the home of the brave", we have the highest per-capita imprisonment rate in the world, 25% of the incarcerated human beings on planet earth are behind bars right here in the good ol' USA.

Is this the definition of Democracy and Freedom?

Is this what the Statue of Liberty stands for?

We all know better...

True freedom lies in the unspoiled bounty of nature where all species are created equal, where those who can't, or won't, adapt to the limits of their environment eventually perish.

We're so deep in denial of our collective addiction that we've kept shooting petroleum into the bloodstream of our lives without facing those limits until we have, quite suddenly, found ourselves up against a wall, with the limits of our ecosystems staring us in the face, point blank.

Perhaps this will wake us up, most addicts need to bottom out before they can face reality and attempt some sort of recovery, but sometimes it's too late for that, when the damage is beyond repair.

So, go ahead my fellow addicts...

Drill Baby Drill!

Buy Baby Buy!

Drive Baby Drive!

Kill Baby Kill!

...but beware, our chickens are coming home to roost.

~

My name is Jim, I'm in recovery from the Petroleum Age*

*Thank you, Chellis Glendinning, for the societal recovery concept.

The Court Jester...

...overstepping the bounds

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

"His characteristic idiom suggests he is a 'natural' fool, not an artificial one, though his perceptiveness and wit show that he is far from being an idiot, however 'touched' he might be.

His folly could be regarded as the raving of a madman but was often deemed to be divinely inspired.

He holds up a mirror to make us aware of our times, mocking politicians and public figures of power and authority.

He served not simply to amuse but to criticize his masters, or mistresses, and their guests.

Jesters could also give bad news to the King that no one else would dare deliver."*

*(excerpted, edited, and out of context - from Wikipedia)

Perhaps this is my calling, Court Jester to the Evil Empire, but then again, there are so many of us...

...so many fools dancing to the tune of our masters while cautiously poking fun, as best we can, without provoking any fatal consequences.

Keep 'em laughing, keep 'em amused, but whatever you do, don't overstep the bounds...

Alas, when I get too near the edge, I can always change hats and revert to my cover as an artsy-craftsy garden gnome.

But not just yet, these are the cold dark days of winter and I'm still feeling a tad bit cranky...

;~o

(Stay tuned for 'Looking Back From The Future', Part 3)

Quote Of The Day, from Copenhagen...

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

To the United States Congress:

"You Approve billions of dollars in defense budgets. Can't you approve $200 billion to save the world?"

Lumumba D-Aping, Copenhagen Climate Summit negotiator for the G-77.

Say it like it is brother, there's no money for Peace, Love, or Health Care, but there's plenty for war and corporate bailouts!

And here's a quote from me:

"Halliburton, Leading The World In War Profiteering".

Dick Cheney's Halliburton is now a Dubai corporation, they moved there to avoid paying taxes in the U.S., the country that made them filthy stinking rich...

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

That question comes to mind because we are so close to Christmas, a day of reverence and worship for the world's Christians, and Capitalists (ohhh, the irony).

And, I know what he would do, he'd be crucified for his advocacy of throwing the money-changers out of the temple.

Another quote from me:

"The Earth Is Our Temple, and Today, We Are The Money-Changers".

~PEACE~

We, The People...

...Have Spoken

Click on images to enlarge

Obama Collages by Charis Tsevis

Creative Commons Licensed

Something very beautiful just happened in America!

We mustered the largest voter turnout in nearly 100 years to elect the country's first African-American president by mounting a huge, truly modern, grassroots campaign funded primarily by average Americans like you and I.

An incredible 700 million dollars was raised online, mostly through small donations under $100.

From Earth Home Garden alone we raised nearly $1,000 of that total through our personal fundraising page at BarackObama.com.

It's a crying shame that this amount of money has to be spent to overcome the political influence of Corporatism but it's a reality of our times and an obviously fed-up populace rose to the occasion.

I vote in every election but I am rarely inspired by politicians and this is the first time I've done fundraising for one.

