Application for Citizenship

Applicationfor Ephemeral Citizenshipof Dogland,

a biogregional republic

         

Personal information of applicant:

Millennium of birth (circle one):  1   2   3   4   5   other

Country of former/dual citizenship:

Number of canine cohabitants:

Number of identities, face-to-face, role-play, MMORPG, social networking, multiverse, other:

Preferred name:

Citizenship of Dogland includes, but is not limited to, the following duties:

I pledge to learn about 5 new local flora or fauna in the next year.

I pledge to plant a tree in the next year.

I pledge to see at least one of these films in 2018:  An Inconvenient Truth, No Impact Man, Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral, or Before the Flood.

I pledge to notice the full moon.

I pledge to walk under the stars on clear nights.

I pledge to toast the quantum expiration of Dogland, on the morning of December 28, 2017.

    

 

Include an original poem along with your application materials.  Please do not exceed 10,000 lines.

(Additional bioregional training materials are available at the main government offices.)

Applicant’s signature__________________, Date ________

Approved                                                        

Vice President/Director of Naturalization

Issued at the Crossroads, Hague and Spiva

Dogland's Proposal to the U.N.

Not that the micronation of Dogland has yet been recognized by any substantial number of other nations, this quantum reality having only unfolded into existence about 26 hours ago, but anticipating the general approval of the world, here's our first proposal we would like the UN to consider.  And while we do consider this a crucial step in providing a safe world not only for our dog citizens, but also for the humans in our neighbor, America, we make no threats nor do we suggest any retaliation if the members of the UN need a few weeks to process this proposal--for clearly, a global civilization can't conduct its mission of bettering the lives of all involved in a hostile atmosphere.

Some background information first.  As of 2013, we passed 1 billion cars in the world.  And where?  "That gives China the world's second largest car population, with 78 million vehicles. But the United States still constitutes by far the largest vehicle population in the world, with 239.8 million cars," according to the Huffingtonpost, and there are predictions of more than 2 billion by 2035. 
  

   

           

 And is that a happy thing?  Getting a car is not only the dream of flocks of young teens, but of nearly everyone around the world, as that huge step up from the grinding limits of poverty.  We seem to believe in cars as that keystone of our independence, can't imagine life without cars--indeed, most of us seem pretty sure that all science and history talking about human life before Henry Ford is just scandalous propaganda.

Some consequences of all these cars...
land paved over:  "The United States, with its 214 million motor vehicles, has paved 6.3 million kilometers (3.9 million miles) of roads, enough to circle the Earth at the equator 157 times. In addition to roads, cars require parking space. Imagine a parking lot for 214 million cars and trucks. If that is too difficult, try visualizing a parking lot for 1,000 cars and then imagine what 214,000 of these would look like."
 

road deaths:   32,744 in 2014,  35,485 in 2015,  37,461 in 2016...and counting.  (There's a great chart there in Wikipedia.)

Even more danger to our citizen-dogs, and all the other critters who get squished on the road, 1000s of times a day.

And then, just the changes in who we are and how we live.  I assert that driving has never made anyone a better person, nor strengthened any neighborhood.

Perhaps most vital, the world just can't afford to keep this habit, neither in terms of production costs, resources used, nor carbon emissions.

 

                       source                                        image 

So, here it is.  We follow the notions of Ernest Callenbach, in his seminal, if not perfectly written novel, Ecotopia Emerging, in which the newly formed nation agreed to a list of key principles.  It's worth finding the book and looking at the 10 items on that "No more" list, but we'll adopt here, "No more private cars."  That's what we propose the UN vote on--finding ways to eliminate the automobile industry worldwide, before natural castrophies do it for us.

Talk to your dogs.  They'll agree.

later, 
President bob


  

Ernest Callenbach’s Last Words, https://learningfromdogs.com/tag/ecotopia-emerging/ 

Instantiation

Here, a word the logic folks will quibble about:  instantiation:  "the existence of properties or universals is not tied to their actual existence now, but to their existence in space-time considered as a whole.Thus, any property which is, has been, or will be instantiated exists."

In any case, I set my alarm, waited till 10:28 am today, and suddenly, in the whirlwind of what is, Dogland popped into existence.

