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I dream of a Star Trek world. This think tank will focus on creative actions designed to initiate a global paradigm shift towards a world where racism, poverty and war will be a thing of the past.
This is a photograph
taken by Apollo 8 at the moon
Enlarge the image
and experience that feeling
when they saw their preciouslifeboat
Peace is a word
Of the sea and the wind.
Peace is a bird who sings
As you smile.
Peace is the love
Of a foe as a friend;
Peace is the love you bring
To a child
Searching for me
You look everywhere,
Except beside you.
Searching for you
You look everywhere,
But not inside you.
Peace is a stream
From the heart of a man;
Peace is a man,
whose breadth
Is the dawn.
Peace is a dawn
On a day without end;
Peace is the end, like death
Of the war.
Words by Peter Sinfield from a song by King Crimson
Flamboyant bouquet thrills
In color bursts and sunshine
Leaning into the sky
Dancing in tune with the breeze
Petal shedding with cool moon change
In unison, bouquet sighs
Rain splish-splash drip-drops
Swirls, twirls, and slides down from the sky
Pools in puddles and slimes into mud
Rivets of rivers run down the hillside
A mountain of droplets unleashed all at once
Together they depart; together they shone
A flock of birds flies in overhead
Bunches of ants all scrounging for food
Lions, gazelles, and antelope herd
And sparrows each year convene all at once
Learning and hunting, storytelling for all
Community structured love orientation
Human boy sits alone in his yard
Plucks grass blades in batches of fives
Interprets clouds as they each pass him by
Sighs ever so sadly, and all to himself
Pours concrete resolve into heartfelt foundation
Depending on no one for fun’s exaltation
He grew older while he stood there all alone
Surrounded by ones all arranged into twos
Boy built a big house on foundation he started
Filled it with things and then called it a home
Interprets himself in shiny glass mirror
Feels saddened, alone, and afraid of the dark
At some point, we lost it:
This lesson of life - the reason for life
Broken hearted and blinded and dying from pain
Outreaching is hollow, a hug is the same
Unlike all the flowers and creatures and stars
We’ve forgotten how to let “ours” simply be ours.
I'm getting bored
Being part of mankind
There's not a lot to do no more
This race is a waste of time
People rushing everywhere
Swarming around like flies
Think I'll buy a forty four
Give them all a surprise
chorus
Think I'm gonna kill myself
Cause a little suicide
Stick around for a couple of days
What a scandal if I died
Yeah I'm gonna kill myself
Get a little headline news
I'd like to see what the papers say
On the state of teenage blues
A rift in my family
I can't use the car
I gotta be in by ten o'clock
Who do they think they are
I'd make an exception
If you want to save my life
Brigitte Bardot gotta come
And see me every night
[repeat chorus]
This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed at home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none...
And this little piggy is an example
of what chemical and toxic pollution
is doing to biological life forms,
meaning us, the cause of it all,
we are the little guinea piggies,
and we will be the ones that go...
"Wee wee wee" all the way home.
(read more)
The United States has 4.6% of the worlds population and nearly 25% of the worlds prisoners......what's wrong with this picture?
In 1983 Corrections Corporation of America founded the private corrections industry. Despite having been outlawed nationally for over a century, private prisons have been turned into a money making proposition. Traded daily on the stock exchange, the profit for prisoners business is growing by leaps and bounds, incarceration rates have soared. Should this be a for-profit business?
The continued prohibition of legalized marijuana provides a convenient source of fodder for the prison-industrial complex. An American is arrested for pot every 38 seconds. Since 1965, more than 20 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana offenses, 90 percent of them for simple possession.
Keith Stroup, Executive Director of NORML said "In fact, the war on drugs is largely a war on pot smokers. This effort is a tremendous waste of criminal justice resources that should be dedicated toward combating serious and violent crime, including the war on terrorism."
And despite baby boomers being in charge in recent years, annual pot busts have tripled since the non-inhaling Bill Clinton took office. The total number of marijuana arrests far exceeds the total number of arrests for all violent crimes combined, including murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
It isn’t only marijuana consumers who want to see weed legalized. (None other than William F. Buckley was for it.) Ending prohibition is also a popular cause for at least 10,000 cops, narcs, judges, and others who make up the membership of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
From LEAP’s down-and-dirty perspective, prohibition exacerbates rather than ameliorates America’s drug problem. Prohibition not only diverts resources from the pursuit of more-serious crimes, it empowers criminals and enhances black-market incentives. Money spent fighting what adults seem to want could be better allocated toward education and rehab.
It is well known that alcohol and tobacco related health effects and deaths by far eclipse any detrimental effects of occasional recreational marijuana use by adults. Common sense would tell you that, if anything, alcohol and tobacco should be prohibited and marijuana should be legalized.
