prequel: Retro30  |  PROJECT Way Out  |  Preface  |  Page 3  |  Projects  |  Notes 

PROJECT Way Out

On the way out, a way forward
{#SustainablePlanet}

{ NOTES }

A way forward in answering the question: "How do you decide?"

Suspended in Language

ELEMENTS

Narrative by elements

First and foremost, it's all entertainment.
(Then there's Ralph Abraham's Chaos Collage)

Within is the Way Out :
staying between the Quantum foam and the Sun (for now)
The Way Out is Far Out

{{ element BLENDs:

  1. Appropriate Scale > Agrivoltaic > Alliance > Sustainable Land Management > Sustainable Diets > New Foods > Fusarium Venenatum: Quorn > Intentional Community > Buy Nothing > Laughter > Waterless Toilets > Freedom  (SEE: Narrative by element BLEND: 01)
  2. Art (Artist) > Comedy (Sense of Humor) > Entertainment > Music > Poetry (Poets)
  3. Awareness > Consciousness > Decision (SEE: "The Preeminence of Awareness"; First Thoughts) > Emotions > Eros > Gaia > Health (Well-being) > Intelligence > Nature (Wilderness) > People (non-human) > Pragmatism > Scale > Simplicity (SEE: Complexity) > Sustainable > Thinking (First Thoughts) [SEE: Awareness] > Wild (Wilderness)
  4. Animals (domesticated) (wild) > Anthropocene > Atmosphere (Sky) (Clouds) (Temperature) (Humidity) (Wind) (Air) (Carbon) > Deserts > Earth (planet) (soil) (clay) > Glass > Metal > Minerals (crystals) (geology) (rocks) > Nature (Wilderness) > Paper (Corrugated Cardboard) > Plants (wild) (weeds) (cultivated) (poisonous) (Edible) > Shelter [SEE: Trees] > Sugar > Sunshine (ALSO: Sunlight) > Trees (wood) (paper) (shelter) (shade) > Viruses (Biological Viruses) (Computer Virus) > Water (ice) (steam) (dewdrop) (teardrop) (rivers) (lakes) (oceans) > Wild (Wilderness)
  5. Anthropocene > Artificial Intelligence (AI) > Comedy (Sense of Humor) > Communicate > Communication (Conversation) (SEE: Community) > Community > Competition (SEE: Cooperation) > Complexity (SEE: Simplicity) > Cooperation (SEE: Community, Competition; Communication) > Decision (SEE: "The Preeminence of Awareness"; First Thoughts) (ALSO: choice, options, variables, habits, routines) > Economy > Buy Nothing (Barter) (Trade) > Education > Equality (racism) > Entertainment > Ethics > Farming > Food (Sustainable Diets) (cooking) (raw) (omnivore)(vegetarian) (vegan) (fruitarian) (fungi) (breatharian) (paleo, ketogenic, fermentation, enzymes, etc) > Health (Well-being) (Human Potential) > History > Holism > Indra's Net > Media > Open-source Intelligence (wisdom of the crowd) > Pace of Life > Permaculture > Pragmatism > Religion (Metaphysics) > Scale > Science > Self-governance > Self--organization > Socially Responsible Investing > Socio-Politics (Political Sociology) (Social) (Politics) > Sovereignty (SEE: Self-governance) > Sustainable > Sustainable Land Management > Thinking (First Thoughts) (misinformation, disinformation)

}}

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Agrivoltaic

Agrivoltaic or agrophotovoltaics is the simultaneous use of areas of land for both solar photovoltaic power generation and agriculture. The coexistence of solar panels and crops implies a sharing of light between these two types of production, so the design of agrivoltaic facilities requires trading off such objectives as optimizing crop yield, crop quality, and energy production. The technique was originally conceived by Adolf Goetzberger and Armin Zastrow in 1981, and the word agrivoltaic was coined in 2011.

This Colorado 'solar garden' is literally a farm under solar panels | November 14, 2021
"That humming [you hear] is the inverters making us money," he says, pointing toward an electric converter box mounted near a row of kale. A series of wires carry the power out to the county highway and onto the local Xcel Energy grid. The inverters here generate enough power for 300 homes to use in a year. Kominek hopes to soon grow enough food beneath the panels to maybe feed as many local families.