I'm proud to have been a small part of this historic moment and I truly hope Barack Obama can heal some of the mean-spiritedness which has dominated American politics and divided the country in recent decades.

The world is weary of greed, corruption and war, and perhaps President Obama can help restore some of the goodwill America once enjoyed in the international community.

We are also facing very difficult economic times, compounded by the problems of climate change, resource depletion, and increasing social unrest all over the globe.

It's time for diplomacy, dialogue, and responsible leadership to replace blind arrogance and callous brutality on the world stage. Time to share the fruits of democracy instead of pursuing a path of world domination through corporate sponsored tyranny.

And, if Barack Obama is to be a successful president, he will need all the support we can give him.

When Barack says we will all need to "sacrifice and work together", I hope people are listening, because there are very hard times ahead.

Remember, Barack Obama is not a saint, a savior, or a magician. He's just a man. An educated thoughtful man with the eloquence to inspire people. The man we chose to help us bring change to America.

No president will be able to effectively address the unprecedented challenges we face without a well-informed participatory and vigilant citizenry lending their voices.

And, at this time also, in this world of new possibilities, we might want to carefully and consistently be re-evaluating our needs while learning to live more sustainably and leave smaller footprints.

On this day of renewed optimism, my Hope is, that, with strong and thoughtful leadership, we can now begin to realize the magnitude of the Change we need to make as a society, and as individuals, in order to meet the challenges required for building a sustainable future.

TO NEW BEGINNINGS

TO HOPE AND CHANGE

TO PEACE & LOVE

Jim & Peg

November 4th, 2008

We Voted! What About You?

Click on image to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

We walked to our polling place this morning arriving at 7:04, four minutes after they opened.

The lines were long at the Bear City Fire Station but the folks were friendly and the mood relaxed.

We saw a lot of old friends we haven't seen in years and there were lots of hugs going 'round.

Now, we wait and see...

Predatory Capitalism Is Nearing Its Ugly Peak While The American Corpocracy Runs Amok!

Video courtesy of BLIMPTV.net

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I just had to share this spot-on hilarious lambasting of the perfectly ludicrous Bush Oiligarchy.

And please excuse the iPod advertisement at the end of the video, ironic confirmation that even a freely shared parody of capitalism must be contaminated by the quest for $$$$!

YES, WE CAN!

Click on image to enlarge - Logo © Obama '08

Modifications conceived by Peggy Otterstrom and rendered by Jim Otterstrom on Valentines Day, 2008.

~An Open Letter To Our Friends~

Dear Friends,

Many of you know Peggy and I don't usually get involved in political campaigns, but I believe this election is the most important of our lifetime.

As Americans, we have a clear choice in how we face the next several years. Very difficult years where we must deal creatively and constructively with huge challenges, including climate change, environmental degradation, growing anti-American sentiment, increasing resource scarcity, peak oil and a faltering economy.

We need new ideas, and a sense that America can cooperate with the rest of the world in addressing our very urgent problems, by some means other than unilateral pre-emptive perpetual war.

Right now we have the chance to choose a president who is honest, personable, intelligent, courageous, wise, and hopeful, a man of the people with fresh ideas. Or, we can continue onward with politics as usual and the failed policies of the status quo.

Barack Obama spoke eloquently against the War In Iraq from day one, while Hillary Clinton voted for it.

This is a needless and costly war where nearly 4,000 Americans have already lost their lives, along with countless thousands of innocent civilian Iraqi men, women, and children.

We have squandered nearly a half-trillion dollars of our hard-earned money on this war so far, enough to have rebuilt much of the deteriorating public infrastructure of the United States, our crumbling highways, bridges, levees, power grids, hospitals etc.!

America was once respected around the world as a Beacon Of Freedom, but now we are more often feared as self-serving war-mongers bent on world domination.

We need strong visionary leadership that also understands the struggles of the average person. Someone who believes in Democracy and will work to restore our credibility on the world stage with good will and diplomacy instead of threats and violence.

