The revolution will not be twittered

The revolution will not be brought to you in 140 characters or less from anonymous sources half-a-world away and repeated as the whole truth by talking heads with an agenda. It will not star your internet friends or make you vicariously courageous.

And what business is it of ours in any case? If you’re so excited about freedom on its bloody march, then start walking. But my best honest guess is that the majority of Americans now weighing in on a contested election in a country that a good many of them can’t find on a map don’t even understand what’s happening in Iran.

That’s the problem.

There’s a statue in it for you

While still on the lookout for the significant change that i was told to believe in, my innate – but well cultivated – cynicism has gotten the upper hand. We’re not leaving Iraq anytime soon; we’ll probably hang around almost as long as the depleted uranium munitions we use. Afghanistan is just heating up, but that was to be expected. Our first minority president seems intent on solving the gay rights question with a separate but equal answer. The automotive industry will, apparently, be righted by an investment banker. And Vegas has the insurance industry favored heavily to come out on top in health care “reform”.

So be it. If Americans believed every advertising campaign that was rolled over us, we’d picture ourselves as a land of skinny, white-toothed celebrities consuming the latest thing as if it would make our existence complete and wonderful…oh, yeah, well, um…never mind.

Not that Mr. Obama is concerned with winning my good graces, but if wants them then he need only make a simple declaration:

The empire strikes back

It is a dark time for the rebellion.  Although the Bush administration has been defeated, imperial troops have co-opted groups like Moveon and vast swaths of the Democratic Party in their continued pursuit of global dominance.

Evading the Imperial Department of State, a group of freedom fighters without a leader has withdrawn to the remote corners of the blogosphere.

The evil lord Barack Obama, obsessed with imperial glory, is dispatching thousands of new storm troopers and imperial governors into the far reaches of South Asia…

Evolve

Kevin Kelly has published a 13,000 word essay on evolution at The Technium.  It is engaging, interesting and well worth your time to read.  He makes two assertions; one evolving from the other.  First, he says that evolution is directional, towards complexity and becoming optimal.  Evolution is then “ordained-becoming”.  His second assertion is much less developed, but states that technology follows the same path as biological evolution towards complexity with, apparently, pre-ordained outcomes.  You may have learned from the likes of Stephen J. Gould that if we rerun the great experiment of life, it would not bring about the same results that surround us today.  Kelly disagrees.

I disagree with Kelly, not because his train of thought is faulty but because it seems incomplete and because his thesis requires overlaying the evidence with value statements and judgments.  It’s amazing that the eye has evolved independently on multiple occasions, but i’m not ready to say that life must evolve eyes…which may, or may not, have been Kelly’s assertion.

The hundred and eighty third time’s a charm

One hundred and eighty-three times.  It must have been that last one that made KSM say, “Oh fuck it, what do you want me to say?  Where do I sign?”  Any in-depth reading of the depravity to which the Gestapo and the SS sunk tells the story that we don’t want to hear.  Any perusing of the memoirs penned by those who managed to walk out of the Lubyanka sings the same refrain.  There should be no surprise in any of this.  Don’t be surprised by the insects, and don’t be surprised when we someday find out about the rubber hoses and the 12V batteries attached to genitalia.

Got change?

The buzzing topic of conversation throughout liberal America appears to be just how much change the new president brings to the table.  His stalwart defenders rally to his side on comment threads, regularly regurgitating the stock phrases that appear in emails from campaign headquarters, er, the White House.  One need not look very far to find a statement like, “He’s our President and we have to stand behind him.”  That type of statement is a little too close to Bushbottery for me, but i’ve come to understand that it is, in fact, nothing of the sort because Bush was evil and Obama is good.  I won’t argue the former, but it is far too early to make the call on the latter.

Street Smarts: Me Lost Me Cookie at the Disco

Oh man, i can’t believe that i haven’t posted this one yet…i thought that i had and was tempted to post it again anyhow.  (And if you watch closely, you can see Elmo from back when he was an “anything Muppet”.)

P.S.  If you like these, you can type “street smarts” into the search box at the top of the page and they’ll all come up.

Street Smarts: Doin the pigeon

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Oh boy, this is not how the first 100 days were supposed to go…not at all.  America’s hopping mad about those damned bonuses that AIG executives got.  It’s unbelievable that they got $165,000,000 out of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money.  Yes, i know, people are up in arms over $165,000,000 but seem relatively unconcerned about the $170,000,000,000.  While the former number is in Powerball territory, put it in perspective by lopping six zeroes off the end of both numbers.  We’re upset about the equivalent of $165 even as the real theft of $170,000 rolls right along.  Then again, this is a nation that goes crazy about $4/gl gasoline and basically just ignores that we’ve descended into Klaus Barbie morality.

Street Smarts: ABCDEF…Cookie Monster!

Anno Solanum Tuberosum

Perhaps you didn’t know that 2008 is the “Year of the Potato”, as decreed by the United Nations. The New York Times let the cat out of the bag this weekend, so now you have no excuse for not knowing what year it is…unless, of course, you’re a resident of Pro-America, America. In which case you probably have little use for The New York Times or the UN.

Countries around the world are indeed turning to the potato. The potato doesn’t ship very well, so it is rarely traded on international markets. Consequently, it is less likely to see dramatic swings in price. As grain prices have climbed to the point of vertigo, the potato looks like a solid option for reducing dependency on foreign grain. Both China and India are adopting potato cultivation, and the spud is catching on in Africa too. Could the lowly spud have wound its way from the Andean highlands to savior of the world’s poor?

In a word, no. In many words, maybe.

Food aid programs avoid the potato because of its weight and how well it keeps…or not keeps. Potatoes rot quickly in warm temperatures; when conditions are right they will sprout; and when exposed to light they can become toxic. As a Solanaceous species – like tomatoes and eggplant – the only parts you can eat are the parts you eat. All the rest contain solanine, the alkaloid that makes nightshade deadly. Some food aid groups are looking at encouraging local potato growing rather than shipping in aid. This is a beautiful idea along the lines of teaching a man to fish.

There are, however, problems. The potato is susceptible to a host of pests and diseases, and while most of these can be alleviated in many ways, i would suspect that the world’s poor will be sold a great deal of chemical pesticides, fungicides, etc. along with their new crop to “help” them achieve food security. The other issue is that potatoes are rather heavy feeders, particularly on nitrogen. Successive plantings can strip the soil. This issue will probably be alleviated with bags of chemical fertilizer, or treating the symptom rather than the disease. Andean natives handled some of these issues by planting a wide range of varieties in a plot in a shotgun approach. If a blight struck, it would probably not affect all of the varieties. Moreover, the 3000+ varieties in the Andes are spread across at least 8 distinct species, whereas the modern varieties are all tuberosum. We all know the story of the blight in Ireland that resulted from everyone planting the same variety.

The potato certainly deserves a place in the food plots of the world, but it will not, by itself, solve world hunger. Encouraging self sufficiency instead of aid is a step in the right direction, but giving the world’s poor a crop that requires a great deal of input will only shackle them to different international markets.

