In the early ’70s, John van der Zee, a San Francisco writer, got himself a job at the Bohemian Grove, posing as a waiter. He then wrote the book, The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth, about the Grove and its wierd right-wing shenanigans. Now he has written this article, comparing it to Burning Man:

Why Burning Man is like the Bohemian Grove

 It is a kind of annual human migration from opposite poles.

     Each year, in midsummer, significant numbers of people abandon their homes, jobs, partners and families and travel, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles, to take up residence in a distant, intentionally remote corner of the American West, where they reconstitute a self-contained society, a retreat from, and in many ways a critique of the larger society they have fled.

      One destination is wooded, arboreal, druidic, the other desertine, hermitic.  Yet both involve at their core, the shedding like an outer skin one’s routine response to the outside world’s demands and constraints.  Both involve the celebratory cremation in a fiery spectacle of a totemic figure. Both form communities, divided into tribal camps,  under a nominal devotion to the arts that are as brief, fleeting and ephemeral as frontier boomtowns, yet have had profound influence on the society at large.

     Both have influenced our lives, whether we choose to admit it or not.

Read More …

Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014

Subject: [SALT] Government as radical, patient VC (Mariana Mazzucato talk)

“The iPhone, Mazzucato pointed out, is held up as a classic example of world-changing innovation coming from business.

   Yet every feature of the iPhone was created, originally, by multi-decade government-funded research.  From DARPA came the microchip, the Internet, the micro hard drive, the DRAM cache, and Siri.  From the Department of Defense came GPS, cellular technology, signal compression, and parts of the liquid crystal display and multi-touch screen (joining funding from the CIA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, which, by the way, developed the lithium-ion battery.)  CERN in Europe created the Web.  Steve Jobs’ contribution was to integrate all of them beautifully.

   Venture Capitalists (VCs) in business expect a return in 3 to 5 years, and they count on no more than one in ten companies to succeed.  The time frame for government research and investment embraces a whole innovation cycle of 15 to 20 years, supporting the full chain from basic research through to viable companies. That means they can develop entire new fields such as space technology, aviation technology, nanotechnology, and, hopefully, Green technology.

   But compare the reward structure.  Government takes the greater risk with no prospect of great reward, while VCs and businesses take less risk and can reap enormous rewards.  ‘We socialize the risks and privatize the rewards.’

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dontdronemebro

This event is to help this wonderful local food operation stay in business while they are being persecuted by uber-environmental groups such as the West Marin Environmental Action Committee (one of the Tea Party type environmental groups — well financed, politically connected, and heads up their ass), and misrepresented with blatantly false scientific reports by the National Park Service.

   I heard that a petition with some 50,000 signatures was obtained in favor of closing the operation down. I’ll bet 95% of these were city dwellers and 98% of these people had never been to the farm. My first-hand and native Californian assessment is that is a triple-win food production system, and it will be a tragedy if it is closed own by what the Italians call the talibano dell’ ecologia .

From sananselmofairfax.patch.com: “…If they lose, the Lunnys will be forced to demolish buildings, remove and destroy an estimated $4.5 million worth of oysters, and put 30 people currently employed at the farm out of work.…With thirty full-time workers, many of whom live on the property, the farm is currently the second largest employer in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Oysters harvested from Drakes Bay make up nearly 40% of California’s yearly shellfish production, some 500,000 pounds of oyster meat annually, marketed exclusively in the Bay Area. The farm is also the last operating oyster cannery in the state.…”

Other stuff I’ve written about this in the past here.