A lot of people have stopped believing that is even possible, but we support Barack Obama because we believe he can be that leader.

His grassroots funded campaign for the presidency is unparalleled in history and our need for an honest, fresh-thinking leader could not be more urgent.

Americans are hungry for change and Barack Obama will bring that change when he is elected.

If you still believe that ordinary people can make a difference please take a moment now, and click here to visit our Obama '08 fundraising page, to make a donation of any size, $5, $10, $25, whatever you can do.

It all adds up, and this is how Barack Obama has come so far, with support from average people like you and I.

Thank You,

Jim & Peggy Otterstrom

A few days ago Peggy asked me to design a T-shirt for her with the Obama Campaign Logo.

She wanted one created in rainbow colors over a sunburst with her own slogan, "Obama Gives Me Hope".

I took a picture of the sun and then spent a couple of hours playing in Photoshop to turn her idea into reality. The designs above, and on her T-shirt below are the results.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY HONEY,

YOU GIVE ME HOPE!

Click on photo to enlarge

a day for mourning...

Click on image and text to enlarge

The above excerpts and illustration are from the book, American Holocaust, by David E. Stannard --- © 1992 by David E. Stannard/Oxford University Press

~

I share this with you in remembrance of the monstrous legacy of Christopher Columbus, and the crimes against humanity he perpetrated in the name of God & Country, and the pursuit of Gold.

America has continued to build its Empire upon the sick heritage of Columbus as evidenced by our contributions, funneled through the CIA, to the disappearances and murder of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people in Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the past several decades. People who resisted or disapproved of American-supported military coups and brutal dictatorships which gave control of their countries, their land, their wealth, and their resources to corporations---many of them based in the U.S.

This was the direct result of American-sponsored experiments to spread the neo-liberal (now neocon) corporatist economic theories of Milton Friedman across South America, and there is no defensible or pardonable excuse (such as fighting The Red Scare or putting and end to Creeping Socialism) for these and countless other atrocities committed, just during my lifetime, in the name of freedom and democracy.

Therefore, I, like every other human being, carry in my heart an insidious poison distilled from the suffering of the aforementioned peoples, and from the terror visited upon Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so many other places.

Our current human predicament, as well as our future, is surely determined by the karma of our actions, past and present, and the consequences of those actions are coming home to roost more & more, as we live each day with new revelations of unspeakable horrors, and not just terrorist attacks, but psychopathic acts of violence everywhere. Campus massacres, workplace shootings, murder, mayhem, kidnapping, rape, child-molestion, infanticide, maiming, torture, and even cannibalism, committed by ordinary people, male, female---adults and children alike--- whether black, white, brown, yellow or red, here at home, and all around the world.

Yet we continue sowing the seed of monsters even as we reap the grotesquely bitter fruit borne of selfishness and greed.

These days we do it in the name of God, Country, and the pursuit of Oil, not to mention the myriad other resources required to feed the insatiable appetites of rogue Capitalism and unbridled growth.

Atrocities and war crimes committed by the American government and its corporate leaders belong to each one of us because we allow them to happen, through either ignorance, apathy, or intimidation, and we pay for them not only with our dollars, but with the lives of our loved ones.

Many of us would deny that we play any part in this, a denial that ends rather bluntly when you trace the path of the dollars withheld from your paycheck. But we can't stop our payments for war and killing because deep-down we understand that this is not really a democracy and we're afraid of being imprisoned or impoverished like the victims of the foreign policy we pay for.

And besides, we're certainly not the only country guilty of crimes against humanity now are we?

Still, even after we nearly exterminated the people who inhabited this place when we got here, the great American experiment with democracy was seen by many as "a beacon of freedom", "a shining light of hope in the world", an alternative to the tyranny, oppression, and corruption of previous empire-builders. Not so many people believe that about America anymore though, because we've long since given our country, and its lofty ideals, over to the criminals and thieves of Corporatism.

The American experiment with democracy seems to have failed, and, once again, the emperor wears no clothes, but what could we expect?

