Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Money on the brain is a disease.

St John Hunt, son of Watergate Hunt, who (if my memory is correct) received death confession from his dad re involvement in JFK's killing, (again, if my memory serves me) played a part in keeping the computer election stealers from again stealing the national presidential election by exposing the plot. I don't mean to be pejorative, but the "rats" jumped the burning ship, and so we still don't have it in common knowledge that our election machines are hackable.

Save ya seeds

Seed Swap and Seed Saving Discussion
Oct28Thu 6:30 PM
Jewish Community Center 5738 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh
"Please enter the building from the garage entrance or Darlington street and sign in at the desks. We will be in Room 202 the Goldstein Lounge."
Who's hosting? Jeff Newman and Katrina...
swapping seeds and sharing our collective knowledge about seed saving. Bring any seeds you have to share...Even if you don't have any seeds to share please feel free to come and learn about seed saving. Some people might even be kind enough to give away seeds instead of swapping...
Katrina: People coming to this Meetup should bring some little baggies, envelopes or some other container to take their seeds home in. Just a heads up. See you all soon! :)
Jeff Newman: My heirloom bush beans are ready! I let the plants dry out and I have a ton of seeds to swap.

Monday, October 18, 2010

We need a sense of history

We can change

For all our talk and action about going green, for the most part we're still on the fossil fuel path to extinction, basically the same path the dinosaurs took. But that doesn't mean the situation's hopeless. Wonderful new inventions are coming online and can be used to help us get to the new age of power generation via respect for Nature and new understanding of our role in Creation. Yes, it's not going to be the same in a lot ways, but we'll actually feel even more at home with the changes to come because we've already strayed far from the home we come from. What am I talking about? No less than the ideal Earth we each secretly desire. No, we don't know its details, but it does exist in the future IF we are willing to work for it. A world without all those things that plague us now - war, competition, fear, pain, confusion, disease, trouble. A better life awaits close by, only needing all to agree to love.

I know that sounds whacky. I've been called daft before, but I've been right before. Do you know there have been people worried about the ozone layer since the Sixties? They were ridiculed for being, "out in the ozone," as if there was no such thing as the ozone layer and anybody who talked about it had a string loose in the cabeza if you know what I mean. But it turned out there really was an ozone layer, and it's really important for life on Earth, and we humans are still doing things that damage it.

I think life has meaning and we can learn. Things are always slowly getting better, though it sure doesn't show sometimes. Sometimes the improvement is just "spiritual" - an attitude adjustment that doesn't immediately show up in behavior. That's where I think we are today. We're developing a whole new ethic towards the Earth, each other, and all life. As the ecosystem collapses, we see we need life forms we either didn't even know existed or thought of as problems.

Actually, I'm trying to convince that we NEED to change, not just that we can. Some of the best scientists are struggling with what I guess you could call a controlled state of panic. Trained to look at not only the effects but also the causes of things, they increasingly concur that the planet is going in a direction of loss of what we define as life, both human and all the other species. The patterns and relationships between living things are in flux. No matter where you look you can see historic change. If you're young or have failing memory you won't notice, but life just isn't the same any more. Now I'm not trying to wallow in regrets and nostalgia for the past. I just want to point out a few things some of us have either forgotten or are too young to remember because we weren't alive when these things were.

It used to be that winter came slowly in this part of the world, and gradually. Living in West Virginia about thirty years ago, I remember an older man telling me the snow would just gradually start building up and stay throughout the winter and then gradually melt in the spring. I remember viewing a lecture on C-Span twenty some years ago a fellow in frustration trying to explain to his audience that global warming didn't just involve a seemingly minute average temperature increase on the surface of the Earth, but also involved more rapid temperature changes. "If you have your head in the oven and your feet in the freezer, your mean [average] temp doesn't mean a damn thing", he said. We are not living in the same world any more.

Author/activist Bill McKibben has coined a new word - Eaarth - to bring us to understand that things will never be the same. He purposely misspells the word Earth to emphasize things are not the same. His book is called Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. His website is http://billmckibben.com. I don't recommend reading him unless you have, as I do, a really positive attitude. I believe in miracles, both scientific and spiritual, and think we can pull this one (the fix all life is currently in) out of a hat so to speak. But I agree with him that it doesn't look good, at all. To the extent we are able to unite in transitioning to new technology which regenerates the ecosystem and rebalances Nature - and using our amazing and mushrooming capacity for communication - we will be able to salvage the good and preserve it for a new age and even better Earth. But it's going to take going outside of ourselves, with the inevitable risk and vulnerability of falling in love with all life rather than just our own.

We'll either open our doors to strangers or the changes will blow them open - our choice. The doors will open regardless.

The first step to learning is to be unafraid to admit you don't know something. The problems we're facing today force us to go back to the drawing board and figure out where we went wrong. If you're afraid of all bugs, for instance, maybe you need to check yourself. What drove you to designate this wonderful category of life as evil? Stop killing the bugs. Their part in Nature is just as important as yours. Stop buying into the fear hypotheses that have us going to war with others and even ourselves in vain attempt to destroy evil that isn't really there. Yes, terrible suffering has existed - caused by our acting in fear. We play a role in the creation of our enemies by our expecting them to BE enemies and acting on those expectations. Peace is only possible through love, and I love the BUGS SO LEAVE THEM THE HELL ALONE!

