The Road Goes On

My Experience in Occupy Bloomington, Part 1

Published on May 17, 2012, by Daniel Bingham in Ramblings and Essays.

So, I’ve been sitting on this one for quite a while — for fear of offending many new friends I made while participating in my local Occupy. But as I’ve slowly managed to coalesce my feelings on things, I felt the need to tell the story of my experience. I don’t know what good or harm it might do. I just feel the need to share it. To all my friends who stuck it out until the eviction — and who still meet in GAs, I think nothing but the world of you. All of you. But I’m ambivalent about the protest — or movement, or resistance, or whatever your favorite term for it is — that we built. And by the time I left, I felt very strongly that it wasn’t the best use of my limited energies.

This is the story of my experience in Occupy Bloomington, viewed through a lens several months old and parsed as best I can.

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I spent about a month and a half up to my neck in Occupy Bloomington. I hosted and helped to build the webpage, regularly attended GA and working group meetings, was point person on one (and very briefly two) working groups, and took part in several big actions — including our blown attempt to Mic Check Senator Lugar. I never camped, but I did dishes, helped clean up the camp and spent most nights from the end of work until around midnight down there. I held down a full time job while doing all of this.

I got in to it at the beginning. I watched on Twitter, Facebook and in the news as the NYCGA as the camp went up in Zuccotti Park. Excuse me, Liberty Park. I was cheering the whole time. I could barely contain my excitement, let alone focus on work. I almost bought a ticket down to NYC, except that I wasn’t sure how to explain that one to my boss and wasn’t quite ready to quit. When I heard about the Occupation in Bloomington, I jumped at the chance to be involved. I wasn’t sure what we could accomplish, but I sure as hell wanted to be a part of it. The first two GAs I attended were inspiring. They were attended by between 40 and 60 people each. The consensus method worked extraordinarily well as we tried to hash out where the occupation should start and what the goal was. Did we have an ideology? A statement? Demands? We decided to shelve that one for later. Eventually, we achieved consensus to start in People’s Park.

The first night was an experience I will never forget. Two hundred people came out and marched down to Chase bank where they gave speeches, held signs and did what you do at a protest march. Then they marched back to the park and a held what can only be described as a party. Eventually people started setting up tents. Everyone waited with baited breath for 11pm to see what would happen. The park technically closed then. Would the cops kick us out? Would enough people stay to hold the space? Should we try to hold the space if they did try to kick us out? 11pm came and went. Then midnight. Nothing happened. People were elated and excited. The space was ours.

I had to leave for a conference the next day and spent the week in SF. While there I paid a visit to Occupy SF, and got a taste of things to come. Occupy SF was in the downtown area of San Francisco outside the Federal Reserve. It was pretty small, relegated to a tiny portion of the side walk and forced up against the street. It was barred from having tents. The few people there looked pretty rough and beat up. They weren’t particularly friendly either. I mentioned to someone that I’d come from Occupy Bloomington to say, “Hi”. He made a Mic Check announcement of the fact and then promptly stopped talking to me. I hung around for a while eventually striking up a conversation with a couple other onlookers who were dropping by. There was a distinct division between the occupiers and those who were walking on the side walk looking in at them. As if they were somehow an attraction on display rather than members of the 99% standing up for all of us. In retrospect, it was a telling image.

Part two to come.

Tags: occupy, politics, protest

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Fridge To Food Version 3 is Released

Published on April 21, 2012, by Daniel Bingham in Fridge To Food.

Two years and a lot of work later, Fridge To Food finally looks like what I envisioned when I first started. It’s taken me about a year to finish the fourth (and final?) total rewrite. But I’m thoroughly satisfied with the results. I completely redesigned the front end, stripped out a bunch of unnecessary stuff and really cleaned it up. It finally looks like it could be a modern website.

There are also several important new features. Probably the most important of these are the ability to login using Google and Facebook and the ability to post a profile badge to your website. Neither of these is perfect. When you register using Google, your profile is permanently linked to Google and you have to login with Google each time. If you login with Facebook it will create a new profile. A feature planned for the next version is to allow you to link your base profile with both Facebook and Google, so that you can log in with any of them. But in the mean time, make sure to remember which one you log in with.

As always, if you spot any bugs, let me know! I’ll go chasing after them. I’m probably going to take a break from working on Fridge to Food for a while now. I’m going to refocus on Farm to Fridge and try to get the beta of that done. I’m pretty close, so hopefully, I should be back to further improve Fridge to Food in no time.

I’ve spread the link around to all the usual places — Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HN, Hubski. So far not many people seem to be taking notice. Not surprising really. I’m not sure how much I even care any more if it goes anywhere in particular. I finally succeeded in building the website I wanted to use. I think — for now, anyway — that’s good enough for me.