After all, this so-called democracy was founded upon conquest, murder, theft, injustice and suffering, and all of us today shoulder a good measure of guilt in the continuing creation of a war-torn world full of fear and hatred.

We remake our beds each day, in which we must lie each night...

Will we ever learn?

Or are we simply incapable of transforming ourselves into thoughtful, conscientious, benevolent, sustainable human beings?

On this day of mourning I would humbly ask all victims of American-sponsored terrorism to try and find forgiveness in their hearts, for we are also victims. Corporatist Fascism is rapidly overtaking the world and the average person here has been duped, just like everywhere else.

in PEACE, LOVE, and HUMILITY

jim

JOE BAGEANT TELLS IT LIKE IT IS!

EARTH HOME GARDEN'S

'BOOK OF THE YEAR'

Click on covers to enlarge - © 2007 Joseph L. Bageant/Crown Publishers

I know, the year isn't over yet, and we've read a bunch of good books at Earth Home Garden in the past 7+ months, including Jared Diamond's Collapse, The Humboldt Current by Aaron Sachs, and Limits to Growth, The 30‑Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. But I'm willing to claim that no other book I read during the remainder of the year will resonate with me like Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus.

Articulately profane, gut-wrenchingly honest, and frighteningly well-informed, Deer Hunting With Jesus paints a profoundly vivid portrait of what's become of America and the promise of Democracy, revealing in great detail the tragic consequences of blind faith, of a mis-informed semi-literate right-wing conservative working class, and the arrogant self-defeating intellectual elitism of the so-called liberal left. Joe tells his potentially depressing story with deep affection and generous humor.

If Deer Hunting With Jesus doesn't hit home with you, you're living in a different America than I am.

State Of The #&%*@$?! Union

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2007 jim otterstrom

I was feeling so patriotic after reading Dubya's 'State Of The Union Address' that I could hardly contain myself, so I decided to fly America's true colors today.

I move that we recommend this more appropriate re-design of Old Glory depicted on my T-shirt be adopted as the official flag of The Corporate States Of Amerika.

Excuse me while I go vomit, King George!

The only thing more disgusting than the state of this union is The State Of The World!

Blecccchhhhhh!

Even a good cup of tea can't get the bad taste out of my mouth, maybe a shot or two of Tequila will do the trick...

Pardon my smart-ass smirk but the gang-bangers in Washington get my cranky mischievous dander up...

You can be a Patriot too! Get your own Corporate States Of Amerika shirt here.

Addendum-1-25-07

Yesterday evening our friend Jane, in Texas, e-mailed me the following list of quotes on "Political Wisdom".

Political wisdom! Now there's an oxymoron!!

1. Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself.............Mark Twain

2. I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle...........Winston Churchill

3. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.............George Bernard Shaw

4. A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money............G. Gordon Liddy

5. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner...........James Bovard

6. Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries............. Douglas Casey

7. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys...............P. J. O'Rourke

8. Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else..........Frederic Bastiat

9. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it......Ronald Reagan

10. I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts..............Will Rogers

11. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin........Mark Twain

And I'll add this one.

12. The difference between the two parties is the difference between syphillis and gonorrhea..........Rita Mae Brown

Thanks Jane!

It helps to find a little humor in all this crap.

Homo colossus - A colossal failure of values

Click on photo to enlarge-photo by an unknown passerby

A post-election rant...

At 8:30 this morning, during a 5-mile nature-walk with Dallas, I found myself staring at this advertising poster on the front of a gas station mini-mart.

It reminded me of television, of consumerism, of Capitalism and economic growth, of propaganda and corporate funded mind-control, of the recent elections, and, of the colossal failure the human species faces.

As I stood there dwelling on thoughts of colossal import, pondering the species known as Homo sapiens, I remembered sociologist William R. Catton's term for our species as it exists today, Homo colossus.