Will these new potato farmers be encouraged to interplant legumes with the potatoes? Legumes are nitrogen fixers that would help counteract the feeding habits of the potato…and they’re edible. The world’s poor do not need a new crop, they need systems for cultivating the myriad of crops already available. They need the principles of intensive, sustainable agriculture. They need methods that are not dependent on chemical inputs. They are poor, not stupid. What they need are the right set of tools to address their issues.

Chances are good that they won’t get the right set of tools, because they get their advice from people who don’t use the right set of tools.

Monday’s Myth

In times past a poor Indian was living with his wife and children in a beautiful part of the country. He was not only poor, but inexpert in procuring food for his family, and his children were all too young to give him assistance. Although poor, he was a man of a kind and contented disposition. He was always thankful to the Great spirit for everything he received. The same disposition was inherited by his eldest son, who had now arrived at the proper age to undertake the ceremony of Ke-ig-nish-im-o-win, or fast, to see what kind of spirit would be his guide and guardian through life.

Sunday Evenin’ Comin Down

It’s Sunday evening and I’m staring down a host of civic decisions. Armed with various non-partisan voting guides I’m ready to proceed. Frankly, this would be easier were I a party member, but it wouldn’t be nearly as fun. I’m a resident of Michigan’s 1^st Congressional District and the 109^th State Congressional District.

President Obama

Listening to all these candidates for the two years that seemed like forever wasn’t really a matter of listening to their promises. Those are, by definition, empty in my mind. They sound wonderful or frightening but they mean nothing because they are uttered in a vacuum. The candidate has no power, and if they assume power still will not have the power to simply implement the promised policy.

When i’m not forced to vote against G.W. Bush, i vote for a person rather than policy promises. A person can be broken, but not so easily as a promise.

Sundays with Uncle God-Momma: Sophia and the Tyrant Angels

During the 11th century, in what is today southern France but was then called Languedoc, a Christian sect called the Cathars rose to prominence.  The name suggests catharsis in the Aristotelian usage, that is, cleansing or purification, and some German texts refer to them as Katharoi, the pure ones.  The Cathars, however, did not call themselves by this name; they preferred to use the phrase “Good men and women.”  For more than a century they were a force in southern France.  Some scholars have suggested that they were well on their way to creating a Renaissance long before the Italian version.  Standard history tells us little of them except that they provoked the wrath of the Catholic Church.  Several attempts to remove their influence through “soft power” failed to dislodge the Cathars, and in 1208-9 the Albigensian Crusade was launched.

Twenty years of death and destruction in southern France followed.  Blood ran as rivers through the streets of medieval towns; the killing was wholesale, against both Cathars and Papists.  The famous phrase, “Kill them all and let God sort them out,” was first uttered as, “Kill them all, God will know his own,” during the Albigensian Crusade.  At this point the tale gets complicated and may lead one down the path of modern conspiracies.  The Knights Templar had made their home in Languedoc as well, and they were accused of aiding the Cathars.  Some have gone so far as to suggest that both groups fled to Scotland and became the founders of classical Freemasonry.  But that is beyond the scope of this work.  We know quite well what provoked the wrath of the Catholic Church: the Cathars were clear and vocal in their disdain for orthodox Catholicism.  They referred to the Catholic Church as “The Church of Satan”.  By all accounts, the Cathars lived non-violent, exemplary Christian lives, so where did they get such heretical ideas?  As we only have the writings of their enemies, we will never know for certain, but their ideals share strong similarities with the Gnostic traditions of the first few centuries A.D.  This is particularly evident in their view of the Church.

What follows is a retelling of a retelling of the Gnostic myth of “the tyrant angels”, or a near total upending of orthodox, Christian mythology.

Media Bias: it’s all your fault

The mainstream media has been flogged like a peasant’s nag in a Dostoevsky novel by critics on both sides of the political divide.  For those of us who drink the nectar of abject cynicism, the situation is as sweet as it could be.  The left complains of media bias; the right complains of media bias; and both are convinced that the majority of our woes stem directly from that hideous old beast, the MSM, that refuses to pull.

While it is easy to assume that the slimy tentacles of Rupert Murdoch’s ideology or the latte stains of the Grey Lady are to blame, what if that isn’t the case?

Waterworld

What happens if/when the world runs out of oil and the economy (civilization) that we’ve spent the last 150 years or so building sputters to a lurching stop? Well, it all sputters to a stop and we figure something else out. It’s not as if we can’t live without the wonder of petroleum products, we just don’t want to. But unless your an accomplished yogi, you’ve got four days to live without water. Four days until your kidneys shut down and you die – what i imagine to be – an excruciating death. Excruciating death is not, however, reserved for being deprived of water; dirty water is more than capable of that.

In 2003, the Pentagon released forecasts that provoked more than a few “I told you so’s” from environmentalists.  They looked into a future dominated by resource wars and the national security challenges of climate change.  Fresh water was one of the resources that they concentrated on, and unlike some of the DoD’s other bogeymen, there is some rationality to the fear that people will kill each other over drinking water.  Though water does not find its way into most analyses, it is central to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Even in the United States, water has provoked conflict – albeit unarmed – between residents and farmers over who gets it first and who gets the most.  Worries about the Colorado River basin, aquifers in California, and drought in multiple places crop up regularly.  For the most part, these worries focus on water that we can see: surface water and the water that falls from the sky.  The former is limited and often dependent on the latter, which can fluctuate greatly from year to year.  Underground aquifers get less attention than surface water, but they probably hold more potential for conflict.  Until recently there was no single resource for researchers and governments that detailed the state of the world’s underground aquifers.

404 Not Found

Firefox shows little icons representing the website on its tabs (in case you didn’t know, and i don’t know if explorer does it because i haven’t used explorer for years).  That’s no big deal.  But as i was trawling through the collective wisdom and disjointed ramblings of humanity that we call “The Internet”, i stumbled into a dead end.  I was about to simply close the tab without looking, when i realized a deeper significance:

That about says it all…*

*except thanks/sorry to someone named “peace4ever” who uses the peace sign that i jacked as an avatar at carbonrally. c o m.

Sundays with Uncle God-Momma: The Boy Buddha

Ram Bahadur Bomjon recently reappeared from the Nepalese jungle and made a minor splash in the news. Some are convinced that he is the Buddha reincarnated, while others – including himself – maintain that he is lower on the spiritual ladder of Buddhism. He has called himself a rinpoche (teacher) and others have suggested that he may be a boddhisattva. If nothing else, he’s an 18 year old boy who spends his time in deep meditation, purportedly without food or water for months on end.

The incredulous West smells a scam, or perhaps a young man starved for the monetary benefit of his handlers. The Discovery Channel produced a documentary about Ram in 2007, voiced over in hushed tones about all the nefarious possibilities and with frequent breaks to a British doctor giving scientific explanations for why it is impossible for Ram to go without food or water. Unfortunately for her, the crew managed to film Ram in meditation for four full days and never caught him eating or drinking. She insisted that he would be dead, but wiggled a bit and wondered if maybe he was urinating a little under his robe. Clearly, the West has much to learn.