Jack's Solar Garden is getting ready to energize the community | March 20, 2019
"... you haven't seen the most awe inspiring type of solar installation yet in Boulder County. It's the marriage of both agriculture and solar structures on farmland, dubbed an agrivoltaic system."

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Agroecology   

Agroecology is an applied science that studies ecological processes applied to agricultural production systems. Bringing ecological principles to bear can suggest new management approaches in agroecosystems. The term is often used imprecisely, as the term can be used as a science, a movement, or an agricultural practice. Agroecologists study a variety of agroecosystems. The field of agroecology is not associated with any one particular method of farming, whether it be organic, regenerative, integrated, or conventional, intensive or extensive, although some use the name specifically for alternative agriculture.

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Alliance  [SEE: Tsenacomoco]

An alliance is usually an agreement between two or more parties, made in order to advance common goals and to secure common interests. It can also mean that there is an affinity or similarity.

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Chicago Public Schools Radical Youth Alliance, Letter of Declaration (Twitter) (image)
Chicago Public Schools Radical Youth Alliance
(SEE: Education, Student Alliance, Protest)

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Breaking the Great League of Peace and Power: The Six Iroquois Nations During and After the American Revolution
An upper elementary/middle school course by Shannon C. McCutchen

Over the course of centuries, the Six Nations of Iroquois speakers, in the region comprised today by the state of New York, formed a Great League of Peace and Power in order to preserve good relations among their communities. However, during the American Revolution, the league was unable to safeguard the alliance of Nations. In an attempt to maintain their sovereignty and independence the Iroquois were forced to divide their loyalties between the British and the Americans. In this lesson, students will discover how this organization of Native American tribes collapsed under the pressures of the American Revolution before coming back together to sign a treaty of friendship and reconciliation with the new United States government.

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The Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center provides for the viewing of 3000-plus artifacts with an emphasis on the culture of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee). The Six Nations are: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. The center features story telling lectures; gift shop carries Mohawk baskets, beadwork, books, t-shirts, silver jewelry, and acrylic paintings that reflects Six Nations culture. The center (family owned-Mohawk of Akwesasne) is located in the Northeastern Adirondack Mountains.

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Animals (domesticated) (wild)

You chase lizards?

Alligator Lizard

Me? I chase my neighbor's cat, when it's chasing our lizards. Our lizards help keep the spider population in check and add a certain panache to our suburban, semiarid xeriscape garden. The Western Skink, Western Fence Lizard and Side-blotched Lizards are the species most commonly seen; in spite of being here in appreciable numbers, the Orange-throated Whiptail is observed only occasionally, and the Alligator Lizard is rarely seen. That is until awhile back when we built a section of open cinderblock wall to support a bamboo fence, which quickly became a condo complex for Alligator Lizards. They are proliferating now that they have protection from the marauding neighborhood cats. It's heartwarming to find them splayed out, one-with-the-earth, sunning themselves on their own private penthouse patios. Appreciating the little ones makes me feel so big. It can be heartbreaking to find a Skink tail without a Skink, but it can renew your faith in nature, when later, you come across a tailless Skink sunning on a rock. The most rare lizard around here is the California Legless Lizard, yet a few years back I spent an afternoon with one. This particular Legless Lizard slipped in under the side door and startled the crap out of me. I thought it was a snake. I gave chase. First it ensconced behind the desk, and I when moved the desk, it quickly slithered under, then up into the sofa. Took the damn sofa apart, but never did see that Legless Lizard again. Might still be in there as far as I know.  authored by Dan Landrum

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Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a proposed, though not yet officially approved, geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change. Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution 12,000–15,000 years ago, to as recently as the 1960s. The ratification process is still ongoing, and thus a date remains to be decided definitively, but the peak in radionuclides (a nuclide that has excess nuclear energy, making it unstable) fallout consequential to atomic bomb testing during the 1950s has been more favored than others, locating a possible beginning of the Anthropocene to the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, or the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. In May 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) submitted a formal proposal locating potential stratigraphic markers to the mid-twentieth century of the common era. This time period coincides with the start of the Great Acceleration, a post-WWII time period during which socioeconomic and Earth system trends increase at a dramatic rate, and the Atomic Age.

