Time for the Industrial Revolution to end?

Lots of traffic today. At midday, much of it looked to be headed North on I-35. We were headed South,  into the cities and decided we’d come home using blue highways. By the time we’d done our business and started back home, the temperature had reached 90℉ and it was obvious we weren’t the only ones avoiding the traffic on the interstates.

We’re now anticipating a quiet holiday weekend, getting together with family to reminisce about a long time friend who walked on several months ago. Since I originally met him through work, it feels like something that fits on this Labor Day weekend.

Today ended the kind of week after which I’d like to abandon news and social media. But then the stupid, dangerous, wrong-headed things would keep happening and I wouldn’t know about it until I had to deal with the consequences. On the other hand, I can’t do much, or figure out what to do, about most of the news stories and idiocy I read or read about. All too often I’d like to be able to vote with my feet/communicator and transmit “Beam me up, Scotty.There’s no intelligent life down here.”

Now we know that there is intelligent life down here. Some of it is even human. But has the balance shifted too far the other way? There’s an article in yesterday’s Star Tribune, California's ban on gas-powered cars worries Minnesota's corn and soybean farmers. Now corn and beans used to produce biofuels aren’t “feeding the world.” That makes me wonder why the growers should enjoy exemptions from regulations that other industrial feedstock producers must meet, such as not polluting the water.

should corn be grown for ethanol?

Photo by J. Harrington

I also wonder how, in a world that is more and more skeptical about science and what we mean by truth, as compared to “alternative facts,” we’re supposed to reach decisions about who and what is right, and what we should do, short of actual civil war after civil war. 

Historians, at least some of them, tell us that the Industrial Revolution began with the Enclosure Acts in England, forcing people off the land, out of the countryside and into cities where they became the labor force. Continuing to industrialize agriculture through ethanol and confined animal feeding operations and increasing the size of farms while substituting machinery for labor is continuing the Industrial Revolution. Take a balanced look at the actual quality of life we experience, and the growing number of systemic existential issues we face and decide if we want to keep heading in the same direction.

This Online Shopping Habit Is Sympathetic Magick

By Caroline Crew

Sweater buttoning down the back, dark flower crown, velvet

laced boots—so full of content.

                                                 Right to save for later. Right

to leave to rot. In the plug hole so much debris not living

it’s ritual potential.

                        My phone is a radio this morning, telling me

the witch is a threat because her ethics are her own. 

                                                       Whose hair still writhing.

                                                       Where do I purchase an ethic.

I have this arsenal of ethanol, excellent selfie lighting

and stomped-in elegance; this arsenic of aspiration.

Pinterest boards of visions, mystic as plastic cutlery. Imitation

is categorized as primitive magic

                                               but I just Googled

“Kim Kardashian dress size,” the sum of sophisticated

machine and mass production—machinating the myth

that poison is a woman’s art. The body with arsenic rejects:

vomit, blood vomit, hair loss. It was beautiful,

                                                                      the palette

of rich green lushing the wall, the fondant layers of Victorian

dresses dyed with arsenic. Died for the love of it,

misnomered bitten by witch fever. I’m trying not to say dressed to kill.

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