Batten Down the Hatches

On Friday i looked at my lawn and thought, “Gee, maybe i should mow it one last time.”  By this afternoon it was covered in 6+ inches of snow.  Time to start the long, hard slog through another UP winter.  It’s not always easy to stay upbeat about life in the UP, but i’ve got a friend who replies to every UP negative comment, “That’s just winter talking.”  Yeah, the longer it talks, the harder it is to ignore.

But winter veggies are up and running; the reading list is long; and i’m not old enough to dread shoveling yet.  Better yet, we can enter and exit the house without defending the door against the cat.  He wants nothing to do with the outside anymore…just stalking the house for the sound of the furnace turning on.

Work is Prayer, a maxim far easier to apply to shoveling the driveway than data entry.  If it means inhaling the diesel exhaust of the tractor for 4-6 hours, it may also be an ecstatic experience.  Visions of scaling the tree of life up into the spirit realm and all that jazz.  My spirit helper is orange and calls himself Kubota.

And though the Lake is something to behold in the summer with its glimmers and sandy beaches, i’ve got a soft spot for Her in the winter.  Nature isn’t pretty, it’s brutally majestic.  And there are few places where that is more obvious than wintering with Lake Superior.  It’s like having Shiva as a neighbor.

So bring it on, Kitchi-gammi…remind me how small my big brained,  bi-pedaled, fully opposable thumbed self really is.  I’ll spend the next five months pondering the cycle of life, death, and resurrection, and fighting the damned cat for a spot by the heat register.

Buried

I should have known better.  There was too much snow, but if i hadn’t tried the boss would have been pissed right off.  So i hoped it was just a plow berm, coasted long enough to put the truck into 4-high, chose my line and nailed it.  Everything was fine for the first 150 feet…and then everything was as far from fine as everything gets.  There was no rocking the truck back and forth.  4-low didn’t do anything either.  I opened the door to take the old look see and left a clean sweep across the snow with the bottom edge of the door.  Buried above the front bumper, with a perfect little trench from the rear differential tailing from the back of the truck.  Two guys, no shovel, and a 3/4 ton 4×4 pickup truck attached to an 18 foot flatbed trailer stuck like a Honda Civic.  And we were in the geographical dead center of the UP, i.e. butt fucking Egypt.

Sundays with Uncle God-Momma: Mana

With a hand/eye but relatively brain free task at hand, i decided to watch a film called Mana.  I assumed that there would be a great deal of talking; i assumed incorrectly.  There was very little in the way of aural communication in the film, leaving me to ruminate on the meaning while checking in on the visual aspect here and there.  The film opens with a Maori man sitting on a rock, explaining that the rock has spirit.  His belief was expressed with a gentle smile and an affectionate manner towards something that most of us would describe as inanimate.  The rock, he said, held a very old and great spirit; it was powerful because of its longevity.  Mana, the Maori continued, is everywhere and within all things.  Like magic, it can be harnessed for use by man.  But it is also far larger than, and ultimately not in the control of, man.

The film moved through examples both expected and unexpected, juxtapositioning modern situations with our most ancient religio-spiritual conceptualization.  From South Asians ritually pressing gold leaf onto a stupa topped boulder to polyester pilgrims visiting Graceland.  We may think that our civilization has left the old ways behind but perhaps not.  Perhaps we are they and they are we, too embedded in our psychological makeup to be discarded for shiny technology and rigorous logic.

The Motor City’s Burnin’

Today, the executives of the Big Three return to Washington to pitch their case for federal assistance.  Presumably they will not be blundering into town on corporate jets.  Whether they will walk away with anything more than a political whipping remains to be seen, though given the current atmosphere they had better expect to be tied to the post.

I’m not an industry analyst, but my great-grandmother swung rear axle assemblies for Chrysler; my grandfather on the other side retired from the FoMoCo; both a brother and an uncle currently work in the industry; and i was raised in a UAW town dominated by three auto plants.  You can take the boy out of Detroit, but you cannot take Detroit out of the boy.  And i can tell you that the bullshit in this “debate” piles up so fast that you’d need wings to stay above it.

One does not go to Tula with one’s own samovar

Get it?  No, okay.  A samovar is the traditional Russian contraption for making tea.  Very few Russians actually use one anymore because the electric kettle has made them obsolete.*  Tula was the famed home of Russia’s best samovars.  Ergo, it’s rather stupid to bring a samovar on a trip to Tula.  Or, don’t take what you don’t need.  There’s a lesson here for President Elect Obama and the American people.  The Tsar is about as contemporary as the samovar, whichs begs the question: why does he seem intent on turning Washington D.C. into a second Tula?  That city is already full of people who think themselves all powerful, yet tsars are proliferating like rabbits in springtime.

Supreme Global Solutions

According to Tom Coghlan, we’re all being played for suckers by those wily Afghans.  NATO contracts out supply to several “European headquartered” but otherwise unnamed companies; security for the convoys that deliver the supplies is the responsibility of the companies that prefer not to be named.  These companies take the path of least resistance…and quite possibly the only realistic path: they buy protection.

Wash your bowl

From a journal entry regarding a New Year holiday spent at a Korean Buddhist temple.

~A new year approaching…evening in a temple surrounded by slums.  Today i saw a family…young children whose winter coats were caked black and shiny, open sores across their faces.  In the temple live four boys.  I met John as i came around the giant bell i had just run for the sake of all sentient beings…he introduced himself with a peaceful smile.  These boys live here, they wash all the dishes each morning; they clean the table after meals; they do their own laundry; and they perform monkish activities.  They came here by choice and stay here for the same reason.  I saw them chanting and bowing…it was not forced.  I watched them kicking a soccer ball around the yard…they are just happy, healthy boys without sickness or layers of grime that have become permanent.

There’s no truth in the news and no news in the truth

Mark Ames, who was on the ground and has years of experience working in Russia, brilliantly dissects the the flagrant propaganda that American media rolled out in the wake of the Russia-Georgia War.

But it was clear even to us, even though we weren’t positively disposed to a Russian handler, that Sasha’s frustration was real. It was as if the Kremlin was so excited that for once in Putin’s term, the Russians lucked into being on the good guys’ side of a major news story, and it made no sense that the “free Western media” (which the Kremlin takes much more seriously than its own cowed media) wouldn’t see the truth, that they’d do the Russian thing and twist reality into propaganda. What was so shameful and embarrassing to me, an American journalist whose own Moscow-based newspaper, The eXile, had just been driven out of existence by these same Kremlin bastards, is that Sasha was rightly frustrated. A Kremlin minder right and the Western journalists wrong? What has this world come to when the Kremlin has a better grasp of the truth than the free Western media?