Independent Review on the Economics of Biodiversity led by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta.
From: HM Treasury; Published: 2 February 2021, Last updated: 20 August 2021

The Dasgupta Review is an independent, global review on the Economics of Biodiversity led by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta (Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus, University of Cambridge). The Review was commissioned in 2019 by HM Treasury and has been supported by an Advisory Panel drawn from public policy, science, economics, finance and business. The Review calls for changes in how we think, act and measure economic success to protect and enhance our prosperity and the natural world. Grounded in a deep understanding of ecosystem processes and how they are affected by economic activity, the new framework presented by the Review sets out how we should account for Nature in economics and decision-making.

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Appropriateness [SEE: Scale]  [SEE: Pragmatism]  [SEE: First Thoughts]

The logic of appropriateness is a theoretical perspective to explain human decision-making. It proposes that decisions and behavior follow from rules of appropriate behavior for a given role or identity. These rules are institutionalized in social practices and sustained over time through learning. People adhere to them because they see them as natural, rightful, expected, and legitimate. In other words, the logic of appropriateness assumes that actors decide on the basis of what social norms deem right rather than what cost-benefit calculations suggest best. The term was coined by organization theorists James G. March and Johan Olsen. They presented the argument in two prominent articles published by the journals Governance in 1996 and International Organization in 1998.

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Appropriateness in health care: application to prescribing
S A Buetow et al, July 1997

ABSTRACT: To help account for and address observed variations in medical practice, evaluations of "appropriateness" have sought to supplement incomplete evidence with professional opinion. This article contributes to an understanding and refinement of the construct of appropriateness by discussing how it has been defined and applied in studies of health care in general and prescribing in particular. We suggest that appropriateness is the outcome of a process of decision-making that maximises net individual health gains within society's available resources.

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Media Appropriateness: Using Social Presence Theory to Compare Traditional and New Organizational Media
Ronald E. Rice, 7 March 2006

ABSTRACT: This study assesses a scale measuring appropriateness of media for a variety of organizational communication activities and then compares seven media across six organizational sites. The ranking of media were face-to-face, telephone, meetings, desktop video and videoconferencing, voice mail, text, and electronic mail. Although information exchange and socioemotional relations dimensions emerged, the first provided a parsimonious solution. Multidimensional scaling placed traditional media in separate clusters, and new media together with some instances of text and phone, along interpersonal-mediated and synchronous-asynchronous axes. The appropriateness of face-to-face and meetings did not change over time, whereas ratings of phone and text (to some extent) and new media did. Appropriateness of new media was weakly associated with use. finally, there was very little evidence of social information processing influence on appropriateness, except for organizational newcomers’ratings of the newest medium, desktop video.

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Appropriate Technology
From: Field Guide to Appropriate Technology, 2003

WHAT IS AN APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY?

Appropriate technology is defined as any object, process, ideas, or practice that enhances human fulfillment through satisfaction of human needs. A technology is deemed to be appropriate when it is compatible with local, cultural, and economic conditions (i.e., the human, material and cultural resources of the economy), and utilizes locally available materials and energy resources, with tools and processes maintained and operationally controlled by the local population. Technology is considered thus “appropriate” to the extent that it is consistent with the cultural, social, economic, and political institutions of the society in which it is used. Abubakar N. Abdullalli has suggested that appropriate technology should be self-sustaining, cause little cultural disruption, and should ensure the relevance of technology to the welfare of the local population.