Turns out though that it's hard to photograph both a moment of quantum coherence, which often looks pretty much like the moment before (the problem of continuation still much to be argued in one object theory or another), and the moment of the winter solstice.  For the solstice--would I be photographing the earth's brief new tilt?
  

Or something about the seasonality?  Today, when one bank I drove past asserted that before noon, the temperature was 65 degrees F, while the one up the hill said 56.  In either case, much is still green, too green for December 21.             


   


And I scooped a very lively tick off one of the dogs after our morning walk along the edges of our new nation.  Alas.  Much is out of order. (Note the current and continuing rise of CO2, as charted by the still not-suppressed NOAA--just now over 406 ppm, vs. the pre-Industrial baseline of 285, or worse...).
    

later, bob

Dogland Visa

                     DOGLAND VISA

Valid for one visit, not to exceed 12 hours  
                                             

Full legal name__________________________________      Date___________________

Three major aliases ______________________, ______________________, ______________________

Nationality      _________________________________________

Purpose of trip (attach additional pages if needed)_______________________________________

Have you visited any hostile national entities in the last three days?         Yes        No

Have you eaten any forbidden fruits this year?                                          Yes        No

Do you own one or more cats?                                                                   Yes        No

Have you ever been injured by a cat?                                                         Yes        No

Do you have permission from your dogs to enter Dogland?                      Yes        No

Will your dogs be escorting you?                                                                Yes        No

Do you support the eradication of autumn olive?                                       Yes        No

Do you own, or have you had any intimate physical contact

with, any of these in the last 3 weeks (circle any that apply): 

Llamas, reindeer, polar bears, mudpuppies, black rhinos,

Neanderthals, puffins, golden toads, Irish elk, quagga,

or ivory-billed woodpeckers?                                                                     Yes        No

Do you support the International Convention

for the Regulation of Whaling?                                                                   Yes        No

Have you seen any meteors in the last 10 days?                                        Yes        No

Have you seen Star Wars:  The Last Jedi?                                                 Yes        No

Applicant’s signature ______________________          Approved,  DL Secy. of State 

                                                                             

          

Dogland

As of Thursday, December 21, 2017 at 10:28 am CST , owing to the constant and irrepressible eruption of the quantum ground, out of which we all constantly bubble, we declare the existence of the micronation of Dogland.  We predict this outburst of sovereignty will exist for one week. 

The borders of this new nation are derived from the dog-driven dérive, which enfold our actual homeplace/property, but extend farther and furtively along dark roads and back fields.  

Our nation slogan:  Trespass      

Founders and First Citizens, Hector, Cybele, and Dorothy

                      

                


President, Robert Boon
Vice President, Mike Schatz
Secretary of State, Ashton Schatz
Secretary of Defense, Tim McGovney
Secretary of the Interior, Soren Larsen
Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Mike O'Conner 
Director, National Endowment for the Arts/Science Advisor Jim Evans
Surgeon General, Graham Greer        
Attorney General, Hao Nguyen 
Postmaster General/Special Counsel to the Founders , Murphy Boon Schatz
Evie McGovney, Secretary of Energy
Alice McGovney, Director of Homeland Security
Mike Urban, Director, Dogland Army Corps of Engineers
Mark Palmer, National Quantum Cartographer
Matt Jacobson, National Wildlife Director

Our national beverages:  coffee from Lakota, Pinot Noir from Oregon, Busch Lite at D&D Pub, and Guinness anywhere
Our national anthem:  Ol' Red [video by honorary citizen, Blake Shelton]

Information about Citizenship and One-day Visas forthcoming.

 

Place-Making

lifted here

I've not been much interested in some of the standard ways we track place [and we could insert here whole volumes of crusty material, or more interesting histories, like Edward Casey's The Fate of Place], certainly not in place as yet one more quadrant of "the grid."  And I can't simply say 'place is the subjective version of objective real space,' because that falsifies reality, shifts us merely to the barren ground of the long, harsh ontology of the modern West.  None of that.

