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Spend a day in scenic St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin

Hot off the press — mark your calendar:

PSCENIC OVERLOOK – The St. Croix Falls Music & Art Fair

Amateur Psychologist Convention

Saturday, September 24th, 2005
St. Croix Falls Outdoor Overlook Amphitheater
12 noon to 2 a.m.
All ages
Rain or shine
Free Admission
Free Thinking
38 Acts

The Amphitheater is on the main drag of St. Croix Falls right across the street from the Festival Theater.

Five of the Twin Cities’ Coolest Acts perform in one of the most beautiful areas in the region!

Sponsored by Ménagerie AVEDA concept salon & organic café

Savage Aural Hotbed, Faux Jean, Dan Leary, Bill Mike 13 Hertz
with many others.

Free admission (donations accepted

Make a Fall Colors Daytrip to SCF (Cities Pages pick)

Arts and crafts vendors welcome (low registration fee)

Info 612.385.4598 or 715 483.1250

38 performances! Jam, Rock, Ambient, Tribal, Punk, Industrial, Techno, Folk Nouveau et much more! The Overlook Ampitheatre in downtown SCF is an amazing place to see live music!

Savage Aural Hotbed (mpls)
Faux Jean (mpls)
Bill Mike (mpls)
13 Hertz (mpls)
DJ ESP (st. croix falls)
Unincorporated (st.croix falls)
St. Vitas (luck)
David Diagonal (phoenix)
Dave Wesley (scandia)

and many many more…

Finally! Internet access, wireless, what more could I ask for? 15 days of officing at the St. James Hotel is enough for me! And the pound puppies, Kenya and Krie, didn’t disembowel the repair guy, but that’s probably because they could tell that his wife worked at the Humane Society when I got Katze! It’s a dog thing.

Now get to work!

I’ve been looking for a winter home somewhere else for a while now, and have been looking at New Orleans since I was down there in February a few years ago. And now, in the security of a coffeeshop with wireless 1200 miles away, this hurricane Katrina devastation is a horrific scene to watch (there was an earlier Katrina, in 1999)

Today is the Iowa brief deadline, no time to surf, so here’s a few quick blurbs from others:

Paul Krugman – A Can’t Do Government

In the STrib lately:
Editorial: Unprepared/Woeful planning for Katrina

The rich occupy the highest ground

10,000 miles of canals

Some insights from Eric Francis (for indepth, check PlanetWaves:

By ERIC FRANCIS

Paris, Friday, Sept. 2, 2005

Daily at http://PlanetWaves.net/
Subscribe! (206) 567-4455

Katrina, the Awakener

ONE IMAGE keeps haunting me from this week’s journalism, spun by William Rivers Pitt at truthout.org — that of presidential advisor Karl Rove standing on the roof of the White House in a magician’s hat and cape, with a big staff, conjuring Hurricane Katrina. Given the witch-hunt against climate change scientists reported in The Guardian earlier this week, that may not be far from the truth (links below, in blue).

On its face, this storm happened at a brilliantly convenient time for world managers who thrive on chaos and distraction, right in the midst of the first meaningful protests against the catastrophic Iraq war gaining momentum — and with George Bush’s approval ratings lower than any president since Nixon at the height of Watergate. If you recall, moments before Katrina arrived, we were in a reflective, concerned moment as the situation in Iraq descended into worse condition than even staunch pessimists predicted.

The US military death toll is near 2,000, and the number of journalists killed in the 30-month conflict has exceeded that of two decades in Vietnam. New, uncontrolled violence takes more Iraqi lives by the day, and sometimes by the hour.

Public attention has now been swayed to a domestic emergency the like of which we have not seen since Sept. 11, 2001. But New Orleans makes what happened four years ago in New York City seem rather dim by comparison, in terms of the number of lives devastated, loss of life, and the destruction of homes. An entire major city has been taken out, not 16 acres of one and the surrounding buildings.

The difference now is, there’s no one to blame, no emotions of hatred and enmity of some alien outsider to whip up and use to dial in the team spirit — and the disaster happened to a poor, predominantly black city instead of at the heart of the world’s financial and banking operations. Deprived of our prerogative to get revenge, we may actually have to pay attention.

News channels are reporting a state of urban warfare, and troops have consent to shoot and kill American citizens. Police officers are turning in their badges. Scanning the news reports reveals that people are still trapped in the city, on rooftops and in high-rises, and thousands are starving.

The condition is deteriorating to the point where vigilante sniper fire at recovery personnel has been reported. Is this even vaguely possible? Who, stranded in their own city, would shoot at rescue workers just for the hell of it?

There is no drinking water. Bodies are everywhere. Widespread disease will be inevitable. Tens of thousands of refugees are still left behind at the Superdome and the Convention Center as people die before the eyes of onlookers. The city remains completely flooded because breached levees and overwhelmed pumping stations have made it impossible to remove the water. Due to a breached levee, water from Lake Pontchartrain is still flowing into the city. The stories of cuts to budgets for maintaining these structures only makes one feel sick, in hindsight.

It’s starting to make the tsunami look good.

CNN reported Thursday that a police officer working in downtown New Orleans said police were siphoning gas from abandoned vehicles in an effort to keep their squad cars running, like a detail straight from the mind of Stephen King.

Incredibly, no organized relief program appears visible. Indeed, police have received federal orders to privilege stopping looters against delivering aid and searching for survivors. In other words: the priority (as we have so often come to expect) is to protect property, though it would seem there is little property left to even bother with. The effect: poor blacks can die. What we are witnessing is beyond incompetence at this stage, and is approaching the level of genocide.

