Illegal Artistry

Illegal Artistry

Mark Delano posed some questions in that forum the other day that were deep enough to require some thought before answering. Here's that conversation:

MD: I'm curious as to why, exactly, you feel that you are entitled to stay in a public park at all?

Steve Bass: [Link to Legalismo here, assuming Mark could follow further links if motivated].

 not quite a starting place, but linked to that

MD: Lol, I read the post earlier, as well as the article in the Independent in which you are referred to as unemployed, which begs the question: what makes you feel that you are entitled to enjoy the "right" of pursuing your happiness -- that is, living in Acacia park -- without having to contribute monetarily to the upkeep of that public facility.. Furthermore, why is it that you believe that, in the interest of effecting a change in a law which you disagree with, the best course of action is to choose to voluntarily break said law, rather than getting involved in the legal process and effecting a change in the typical fashion? After all, all that really accomplishes is an additional waste of taxpayer-funded services, in this case law enforcement.

SB: these are excellent questions, which i hope you'll be so kind as to allow me time to answer, which i'll be required to take anyhow

MD: Of course...I would prefer that over a hasty response anyways. I likely wont be able to get back to you until tomorrow, so please don't feel rushed.

SB: right on....

SB: I'll reiterate again before i take this on that these are profoundly excellent questions that i think every Occupier, observer, and citizen of any country ought to contemplate deeply before entering the fray--maybe even before leaving the house this morning.

First I should clarify what may amount to a few misconceptions wrought largely by the media of late. As has been reported I am living with dear friends who find my comfort to be a valuable thing and have extended their hospitality freely, absent any solicitation on my end. J. Adrian Stanley of the CS Independent has referred to me as a "technically homeless...couch[-]surf[er]," which is true, though only by certain technical legal definitions, which are generally designed to either skirt or address issues involving benefits of some sort.  I am "technically" employed as the sole proprietor of the Paint Squad, a remodeling company that has been defunct for practical purposes since the media began trumpeting a new Great Depression, and the guy i had been working with abandoned the project. For the record, i collect no unemployment, disability, food stamps, or any other money or benefits of any kind from the government. Plainly stated, i have no monetary income. This is not meant to offer ethical assessment of my situation nor to elicit sympathy or whatever, but is merely offered to add perspective to my positions, and to rectify factual errors that have made it into the mix. Bear in mind i was camping at Acacia Park not out of necessity, but to effect the specific outcome that you may observe to have been effected. Note that although hundreds of campers are now down along Fountain Creek in violation of the same ordinance, they are not at Acacia Park kicking the bee's nest with me--they have different and rather more imminent needs than i.

I believe i adequately responded to Mark's first question by directing him to the appropriate pages here at hipgnosis. The second is a continuation of the first, with the addenda about "contributing monetarily." A response must necessarily involve the natures of money, property and its use, and our interaction amongst ourselves as human beings. The third involves political processes and movements, civil disobedience, and my own spiritual foundation. I hope those statements enlightens the reader on the length of this post, and Mark in particular on the reason for the time taken for its development. 

Some questions in answer to a question: Who owns public land? What does it mean to "own" it? Whence the resources to maintain the land, and what does that mean? We Americans have never adequately addressed these matters, and our ethical foundation for holding this conversation will remain forever spongy until we do. All land ownership in the United States harks back to the arbitrary decrees of that series of monarchies our predecessors here acknowledged to be so corrupt that a bloody war was necessary to shed the influence thereof. Land was simply declared by powerful people to be "owned" by favored sycophants, regardless of the opinions of the contemporary inhabitants. The Founders adopted the same attitudes governing property as had been utilized by their enemies. Every piece of property in the country now, public or private, is viewed through the lens of this fact. Its "ownership" is determined by arbitrary acts of murder and fiat. It's understandable that this is the case--effecting such jarring and massive shifts in foundational thinking is never blithely easy, though it does appear simple once accomplished.