The benifits of legalizing pot would be a double-triple-whammy in that it could create a substantial amount of wealth for farmers and industry, increase revenue through the regulation and taxation of hemp and marijuana sales, it would free up much needed police and judicial resources, put a significant dent in the income of criminal black-market forces, it would keep non-violent consumers out of jail, and create a sustainable resource that could replace many of the items now made of plastic.
The Marijuana Policy Project advocates taxing and regulating the possession and sale of cannabis, arguing that a regulated industry would separate purchasers from the street market for cocaine, heroin, and other hard drugs. You can't legislate morality, adults should be allowed the freedom to pursue their ideal of happiness as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Legalizing marijuana would be a fabulous way to "Go Green!" There's no reason we shouldn't legalize pot, it's just a plant.
(excerpts from Kathleen Parker and skeptically.org)
I’m sitting in the hot springs, having another late night discussion with Gregg, a psychiatrist from Ann Arbor (U of M). He’s doing research for a book he’s writing that claims that we humans are not the most intelligent species on earth. At best, we come in a distant third .. whales and dolphins are much smarter. In fact, he says jokingly, whales evolved wireless Internet millions of years before Al Gore .. they communicate with each other by sending ‘sonar messages’ that can be heard by other whales in any ocean on the planet. Back at the cabin, he shows me 8 by 10 glossy photos of a whale’s brain. Pretty impressive I say (once he explains what I’m looking at). They have a much larger, and more convoluted, cerebral cortex than we do. I ask him if that’s because they have much more body area to control. He says no, very little of it is ‘motor cortex’ .. those functions were distributed to areas outside the whale’s brain a long long time ago. Now humans, he believes, operate from a much lower part of the brain .. what’s known as the ‘reptilian brain’ .. and that’s what drives our’ rational brain’ .. not the other way around .. as we would like to think. He goes on to tell me that these lower brain areas assign ‘addresses’ that link ‘powerful emotions’ to information entering memory. That’s why we remember what other people tell us much better than what we read in books. I sit fascinated by all of this. Afterwards, he gives me a book called ‘Up from Dragons’ by Dorion Sagan, the son of the late Carl Sagan. I remember reading ‘Dragons of Eden’ in college and was fascinated then too. Gregg has been one of the most interesting parts of this trip. I tell him so the next morning, and we hug before he disappears down highway one. I must remember to send him a copy of “Defending the Cavewoman” when I get home.
Overhead, crows are shouting ..and drowning out the music on my deck. I look up and see them clustered in the trees and scenes from the Hitchcock movie ‘The Birds’ flash by and I feel a twinge of ‘can that happen here’. Something tells me no so I howl back at them. There’s a momentary pause as they lift off .. cluster in another group of trees ..and crank up the volume. Crows are not my bird of choice to take with me if I ever had to live on a deserted island. I start reading an article in the news about future space colonies on the moon ..and mistake the term ‘reconnaissance orbiter’ for ‘renaissance orbiter’. For some reason, I think the word renaissance is more fitting. Then a movie scene from early-childhood comes to mind (from before we walked on the moon) .. where one of the astronauts goes crazy ..breaks away from the pack ..crosses over to the ‘sunny side’ and immediately disintegrates and turns into a skeleton. I cringe when I think about packing the kids and the dog and moving there. Now I'm worried that everything I know comes from either the movies or television shows.
Have you seen the stars tonight ..they remind me that we live on a lunar colony ..and not the oppressed state of some god forsaken planet. The colonies are not safe from tyranny either, I remind her .. the ones on Saturn were once free-states. I know, she says ..that’s why I like it here ..hydroponic gardens and you can practice revelry without persecution ..you know, I don’t even miss home that much. Where’s home ? In the Euripides. Oh yeah, I see what you mean ..I remember the witch hunts of November, 2023 .. are you ever afraid of something like that happening here ? All the time, she says. If it does ..I think I’ll stowaway on a starship to Europa ..I hear they’re much more civilized there ..it’s an incubator of free ideas ..and the mother of all creatures ..they live in the lapis lazuli realm, you know ..not just the temporary worlds of hungry ghosts and empire builders ..the waters of life have been flowing freely on Europa ..since the beginning ..and I think they will keep on flowing free thru eternity.
Your world is confusing
and imploding around you
you want to do something
but you don't know what
I know you feel lost
join the crowd
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"
that is all Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know.
...John Keats...
Shortly after midday on 16 January 1958, a series of photographs were taken from a ship anchored off Trindade Island, about 650 miles from the coast of Brazil.
The photographer, a Brazilian named Almiro Barauna, claimed to have seen a dark grey object approach the island, fly behind a mountain peak and then turn around and head back the way it came, disappearing at high speed over the horizon.
The object glittered and was surrounded by a green mist, and it displayed an undulating motion, changing to a tilted position as it passed over the island. On board the ship with Barauna were some 300 other crew, and around 50 of them are claimed to have seen the object.
April 11, 2008
Unbridled capitalism
is a money machine
that will eat you alive,
kill the monster.
http://www.americanhealthcarereform.org/