More, that place itself an unstable phenomenon, an occurrence and continual re-occurrence, that involves not only the physical items in our view, nor merely the elements of power, nor just the various plants and animals and rocks and other folks.  But all of those together.  I think I'll borrow from one of my own documents in progress, some book of poetry, some interminable thesis-thing:

I’ve wanted to test out how place-experience ‘informs’ new place, but that isn’t strong enough, suggests too much graceful observation as we glide along in our hover cars.  Not ‘sensibility,’ not memory exactly, but what is crucially involved in place-making—that is, how we use our experience, all of it, to actively and actually shape the places we tread, at every moment.  The and actually is important.  I’m not a believer in a reality that waits for us to draw grids across it, nor a reality that is independent of our observation.  Nor one that we control.  Not magic, and not stability.

That is, place-making itself is the “apparatus” that we are constantly involved in.  (I steal liberally from Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, whose title I already appropriate and misshape.)  That is, there is no solid ground beneath us, or around us, or ahead or behind us.  With each little shimmer of the universe, we participate in creating place.  No, we aren’t wizards, conjuring up that bit of land we need in the middle of a stormy sea, nor can we whip up a pocket universe to save us from the ravages of demonic invasion.  Not exactly.  We don’t have such power.  But we do participate in that process, along with all the other agents that share this universe with us—so that all our experience, knowledge, biochemistry, fleshy history, even our imagination, these all shape that process, ever so slightly, at every moment.  Nothing detached, nothing innocent.  Ecology and ethics in every breath, every step.

Perhaps I can say this efficiently:  we live in a universe that is very real—not illusion, not human construct or category—a universe which simply isn’t solid or fixed.  Not even time or space exists in any stable form, nor any part ever in isolation.  This invites us to re-imagine who and what we are, in terms of biology and geology.  Quantum physics is certainly in the background, in my naive understanding of it, but I want mostly to work at the scale of human/other bodies and our collective place-making.  This, against the background of the Anthropocene, the grand catastrophe we in these generations will not outlive.

Do investigate Karen Barad--a nice look at "apparatus" here, or a useful interview.

  

image

***

All of this a long way to get to the essential problem--I haven't stayed in the U.S. for Christmas yet this century, avoiding this most gruesome holiday at all costs, whether it's wandering the old city of Taipei or trudging through the slush in Quebec City, or, or.....

         

But this year, with my expensive new eyes (ah, some gruesome moments there), I can't/shouldn't afford to travel.  So if I can't afford to leave this country in the traditional way, planes, trains, automobiles, Korean sub, hot air balloon, and there's no "Beam me up" option, well...

Not that Hallsville isn't swell, but...  

Next post.

later, bob

Micronations

image source 

Here's a bit of alternate geography, these self-proclaimed countries called micronations.  As our friends at Wikipedia tell us (and have you donated to Wikipedia yet this year?  I have):

A micronation, sometimes referred to as a model country or new country project, is an entity that claims to be an independent nation or state but is not recognized by world governments or major international organizations.

Micronations are distinguished from imaginary countries and from other kinds of social groups (such as eco-villages, campuses, tribes, clans, sects, and residential community associations) by expressing a formal and persistent, even if unrecognized, claim of sovereignty over some physical territory. Micronations are also distinct from true secessionist movements; micronations' activities are almost always trivial enough to be ignored rather than challenged by the established nations whose territory they claim.

          Find that here.  

Lots useful here--the distinction from secessionist movements, which get everyone bent out of shape, and the notion that such sovereignty involves a claim over physical territory.  Ah, such...last century thinking.

Here's a visual for where they've popped up:

map address

Business Insider points at what they claim are the "most interesting micronations".  North Dumpling Island does sound intriguing:  "Summer home of Dean Kamen, the man who invented the Segway, North Dumpling Island is a small piece of land off the coast of Connecticut. Kamen, or “Lord Dumpling” as he likes to refer to himself, even got then-president George H. W. Bush to sign a “non-aggression” pact with the nation of North Dumpling. The island is powered by a wind turbine, solar panels, a helipad, and a replica of Stonehenge."

And of course, there's a web page on how-to-do-it-yourself, which I'm going to ignore...

I rather like the micronation of Sealand, and am contemplating becoming a Lord or Baron for 44.99$.  I'd go for the coffee mug, but I'm guessing the shipping rates aren't friendly.

And why all this obscure interest in micronations?  Besides having just turned in my very last set of grades for this semester?  More to come...

later, bob