Having had an ear to the ground for some time on matters such as we are discussing , i am alert to numerous suggestion that "we" give land back to the "Indians." This idea is as flawed as the other, and the thinking of indigenous peoples advocating it has been corrupted by our Western philosophical bias. The only genuine option uncorrupted by avarice and murder is to revert to a state of ignorance of ownership where the land is concerned. The elaboration of this notion constitutes a genuine system of political economy and i will carry it no further here, (but will link below). This is put in the mix to allow the reader to investigate further, and to establish that the following points are argued from an academic point of view rendered at least partially moot by the actual philosophical basis for the actions in question.

Be alert, Mark, that i have not been a societal parasite. I have worked and paid taxes since the age of 12, in spite of strenuous effort to limit the absurd, onerous, and unethical share the Government has taken through any nefarious means available. Maintenance at Acacia Park is paid out of city sales tax, unless i'm mistaken, which i certainly paid when i bought the sleeping bag i slept in there, the bicycle i rode to the park, the tobacco i smoked while there. Additionally, though i have not camped there in a week or so, one might readily visit the Park and ascertain that it is in a far cleaner state than before Occupiers carved out a space there, the rest rooms were locked coincident to their arrival, and the only maintenance in evidence is a guy that comes around in the morning to collect the bags of trash the Occupiers have gathered from around the whole park, and the sprinklers which still douse the tree lawns where people are camping even though watering season is so obviously over that infrastructure damage is imminent. Regardless, and without additional verbosity, the land in question is public, and we Occupiers clean up after ourselves requiring less maintenance, not more, of the City. Opposition to the notion that smaller contributions in tax payments ought to equal diminished rights to enjoy publicly held assets with which we are endowed at birth is quite close to the heart of the Occupiers' battles, whether individual Occupiers have become aware of the idea yet or not. We all pay for it, both monetarily and in karmic debt, or by whatever system of spiritual balance you may care to invoke. Any Rockefeller is welcome to pop a tent next to mine.

Your final point, that is, why civil disobedience rather than ordinary action is yet another that might be expanded at length. In the interest of getting this up i'll restrain myself from that in hopes that you will recognize that i am not attempting to be glib or brusque with you here, Mark, but merely brief. Additional commentary on all these points is both available and forthcoming. Simply enough--civil disobedience, and in fact in my mind and those of many, many others, full-blown political and ideological restructuring is necessary because no approach within the confines of less strenuous discourse has worked thus far, and people all over the planet have had quite enough bullshit. If you imagine to yourself that this business of mine, or the business of Occupy in general is about camping in Acacia Park, or the stupid camping ordinance enacted but not enforced by the City of Colorado Springs then you have badly missed some very important news. I suggest you follow the links below. Visit the Occupiers, both here and in many other cities around the whole wide World right now.

This'll do. Ask more questions! Read these links:

I'm not angry, but, hmmm... http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

Henry George developed a system addressing this stuff. I can't say his system is complete, and in fact, i am personally convinced our problem as humans must be addressed spiritually. That's a topic for another moment, and it does not detract from George's thesis: http://www.henrygeorge.org/

This strikes me as so obvious that it could be seen as a jab, and almost feels that way, but it's still the place to go for primary discourse on civil disobedience: http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

This is obviously unnecessary, but i'll point out once more that the reader will find an abundance of words of my own that bounce around all these topics and more. It's all the same conversation: www.hipgnosis21.blogspot.com

PPCC Philo Club page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/168063276537761/

Some other discussion and reporting establishing basis: http://wwwwendolbloggercom.blogspot.com/

There's no end. Keep looking.

Willie and Waylon and Some Other Guy: A story about weed, marriage, and Texas tall tales. Part I

Willie and Waylon and Some Other Guy: A story about weed, marriage, and Texas tall tales. Part I

                I like telling the story of the time we went to Telluride with my brother David to catch the Bluegrass Festival there. Dave is a pretty dang famous fiddler, and this happened 13 or 14 years ago when his Freight Hoppers were riding a crest, having two then current Billboard Top 10 Americana list releases on Rounder Records, (Rounder is pretty much a ripoff for them, but that’s for another time).  The Freight Hoppers were hot in Colorado, and their set would draw some 30, 000 festival-goers, with a respectable bevy of hairy Deadheads looking for an outlet following Jerry’s departure bouncing, flouncing and working their little Tai Chi dance up at the stage. Lots of really notable musicians liked The Hoppers, too, and still do, actually.