Goose/gander and pot/kettle

Oh, our illustrious representation…

The auto executives should work for a dollar per year, but Congress obviously deserves a raise. Who could disagree with that? And they’ve set up the system so that automatic pay raises have to be voted down. Such a system probably should not come as a surprise; after all, this is the organization that gives itself the final say on it’s own debt ceiling.

With all the talk about punishing executives who’ve run their companies into the ground and what sort of inquisition like punishment said executives deserve, we have Congress congratulating itself for running the whole nation into the ground.

I think that it’s time for some hearings, and i’ll happily take unpaid leave from the job that i’m lucky to have in order to chair those hearings. When it’s all set and done We the People can argue and vote on whether or not our employees get a raise. Since they seem to think that American manufacturing jobs should pay the lowest possible wage…as if we’re trying to bring them in line with Chinese wages…i think it would only be fitting for us to pay Congress a wage comparable to what it would cost us to outsource their labor to, say, India.

Free Rice

The composition of UN World Food Program (WFP) food baskets varies from country to country and region to region, depending upon the eating habits of the people WFP feeds. In countries where rice is a staple part of the diet, WFP provides, on average, about 400 grams of rice per person, per day (for families, including children and adults). That is intended for two meals that include other ingredients to ensure a minimum of 2,100 kilocalories per day. There are about 48 grains of rice in a gram.

At Free Rice you can play vocabulary, math, geography, and foreign language games. They aren’t too fancy, but for each correct answer you donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. Sure, it will take you a while to feed just one person for one day…but it’s not like you aren’t already sitting there fucking around on the computer. At least with Free Rice you can feel good about it.

Go check it out.

Just say “No” to Santa

Tis the season to conflate religion with profligate consumerism. It is a time to pretend that shepherds would be herding in the middle of winter so that the birth of a savior might coincide with pagan, winter solstice festivals. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that.

The above picture is from a shopping mall in Dubai. How’s that for juxtaposing culture? But what i want you to look at is the base of the tree. See all those Smurf mushrooms?

The great gig in the sky…

Not only is this a pretty cool video from the Discovery Channel, but someone had the amazing good sense to choose “The Great Gig in the Sky” from Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack.

If you make it back you can be a citizen

Ah, the glimmer of silver in a dark cloud…the Army’s recruiting troubles are being lessened by economic hard times.  More people in their 30’s and 40’s are signing up, according to the LA Times.  So when P-E Obama sounds his call for more soldiers to head off to Afghanistan, he might get a few more takers.  How’s that for an economic indicator?  Things are bad enough that people are thinking to themselves, “Well, shit, Iraq can’t be much worse than this.”

Never mind organic, go local

The smell eminating from those bursting bubbles is ammonium sulfate.  The bubbles arose from contradiction and unrealistic expectations.

If you want organic food, grow it yourself or buy it directly from growers.  The only way that our markets will be stocked with organic produce is if we – and a massive network of small market gardeners – take a great deal of strain off of the agricultural system.  It will simply not be possible for industrial agriculture to use organic methods: the two systems are incompatible. (Though it would be both possible and beneficial for industrial agriculture to adopt some organic methods.) A large, “organic” farm will still have to feed.  That’s what the California controversy stems from.  A fertilizer company doctoring their “organic” fertilizer with inorganic salts.  But serious organic culture wouldn’t be using amendments like fish/feather puree, and there’s philosophical problems with those fertilizers within “organic” to begin with.  Are the chickens whose feathers go into the fertilizer organic?  The fish is waste from other processes, but would those processes fit into the organic philosophy?

Cowboy up, Mr. almost President

Mr. Almost President,

The “battle” in Gaza rages on. The President has decided that sorting the mess out would be best left to the President Elect. The President Elect is mum, as is his super Secretary of State. So exactly who is driving the bus towards the cliff here? Hamas points the finger at Israel. Israel points the finger at Hamas. And so the wheel turns: the fault lies elsewhere…perhaps in the same place that responsibility is stored away.

But the big question is why there has been no word from you, Mr. Obama. While we may only have one president at a time, that hasn’t stopped the president elect from having snazzy podiums built to reflect his almost position of executive power. So why is he so restrained from issuing an almost statement of where he stands? Your silence speaks unfortunate volumes. Either you have nothing to say or you don’t want to say it.

Sundays with Uncle God-Momma: the What

Within the novel What is the What (Dave Eggers, 2006) is the Dinka creation myth. This is, after all, a novel…though a novel based tightly on the memories of Valentino Achak Deng…so the telling done by Deng’s father via Deng’s memory and Eggers’s writing may not be theologically precise.* The Dinka are a pastoral people of southern Sudan, most famed for producing Manute Bol and their suffering in the Sudanese Civil War. It was that civil war which made Achak Deng one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan.

The Dinka were monotheistic before the coming of either Islam or Christian missionaries, so the creation story here and its reference to a single god is not an adaptation of ancient belief to those more modern.

Peace through cluster munitions

Gaza is now full blown.  The US of A blocked the Security Council resolution…will wonders never cease?  And still no word from the president to be, who’s now in D.C. and must have full knowledge of the situation.  By “full knowledge” i mean the kind that you can’t read in the newspaper.

I’m either the best or worst type of commentator for this situation.  I don’t have a dog in this fight.  And while i can see some point to both sides being right, i mostly see both sides being terribly, terribly wrong.  The more pressing issues are, as usual, buried under the weight of politics, punditry, and personal animosity.

An interesting thought experiment

I’m hardly of the school that fears Zionists under my bed, and i tire of the good Jew/bad Jew schtick that is so common within the world wide intertubes.  The history behind the settling of Israel is as complicated as history gets, and the present situation is so tangled in the complicated history as to be almost unsortable.

None-the-less, this is an interesting thought experiment only muddied by the constant use of the loaded term “Zionist”.

Sundays with Uncle God-Momma: what would Jesus do?

Let’s face it, that’s a tall order.  And no matter how much you practice you probably won’t be able to get tanked from the tap.  Still, it makes a pretty good bumper sticker.  Everybody knows which side your on, even if you have no intention of actually behaving like Jesus.  But divorced from being a mere affirmation of faith, it makes a damned good question.  Maybe not as good a question as, “What would a wookie do?” or meditating on what Jesus would do for a Klondike bar…but still a good question.

Ed Dobson decided that he would try to find out by attempting to live like Jesus for the year of our Lord 2008.  Keeping the Jewish sabbath was important, as was eating Kosher.  There has been no word concerning loaves and fishes or if Ed took up carpentry.  But he succeeded to some degree, because he managed to piss off a bunch of Christians in the process.  As an added bonus he grew a luxurious beard.

New camera…

I went out and splurged on a new camera.  By a stroke of luck and a little haggling, i got a real nice deal on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18.  It’s really more camera than i set out to buy, but came out to the kind of money i was willing to spend.  I took it on a walk around Presque Isle this afternoon to get the feel of the camera and fiddle around with the settings.  Yeah, it was a little chilly to fiddle ungloved for very long, so i pretty much just took some pictures using the intelligent auto-focus and tried out the “snow” scene function.

