If you’re local to Somerville (like some of us are, or were), then you’ve hopefully enjoyed a fantastic breakfast at either or both of Sound Bites and the Ball Square Café. There’s been bad blood between the two ever since Sound Bites expanded to the building next door, and the owners of the old space rented it to their son, who convinced the old Sound Bites chef to stay behind. The Somerville News’s blog picks up the story:

Police were called to Broadway today as a crowd scuffled and tried to separate the owners of SoundBites and Ball Square Cafe. It wasn’t the first time police were called to mediate Ball Square owner Mike Moccia and Yasser Mirza, of Sound Bites, but it may have been the most intense episode yet with witnesses reporting punches thrown and blood drawn.

…the masters of the American economy (and, thus, the people whose largely unaccountable decisions determine the material fortunes of most people in our country) don’t give a flying fuck about you, me, or anyone else we know:

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

(Source: New York Times, “The New Poor: Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs”)

What a shame that the structure of our economic and political life is simply a force of nature that is immune to modification. If only there were some way to structure a society so that the primary economic activities were directed toward something else in addition to “maximizing shareholder value.”

Or, wait…

“The knowledge that we are slaves being bought by the hour rather than the lifetime has also been lost. We have been wage slaves for so long that we have forgotten there is any other way to live. We have forgotten that once we had land and tools and could live independently, providing for ourselves, without being forced to sell our labor power for wages.”

I’ve linked to him before… and now I’ll do it again. Highly worth reading.

in case it hadn’t passed through your FB feed, the self-explanatory group, “I bet we can find 1,000,000 People who Support Same Sex Marriage,” surpassed its goal by the end of 11 days, and is still going strong.

so i guess the question is whether we have a really big choir preaching to itself, or if this kind of action really gets noticed and influences any kind of change.

Rebecca Solnit writes in the London Review of Books of the water-powered rise and fall of the North American west:

Eighty per cent of the Colorado River’s water goes to agriculture. Twenty per cent of California’s agricultural water goes to grow low-value alfalfa. The river, in its climate-change-driven decline, will strangle all these projects and make a mockery of the two great dams and the reservoirs that were once signs of triumph over it and over nature. The reservoirs and dams are failing now, long on silt, short on water, products of the short-sightedness that has made the West a place littered with projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Indeed, the epitaph for most of the “modern world” could be simply “projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.” The UN’s triennial World Water Development report says, “Humanity has embarked on a huge ecological engineering project with little or no preconception – or indeed full present knowledge – of the consequences. We have sought to redesign and impose a new order on natural planetary systems, built over aeons of time.”

(By the way, that UN quote, the riverbed image, and the inspiration for this blog post’s title, come from Arteries International.)

It’s even creepier than it sounds. Under the new “Secure Communities” program spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security – named in the fashion of Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” Initiatives – all local and state police bookings will be run through the DHS master immigration database. Anyone flagged as an “illegal alien” will be detained at the request of DHS.

The idea that your local police would be cooperating with DHS in enforcing immigration rules completely undermines whatever limited trust might still remain between community members and police officers. Don’t just take my word for it; here’s the conclusion of a lobbying group called the Police Foundation:

immigration enforcement by local police undermines their core public safety mission, diverts scarce resources, increases their exposure to liability and litigation, and exacerbates fear in communities already distrustful of police.

The fact that every single person arrested and booked will be run through this system is considered a civil rights PLUS because it avoids the “profiling” of people based on their skin color or perceived ethnic background.

With that so-called advantage, I’m sure a lot of liberals will line up and cheer for the Obama administration’s newest plan to help Keep Us Safe from all those house-cleaners, musicians, DJs, gardeners, nannies, computer programmers, strawberry pickers, and meat packers who currently enable threaten our way of life.

Christine Smallwood, writing at the Baffler blog, examines the question, “What Does the Internet Look Like?” It’s a long way from the question to the answer, and the journey is well worth it.

After noting that many visions of the Internet rely on images of connectedness, she explores the essentially solitary nature of the Internet search:

We are born alone, we die alone, and we use the Internet alone. You may gather round the screen with friends to watch a video clip (turning the Internet into a television), or hang out while you play music on Pandora (turning the Internet into a radio), or post to your blog, or “comment” on someone else’s blog (turning the Internet into a roundtable, or a bathroom wall, depending). But these are subsidiary Internet uses. The essence of the Internet, the thing it does that nothing else can do, its Internet-ness, is the search. Comedian Dave Chappelle captured this with the skit “If the Internet Were a Real Place,” in which he loitered in a seedy mall like a modern Odysseus, ransacking CD stores, ducking into curtained rooms to indulge various temptations, and running away from spammers. Wandering around the Internet, the thing we are always searching for is the door—the exit ramp off the superhighway, the way home. But it’s hard to find. How do you know when you’re done doing nothing?

Please, read the whole thing.

(h/t to Dr. Hoo for noting that Thomas Frank is one again producing The Baffler in print!)

Last year I became one of the millions to join the Borg of the social network known as Facebook. I had been apprehensive about joining (why would I want to spend more time online?) I have come to enjoy the ability to stay abreast of what my friends are up to (or at least what they are bragging or complaining about).

But as FB has worked itself into my life I have also come to wonder if it really is beneficial to me in the end. Do I really need to maintain relationships with so many folks I barely know? Do I really want to be publishing my life to friends of friends of friends?

Well, there’s a new solution called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine which helps you “commit” the deed and get back to your real life in meat-space.

A great article about Timothy Leary includes this bit of a conversation between Leary and media/society scholar Marshall McLuhan:

In one of their prophetic conversations McLuhan made the following prediction: ‘You’re going to win the war, Timothy. Eventually. But you’re going to lose some major battles on the way. You’re not going to overthrow the Protestant Ethic in a couple of years. This culture knows how to sell fear and pain. Drugs that accelerate the brain won’t be accepted until the population is geared to computers. You’re ahead of your time. They’ll attempt to destroy your credibility.’ Leary replied with typical Irish blarney: ‘It’s incredibility I’m after’, declaring himself a true futurist once and for all.

Leary’s Wikipedia page is excellent, too.

via BLDBLG I found ediblegeography.com – their current top story links to a New York Times feature about the rediscovery of the Ebling Brewing Company’s beer-aging caves in the Bronx.