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Evaluating Human-Machine Conversation for Appropriateness
Nick Webb, David Benyon, Preben Hansen, Oil Mival | May 2010

ABSTRACT: Evaluation of complex, collaborative dialogue systems is a difficult task. Traditionally, developers have relied upon subjective feedback from the user, and parametrisation over observable metrics. However, both models place some reliance on the notion of a task; that is, the system is helping to user achieve some clearly defined goal, such as book a flight or complete a banking transaction. It is not clear that such metrics are as useful when dealing with a system that has a more complex task, or even no definable task at all, beyond maintain and performing a collaborative dialogue. Working within the EU funded COMPANIONS program, we investigate the use of appropriateness as a measure of conversation quality, the hypothesis being that good companions need to be good conversational partners . We report initial work in the direction of annotating dialogue for indicators of good conversation, including the annotation and comparison of the output of two generations of the same dialogue system.

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Art (Artist)

"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life," writer, Oscar Wilde
“Art depicts life and life depicts art,” sculptor, Bert McCoy

An example of art as an expression amalgamating life in a way nothing else can:

Around the World in 80 Days Episode #1.3 (PBS: 51m29s)
Around the World in 80 Days is a period drama adventure television series based on the 1873 Jules Verne novel of the same name. Season 1 Episode 3: "Stuck on Yemen's west coast, foolhardy Fogg decides on a dangerous desert crossing, leaving Abigail Fix in a place where even a fellow Englishwoman proves hostile."

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An artist is one who defines success for themselves.

"Having a singular body of work is passé, it's more important to be an interesting artist," Jason Middlebrook

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FB: February 16, 2015:

Dan Landrum: The difference between (artist) Vision and (marketing*) Strategy. Vision is unique to the artist, what makes them distinctive, but strategy is what's negotiable, the grist of the dialog between the art maker and the audience. Nice ability to have -- to hold the vision and learn to make it appropriate and appreciated in the world, which is an art in itself.

* {SEE: My Quest to Turn Smart Craft into a Sustainable Business -- MAKE Magazine 2014   [PDF: 1MB]}

Ella Whitehead: People do have different goals, I have so many distractions in my life right now I can't wrap my head around the direction I should go with my painting. Until I'm satisfied with my work, I can't think about marketing or selling. I've been teaching and doing art my entire life, but now that I'm free to do what I want and have the time, I've hit a wall. Two dear friends who are working artists in NY sent me this "Ira Glass on Storytelling" video, it's great advice for those, young and old, trying to find their way towards creating "good art": https://vimeo.com/24715531

Dan Landrum: Thanks, Ella. Here's wishing you large volumes of undistracted play! To Ira's point ... it was true for me too -- that I had to do a huge amount of work before I had confidence that my output would consistently match my avant-garde taste, both the artifacts and conceptually. The good news is, its like learning to ride a bicycle – once you've got it, you've got it. The road to getting there did include struggle, but I'm not sure it needed to – I can imagine I could have gotten further faster purely with play.

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WildlifeI'd like to write an exhaustive essay on the 'leading edge in Art' – how it captures the genius of the new and innovative, how it's about ideas and differentiates from the craft and skills of making things, how the wealth of expression and sentiment in folk art, in illustrative representational and story-telling art, hold valuable places in the conversation, but that there is a special risk taking place where the intersection of saying something that takes an expansive step beyond and is both useful, aesthetic and thought provoking – that edge, how that edge is *** the living art *** and all else is artifacts of art making past. I'd like to write such an exhaustive essay, but who has the time? authored by Dan Landrum

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Why I Am Out of the Art Conversation   [PDF: 1MB]
The world is increasingly polarized between the myth of the rational and the myth of the faithful. The confrontation between religious faith and the modern scientific world is not going away. It's time to break the spell.  authored by Dan Landrum

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy 4: Seeing Through The Net | 1969
In a talk given to the IBM Systems Group, Alan Watts describes the wiggly world of nature and the net we cast over it.

"...We have bit-ed the cosmos and see everything going on in terms of bits—bits of information—and have found that this is extremely fruitful in enabling us to control what’s happening. After all, the whole of Western technology is the result of bit-ing. In order to talk about the universe, you have to reduce it to things. But each thing, or 'think', is, as it were, one grasp of that spotlight going "Tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha," like this, you see? So we reduce the infinite wiggliness of the world to grasps—or bits; and this has been the immensely, and apparently successful, enterprise of all technological culture, superbly emphasized by ourselves. So then: if we are trying to control and understand the world through conscious attention—which is a scanning system which takes in everything bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit—what we’re going to run into is that if that’s the only method we rely on, everything is going to appear increasingly too complicated to manage."  [...]