As pretty as my neighborhood is (and Presque is just a pleasant walk away), at this time of year it’s mostly just white and blue.  The lake is just starting to freeze.  Eventually there will be alien landscape ice structures along the shore, but that sort of thing is just beginning.  It takes a while, even starting from Superior’s hardly warm summer temperature, to to freeze up a lake the size of Austria…even at the edges.

There’s pictures and an amusing anectdote below the fold.

Eating the sun

I love plants; in fact, i prefer the company of plants to that of people and i consider our green companions the higher life form.  So when i saw Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (Oliver Morton) staring at me from a shelf in the bookstore, i caved.  I didn’t even need the jacket blurbs making statements like, “A book that may reorder the way you think about the world…” (The Economist).  I was after the advertised “…complete biography of the earth through the lens of this mundane and most important of processes [photosynthesis].”  My expectations were high.  Mr. Morton exceeded them with massive amounts of historical and scientific information rendered in rich prose.

It’s a booty thing

Hometown pride is a funny thing…especially if you’re from Detroit.  Sure, i’ve had people that i couldn’t really speak with mime the act of driving a car to indicate that they know where i’m from.  I once hitched a ride with a Korean who knew my fair city well from his days as a sailor.  Russians have told me about the archtictural influence of Ford’s Rouge factory on Soviet design.  But none of those compare to being on a bus somewhere when a Motown song comes on the radio.  For me it’s music with the ability to lift me up and carry me home.  Soul music.  But everybody seems knows the words and feet start to tap.  Maybe we all have the same soul.  Or maybe we’re talking about the wrong portion of human anatomy.  There’s something about Motown that runs deeper than other music, there’s something that makes your booty shake…it is, fundamentally, a booty thing.

Motown turns 50 today.  From $800 and a dirt floored garage in Detroit came some of the most memorable music ever produced.  We can all hum along.  We all know the names of Smokey, Marvin, Stevie, Martha, Diana, Michael, The Temptations and all the rest.  But Marvin never made a booty shake.  What’s been engrained in the collective, cultural consciousness came from underneath, made by men you’ve never heard of.  It was the same group of men behind all those hits, cutting tunes in a single take and getting no recognition for it.  They called themselves The Funk Brothers, an apt moniker for the sheer volume of kinetic booty energy that they’ve released over the years.

The Taming of the Shoe

Check back regularly for more editions of “Street Smarts”

The Zionist in my closet

Few conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem restrained by reason; worse, someone inevitably tosses out the word “Zionism” in some form or another.  Things generally go to hell after that.  “Antisemitism” follows closely on the invocation of the dreaded Zionist, and from then on the “conversation” too often becomes a matter of person A proving that person B hates Jews and person B either defending themself or cloaking actual antisemitism in the guise of being anti-Zionist.  All sorts of proofs and arguments follow from both sides.  I like to call it the good Jew/bad Jew routine.

It was recently suggested that a glossary of terms should be developed.  Unfortunately, many of these terms are subjective and a true glossary would need to be provided by each user of the word.  But the call to duty was raised and i’ve supplemented what i already knew with some quality time at Mid-East Web, the Jewish Virtual Library, and E-Zion.  I purposefully did not visit “anti-Zionist” resources because i don’t really believe that there’s a Zionist in my closet or that a shadowy cabal of powerful, Jewish bankers is plotting the domination/destruction of the planet.  I don’t believe in Leprechuans either.

A quote for thought

The world within me is indeed much more real than the extraneous world without.  Some have often reproached me with inability to acknowledge the movement from within outward – achievement, realization, success, victory … It is true that I have no liking for the victors and the successful:  they seem to me to pursue the course of mere adaptation to a world which is situated in evil and is largely evil.  I do not … believe in the possibility of true realization on the level of an alienated, objectified universe: tragedy has struck too deep at the heart of the world.

~Nikolai Berdyaev, 1874-1948

One of the most powerful things you’ll ever read

I realize that a great many things crowd our attention today, but there’s always more.  Chances are that you don’t know much about the violent struggle in Sri Lanka.  Lasantha Wickramatunga knew the struggle all too well.  He was the editor of The Sunday Leader, and he was committed to informing his fellow man.  Mr. Wickramatunga was murdered recently, just as he knew that he would be…just as he knew who would order that murder.  He wrote a letter to be published after the murder finally took place.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

The free media serve as a mirror in which the public can see itself sans mascara and styling gel. From us you learn the state of your nation, and especially its management by the people you elected to give your children a better future. Sometimes the image you see in that mirror is not a pleasant one. But while you may grumble in the privacy of your armchair, the journalists who hold the mirror up to you do so publicly and at great risk to themselves. That is our calling, and we do not shirk it.

Please read the rest here: http://www.thesundayleader.lk/20090111/editorial-.htm

Street Smarts: What makes people angry

Street Smarts: presidential transistions

Oh, do i have a treat for you.  The vaults of vintage Sesame Street have opened up serendipitously for the peaceful transistion of political power in the United States.

First up, in honor of George, i was almost Jr. and then my dad thought better of it, Bush we have Bert and the “National Association of W Lovers”.

And since single letter designation of presidents seems to be the 21st century thing to do, we’re sending this out to tommorow’s president: Barack, It would have been easier if my mom hadn’t thrown Hussein in there, Obama.

Nanook rubs it in

The bitter cold has broken.  Several days of warmer temperatures.  It must have been 20 today and it’s supposed to be warmer yet tomorrow.  On the other hand, it’s been snowing.  Not just the 1 – 4 inch dusting kind of snowing, really fucking snowing.

Yesterday began the task of digging the greenhouses out so that they can be used in a couple of weeks; there’s plenty else to do but it can’t be done until places are accessible and places can’t be made properly accessible until the emergencies are taken care off.  The Quonset hut design is strong stuff.  Metal arcs twenty plus feet across spaced four feet apart for ninety feet bears a lot of stress, even with just two sheets of plastic stretched across it.  It doesn’t bear an infinite amount of stress.  They will fall down.

Five feet hight and risin’

Just because i’ve been walking around singing my own version of the song “Five Feet High and Risin”.  A sample:

How high is the snowbank, Momma?

She said, “It’s five feet high and risin”

How high is the snowbank, Poppa?

He said it’s five feet high and risin

Well the highway’s closed out east of town

The cars are a slippin and a slidin around

The sky’s the same color as the ground

Five feet high and risin

Other working verses are as innocuous as school closings and snowman building.  While others explore cannibalism…of course they would.

