Melissa needed a lobster roll so we took a ride to Castine and sat by the water. Maine Maritime Academy's training ship is parked there. Anything to bust out of our routine. I took myself to a matinee at the wonderful Arts Center in Waterville to see Barbie; even bought a $5 popcorn. I loved every minute of the movie; it's a feminist classic. Much great memeage about it online. I am revisiting Saul Alinsky's 1971 book Rules for Radicals; I see my pencil markings in the margins, but don't remember any of it. I probably read it in the 90's since the publication date on my copy is 1989. The year 1971, being pre-internet and pre-cellphone, was a time when you made your arguments on paper and you organized face to face. It took a lot of work to get people into the streets. The book now seems so polite and so insightful into history, with quotes from catholic philosophers as well as politicians. He urged compromise and working within the system and disliked the extreme left as well as the extreme right. I wonder what his rules for using social media would be. I'm taking back my marked up copy and buying the library and new shiny copy. From the chapter on the ethics of means and ends, here are the laws:

1. One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.
2. The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgement
3. In war, the end justifies almost any means.
4. Judgement must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics
8. The morality of a mean depends upon whether the mean is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective mean is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.

It's interesting when people have a meeting and everyone comes away with a different impression of what was said and what the status quo is. Melik is probably waiting to get a better offer from the state as the deadline approaches. It's all about money with that one.

If my usual dream structure were databased, the columns might look like: Objective, Impediment, Anxiety Issue, People Drifting By, Unnecessary Weird Stuff. For example: get to the other side of the UNO campus, bare feet, finding car, Anita Bridges & Kathy Hall, crying person needing to be comforted.
Structure 2: do a thing that one would never do; realize it would never happen; repeat endlessly.
Dream Escape strategies: write recursive function for something non-programmable like building a lincoln log house; calculate fibonacci series; wake up and make coffee.

Reporters chasing a story usually arrive in town mid-morning and they look for open flags to find people. The library is an easy target, so I guess we will always get quoted. Nothing I haven't said here before. Another piece this morning is justifiably bothered by the pastor's quote that it's too many to help and what if they go wandering through town. God forbid they should go to the grocery. Anyhow I maintain that dispite a minority of reflexively freaked out locals, Unity is a welcoming place and we would rise to the occasion.

I am about half way through the 550 pages of Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future,a book that teaches critically important things in the vessel of a novel with a thriller plot and narration by a variety of characters around the world caught in the suffering of the climate catastrophe. I almost didn't get past the first chapter's experience of a heat wave in India that kills 20 million people. Interspersed in the black ops plot and the first person experiences vignettes are short chapters where pieces of the science tell about themselves poetically: carbon, blockchain, photons, etc. It's a brilliant book, especially good with the economics; doesn't hold back about capitalism and billionaires.

What's the monetary value of human civilization? Trying to answer that question proves you are a moral and practical idiot.
Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.
the name for a certain kind of fiscal decapitation is called taking a haircut, which clarifies just how minor and even trivial are most of the financial limitations on wealth that get considered in the neoliberal hegemony.
it’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.