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Xenobots:

Scientists Unveiled the World’s First Living Robots Last Year. Now, They Can Reproduce
Rasha Aridi | December 2, 2021
By clustering free-floating stem cells together, ‘xenobots’ can assemble baby bots

World's first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say
By Katie Hunt, CNN | November 29, 2021
(CNN) The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce -- and in a way not seen in plants and animals.

Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms
Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard | PNAS | December 7, 2021
We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia.

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Atmosphere (Sky) (Clouds) (Temperature) (Humidity) (Wind) (Air) (Carbon)

"My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,..." Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

As carbon removal gains traction, economists imagine a new market to save the planet
January 11, 2022 | Greg Rosalsky | NPR: Planet Money

Up until recently, the idea of sucking gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to reverse climate change was solidly in the realm of science fiction. For believers, it's been an exciting fantasy in which human ingenuity and technology triumph in saving the planet. For naysayers, it's been a fantastical distraction from the urgent work of cutting emissions. Climate activists fear that focusing on carbon removal might lull us into a false sense of complacency as humanity careens a fossil-fuel-powered locomotive off a cliff. The fact that fossil fuel companies have become prominent advocates for developing carbon removal technologies has only added to their distrust.

But the issue of climate change has become so pressing — and the lack of real political progress in slashing emissions has become so apparent — that 2021 saw a growing movement in support of removing gobs of carbon from the atmosphere as a life-preserver for the planet. To be clear, serious proponents of carbon removal see it as a now-necessary complement to — not a substitute for — dramatically cutting emissions.

Unlike a prize, economists Susan Athey, says, an Advance Market Commitment creates a real market, with all of the benefits that come with it. "Winning a prize is not a business model," she says. Not only would an Advance Market Commitment create economic incentives for carbon removal, it could allow companies to get private financing from banks and investors, allowing them to fund teams of engineers and new machines. These companies would then compete and the best technologies and methods would rise to prominence.

Athey says the companies and foundations already funding carbon removal could create a prototype of this system themselves. They could commit to paying for units of carbon removal, jumpstart this sector, and prove the viability of the AMC approach to carbon-removal technologies. "Then it would be something governments could start to lean into at a larger scale," she says.

When it comes to the continued failure of humanity to confront climate change, Athey says, "it's hard not to get depressed and fatalistic and throw up your hands," Athey says. "But I think one way to help avoid that is to break the problem down into smaller pieces and then figure out what can be done."

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Awareness

Awareness is the state of being conscious, sentient of something (or lack of something), including being aware of yourself, or simply aware of awareness. More specifically, it is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events, or states of being. The concept is often synonymous to consciousness and is also understood as being consciousness itself. According to Gregory Bateson, the mind is the dynamics of self-organization and that awareness is crucial in the existence of this process.

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The Preeminence of Awareness ...the pragmatic equanimity of awareness  authored by Dan Landrum

Awareness is the ground of all knowing, and simultaneously can be the perception of a specific thing or event — both the event and the perceiver of the event. Global and/or local, whether a spotlight or floodlight focus, awareness itself is value neutral — choiceless awareness*. Understanding the consequence of all possible actions before they happen, ultimately percipient, awareness has no preference for doing or not-doing and holds the ground for being. Awareness aware of itself is an Indra's Net of reflection at play with being and becoming.

(* Krishnamurti held that outside of strictly practical, technical matters, the presence and action of choice indicates confusion and subtle bias: an individual who perceives a given situation in an unbiased manner, without distortion, and therefore with complete awareness, will immediately, naturally, act according to this awareness — the action will be the manifestation and result of this awareness, rather than the result of choice. Such action (and quality of mind) is inherently without conflict. [SEE: First Thoughts])

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Buy Nothing (Barter) (Trade)

Demand Less

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The Buy Nothing Project is a social movement that helps neighbors give and receive free items, ranging from food to furniture. The Buy Nothing Project currently boasts 4.25 million participants in 44 countries, according to its website: https://buynothingproject.org/  Download for iOS/Android. Web app coming Spring '22. The Buy Nothing Project encourages local communities to focus on improving the community in which they live and keep groups small and local to minimize distance travelled to pick up items. There is no overt criticism of consumerism, but the project's goals include saving money and reducing waste. The projects' co-founders, Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark, say that it is not just recycling: it is a way to fuel the gift economy and build community.

