the urge to merge

...the primary human motivations are...

...food, sleep and sex...

...feeble human mores are no match for...

...hunger for food...

...the need to sleep and...

...the urge to merge...

...you will never stop the hormonal tides...

...insemination will result in pregnancies...

...does a zygote rise to the level of "human being?"...

...shall we endow a microscopic cell mass with "full human rights?"

...shall we force every impregnated women to carry to full term and give birth?...

...perhaps we should offer free and available birth control instead and...

...counsel women on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies...

...no one should be using abortion as a form of "birth control"...

...pro-life...pro-choice...both want to reduce abortions...

...anti-choice...pro-abortion...are "loaded words"...

...who wants an abortion?...

...nobody...wants an abortion...

...why do women have abortions?...

...mostly one reason...an unwanted pregnancy...

...why are there unwanted pregnancies?...

...the mistake is getting pregnant when you don't want to...

...abstinence, sex education and birth control products...

...are the only ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies...

...shouldn't we employ every practical method to reduce abortions?...

...if you are pro-life or pro-choice you have an obligation to support sex education and the availability of free birth control for the prevention of unwanted pregnancies...in addition to this you have an obligation to protest and vote against:

the global arms trade...

the death penalty...

the war machine and all war...

...to reduce abortions we must prevent unwanted pregnancies with:

abstinence education...

detailed sex education...

readily available birth control products for free...

state supported womens clinics for reproductive health...

...abortions have declined worldwide as access to family planning education and contraceptive services has increased.

Conspiracy theory

It was the intention of the Bush administration to raise unemployment and drive more middle-class citizens to lower economic classes. They felt it was necessary to get middle-class Americans to accept lower wages. Lower wages mean lower prices and greater demand for American-made products, which helps balance the trade deficit. Reduced purchasing power also means less tolerance for high-priced foreign oil, which helps domestic oil companies expand their operations into coastal waters as well as wildlife sanctuaries. Furthermore, they figured it would discourage fanatics from developing renewable energy sources. A larger class of low paid workers creates greater competition for low-paying jobs. Greater competition for low-paying jobs is how you get the job market to deal with immigration. Fear of foreign workers helps Republicans enact tougher immigration laws ..like denying immigrants any chance of citizenship, which also goes for their American-born, college-educated children ..as well as those serving in the military. Another advantage of the politics of fear is that it helps Republicans win elections. That’s probably what helped Republicans gain control of Congress. Records show that the more support there is for republican issues in congress ..the more cutbacks you can expect to see in public education (especially in the form of federal grants and student aid). Cutbacks such as these deny middle-class access to higher education. What was their intention ..? To create a larger pool of low-cost labor. These advantages are short-term however, and the cycle will turn. When the disparity becomes so great that higher education becomes a luxury only the wealthy can afford, they might as well shut down the state universities ..there aren’t enough wealthy students to go around. When the GOP cuts all ties with the Latino community, and their efforts at stemming immigration fail (because it’s like trying to stop water) ..they’ll have succeeded in creating a larger population of democratic voters. And when support from the rural Midwest farmer collapses because they haven’t kept their promise to repeal the estate tax ..the cycle will come full circle.

some kind of nightmare ?

Failure

The greatest failure is the failure of the imagination; the inability to think that things can be other than they are; the lack of openness to the deeper layers of the human psyche; the unquestioning of all too popular assumptions; the ready acceptance of the lies that all vested interests in society tell and the deadening and depressing thought that nothing will ever change.

The Wave, 1971 by the sculptor Sinisca, Vatican Museum.

Many years ago I heard one of our Irish Senators say that the reason there was so much bloodshed on the streets of the North of Ireland (happily now a nightmare from the past and long gone!)could be directly attributed to a singular lack of imagination. How accurate this politician was - Senator David Norris - veritably goes without saying. When imagination fails, or is not even tried in the first place, then all mediation and dialogue which are the essence of diplomacy are committed to the dunghill of failure. Conflict at all levels - familial, national and international - is the result of the brekdown in our ability to imagine that things can be different, that dreams of peace and harmony are possible, that they are not just pipe dreams or pie in the sky.

What is greatly needed today on all levels of society - in local communities, in cities, in towns, in clubs and indeed in countries and in international affairs are statesmen and stateswomen with imagination, people with dreams and visions that are realizable, practicable, and feasible. But, I suppose, all real change starts at the bottom, in local communities, in our very own families, where we encourage each other to follow our dreams; where we encourage each other that we can make a difference here and now where we are, that as the Bard of Avon once said, that "we are the stuff that dreams are made on," that humankind can redeem itself as well as wreaking sheer havoc, if not possible extinction, upon itself if only it has the courage to dream that things can be different.