Catton wrote, in his groundbreaking 1980 book, 'Overshoot-The Ecological Basis For Revolutionary Change';

"The more potent human technology became, the more man turned into a colossus. Each human colossus required more resources and more space than each pre-colossal human. Contrast the environmental impact of the Central Ohio Coal Company and its huge machines with the environmental impact of the Stone Age people who inhabited the same area a few centuries before. The Indians had not necessarily possessed any more virtue; they simply used cruder tools. They were non-colossal.

The same kind of problem would be much easier to recognize if mankind were afflicted with some kind of mutation that had the curious effect of causing children to grow to twice their parents' adult size---so that they required twice as much food and fiber per capita to sustain life and comfort. Suppose, further, that the effect were somehow cumulative, so that each generation grew twice as large and voracious as the preceding one. Quite obviously, the world's carrying capacity would be much less for later generations of giants than for earlier generations of runts. Just as obviously, neither conventional political rostrums nor revolutionary agitation could do much to remedy the situation.

Perhaps we would know this if we ceased to call ourselves Homo sapiens and began to call ourselves Homo colossus. If we were accustomed to thinking of a human being not just as a naked ape or a fallen angel but as a man-tool system, we would have recognized that progress could become a disease. The more colossal man's tool kit became, the larger man became, and the more destructive of his own future."

...and later in the book.

"History will record the period of global dominance by Homo colossus as a brief interlude. Our most urgent task is to develop policies designed not to prolong that dominance, but to ensure that the successor to Homo colossus will be, after all, Homo sapiens. Developing such policies must be so enormously difficult that it is not easy even to accept the urgency of the task. But the longer we delay beginning the more numerous and colossal we become---thereby trapping ourselves all the more irredeemably in the fatal practice of stealing from the future."

Those words were written nearly 30 years ago and no such consensus for change has emerged. On the contrary, population growth, consumption habits, resource depletion, species extinctions, widespread pollution, toxic contamination of food & water supplies, and global warming are all spiraling, exponentially, out of control.

But wait, Jim! Haven't you heard the good news?

There's been a "paradigm shift" in Washington!

Great change is on the horizon because the democrats have trounced the republicans in the American political arena.

Hogwash! When's the last time you heard a democrat argue against economic growth or global Capitalism?

Here's a quote describing the differences between democrats & republicans by another author, Rita Mae Brown, whom, much to my liking, speaks truth with a rather down-to-earth bluntness.

"The difference between the two parties is the difference between syphillis and gonorrhea. Neither one of them has a very compelling program for America. They don't question our whole economic base, and I'm not talking about being socialist or anything like that. What we need to look at is whether our economy is safe for the earth."

As far as I'm concerned, you can apply that very analogy to Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.etc. etc., and any other anthropocentric notion that separates Homo colossus from his place among Nature and her universal laws.

What would be needed for our long-term survival is a profound, species-wide, paradigm shift (combined with a lot fewer people), because, as long as we place ourselves above Nature, instead of within her, the ways in which we live our lives will continue to be a disease upon (or at dis-ease with) the earth that supports us.

And, evidently, that paradigm shift isn't going to happen.

It's become quite obvious that, as a civilization, we are incapable of understanding the colossal changes we need to make in ourselves if we wish to continue as a viable species. Eventually though, forces beyond our apparent control will greatly reduce our numbers, and, for the sake of our species, as well as the diversity of life on earth, I hope that happens before we ourselves end up on the ever-growing heap of extinctions we are causing.

So, did I vote?

Yes, I always vote...

...although, in recent memory, I haven't voted for anything, or anybody, that had much of a chance of winning. Yet I keep on voting lest those creeps in power think I just don't give a damn. I go to the polls and make my contrary little statement of displeasure with the status-quo, no matter how inconsequential that statement is.

It's kind of like the words, and time, I've wasted here today, when the above picture already said it all...

Still, I often feel a need to speak my mind, and, as I said in my October 11th post, "I’ll take protest and dissent over war or collapse any time", but that doesn't imply that I usually get my way, because world events almost never go in the direction I'd like to see them go.