“People can’t hear anything except when it’s nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don’t mean it, or don’t know anything anyway, or it’s not true, or it’s against religion, or it’s not what they are used to reading in the newspapers...”
— Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter
1.
Lux Claridge, an Emporia (Kansas) High School physics teacher, was arrested for interference with law enforcement after clapping during the meeting. He and several others clapped in support of speakers opposing the Flint Hills Digital Campus data center.
“We are citizens of this community. We have a right to do our constitutionally-protected activities, which is exactly what they’re violating at this time as well,” the community member said. “I think we’re all in a state of fear because of what this government’s doing to us.”
More and more ordinary people across the country are standing up and saying NO to the invasive and unlimited expansion of Data Centers. And many prominent people are speaking out: Erin Brockovich and Willie Nelson, among others.
The New York Times published a piece last month that said a Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans. They are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use and thermodynamics. Cities like Tulsa, Okla.; Birmingham, Ala.; and New Orleans have recently passed temporary moratoriums on data center construction.
2.
In June I posted that the giant elder cottonwoods on the border near Lochiel, Arizona, were in danger of being bulldozed for the fascist and useless border wall ordered by the *rump administration. Here’s a photo I posted then.
AZPM reports that this last Monday, contractors uprooted three cottonwood trees in rural Santa Cruz County Monday morning to make way for new border wall construction, despite outcry from conservation groups and local residents, who say the sprawling trees hold deep cultural and ecological significance. The Sierra Club estimates the trees, located in the small ranching community of Lochiel, are more than 200 years old.
If you care to express your opinion of the MAGA Fisher Industries, the group contracted to implement the destruction of natural terrain for the project, here you go:
Northern Headquarters
3020 Energy Drive
Dickinson, ND 58601
(800) 932-8740
(701) 456-9184
Southern Headquarters
1302 West Drivers Way
Tempe, AZ 85284
(877) 796-9238
(480) 730-1033
The Tucson Sentinel went into more detail: Earlier this summer, Homeland Security officials told Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator with the Sierra Club, they plan to build a new double wall through Lochiel, expanding at least three feet beyond the 60-foot Roosevelt Reservation claimed by the federal government more than a century ago. The work will include cutting down the trees and expanding the road, while threatening access to the town cemetery and the historic customs house that once served the unofficial port for decades.
Meza said U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials “lied” to environmental groups, telling them environmental monitors would conduct surveys for migratory birds nesting in the trees.
The new construction will create the “longest unbroken stretch of border wall” in Arizona, spanning 100 miles and effectively closing the ability of the northern jaguar, along with ocelots and dozens of other species, to move through the state’s Sky Islands—a region known for its immense and unique biodiversity.
3.
Good lord, is nowhere safe from sexual predators? Over 70 former students and campers at Interlochen Center for the Arts have come forward as part of a two-year investigation into alleged sexual assaults said to have taken place at the institution.
In addition to former staff members, counselors, visiting artists and faculty, the report addresses additional alleged assaults committed by Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein has previously been reported to have met his first victim, a 13-year-old girl, while he and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell visited the camp in 1994.
One of the victims said that Epstein and Maxwell had paid her tuition at Interlochen but later withdrew it after she refused to engage in requested sexual conduct, according to the report. That student highlighted at least three occasions where Epstein had touched her sexually against her will.
The only good news associated with this is that Democracy Now reports that the U.S. Senate has unanimously passed a resolution opposing a pardon for Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking crimes. The resolution introduced by Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada says that Maxwell “should not be granted a Presidential pardon or any form of clemency for her crimes with Jeffrey Epstein relating to the sexual exploitation and abuse of minors.”
4.
And while we’re in a GOOD LORD moment, a US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week. The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
Top shelf, our current government…
5.
If you are interested in the growing wellbeing economy, The Open Co-op is a site dedicated to building the tools, technologies and protocols of a collaborative, regenerative economy.
Since AI is here to stay, the Co-op has developed CoBot: Your AI Guide to the Regenerative Economy. They write that the regenerative economy already exists. But it’s fragmented and invisible. CoBot changes that by connecting data from multiple open networks into a living map of the regenerative economy.
They cover everything from farm shops, organic stores, vegan and vegetarian restaurants, food co-ops and community food hubs, makerspaces and hackerspaces, repair cafés, social centres, tool libraries, cooperatives, credit unions, zero-waste shops, fair-trade businesses, nature reserves, ecology centres, rewilding projects, to eco campsites.
And even cooler is you can add or correct to help maintain the accuracy of the map. Check it out!
While we’re on the subject, check out the Regenerative Economy Podcast from LIFT Economy.
More on this subject in future posts.
6.
An interesting article in the New York Times notes that Dylan Alverson, owner of the restaurant Modern Times in Minneapolis, decided to stop charging for food after Alex Pretti was shot and killed.
“For the remainder of the government occupation, we will function as a free and donation-based restaurant,” he wrote on social media, two days after the shooting. The original intent of the change was to stop paying sales taxes to a government he said was “actively inflicting daily harm on its citizens.” The pay-what-you-wish restaurant would also have a new name: Post Modern Times.
And now…
