Good morning, all you New Dayists.
I hope you all are feeling the warm glow of a happy Caturday.
Diary bird —
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Northern Cardinal — Cardinalis cardinalis
A Warm Welcome to the New Day Cafe open thread.
Grab a cup of coffee or tea, something to eat, and please join us.
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All are welcome to join the fun, the silliness, the conversations. If you don’t know...just ask! Some things really do require a bit of explanation.
There will be a few surprises along the way, all good ones, we hope.
We are here to keep building the Daily Kos Community.
We post Mon-Sun at 10:30 a.m. Eastern. On Sunday we go to the C!U!A! posting to show support for all the work being done to promote Democratic candidates/causes. Please to join us there, as well.
Pie fights will be met with outrageous ridicule and insults. Trolls will be incinerated and served at the next group BBQ. As briquettes.
I’ve never been to Burning Man. I don’t really have any desire to go to it either, even though it looks interesting. Have any of the New Dayists been?
Is it true that:
If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air. A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct.
Evidently not so. Burning Man has become a place populated by Silicon Valley billionaires and regular punks. Apparently, a magnet for punks of all passions — biker punks, cyberpunks, steampunks, and other punks. Additionally:
It is, and always has been, ruled by all kinds of techno-smart futuristic punks rather than nostalgic hippies or dippy ravers.
Consider: this is a week-long art party in a handmade city in an environment that is doing its level best to kill you. Either the sun is baking dry ground that is blinding white, leeching water from your body, or the wind is blasting mile-high storms of dust across this enormous barren plain at fifty miles an hour, enough to take your tent away if it isn't attached to rebar, or a starry desert night is damn-near freezing you to death.
Occasionally the climate likes to remind you you're actually partying on an ancient lake bed — the playa — and rains for days until the solid dusty ground turns to thick soupy mud that adds inches to your shoes in seconds.
SNIP
Sure, you're getting away from some of the trappings of civilization — though certainly not all, because the county police are as numerous and visible a presence in Black Rock City as in any American city. It is also Federal land filled with BLM rangers, who work hand in hand with the Burning Man organization to make sure this party on protected land gets its usual world-class cleanup.
Burning Man is crawling with law enforcement and officialdom; they've just gotten very good at blending in. The notion that you have complete freedom to openly flout federal or Nevada state law is a dangerous myth. The idea that, as Bilton suggests, "drugs are easier to find than candy on Halloween" is what leads the guy carrying the "I Need Drugs" sign to his inevitable arrest on the city's main drag, the Esplanade.
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