Why I stopped using Buy Nothing groups to get free stuff  | Katie Oelker | Jan 1, 2022 |  Business Insider
"... my scarcity mindset was the reason why I was taking this stuff in the first place. At some point I realized that free stuff doesn't come free. It costs you in terms of space and the mental load it takes to organize and keep. Having a scarcity mindset was allowing extra junk into my house, and getting rid of this extra stuff took time away from other things, like spending time with my family or making money — money I could spend on higher quality items or items I needed when I actually needed them." — Katie Oelker is a financial coach, personal finance writer, and podcaster.

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Barter

Could bartering become the new buying in a changed world? by Jessica Jones | 26th August 2020 (BBC)
Amid economic uncertainty — and a desire to connect as we distance — bartering is experiencing an unprecedented rise. Could it stick around?

“I invited all of my friends and it just grew. We had 1,000 people in less than 24 hours,” says Veronica Coon, a hairstylist who started her Facebook barter group in Henderson, Nevada, USA on 15 March. It now has more than 5,600 members. The most popular items traded have been hard-to-find groceries like flour, yeast and eggs, as well as baby wipes, disinfecting spray and masks.

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Chaos

"Chaos does not mean disorder... it represents an abstract cosmic principle referring to the source of all creation," Ralph Abraham.

Facing the Age of Chaos
Jamais Cascio | Apr 29, 2020

BANI — Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible — is a framework to articulate the increasingly commonplace situations in which simple volatility or complexity are insufficient lenses through which to understand what’s taking place. Situations in which conditions aren’t simply unstable, they’re chaotic. In which outcomes aren’t simply hard to foresee, they’re completely unpredictable. Or, to use the particular language of these frameworks, situations where what happens isn’t simply ambiguous, it’s incomprehensible.

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Stephen Killelea's  Peace in the Age of Chaos: The Key for a Sustainable Future
The compelling story of one man’s journey to the most dangerous places on earth in his quest to discover what creates peace.

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Comedy          (Sense of Humor)

...to cause laughter. The most commonly used word is funny.

Wildlife

"Keep your sense of humor, my friend; if you don't have a sense of humor it just isn't funny anymore." —  Wavy Gravy

{Irony as funny:} “Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.” —  Allan Gurganus, "White People"

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Stand-up comedy
Stand-up comedy got its start in the 1840s from the three-act, variety show format of minstrel shows (via blackface performances of the Jim Crow character); Frederick Douglass criticized these shows for profiting from and perpetuating racism. Minstrelsy monologists performed second-act, stump-speech monologues from within minstrel shows until 1896, although traces of these racist performances continued to be used until the mid-1900s. Stand-up comedy also has roots in various traditions of popular entertainment of the late 19th century, including vaudeville (via minstrel shows, dime museums, concert saloons, freak shows, variety shows, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus), American burlesque (via Lydia Thompson's feminization of the minstrel show, concert saloons, English music halls, and circus clown antics), and humorist monologues like those delivered by Mark Twain in his first (1866) touring show, Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.Unadulterated, vaudeville monologuist run-times were 10–15 minutes.

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Theories of Humor

There are many theories of humor which attempt to explain what humor is, what social functions it serves, and what would be considered humorous. Among the prevailing types of theories that attempt to account for the existence of humor, there are psychological theories, the vast majority of which consider humor to be very healthy behavior; there are spiritual theories, which consider humor to be an inexplicable mystery, very much like a mystical experience. Although various classical theories of humor and laughter may be found, in contemporary academic literature, three theories of humor appear repeatedly: relief theory, superiority theory, and incongruity theory. Among current humor researchers, there is no consensus about which of these three theories of humor is most viable. Proponents of each one originally claimed their theory to be capable of explaining all cases of humor. However, they now acknowledge that although each theory generally covers its own area of focus, many instances of humor can be explained by more than one theory. Similarly, one view holds that theories have a combinative effect; Jeroen Vandaele claims that incongruity and superiority theories describe complementary mechanisms which together create humor.