Tags: news, release

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The Myth of Sustainable Meat

Published on April 13, 2012, by Daniel Bingham in Ramblings and Essays.

I’ve seen this guy publish variations of this essay in a few places now. I’m getting tired of raising my objections over and over again. So I’m going to lay them out here, where I can consistently link them. Here’s the essay in question recently posted as an op-ed in the New York Times (paywall warning).

He’s selecting the data to make it appear unsustainable but leaving out a number of key elements.

Many of the farms he seems to be referencing are not truly sustainable farms, but rather large scale “organic” farms. Part of the point of sustainable meat production is that you keep it small, you don’t scale it up. Otherwise it doesn’t get the title “sustainable”. He seems to be making the argument that market forces will always force farms to scale up and thus “sustainable” will never exist for long. Part of what needs to happen for any kind of sustainable farming to be a success is for there to be a change of culture that removes some of this growth pressure from food markets.
Intensive grazing builds soil, and builds it fast. The nutrients lost when you remove an animal from the system are negligible compared to the amount you are adding. Salatin doesn’t use his chickens to add nutrients — the cows do that — he uses them primarily for pest control. And yes, he still feeds his chickens grain. And he cuts corners on that. It doesn’t mean corners have to be cut there. Part of the problem here is supply of sustainably farmed grain, it’s hard to find right now.
Animal farming can use land that cannot be used for vegetable farming. Yes, right now we’re clearing rain forest for cattle. But right now we eat way too much meat. That does not mean we need to go to zero meat. Sustainable meat production is possible, it just requires a cultural shift to a reduced meat diet — not a vegetarian or vegan diet, though.
When people measure the “efficiency” of meat production as a food source, they usually measure the output in the form of calories. However, there is more to food than calories — when you eat animal flesh you are taking in complex proteins that don’t register when they measure calories but that none the less would cost you calories if you had to produce them yourselves. In other words, when they measure the energy content of meat, they get it wrong because they don’t consider the whole nutritional picture.

Finally, people’s bodies are different. Their nutritional requirements are different. The way their bodies absorb nutrients are different. Not everyone is able to maintain a nutritionally complete diet with out meat. Some people can, but not everyone. Sustainable meat production is perfectly possible. It requires a cultural and paradigm shift, but that is different from being impossible.

Tags: diet, food, omnivory, sustainability

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Women-Only Public Transit

Published on February 10, 2012, by Daniel Bingham in Ramblings and Essays.

This was written in response to an article posted to Reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes, a sub-reddit focused on the discussion of women’s issues. I wanted to save it here, because I waited a while to post to the reddit thread and I expect it to get buried.

I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. I wanted to see what TwoX’s response was and try to parse my conflicted feelings into words. I hear those saying that this is great for women, especially in countries where sexual harassment and groping on public transit are particularly rampant and culturally entrenched. I understand — intellectually, if not viscerally — how intimidating and frustrating it must be to ride the crowded public transit in those countries. I can imagine how much of a relief it must be to have an alternative that makes such treatment much less likely.

Even so, I don’t think women-only public transportation is a good thing.

The excuse used to keep women down for so long, at least in America, was that they needed to be ‘protected’. Protected from unruly men. Protected from the harshness of the world. They were to be treated as fragile perfect children to be sheltered and kept on a pedestal. It has been a hell of a fight to remove that world view and that fight is on going. This plays right into the narrative that ‘women need to be protected’. It seems like it’s handing a tool to those who would try to undo the gains women have made world wide in the last half century.

Second, I am reminded of Tony Porter’s TED Women talk A Call to Men. What are we telling the boys of the next generation with something like this? “Women need their own transportation, because you can’t control yourself.” It seems self defeating in the long run. And as a guy who has never treated women as anything other than respected equals, I’ve got to say, this is telling me “We’re afraid of you. We need to keep you away. We can’t trust you. Because of your gender.” That’s pretty fucking hurtful. I can step back from it and understand the need and reasoning for it, because I can imagine what it must be like to ride the subway always fearful of being groped by the people around you. But what about that kid who doesn’t have the experience to put himself in those shoes?

I feel like this has the potential to do far more harm over the long term than it will do good in the short term.

Tags: gender relations, politics, public transit

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Guerrilla Grafters and Green Rappers

Published on December 23, 2011, by Daniel Bingham in Ramblings and Essays.

I love the myriad of ways in which people are working to change American culture and move towards sustainability. Today, reading Grist, I came across two completely different efforts to tackle the problem.