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

We oughta be fuckin ashamed

October 11, 2010
FROM: Charles Kernaghan
RE: Imprisoned Bangladeshi Labor Leader Freed Mr. Montu Ghosh, an important progressive trade union leader and lawyer in Bangladesh was released an hour ago on bail, after having spent 73 days in prison. Mr. Ghosh, who is 62 years old, was arrested after organizing large demonstrations in support of the garment workers demand for a 35-cent-an-hour minimum wage. For years, the minimum wage has stood at just 11 ½ cents an hour, leaving Bangladesh’s 3.5 million garment workers—80 percent of whom are women—trapped in abject misery. When the garment workers made the very modest demand for a 35-cent-an-hour wage, the multinational apparel companies blocked it. The companies told the workers they will not pay more than 21 cents an hour. This may be the largest women’s social justice struggle in the history of the world. Thanks everyone. Your solidarity worked!
http://nlcnet.org

Monday, October 04, 2010

Pittsburgh growing

A facebook conversation about sports:

..."Pittsburgh's a lonely town when you're the only football hater around...." (Sung to the tune of Beach Boys song "New York's a lonely town when you're the only surfer boy around......them's dangerous words ;-)...Gonna go watch dem Stillers now..... duhhh...football is the religion with the most followers...all that passion that could be diverted to cuddling, growing things, care for the worlds and each others well-being!...Just men (usually) playing with their balls (so what's new)...you are so right..what a terrible waste...in so many ways...not always..but perhaps all too often...Why didn't you drink the kool aid at the pep rally?12 hours ago ..Out in the woods with the electric kool aid...My former wife supported WAR: Women who Hate Rugby...it is almost "sinful" to speak these words in Pittsburgh...I have worried in the past about repercussions from saying these words aloud, here, where even my spiritual/artist/female housemate is downstairs screaming and cheering...but years of going to political demonstrations, smiling at the FBI camera dudes, experiencing the criminal justice system, friending dangerous people on FB has given me the courage to speak up on this, most undeservably sacred topic...my popularity, however, has plummeted...I feel the same way, sigh. i wear the jersey and pretend and wait for openings in conversation to drop crumbs of reality.. thats all they can handle at a time at this point anyway. Football isnt any fun any more for me...you wear the jersey?? What are you so afraid of? Oh yeah, being ostracized, I forgot. We must start a movement! Seriously, this town is so depressing when the Steelers play, there is no where to go to hide from it, and don't try to watch news for days (all year, really)... they have jersey day at work, i just started, i am very weird and trying to fit in. its not working anyway...Many in this culture have been brain washed into caring deeply about something that has no real consequence in our day to day life. The game reinforces the notion of competition and the war mentality while robbing people of real interaction that may actually matter...Steelers football is very tribal. we get colors and songs and a reason to get drunk and yell at people wearing different colors singing different songs, especially if its cleveland or baltimore. The men get to have fist fights up and down carson and vent their frustration and get to act macho and manly and everthing around it is commercialized and profiting off of the stupidity, like doritos doesnt make browns chips in ohio and pepsi doesnt care who wins the game stupid. Its a really nice jersey, and palamalu was my favorite, its just not the same anymore. football is only entertainment when your asleep...its just like ancient rome, there are slaves and gladiators, and both are nothing to the emperor...what you just said, and also above posts about wasted time, diverted good energy, misplaced enthusiasm...that is all so true, and a real symptom of our society's ills. The misplaced monetary energy is also huge, and the corruption of that, via gambling, steroid use, makes it all so sceptical anyway. Mobsters are all over those outcomes. And then the crumpled broken bodies...and they start breaking up as small children to aspire to billiondollar macho fame. Uh-oh, you got me started. I was just going to complain about feeling like a "lonely surfer boy" but underneath I am like a volcano of complaint about this industry and its cheerleaders...my mom gave it to me for christmas...The money that goes into diverting our attention into sports when I am certain the arts would enrich our lives in much more meaningful and beneficial ways is scary. It is truly about control...You do not want a society of free thinkers able to think abstractly and question the world and entertain themselves without a commercial exchange and rules.......They want us sitting, watching, and consuming...we cross-posted and I hadn't yet read your comments about tribalism, slaves and gladiators, but you are so right about that aspect of it too. Like street gangs, I kind of understand the historic aspect of the identification, group mentality, colors...our society too quickly became unmoored from earlier clannish, familial, geographic ties...and this vacuum opened up and is now being filled with junk..... the men running things know 3000% more psychology than the average joe. its like stomping on kittens easy for them and hilarious on top of that. I read some where that it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society. what a mad house carnival we are living in...your popularity may have plummeted with some, but it went up with others. I'm with you, got an article for the Hazelwood Homepage (I write a regular column) cut by the exec dir because i said the same type of thing. We're wasting precious time w/sports in a world being destroyed as the new age yearns to be. Didn't catch what you meant by "... Mobsters are all over those outcomes. And then the crumpled broken bodies...and they start breaking up as small children to aspire to billiondollar macho fame..."