HOMEGROWN HEROES

Another awesome post by Driftglass, on his third anniversary, well worth reading for any blogger wanting to get real about life around us, as opposed to the lickspittle of the mainstream media, in a discussion of Raymond Chandler’s inspiring challenge,

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

This so inspired me as to think linking a few quotes in conversation making sense over centuries may home in on the value of the independent thinking individuals in this world of headless chickens.

“My greatest skill has been to want but little.”

“The real measure of our wealth is how much we'd be worth if we lost all our money.”

“You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.”

“In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.”

“Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”

“As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more.”

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

“The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.”

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”

I have begun to perceive the possibility that Barak Obama represents a chance for change like we may never get again if we let McCain win “Bush’s third term.” Perhaps he is such an individual as these folks are talking about:—

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.”

“There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify—so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.”

“To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers - or both.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Quoted
Individuals
-Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
-John Henry Jowett, preacher (1864-1923)
-H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
-John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)
-Arthur Koestler, novelist and journalist (1905-1983)
-Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)
-Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
-Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)
-Gary Zukav, author (1942- )
-Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and painter (1930-1965)
Heroic Individuals
-Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)
- John Keats, Letter - 3 May 1819
-Elizabeth Charles, writer (1828-1896)
-Charles Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)

350

H/T Burbanmom

I LIKE BIRDS

I like to imagine the process of evolution refining the genetic memory that causes the Bird of Paridise to get such an erection. And man believes himself to be the peeknuckle of suffistication.

The next one is longer but worth it for examples of specialization of this amazing species.

I LIKE DRUMS

http://view.break.com/390558 - Watch more free videos

HE READS MY FORMLESS THOUGHTS …

…and puts them together with more justified vitriol than I've yet managed. For anyone not yet aware of the big picture that gives our latest thugs in office the balls to be so incompetently obvious and obviously incompetent, check out my favorite political analyst, Driftglass, with his latest post, Plus Change. And do we still question whether these guys are above orchestrating the death of 3,000 on 9/11. They've passed the 1,004,000 mark, ostensibly exacting vengeance for it! And we still let them claim to represent us with, "SO!"

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I have herewith decided that my politically motivated posts will be totally derivative of the outstanding political posts gleaned in my masochistic mastication of information from the front lines of the war between the mass media and my Political Animals blogroll to see who can lay it down clearly enough to get sleeping dogs on their hind legs. I have back-researched posts by most of the authors contributing to each of these blogs and have found sufficient integrity in their dealing with the facts for me to retire from the headache of back checking them further when I refer to a recent eloquent, relevant, poignant, important post whose consideration could benefit everyone … maybe.

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That said, I must remark that in a survey of both the mainstream and intertube inputs, we are seeing a reenactment of the Pharisees and the Prophet in watching the Jabbalike establishment making massively clumsy, obviously defensive moves against this Jesuslike rabble rousing upstart who has dared to talk about possibilities outside the invisible prison and dared people to change themselves rather than remain addicted to the status quo being pushed by an exploitive system. Obama's biggest flaws, like his foreign policy advisers, his lack of protest during the marginalization of the candidates during the debates, his lack of speaking about the most immanent threat for anyone; the environmental crises — these I am almost willing to grant him in the spirit of playing the game just to get in the door. Anyway, where would one find a foreign policy adviser who hasn't been part of a bully regime? They all have been!

NATURE'S FRIENDS AND FOES

James Hansen ——————————————————Al Gore

I have a love/hate attitude toward Al Gore. His reputation as an environmentalist was the only bright light in the ‘92 elections. His inactivity or foiled effectiveness during his eight year term saw his implied promise go the way of all campaign promises. Dr. James Hansen's revelation of the role of man in global warming began being censored under Gore's eight year watch and continued more restrictively under Bush. His wooden refusal to mention any of Bush’s business debacles and gubernatorial goofs during his own presidential campaign assured the commander in thief we’ve had for the past seven years.

And then, after leaving what I grant may have been the stultifying bureaucratic red tape of our behemoth, profit motivated government, he surfaces with a report on his collation of world wide climate data and expertise to announce what everyone knows but many cannot afford to believe if they are going to maintain the life style they have worked so hard to mimic and inflict on the world and call it “making their mark”, usually a scar. We are shitting in our nest, we’re burning the slats off the house for a fire to keep from freezing, we are monkeying with the life support system of our space ship with no idea how it works, we’re taking stomach upset medicine in the drive-in line because we know we are ordering the kids favorite poison. Whatever metaphor one cares to make of our environmental crisis, none is as dire as the reality of our predicament.

I guess this is the essence of why I’m pissed at Gore today — he identified the entire crisis with its least obvious, most debatable probability: global warming. While the rape of rain forests, pollution of rivers and oceans, poisoning of the earth with insecticides and chemical fertilizers, genetically manipulating food, extermination of biodiversity and contamination of our breathing by petroleum usage are obvious and undeniable with no less dire consequences for life on earth, everyone is arguing global warming. If we address the sure things, the probabilities of the more subtle catastrophe will diminish at the source.

I recommend today’s Democracy Now broadcast for the inside story of the inundation of the white house politicization of all branches of the scientific community to censor environmental connection to the oil industry.