Poor, bare, forked animals…like the rest of us

While i understand the catharsis for many of seeing G.W. Bush back to Texas and i recognize – and share – the pride this nation finally elected something besides a cracker to the highest office in the land, i remain concerned about the cult of presidentialism.  I had hoped that we saw its height with Mr. Bush, but Mr. Obama seems to be reaching for the summit.  This has nothing to do with how he might govern or his ideals, only with the transformation of the President of the United States into a celebrity.  Our celebrity culture is petty and trite to begin with.  Why should we care what Angelina Jolie (-Pitt?  See, i’m not very up on this shit.) thinks…or what some Hollywood star is wearing…or who they’re sleeping with…or whether they pledge to drink less bottled water.  These aren’t even real people, they’re characters.  It is appaling to me to see politicians treated as, and affecting the behavior of, celebrities.

Street Smarts: Cookie funk is its own reward

Sundays with Uncle-God Momma: The mahout’s cry

God is not always far away.  In some parts of the world, God is everywhere all the time.  Not as in we are surrounded by God’s creation, but as in everything is God.  Alan Watts characterized the world as God playing hide and seek with Itself.  God is a masterful player of hide and seek, so good, in fact, that It manages to forget the game entirely and become wholly enveloped in the world.  That  would be you: God forgetting Itself.  And so in India, the classic Hindu greeting is to place the hands together as in prayer and bow to the other.  The bow is a recognition of God within the other person.  Not, of course, the other person’s earthly ego but the Self (Atman).

Heady stuff.  The bow is ritualized and Indians clearly do not all go around contemplating that they are the ultimate ground of being.  It is metaphor pointing the way to the idea that the kingdom of heaven is within; recognizing God in others leads to seeing that the kingdom of heaven is also without.

Winter interest

This is what we in the nursery biz call “winter interest”.

Druggies and yahoos

I thought that the decapitated rabbit i found at work yesterday would be the most exciting moment of my week.  I’m still not sure what got it.  On Saturday i saw small predator tracks but there was also a big orange cat hanging out in the back shed for a while this fall.  The decapitation and leaving of the rest of the carcass struck me as cat behavior.  Being January i would expect a fox or a weasel to drag the whole kill off for feasting.  My apologies if you think that i should have felt some remorse…i didn’t; in fact, i took a picture.  I’m a gardener which means i think rabbits are for stewing.  And this will be one fewer rabbit that we’ll have to trap in the spring.

But it wasn’t the most exciting event of my week.  That would be today, when i got to hang out with a State Trooper for a couple of hours while he played CSI.  No, he wasn’t investigating the brutal decapitation of the bunny (which by this morning was nothing but a pile of entrails anyhow).

900 days

Today marks the breaking of the siege of Leningrad, and President Medvedev choose the moment to announce that Russia would attempt to finally calculate Soviet losses during World War II.  It will be a large number, but it will just be a number.  Such a scale is necessary to witness in some way or another.  This is a story of stumbling upon the sort of thing that words and numbers will always fall short of describing.

It was three days after my arrival.  I had been enjoying the respite of a classically Russian birch forest after my other walks through blocks of Kruschevnikis and industrial wastelands when i popped out onto a sidewalk.  Ahead was the tricolor flying at half mast.  I wondered what might have happened in the three days i’d been cut off from the outside world.  Then i saw two suspiciously clean buildings.  I approached, turning between them.

Street smarts: C is for cookie

Vasilevsky Ostrov

Robin taught me how to use the scanner, so until i get off my sorry ass and get my negatives digitized i can at least make reasonible reproductions of the prints i still possess.  And since i’ve had Russia on my mind…

Street smarts: the African alphabet song

The most beautiful rendition of the alpahbet song you will ever here.

Sundays with uncle-God momma: wash your bowl

An adept asked his master, “I have finished my breakfast, what shall I do?”  “Wash your bowl” was the reply.  To eat in a Zen monastery is both sustenance and ritual.  Like the tea ceremony’s elevation of the mundane to the sublime, it becomes the prayer rather than being prefaced by the prayer.  Simple fare served under the rule of take what you’ll eat and eat what you take.  And when your meal is finished, wash your bowl.  First you pour a small amount of water onto your plate and carefully scrape the plate with the edge of your spoon; then you pour the water from the plate to your bowl and repeat the scraping.  Finally, you drink the wash water.  If all this seems like a waste of time it’s because you’re missing the point.

Open up the border

The AP reports that our comfortable shoed neighbors to the north are a little worried that our great big stimulus bill will end up hurting them.  They’re “optimistic” that Canada will get exempted from the “buy American” clauses written into the legislation.  If we’re legislating bumper sticker slogans now, then i have a list of other suggestions.  But the real worry is that when Canada threatens a trade war over America re-adopting protectionism there will be a backlash from the American public over the money that we’re borrowing going to foreign firms…

“Hey, watch it, that straitjacket pinches.”

Stolen poetry

The author looms above his page
and thinks it strange that at his age
he can not find the proper words
to describe his only world.
One would think that in a life
where no two snowflakes are alike
one would have a brilliant rhyme
for each and every bit of time.

~Neil Fallon, from The Yeti

And that about sums up the last couple of days.

Darth Vader meets Mel Brooks

Our illustrious leadership is haggling over the super-sized bailout like it was the end of the world.  My god, do you know how much money we’re talking about?  Actually, i do.  It’s roughly equal to what the Department of Defense spends every year.  And for those kind of duckets we get our ass kicked by guys wearing dress shoes without socks.  To make matters worse, we’re going stone broke in the process of losing to pick-up teams.  We can call ourselves the Harlem Globetrotters all day long but that don’t make it so.  I have no use for the American Empire, but if an Empire it shall be does it have to be such a half-assed failure of an empire?

Rock is for rednecks

Today i went to the gas station to get diesel for the tractor.  It was great and i got a dougnut and hot chocolate too.  But the real fun started when i drove away from the pump.  Turning onto the highway coincided with G&R’s “Patience” coming on  the classic rock station.  As any red blooded person of my age would, i turned it way up.  And pulling into the left turn lane i started to do an exaggerated, Axl Rose stage slide dance…from the waist up.  With a car next to me, i thought i should check and see if the occupants were pointing and laughing.  They weren’t.  They hadn’t even noticed my existence.  It was a crew cab construction company pickup with at least three guys in it.  The driver almost looked like he was whistling.  I double took.  He was whistling, and he was whistling the intro to “Patience”.  I bet that they all were.

The daily bitch

At least talk good for the radio

Today i heard an ad on the radio for a chiropractic clinic.  The narrator (apparently the chiropractor himself) was discussing the immune system benefits of chiropractic care.  “As a result of chiropractic care there is fewer colds.”  And then again, “With chiropractic there is fewer ear infections.”  Ok, i’ll cut some slack for barely being able to speak one’s own language in daily life.  But if you’re going to pay to have it broadcast with your name attached, at least have the god-damned self respect to have something as simple as is/are correct.  How many people reviewed that text before it was finalized as the commercial?  I picture a  big debate with “is fewer colds” winning  democratically.

One thing’s for sure, i’m not going to any doctor who can’t formulate a simple sentence.

What’s the point of having a personal blog if you can’t publicize the things that make you punch the steering wheel and grit your teeth?  And so i’m instituting “The daily bitch”.  If i’m uncommonly lucky i’ll be skipping some days here and there.  If life proceeds as normal i promise to select only one bitch per day.