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Wildlife

The evolutionary origins of laughter are rooted more in survival than enjoyment
Jordan Raine, University of Sussex | April 13, 2016

Laughter plays a crucial role in every culture across the world. But it’s not clear why laughter exists. While it is evidently an inherently social phenomenon – people are up to 30 times more likely to laugh in a group than when alone – laughter’s function as a form of communication remains mysterious.

John Cleese once said: “Laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter.” He might just have hit the nail on the head – even when we’re faking it.

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Philosophy of Humor
First published Tue Nov 20, 2012; substantive revision Thu Aug 20, 2020

Although most people value humor, philosophers have said little about it, and what they have said is largely critical. Three traditional theories of laughter and humor are examined, along with the theory that humor evolved from mock-aggressive play in apes. Understanding humor as play helps counter the traditional objections to it and reveals some of its benefits, including those it shares with philosophy itself.

1. Humor’s Bad Reputation
2. The Superiority Theory
3. The Relief Theory
4. The Incongruity Theory
5. Humor as Play, Laughter as Play Signal
6. Comedy

One recent philosopher attuned to the affinity between comedy and philosophy was Bertrand Russell. “The point of philosophy,” he said, “is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it” (1918). In the middle of an argument, he once observed, “This seems plainly absurd: but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities” (1912).

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The First Joke: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Humor
Joseph Polimeni, Jeffrey P. Reiss | First Published January 1, 2006

This article explores the possible adaptive features of humor and ponders its evolutionary path through hominid history.

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Study of laughter and dissociation: distinct correlates of laughter and smiling during bereavement
D Keltner 1 , G A Bonanno | Oct 1997

Laughter facilitates the adaptive response to stress by increasing the psychological distance from distress and by enhancing social relations. To test these hypotheses, the authors related measures of bereaved adults' laughter and smiling 6 months postloss to measures of their

(a) subjective emotion and dissociation from distress,
(b) social relations, and
(c) responses they evoked in others.

Duchenne laughter, which involves orbicularis oculi muscle action, related to self-reports of reduced anger and increased enjoyment, the dissociation of distress, better social relations, and positive responses from strangers, whereas non-Duchenne laughter did not. Lending credence to speculations in the ethological literature, Duchenne laughter correlated with different intrapersonal and interpersonal responses than Duchenne smiles.

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Communicate

"We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others," Niels Bohr

We have been made in the image of the word.

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E. O. Wilson discovered the chemical means by which ants communicate. Ants use a variety of small chemicals known as pheromones to communicate, humans communicate symbolically. Symbolic communication includes gestures, body language and facial expressions, as well as vocal moans that can indicate what an individual wants without having to speak. Research argues that about 55% of all communication stems from nonverbal language.

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The Evolution Of Symbolic Language | Terrence Deacon & Ursula Goodenough | March 18, 2010

Most organisms communicate, but humans are unique in communicating via symbolic language. This entails relationships between signifiers (e.g. words) and what's signified (e.g. objects or ideas), where what's special is the construction of a system of relationships among the signifiers themselves, generating a seemingly unlimited web of associations, organized by semantic regularities and constraints, retrieved in narrative form, and enabled by complex memory systems.

Humans are thus a symbolic species: symbols have literally changed the kind of biological organism we are. We think and behave in ways that are quite odd compared to other species because of the way that language has defined us. Symbolic language has become the dominant feature of the cultural environment to which we must adapt in order to flourish; the demands imposed by this niche have favored mental capacities and biases that guarantee successful access to this essential resource.

There are two perspectives on how language evolved.

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Communication  (Conversation) [SEE: Com Poem] (SEE: Community)

Communication (from Latin communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is "an apparent answer to the painful divisions between self and other, private and public, and inner thought and outer world."