One is using music to reach out to people who might not be aware of the sustainability movement, or are maybe skeptical of it.

Not only does DJ Cavem make music, he teaches classes at the high school and middle school level on sustainability. The classes teach kids the why, what and how of living sustainably and give them the tools to start working on their own.

The other is a form of really clever guerrilla gardening, guerrilla grafting. Rather than fighting to get the city to replace it’s ornamental trees with fruit producing ones, this group of sustainability advocates are simply using the ornamental ones as a canvas on which to graft fruit producing limbs. Brilliant!

This is what I really love about the sustainability movement, and why I’ve found it far more enticing and uplifting than almost any other social or political movement today. It is truly grassroots. And not only that, but it is a movement that can succeed, that can win, with out ever having to really fight.

It can happen quietly, in the background, from autonomous action. A community garden here, music maker there, guerrilla gardening, free classes, free food, reclaiming what is ours. We don’t have to change Washington for this one to work. We can change our local communities, one at a time. The change is empowering and liberating.

As cultural change spreads it will undermine the very foundations of the current global powers that be. We can bring them down with out ever having to fight them. When they no longer control our food. When they no longer control our access to shelter. When they can no longer convince us to fight amongst ourselves or buy shit we don’t need. They will no longer control us.

Tags: food, guerrilla gardening, protest, sustainability

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I’ll Just Leave This Here

Published on September 6, 2011, by Daniel Bingham in Ramblings and Essays.

Two visits to the walk in clinic had the doctor tell me, “No idea what that is.” I got to speak with her for 15 minutes or less each visit. Total medical staff’s time I took was probably less than 30 minutes each visit.

Insurance covers half the bill — I’m lucky to have that much insurance.

Final bill for the two visits and no answers? $111.51

You want to try to tell me that our medical system is the best in the world? I call bullshit.

Tags: health care, politics

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A Patent Too Far

Published on August 11, 2011, by Daniel Bingham in Ramblings and Essays.

Someone attempted to patent a doubly linked list, and named the patent “linked list”. In 2002. There’s no way they’d get that patent right? Linked lists have been around since the dawn of Computer Science. If anyone in the patent office has even been through a CS101 course, they will know what linked lists are and they will throw any moron who tries to patent them out on his ass.

Well, apparently no one in the patent office has taken a CS101 course.

Which begs the question, what the hell are they doing granting software patents at all?

For those of you not familiar with software development, this is roughly equivalent to a poet trying to copyright and charge royalties on iambic pentameter or hiaku. Or a film director trying to patent “a shot that zooms in on the face of one character and holds on their facial expression for several seconds”. Or an inventor trying to patent “a hammer with two prongs coming out of the back for pulling nails.”

This is obscene.

Tags: politics, programming, software patents

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Wait, that can’t be true…

Published on June 6, 2011, by Daniel Bingham in Ramblings and Essays.

Except that it is. In the age of the internet the world is full of rumors and conspiracy theories. Many of them seem pretty outlandish. It’s hard to sort out the truth from the fiction. And since most of them are largely ignored by the media, we tend to ignore them.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that many things I’d written off as conspiracy were not. They were true. There had been court cases surrounding them. Government documents dealing with them had been declassified and released, or, in some cases, stolen and leaked. Learning these things has slowly, but steadily, changed my perception of the world and our society. And I’m ready to believe things now, that I wasn’t before. Someone out there feels the same way I do, that if everyone knew these things, maybe the world would be different. And he made a site to spread the knowledge of them. It’s called:

If Everyone Knew

Right now it only lists five items.

The prison system in the United States is a profit-making industry. Private corporations operate over 200 facilities nationwide and are traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Six corporations control virtually all American media. News Corp. owns over 27 television stations and over 150 newspapers. Time Warner has over 100 subsidaries including CNN, Time Magazine, and The CW.
The FBI admits to infiltrating & disrupting peaceful political groups in the United States. The Women’s and Civil Rights movements were among those targeted, with their members being beaten, imprisoned, and assassinated.
In 1977 it was revealed that random American citizens were abducted & tortured for research by the CIA. Project MK Ultra was the code name for a series of covert activities in the early 1950’s.
A plan to attack American cities to justify war with Cuba was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962. Rejected by President Kennedy, Operation Northwoods remained classified for 35 years.

He’s planning on adding more. All of the items are very well backed up by multiple sources. Sources like Wikipedia and the New York Times. Many of these things I’d already heard about or known about. But it’s still pretty powerful to see them together and detailed like this site has them. There are many more pieces of knowledge – incidents and facts – that belong on that list. It could easily get pretty long. If only everyone knew…

Tags: history, politics, social justice

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