It was bound to happen

I’ve been pretty lucky with avalanche play this year, and there’s been a bumper crop of avalanches this winter.  A few exciting moments but nothing truly scary…until today.  We have one house that’s kind of set apart from the other, and with this much snow it’s also a pain in the ass to get to.  From a distance it has looked ok (in terms of snow weight); it should be better than the others since it’s built on an East-West axis, meaning that it’s full length is exposed to the South.  But since i was doing a little house clearing i figured that i’d take a closer look.  Good thing too, because that house was coming down soon.  There was enough weight that individual bows were starting to bend (2.5″ galvanized steel pipe).  The wind was blowing and the whole damned house would rock and sway with every gust.

The Bronze Horseman

I think that this is the best picture i have ever taken, though i don’t think that the scan does it full justice.  It was about 2am in St. Petersburg on a summer night.  Pyotr I (Peter the Great) as immortalized by Cathrine II (The Great).

Crazy-evil-monkey-boy

Kim Jong-il is many things: devilishly stylish, a man of mystery, a ring side titan of international politics, and the sort of guy who has to fence his own admiring senior citizens into their unheated, foodless nursing homes.  His periodic lobbing of a Taepodong-2 over Japan always garners the media attention that he craves.  One would assume that launches (rumor has it that one’s coming up) would send shivers of fear down the spines of S. Koreans.  One would be wrong.  A whole lot of them half-hope that Kim will aim one straight at Tokyo.

His stylish eye wear not withstanding, Kim’s a piece of work and he’s gone on a real tear of saber rattling lately.  Lee Myung-bak should send Suzie (sorry, Suzie, i can’t remember your real name) to do the negotiating.  She’d saunter up to Kim all sweetness and 5 year old girl light, a big smile stretched across her face.  Then there’d be a maniacal glint in her eye and she’d look at him and say, “You crazy-evil-monkey-boy!”  Which would be followed by a quick punch to the nuts and a frightening cackle.

300 fingers for Bible thumbing

Holy Shit!  They found Jesus’s Bible and the folks over at the Rapture Ready forums, at least some of them, are already convinced that this is just one more easter egg laid down by God to let us know that the end times are right around the corner.

Ok, so it’s not Jesus’s actual Bible and the whole stink is being caused by the police in Cyprus declaring that the book they found in raiding an antiquities dealer could be 2,000 years old.  The world of Biblical archeology is neat stuff except that it’s generally ruined by people needing to find proof for their belief.  The practice goes all the way back to Constantine sending his mommy off in search of the True Cross and her subsequent population of European cathedrals with relics.  Jesus must have had like 300 fingers.

Street smarts: The party line

Now that’s more like it

After all the days of cold and snow and sweat and labor, yesterday began the task of bringing spring to the community.  Not that all the other stuff is over, but at least it’s now spiced up with trying to find another couple of square inches to put more life into the biodomes standing against the snowbanks.

There really isn’t much better than forcing yourself out of bed on a late winter morning, shivering to work, and then sliding open one of the greenhouse doors to enter a world of green at 70 degrees.  The To Do list is long and growing, when a FedEx truck is liable to show up at any time and drop of boxes containing hundreds and hundreds of plants.  So the only thing to do is tuck in and find them a home in some dirt.

Yesterday was 6120 geranium cuttings into plug trays.  Today will be as many hanging baskets as we can manage.  Every couple of days another greenhouse will “open” (heat turned on, plants finding a home) until the little sliver of Marquette where i spend the bulk of my time will be an island of spring in a sea of winter.

It’s the biggest fringe benefit of my job: enjoying spring while my fellow citizens are slogging through the end times of cold and cabin fever.

Luo’s dung beetle blues

“We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion [$1,000bn-$2,000bn] . . .we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.”

Those being the words of one Mr. Luo Ping, a director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission.  We can take some cold comfort in the fact that China will continue to lend us the money to give to the wizards who bet the house and lost.  The Chinese are like the wife of a gambling addict, withdrawing the money from her bag lady fund so that the husband can place one more bet…and maybe, hopefully, win the house back.  Mr. Luo doesn’t leave much to the imagination; there’s nothing there except seething resentment.  It’s hard to blame him.  How many people knowingly invest in a money losing scheme?

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil

This is pure insanity.  Apparently Mr. Baker didn’t read the CBO report that he uses to back up his assertions.  His basic thesis is don’t worry about social security because the report says that everything will be fine just as it is for the next twenty years.  Of course the comment thread cheers him on, because Social Security is the abortion of the left.  It’s a litmus test, and failure to pass it leads to excommunication.  Baker goes on to suggest that because a whole bunch of boomers got their equity and investment portfolio wiped out, they deserve to have the next twenty years of SS benefits no matter what.  It’s only fair.  Whoever told Dean Baker that life was fair?

Sundays with Uncle-God Momma: the baseball diamond sutra

I remember childhood afternoons at Tiger Stadium.  The smells, the sounds.  The Game.  And the old men who followed it through cryptic pencil notation in their programs.  Baseball was perhaps a pastime for a slower age.  Transistor radios captured the game in its glory years, but even those are unnecessary for the orthodox baseball fan.  A small box of numbers convey the entirety of the story; a page of boxes contains a whole day and the season to date.  Numbers.  It’s a game of mathematics, where situational percentages and probabilities determine strategy and describe results.  But on the field the game is far deeper.  On the field, baseball is the game of zen.

Street Smarts: the amazing Mumford

Street Smarts: Kermit and Gladys switch places

Busy, busy

I feel bad for not having put anything new, word wise, up in a few days.  I’ve got plenty of ideas but not as much time and energy…plus it may be time to break down and buy a second computer.

The stream of infant plants into the greenhouses is quickly moving from a trickle into a deluge.  They all need homes and to be put into those homes.  Petunias, bidens, some million bells, and a variety of others have arrived…mostly destined for hanging baskets.  We’ve always got the most amazing hanging baskets (pretty cheap too, considering) because we start them so early.  By the time Memorial Day comes around (generally the earliest that plants can be set out here), our 12″ petunia baskets are monsters.  Sticky, annoying monsters…but the customers love ‘em.

But the best news is that the begonias have started arriving.  I love begonias, both the classic bedding variety and those used as houseplants.  I have a cane begonia with giant leaves speckled by metallic silver polkadots.  Usually i take a leftover plug or two home and keep them in the house to get some early flowers…and i had planned on doing some breeding this winter but just never got around to it.

Rumor has it that we’re to be buried in snow again over the next few days.  We’ll see, i don’t believe weatherpeople until i see it with my own two eyes.  In a way it would be for the best, as the dog sled races are this weekend and our previous winter wonderland was degraded by the near week of 40 degree temps.

