Welcome to KickTime - News of the Kickapoo Valley, WI

A Driftless Regional web space for Kickapoo Valley news, events and local commerce (like recycling, ride sharing, eating from local sources, buying and supporting local entrepreneurs.) Look here for more information.

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Visit our Kickapedia site for links to local businesses, farms and services. This is a community wiki (like Wikipedia only smaller) that can be updated by anyone who logs in.

Please visit the new (12/09) video site for the area, Kickapoo Valley Video Collective. It is easy to contribute using the "Add a video" button at the top. Give it a try!

Also link to the KickTime_Calendar. We try to keep it as complete, up-to-date and accurate as possible. Please forgive any errors and use the contact information provided for events to double check times and dates.

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Friday Web Picks

Friday Web Picks--Time to Protect Our Water Resources


By borges, Section Friday Web Picks
Posted on Fri Feb 19, 2010 at 06:00:58 PM CST

Matt Johnson detailed the issues involved in the Dept of Ag review of the CAFO siting law in this editorial (Link). He hits all the major points at issue, lists all the listening sessions DATCP is providing for public input, and calls them out that none of these sessions are within 2 hours of Vernon County. If you can't make the trip to a listening session, write a letter.

Another piece of the puzzle is Karst Management areas being proposed for the eastern side of the state. The incidents of contaminated wells are well documented in Brown, Door, Calumet, Kewaunee, and Manitowoc counties. The proposed bill establishes management areas in these 5 counties based upon criteria to be established by DNR according to the relative risk of land spreading waste in the area.

One of the provisions of the new bill is to allow other parts of the state to petition DNR to be designated a management area. If counties can show evidence of groundwater contamination due to land spreading waste over carbonate bedrock DNR would have to consider the petition.

At this point we need to keep our legislators informed of our risks here, and help them understand the need for every protection available for our fragile landscape.

So get out the pen and paper, pick up the telephone, because there is no better time than now to make a difference to the future of our groundwater resources.

If you need the addresses and numbers...think Kickapedia.

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Friday Web Picks--A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything


By borges, Section Friday Web Picks
Posted on Fri Feb 12, 2010 at 05:19:43 PM CST

Here's a school project that kind of encapsulates world history...an obviously over-achieving student.

(1 comment) Comments >>

Friday Web Picks--Fantasies We Live By


By borges, Section Friday Web Picks
Posted on Fri Feb 05, 2010 at 10:07:12 PM CST

From Corporatist ideology and fantasy of power, pt 2 Stephen Dufrechou.  It is a small snippet, and I recommend reading the whole piece that ranges from Zinn and Chomsky to Zizek and founders of the US on the hunt for a deconstruction of our collective fantasy life that bars us from justice that leads to peace. Well at least perhaps explains the Supreme Court decision that has disturbed so many.

Indeed, "corporate personhood"--and the state's upholding corporate interests over those of "the people"--is but an expected extension of America's founding ideological fantasies. The US Supreme Court's decision in "Citizens United" was not some break with American "democracy". It was not some kind of "take over", in which "We the people" should get "our nation back"--we never "had" a nation to begin with. It was always John Jay's nation, Alexander Hamilton's nation. It was always the "minority of the opulent" who owned the country, and ran it as they saw fit, while distracting the "Great Beast" with political rhetoric and propaganda.

But we should note that every gain in civil rights history, every extension of liberty, has been made when "the people" see through the state's ideological fantasies, when the people civilly-disobey until the state acts according to the people's demands for justice. Only then does "Change" become more than just rhetoric, spouted by US presidents.

And a bit less burdensome, but quite as complicated: an art installation in Istanbul:

from BeginBeing

And if video speaks to you more potently, try this link to a work by Jonas Mekas "As I was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty". All these links were from @mhsteger on Twitter. Tomorrow's music will also be via this interesting person's work.

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Friday Web Picks--Why We Work So Hard and Feel So Poor


By borges, Section Friday Web Picks
Posted on Sat Jan 30, 2010 at 05:59:20 PM CST

Distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard Law School. In this "UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures" she explains (a lengthy one, but worth listening to) why it is the middle class in one generation has come to be working harder and at more risk of collapse.

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Friday Web Picks--An Odd Dot Gov


By borges, Section Friday Web Picks
Posted on Fri Jan 22, 2010 at 08:27:09 PM CST

For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth this week, I came upon a strangely friendly dot gov site about the future of media.  The website is put out by the FCC, and quite a humane looking thing for being a federal production.