I'll finish this wee post with one of my favourite quotations:

Some people see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.  Robert Kennedy on his brother JFK; original quote from G.B.Shaw.

like, you know?

good and evil

What is done out of love......

always takes place beyond good and evil

...Friedrich Nietzsche...

Free And Easy

Anthony Caponi Art Park

Anthony Caponi is an artist, educator, poet, philosopher, innovator and engineer. For 60 years, Caponi has lived, worked, taught, and created his art in Minnesota. His distinguished career has carved an indelible mark in the cultural history of the state and contributed immeasurably to the wealth of arts available to its citizens.

At age 88, Caponi continues to create with energy and inspiration. Caponi Art Park and Learning Center, the manifestation of his 50-year vision, has been a reality since 1992. This vision and creative spirit have built and literally sculpted this public creation for the delight of everyone. The concrete and dirt paths are Caponi’s linear drawings retraced and animated by each person who walks them. The rock walls and shaped earth are his 60-acre sculpture into which conventional works are integrated. Since making a home in Eagan in 1949, the realization of Caponi Art Park crowns his life’s achievements.

Without plucking a leaf or leaving a body in want
I take from life.
I take all I can and give it all back with a personal flavor.
I rub softness into granite; knead clay to free from it a
form that becomes, with the life it takes.
To give ideas a body, to animate a body with spirit,
I sculpt.
To share the pleasure of transforming the mind’s ghosts
into caressable shapes,
I teach.
I teach the unzipping of the inner layer of the mind
where experience ferments and nourishes judgment,
where the soul expands and swells the vents of expression,
flavoring existence with shared feelings.
I teach the fusion of mind and touch, so not to divorce understanding from the sensuous rewards of knowing.

Anthony Caponi

The Schooner Roseway

(photograph by Oberon)


The World Ocean School

is an internationally focused nonprofit,

nonsectarian organization dedicated to providing

challenging educational programs aboard the schooner Roseway.

Coherent curriculum

No other country, with a history of successful education, applies economic principles of competition and incentives to the teaching profession. It’s too narrow-focused. There are so many other variables to consider. Community, family, individual differences. Schools are not factories. No other nation, with a successful school system, abandons courses in cultural subjects, like music and foreign languages, to focus only on basic skills and testing. Schools work best when teachers collaborate to help students, not when they compete for higher scores and bonuses. Otherwise, the lesson we’re teaching our children is: how best to be nothing more than a fucking commodity.

In education, collaboration is not socialism !!

The Whole Earth Catalog

The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture catalog published by Stewart Brand between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Although the WECs listed all sorts of products for sale (clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds -- anything for a self-sustainable "hippie" lifestyle) the Whole Earth Catalogs themselves did not sell any of the products. Instead the vendors and their prices were listed right alongside with the items. This led to a need for the Catalogs to be frequently updated.

Apple Inc. founder and entrepreneur Steve Jobs has described the Catalog as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web.

The title Whole Earth Catalog came from a previous project of Stewart Brand. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite photo of the sphere of Earth as seen from space, the first image of the "Whole Earth." He thought the image might be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny and adaptive strategies from people. The Stanford-educated Brand, a biologist with strong artistic and social interests, believed that there was a groundswell of commitment to thoroughly renovating American industrial society along ecologically and socially just lines, whatever they might prove to be. (read more)

Whole Earth Catalog

Happy 367th Birthday Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who is perceived and considered by a substantial number of scholars and the general public as one of the most influential scientists in history.

His 1687 publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually called the Principia) is considered to be among the most influential books in the history of science, laying the groundwork for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries.

Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.

"I do not know what I may appear to the world,

but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy

playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself

in now and then finding a smoother pebble

or a prettier shell than ordinary,

whilst the great ocean of truth

lay all undiscovered before me."

Sir Isaac Newton


(read more)

The Sun Of God

(click title for astronomical rebuttal)
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/transcript.htm

Bon Appetit

Julia Child was a spy?

I Can Fly

I can fly

I can make a machine

I can make it fly

I can leave the earth

I can soar above the clouds

I can reach the heavens

I learned to fly when I was 6 years old

I can fly

Everybody look what's going down

Question Everything

"There is nothing new in the world

except the history you do not know."

Harry S. Truman

Whale story

Notes from Big Sur,

October 14, 2007

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.

Earth Creatures

We were here

before you were

Darkness

Alone in the darkness

we languish in our fear,

it is only in the light

that we can see the truth