It is important to remember that cities are highly toxic environments, and floods release everything that is usually contained, or held at the bottom or rivers and lakes, into the general environment. Containers and pipes burst. Fires cannot be controlled. In addition, the Mississippi Delta, thanks to generations of contamination by Monsanto, is one of the most dioxin-tainted areas in the world. Though it may not be acknowledged, there is likely to be a serious dioxin problem in New Orleans and nearby areas right now, and for generations to come.

In my mind’s eye, I am seeing this unfold along another strand of time. A fully financed, well prepared Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be on the job years before the hurricane made landfall, as this was a predictable event, contrary to recent assertions. (Indeed, FEMA is being absorbed into Homeland Security and damaged by budget cuts.) Hundreds of Coast Guard helicopters from coastal states and many others would be bringing supplies, and getting those most in need to medical help. Old Army bases, so recently closed by budget cuts, would be used as massive relief centers, complete with airstrips, bathrooms and mess halls. Sports facilities, with all their problems, would not have to be used as refugee camps. America’s standing Army and National Guard units, themselves not trapped in the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, would be widely available to assist, with all their equipment, rations, supplies and other resources.

There would be enough manpower. There would be plenty of money for the operation; America is the richest country in the world. Which may be the problem.

But this is not happening in a different time, under different national leadership: it is happening now. And due to the damaged oil-refining infrastructure along the Gulf Coast, the effects of this storm will be rippling, or ripping, into the world economy. The price of gasoline has suddenly risen well beyond $3.00 per gallon many places in the U.S., and has exceeded $6.00 per gallon at some retail outlets in the south. Apparently, many places in the southeast have no gas at all. We are hearing the first calls for fuel conservation since the mid-1970s.

Generally, this is the one thing that can key people into the fact that something is wrong; America’s real religion is practiced at the filling station, and nearly all of its transportation energy comes from petroleum.

But it’s becoming obvious many more ways that something else is wrong. Imagine if this were a multiple city emergency — that is, if the damage were to more than one city. Imagine if the casualty toll were higher. Are we now to understand that the federal government is incapable of responding to an emergency? It would seem so.

Monday I honked and waved at the NWA Mechanics, Krie and Ken barked and wagged in support, on my frantic run to the Airport Post Office to serve a Reply to Cedar Falls Utilities Motion to Strike (strike an exhibit, no, not picket!)

Labor unions are a powerful force — no wonder the likes of Katherine Kersten are afraid — unions brought us some of the basic concepts that we take for granted, like earning a living wage, benefits including health care coverage, and unions contribute to the community not only by improving the lives of their members and families, but through direct contributions of volunteer labor on important community projects.

Check the STrib and Northfield News today. In the STrib, Northfield’s Rick Keiser got a well-earned reply to Katherin Kersten’s recent “Teachers should leave Wal-Mart alone,” a blast of the teacher union Wal-Mart boycott of conscience:

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What are unions about? Here’s a local example from IBEW Local 110 from the Northfield News:

Local electricians give time, talent to Habitat

8/30/2005 11:26:00 PM

By DEVLYN BROOKS
Managing Editor

NERSTRAND — More than a dozen electricians on Saturday morning buzzed around the Habitat for Humanity home going up in Nerstrand.

Some were wiring light switches and fixtures upstairs. Others were working in the basement, doing much the same thing. And still others were toting material and rolling up wire, trying to clean up behind the others as fast as they were making progress.

If everything went as planned, the crew was to wrap up the basic wiring of the entire house by noon. They started at 7 a.m.

“The best thing about these guys is you don’t have to tell them what to do. They just go and do it,” said Bill Sartor, project manager for the Habitat for Humanity. “Pretty soon they’re flying, stringing wires … in half a day they’re done.”

The electricians were members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 110, a union that stretches a large geographic territory from south of Faribault all the way north to Cambridge. On Saturday, guys came from all over to help — Lonsdale, Northfield, Nerstrand, Dennison, Cannon Falls, Faribault and even from the Twin Cities.

Bob Delisha, the president of Faribault’s IBEW chapter, said that when they can the union members like to give back to the community.

“We want to show the community that we’re there to help out,” he said. “I think sometimes unions get a bad (reputation). We want to let people know we care about them.”

The Nerstrand home is the fourth Habitat for Humanity home that the IBEW has help wire in recent years. Sartor said they’ve done two houses in Northfield, one in Faribault and now the one in Nerstrand.

“It’s a big benefit to us,” he said.

Sartor said the relationship between Habitat for Humanity of Rice County and the IBEW began in earnest a few years ago. And since, when asked, the union has been there ready to help.

Sartor added that the electricians’ flexibility is wonderful. Electricity was just run to the house on Tuesday and the call went out for volunteers to help string the house on Saturday. That morning about 15 electricians showed up.

“These guys on a short notice make things happen,” he said.

Slinger Electric of Faribault is the electricity contractor for the house, Sartor said, and in addition to Slinger, other local electrical contractors have donated material and assistance to make the Nerstrand house happen.

Overall, Sartor said the house is on schedule to be completed in November. The home’s heating system is installed, most of the plumbing is in, much of the exterior siding is on, and thanks to the guys on Saturday, the wiring should be completed except for the finishing touches that have to wait.

At this pace, Sartor said that Khara Huffstutter, and her children, Erick and Laura, should be able to move in during November, just as planned.

Huffstutter was chosen to receive the home by going through Habitat for Humanity’s annual applicant process. During the building process she also has had to put “sweat equity” into the home, meaning she had to physically work on building the home with the Habitat for Humanity volunteers.

Huffstutter had been living with her parents in Faribault because she could not afford to buy a home on her income.

Habitat for Humanity will sell the new home to Huffstutter for about $75,000.

Sartor said that when the home is completed, about 110 volunteers will have worked on the house.

The lot for the home in Nerstrand was donated by Opal Wolf.

— Devlyn Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@northfieldnews.com or 645-1116