                Anyhow, we would meet up with Dave and the band at the festivals after winding through a long cattle-line setup to get to the will-call desk and pick up our magic-rainbow all-access wristbands and hang out all weekend with all these niche-famous musicians, eating, drinking, being merry, smoking, and playing music together. That shit is great!

                So one day we’re back stage chillin’ with Tony Furtado, (hi Tony—rock on!), and someone goes, “Is that Johnny Cash?” and sure enough, The Highwaymen had showed up to play an unscheduled set. We never made it away from whatever we were doing at the time to see them play, but not long later, as if they had come for no other purpose, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson show up looking for my brother to tell him how much they dig his music. How cool is that!? Well, we all got to jawin’, and knowing a little about Willie I pulled a little fairly decent weed out of my pocket  and offered it, but Willie said, “Oh, no thanks, son, put that away,” and busted out some G13 mutant weed or something, and sparked the stoniest joint I’ve ever smoked in my life, to this very day. What a day!

                Now, Willie has always been a hero of mine. His heroes have always been cowboys, he says; mine have always been outlaws, and I always figured Willie for a true outlaw, to the core. I mean the guy runs for president on a platform built of pot smoke, with Ani DiFranco as his running mate. Go Willie! That’s why some things he’s said lately trouble me. I’ll get to that in a minute but the first order of business here is to retell that story one more time, (not that I won’t tell it again—it’s a great staple of mine at parties and such), and to let you in on a secret: It’s all bullshit! It never happened!

                ***

                I am a teller of tall tales, a spinner of yarns, a slinger of bool-shyte. That’s what I do. I’m gonna do some now, here; it’s my schtick, and folks who know me will instantly recognize some of the regular phraseology of my everyday standup, right here on the page. Hi Tim! Hi kids! Hi Willie! Some will recognize little inside tidbits and feel special. They’ll pick out my little eddies and anticipate how I circle back around myself. Hell, if you’re reading you might just as well go ahead and start feeling all conspiratorial and special right now. I mean, this is certainly not USA Today. You can pretty much count on being in an exclusive number by this count.

                So if this is a bit of improv by a bullshit artist, how do you know this isn’t all bullshit right now? I’ll let you in on another secret: it is! That’s right—it’s the Lying Cretin. Everything I say is a lie. The Lie is truer than the Truth. Willie and I will be burning one in Austin when I make it down that way in a few months and we’ll laaaugh and laugh about this whole thing, because he gets it, you know:

                This statement does not belong in the set of all true statements.

               Wrap your head around that a spell. It can’t be done. And no side-winding tap-dance involving imaginary words like "pseudo-statement" allowed, either. This is True Lies. It’s a breakdown in reason, a blind spot in our panoramic window to Reality like that thing with the dots you learned in elementary school. You can not manipulate the notions here to fit your mind, though you may, just maybe, be able to manipulate your mind to fit the notions. OK, so I’ll admit we can’t prove the magick here, and maybe someday some mathematician will build a technical ladder up and out of Gödel’s pit, but, we can’t prove a negative, right? But let’s see ya prove that. And now follow it back to the beginning of this paragraph, the beginning of this rant, the beginning of everything you’ve ever read, heard, saw, sensed felt.

               
And, lo and behold, you find yourself  “poised on the wave of explicit Presence, the clockless Nowever.”
               
But don’t forget what kinda bullshit you’re reading.

(Don't miss Part 2)!

http://hermetic.com/bey/ 

From 2010

From 2010.

I promised yesterday that I'd do a little mewling about American justice today. The reason for my interest in the subject matter at this particular juncture in my life is that I spent last weekend in jail in El Paso County, Colorado. I was picked up on a warrant from five years ago alleging "Failure to Appear" as a new charge over an old case. The appearance in question involved an incident for which I stood in Judge Stephen Sletta's courtroom, heard a sentence, and served it out--five years ago. It took most of a week for the players involved to ascertain the explanation just proffered above to be true, and now I am loose. Sletta absolved his court, and the system in general, of any responsibility in the matter by stating that I should have notified his office of my earlier compliance, and that I had failed in my "ordinary responsibility as an adult" when I did not execute this notification, even though it had been specifically stated in that earlier appearance that all was handled, and I had no further responsibility.