I just got my copy of Path through Infinity’s Rainbow and am impressed with its comprehensive accounting of the “perfect storm” of political, environmental, energy and economic crises contributing to a peak made unavoidable by the investment of the ruling elite in the oil industry for generations. His ideas for surviving to the other side of the collapses remain to be read, but I will definitely keep you up to date with its insights.

HUMMINGBUG SEASON

Meet Bah! the hummingbug

I met Bah! last April during the week long blooming of the yellow jasmine on the south wall of my potting shed and mentioned him in the post Us and Them. Well he's back for the blooms again this spring. The yellow jasmine and the white jasmine on the north side are blooming three to four weeks earlier than last year, just as the last of the yellow flowers fall onto the garden path the white blossoms make of my little haven a greenhouse gas chamber, so thick is their perfume as to gag with my face in them.

Bah! waited, or I just didn't see him earlier, until yesterday to reap the bounty of the white jasmine's nectar, which I caught this time on video, so expectant was I. I still don't know what he/she is and, curiously, I am not that curious now that I have made a cursory search of the entomology. I'll just let him be my little unicorn until some spoil sport injects some facts into the fairy tale. Until very close examination Bah! might be the smallest species of hummingbird — their looks and flight and drinking habits are spot on. The background music is from a concert piece called Street Music written for harmonica and played by Corky Segal, which I was virtually powerless to keep from being the soundtrack.

The return of Bah! the hummingbug

WHAT HE SAYS

This talk by Douglas Adams is as close to my view of religion as anything I've heard. My only addendum would be that the advantage we gained by our creative tool making began to turn against us when the god-in-our-image-therefore-we in-god's-image idea convinced mankind that the energy being however manipulated through the tool need not be that of the employer (mini-god) himself, ie. slavery, monarchy, fire arms, remote control, fuel consumption. Any tool that further removed us from the nature of our actions for the pleasure of effortless convenience has accelerated the evaporation of the puddle as surely as the artificially fed overpopulation's belief in it's exceptionality to the ways of nature.

CANARY GAGS ON VAPORS

Unremitting Failure, in his own inimitable wit, so dry as to be depressing sometimes, just blogged about his reluctance to serve jury duty for a system calling itself justice that has yet to impeach Bush and he gave me a wonderful new idea that could be implemented before the elections. No, it’s not my foolproof method of voting over the internet using our social security numbers as passwords to a free-for-all voting booth, its better than that.

The two Democrats, or the Republican for that matter, could garner a large portion of virgin voters like me, who still constitute the majority of eligible voters if they included a commitment to prosecution and conviction of the Bush/Cheney cabal as seriously and more thoroughly than the Nuremberg trials did the Nazis. There is a surge in the number of voters showing up in the primaries merely due to the anxiety produced by the Bush administration over the past seven and a half years with no one promising more than the same ole same ole change hoped for forever. If someone would promise the prosecution of the criminals who usurped our government there would be some stampedes at the polls no rigging could counteract. How ‘bout it Barak? Hillary? John? Lookin’ for a landslide?

Nah. That would be a promise no one would be able to backslide on and I don’t trust any of these candidates further than their party/corporate leash. Obama is by far the strongest potential for a betterment of the union these states are supposed to be in, but he is not a democratic person. He is a charismatic leader with the debating skills of a ninja fending off opponents’ slings and arrows which emperically supersedes the years of failed experience the others have had and he is accused of lacking, but he is not a democratic person. No one left in the race is truly democratic because none of them objected to corporate marginalization of the candidates who talked off the official agenda. Such as pooh poohing Paul over pot. Or laughing at Kuchinich when he admitted to seeing UFOs, while it is the government cover up of just such existences that is the key to unlocking operations so secret even the president cannot know that are affecting policies beyond the power of the vote to change. The simple logic that giving free health care to everyone would be more affordable than supporting the bureaucracy that filters admissions got these corporate shills shivering from the insurance company monkeys on their backs and the raw anarchistic socialism of it all. It ain’t gonna happen from the top down, never in a million years.

But like grass through the sidewalk, we are here growing along the natural curve toward the light. The internet enlightens me as to advances against the status quo in life style and technology toward a smaller foot print and a more informed existence. I see the isolation of the individual at the keyboard as an antidote to the negative effects on our social instinct by overpopulation and its inherent devaluation of life through the capitalism of pop culture. Everyone with a blog roll has chosen their tribe. Welcome to mine, not a mean bone in a one of ‘em.

THE JUST

Jorge Luis Borges

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A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

TODAY'S SUN SPRINGS SPROUTS

This morning the sun crossed a point in the sky and the branches of Donna's tree which, this year, means warm enough soil for sprouts, as seen so gloriously sprung below after anxious, tardy days since seeding. It could be a month different some years, but this is how lore is accumulated, and the position of the sun is part of the new lore of my garden. Next week I am expecting the first toad chorus for the year during the new moon, as has happened the past two years.

Caulitomapepocab in varying abundance.

Onions and squash-in-a-cage for protection from the dastardly borer moth.

Sundown the same day, the spread looking southwest

THIS IS NEWS?