On the future of Democracy, which seems in peril to some, the writing of Zizek (my latest passion, although I see his limits in vision with his seeming anti-Semitism, sexism so I hear, and vulgarity that is readily apparent and could never be contested) points to deeper, older issues that might point us to a different framing of our situation.  This snip is from a piece on Haiti...

Noam Chomsky once noted that "it is only when the threat of popular participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely contemplated". He thereby pointed at the "passivising" core of parliamentary democracy, which makes it incompatible with the direct political self-organisation and self-empowerment of the people. Direct colonial aggression or military assault are not the only ways of pacifying a "hostile" population: so long as they are backed up by sufficient levels of coercive force, international "stabilisation" missions can overcome the threat of popular participation through the apparently less abrasive tactics of "democracy promotion", "humanitarian intervention" and the "protection of human rights".


Excerpt is from The New Statesman.

And the "dumbing down" of our society certainly makes for an un-threatening democratic form--one any hegemonic system would be comfortable presiding over.   If you feel at a loss about how to resist, there is this movement called Move To Amend that has a petition asking we amend the constitution to push back the Supreme Court decision. Go ahead, sign the petition, lots of smart people are on board.

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Friday Web Picks--So Do Something


By borges, Section Friday Web Picks
Posted on Fri Jan 15, 2010 at 04:16:46 PM CST

Several world events might spur us to action and this post will highlight a couple ideas presented by activists who are important to follow.

First is a reaction to the Obama Administration's decision to tax some of the banks that had fed at the public trough a year ago.  Some feel Obama is missing a chance to put the squeeze on these folks, and taking matters into their own hands (by using their feet) are committed to moving their money to local banks and community credit unions.  The founder of this action made the case this morning on Joy Cardine's WPR program, also via Huffington Post and at their website.

Below is another important view--the video presents (at about 5 minutes) a woman recounting her family's bank that was bought (after the father was fired) because they were running it ethically and had quality assets. This suggests a strong case for credit unions, that stay local and are owned by depositors. 

The commentary in the video is provided by Slavoj Zizek, who is not someone to agree with all the time, but he will make you think...

The whole 6-part series with Zizek is presented on Mariborchan website and it loads all the eight minute sections automatically.

And finally Jay Smooth speaking in an inspired and surprising way on Haiti--a country in need of so much from the world right now....

(1 comment) Comments >>

Zizek on the Environment


By borges, Section Friday Web Picks
Posted on Sat Dec 26, 2009 at 09:42:20 PM CST

Recently, it came to my attention that this Zizek clip (from the movie An Examined Life) was not posted on KickTime. This is a shame because he has an interesting message, radical really, on nature and our need for a new way of thinking about our place in the catastrophe called nature.  Enjoy...

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Friday Web Picks--Video Site for the Valley


By borges, Section Friday Web Picks
Posted on Fri Dec 18, 2009 at 02:49:47 PM CST

Working on a community video site for the Valley this week and the experimental site is actually looking pretty good.  Visit it via this link and please feel free to contribute any video that is relevant to the area.  There is a button at the top of the page "Submit A Video"--nicely done, yes?  You will then be asked to add the URL address for the video off any service, YouTube, Blip, Vimeo, and others and you can even use a link to a video file (.mov link for example.)  If it cannot take the URL then it will ask for the embed code that is generally offered by sites.  Easy, Easy, Easy.

Of course you can create an account and log in to track your submissions and make comments.  So far, so good, but the more who step up, the better we will have as a collection/collective.

Links will be on the Front Page of KickTime.org and also will be on the Kickapedia directory of the valley.

"All in good time, my pretty," as they say...

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Friday Web Picks

Friday December 11th
+ Friday Web Picks--Holiday Clutter (0 comments)

Friday December 4th
+ Friday Web Picks--SoulPancake (0 comments)

Friday November 20th
+ Friday Web Picks--Finally THE Recipe Website (0 comments)

Thursday November 12th
+ Friday Web Picks--Shake the Dust (0 comments)

Friday October 30th
+ Friday Web Picks--Gays and Discrimination (1 comments)

Friday October 23rd
+ Friday Web Picks--A Congressman Doing His Job (1 comments)

Sunday October 18th
+ UN Day Events in LaCrosse (1 comments)

Saturday October 17th
+ Friday Web Picks--Daily Show on the Flu (0 comments)

Friday October 9th
+ Friday Web Picks--Joy Juice (0 comments)

Friday October 2nd
+ Friday Web Picks--Women are Heroes (0 comments)

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