So you understand, if you are reading, that my motivation for promising an earful today was largely a matter of angst, and little more. The thing that happened to me just now was an error though, and I don't know how an attack on the system could do anything at all to rectify errors. I'd have been happier if Sletta had at minimum proffered an apology, and maybe even a piece of paper to back my assertion that this faux pas was not of my own doing. It would have been nice to have something in writing to offer my now former employer to show them I didn't simply walk away from my job for a week. Neither of these concessions have been forthcoming, though, and in a way this does serve to illustrate one part of the multitude of interwoven problems extant in "justice" here in our country, or at least in El Paso County.

In a 2005 Economist article, John Ferguson, CEO of Correction Corp. of America, (CCA), the country's largest private prison administration company, advocates for his industry's takeover of the incarceration business, (The Prophet of Prison, Economist; 9/3/2005, Vol. 376 Issue 8442, p58-58). He trots out the well worn argument that competition is always a good thing for the market, and that his company can always operate more efficiently than the government, in any context. The entire discussion at hand in the article is summed up by this consideration, from par. 5: "Critics complain that a private company will inevitably treat prisoners simply as inventory. But Mr Ferguson responds that prisons--like any other public service--can be improved by competition and flexibility." Any third grade reader can point out that, though competition and flexibility may well be admirable and beneficial traits in any enterprise or market, Mr. Ferguson has entirely sidestepped the concern of the general milieu of critics cited.

The mission of any business, corporate or otherwise, is to make a profit. In spite of Ferguson's description of various administrative cost-cutting measures, all admirable, the fact remains that inmates in his prisons are inventory. Each of those human bodies represents a fee from whatever government body is contracting CCA's services. One might imagine any defense by a guy like Ferguson to the contrary to be superfluous to begin with, but he offers none, (I suppose this may be to his credit, or at least to the credit of his subconscious mind), but rather prefers to shift ground.

What does this have to do with El Paso County, one may ask. Time has prevented prompt posting of this little tirade, and the more remote the basis for it grows, the greater the disconnect feels in my mind. The "Criminal Justice Center," (CJC), here is not a contract jail; it's administered by the county. A casual examination of the mechanics of the thing leaves the impression that only the food is farmed out to an outside party, Aramark, an esteemed corporation whose official website is loaded with notation of awards and recognition of its great ethical standard, and whose tentacles hold strong market position in all manner of industry including education, health care, and, (pertinent here), food service. In spite of the adulation of business peers, the fact remains that prisoners at CJC in El Paso County, CO are provided "meals" that would likely make the rice-boilers at an average Chinese prison cringe. Aramark happily supplements their hopelessly inadequate nutritional offerings with junk food, available at a ridiculous premium through the CJC "commissary." (Hmm. Interesting to note the association inherent to the term with "commissar", but Aramark is a fascist outfit, not communist).

This is, no doubt, whining. But it is, I promise, germane. The point I'll be revisiting in a later post is that money is a far, far to big an elephant in the room for any conversation on American jurisprudence to proceed without addressing it.

Stay tuned.

First Things

So everyone tells me I ought to write. Here it is then, and what to write about?

Write what you know, I've heard before, but then, I'm with Aristotle in that "All I know for sure is I know nothing for sure," or was that Plato? I can't say for sure.

Some way or another I mean for this to be an expression of things I care about, whether I know them or not. I'll mess around with politics a little, probably stuff that will perturb some more than a bit. I'll blather on about religion, although religion and politics are pretty symbiotic topics, in my head. Then again, so are religion and science, religion and sociology, religion and psychology, religion and actual spirituality, and so on. On second thought, maybe the choice of the term "religion" is a poor one, since only a smattering of my thoughts have to do with actual religion and its tedious mechanics of denomination and conflict between world religious powers. But all those things interest me, and since this is really no more than an exercise for me, I'll probably mingle the ideas around so much that no one will be able to tell what I'm carrying on about anyways.

Just an opener, for now. Tomorrow I'll bellyache about justice in America for a spell, both in terms of overall social justice, and the so-called justice system under which we live. this will be addressed form a spiritual and philosophical perspective, of course.