Aquaboogie

Knock, knock

And today’s weather report for the Great White North is greatly white, bordering on insanity.  It might have snowed all day, but the 35+ mph winds make it hard to tell exactly what’s new and what’s just moving from place to place.  Visibility – if you really want to call it that – varies between “hey, it’s white” and “where am i?”.  I’ll have to fix a 5′x8′ fence gate that caught a gust and got blown apart and off the post.  And i made one turn on the way home by figuring that it was about where i always turn. (Boldness is in direct propotion to ground clearance, disregarding the ability to drive all four wheels.)

Beauty and philosophy after the break…

A for effort

This just in, America’s youth are a bunch of narcissitically self-entitled little snots.  I’m thinking of an anti-drug commercial right now.  Can you guess which one?

The paper of record (Max Roosevelt), tells me that universities are dealing with “grade disputes” and that the probable cause is “student expectation”.  In other words, “My grades aren’t as high as I think they should be, so we have a dispute.”  Really, it isn’t fair.  You work, like, really really hard all semester.  Ya know, like, going to every class and even reading all of the books that the professor assigns.  You couldn’t possibly, like, receive, like, a C for that.  You even took the time to learn how to use an apostrophe and everything.

We’ll get Grampa Bud’s statement out of the way early, “Who ever told you that life was fair?”

Only in the UP

This one’s going out to Jeff.  Today at the gas station i saw some Superior surfers…strange sight, guys probably finishing up a day of surfing with windchills into the negative numbers.  But these guys were a strange sight all around.

First, they were driving a Lincoln Town Car (mid 90’s or so) hearse.  Not only were they driving a hearse, it had a brush guard and KC lights on the frong.  It was also bedecked with decals of hibiscus flowers.  And there were four surf boards strapped to the top.  There was also a snowmobile on a trailer connected to the back of the hearse.

Like i said, only in the UP.

Street smarts: two-headed monster surprise

Money talks

A handful of human rights NGO’s are up in arms because Madame Secretary Clinton is not going to beat China up over human rights abuses during her upcoming visit.  The State Department announced that human rights would be “an important issue” for Clinton but that she would be careful to only raise this important issue when “appropriate”.  Groups like Amnesty International believe that only the United States has the power to move China on the issue of human rights, so to hear that Madame Secretary will only discuss them as an aside when the important talking wraps up strikes the human rights campaigners as defeat.  It probably is defeat.  And while the upset is understandable, it stems from an inability to connect dots outside their specific area of concern.

Change

This (and several variatons on the theme) is available as a T-shirt here zazzle storefront, and the explanation for the idea/where the money goes is here.

Ignavus populus

“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, a nation of cowards.”  ~AG Eric Holder

A quote like this is always guaranteed to unleash a shit-storm, and even those who agree with the sentiment which provoked the statement are likely to suggest that actually saying it was in-artful…at best.  It wasn’t a slip of the tongue.  Holder’s recent statement about ending federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California attest to his ability at making artful statements.  Clinton’s old point-man in the war on reefer made it more than clear that he was only following the big-boss man’s orders concerning the federal raids, not his own beliefs.  So what was he trying to accomplish?

Always look on the bright side of life

Some say that the glass is half-full.  Some are ruefull that it is half-empty.  The bitter truth remains: the stupid glass is twice as big as it needs to be.  Optimist.  Pessimist.  Pessimist who has embraced his pessimism.  But where do these outlooks originate?  If it’s a conscious decision, i.e. will power, then the pessimist may argue that the optimist is deluding himself; furthermore, the optimist can argue that the pessimist is ruining everything on purpose.  The high priests of pharmacology consider the issue to be one of brain chemistry, fixable with the elixirs of better living through chemistry.  It may well be further out of our hands that, at least if preliminary research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B turns out to be correct.

How about this?

Image credit: Greta Oto

More

The only hole we’ll dig ourselves out of

The economy is in free fall; peanut butter has become a deadly killer; and you’re worried about the fate of the planet due to our collective, environmental profligacy.  What you’re looking for is a silver bullet, an elegant solution that addresses multiple problems.  Well, by God, Eleanor Roosevelt has an answer for you.  Long considered a quaint relic of American history, her decision to dig up a portion of the White House lawn is being dusted off and discussed beyond the confines of hippie communes and Whole-Food stores.  The Victory Garden has found a new home on page 36 of The Economist (2/28 – 3/6 2009) and managed to nibble into a little bit of concrete outside the USDA headquarters in Washington.  Just in time for the season of seed catalogs and the yearly perfection of mental gardening.

Power player

Those Americans who’ve spent any significant time overseas know what’s it like to be embarrassed by their fellow innocents abroad.  There’s not much worse than being accosted for spare change outside of Amsterdam’s Central Station by a fellow American in vagrant residence; or, a summer stroll down Salzburg’s Getreidegasse only to be confronted by an obese American wearing blindingly white shoes and a sweatshirt emblazoned with a sequined representation of Old Glory…using a walkie-talkie to loudly arrange a meeting at the McDonald’s.

And then there’s our Secretary of State, managing to take the cliche of Dumb-ugly American to new heights where the only solace is to place your head in your hands and weep.

Sundays with Uncle-God Momma: Sita sings the blues

Myth serves as an individual path into the collective unconscious.  It is a means to attain at-one-ment with the greater forces that affect the individual life.  That is, it informs life by putting it into context.  We often disdain myth because it generally portrays less than perfect gods (and goddesses), whereas what we call religion rests on an assumption of divine perfection.  How quaint it is to see the Springeresque antics of Zeus chasing women and Hera chasing Zeus, no wonder the Olympians fell out of favor to be replaced by a single, all-seeing, all-knowing God of perfection.  But which set of beliefs would do an individual more psychological good when faced with infidelity?

Street Smarts: rubber ducky

#1 on the Billboard Top 40 in 1971

The profits of doom

Have you ever wondered what happens when you take a really, really dumb idea and run with it?  Not just run with it for a few steps either, run with it for nearly three decades until it becomes the foundation for the decision making process throughout the business world.  Look around.  This, right now, is what happens when you run with a really dumb idea for that long.

Who’s there?

As it turns out, i got a little sun today.  It seems too early for the “second knock” (in the Russian system of predicting when spring will come to stay…”Spring must knock three times before Winter lets it in.”)  Maybe counting the February thaw was wrong, but it was a week of warm temperatures…too much to discount.  The forecast looks pleasant ten days out – with some spots of around freezing highs – and the low pressure front looks like it’s running north of the Lake.

I guess we’ll see, but given that my face took on some color after today it is probably time to lose the beard.  Fucker’s hot in a greenhouse and methinks that a beard tan would be a strange way to start the year.

I can hope that we’re into the second knock, even considering that in these parts winter usually slams the door when it finally does leave.

The greenhouses are filling up, and these sunny days mean pretty amazing growth.  It has been hot enough in the houses over the last few afternoons that the doors need to be flung open and (in some cases) fans turned running.  Outside, however, tis the season of mud.  That’s life, eh?  To hear the birds pretty well makes up for the puddle jumping.