Conversations with Arne Wilson
"Arne Wilson" is a pseudonym for a Canadian-American Sociology professor who ultimately retired in Mexico. I met him on Facebook. Here are a few conversations from between July 2012 to Februrary 2018: PDF: 2MB

A taste, "democracy": Arne Wilson April 4, 2017:

I can't give up on democracy, can I? I can't affirm for the life of me that democracy will produce the best possible governance, but, it does have one advantage that myths, dogmas, and the tyrannies they support do not have. It preserves the right to refuse the choices offered by the other. Democracy doesn't allow for Godfathers. "Let me make you an offer you can't refuse." That, if you wish to retain your freedom, is the sort of offer you must answer with a clear No. Democracy says nothing about what you will choose, but it rejects the notion that your choice will be that made by others. Thereafter, it gets complicated, but that's endurable. It's the simplicities proposed by others that go beyond human endurance.

Dan Landrum: Greek thinkers were unapologetically elitist and saw that democracies would invariably fall to tyrants. Add the unwavering Byzantine type complexity to any administrative control (be it goverment or corporate...Cox, AT&T or Verizon ...) and you've got an insoluble mess -- not so much an offer you can't refuse, but more an offer you, for the life of you, you can't figure out.

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Community
a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.

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7th Generation Principle

The Seventh Generation takes its name from the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee, the founding document of the Iroquois Confederacy, the oldest living participatory democracy on Earth. It is based on an ancient Iroquois philosophy that: "In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations." This philosophy is not unique to just the Iroquois nation. Many Native American nations, tribes and other indigenous people around the world have and still live by this philosophy.

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Thanksgiving in Virginia 1607

"By 1607, Wahunsonacock, the leader of alliance of Natives called Tsenacomoco, had spent a generation forming a confederation of roughly 30 distinct communities along tributaries of Chesapeake Bay. The English called him Powhatan and labeled his followers the Powhatans. Wahunsonacock could have likely prevented the English from establishing their community at Jamestown; after all, the Powhatans controlled most of the resources in the region. In 1608, when the newcomers were near starvation, the Powhatans provided them with food. Wahunsonacock also spared Captain John Smith’s life after his people captured the Englishman. Wahunsonacock’s actions revealed his strategic thinking. Rather than see the newcomers as all-powerful, he likely believed the English would become a subordinate community under his control. After a war from 1609 to 1614 between English and Powhatans, Wahunsonacock and his allies agreed to peace and coexistence."

When Columbus landed in what is now the Bahamas, it signaled the beginning of the 'western-ho' manifest destiny for "my use and thus to thy service" conquest; and the end, in my mind, to the most egregious loss of human societal 'in balance with nature' wisdom in history reaching back hundreds of thousands of years.

Hunting and gathering was presumably the subsistence strategy employed by human societies beginning some 1.8 million years ago, by Homo erectus, and from its appearance some 200,000 years ago by Homo sapiens, while the (First) Agricultural Revolution begins merely some 11,700 years ago.

Wikipedia tells us, "Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change were displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. However, the division between the two is no longer presumed to be a fundamental marker in human history, and there is not necessarily a hierarchy which places agriculture and industry at the top as a goal to be reached."

Sadly we come to this realization some 500 years too late.

What we lost in our genocide and assimilation of the aboriginal people of the "New World" in unimaginable. Not only their ancient wisdom of plants and animal, but the appropriate scale and how to sustainably relate to plants and animal, and water, and air, and earth. And how to relate to each other.

The Iroquois Confederacy, perhaps the most appropriate scale malgam of hunter-gatherers, agriculture, industry and democracy we've known in evolution, is believed to have been founded by the Great Peacemaker at an unknown date estimated between 1142 and 1660, bringing together five distinct nations in the southern Great Lakes area into "The Great League of Peace." The Iroquois are a mix of horticulturalists, farmers, fishers, gatherers and hunters, though traditionally their main diet has come from farming. For the Iroquois, farming was traditionally women's work and the entire process of planting, maintaining, harvesting and cooking was done by women. Gathering has also traditionally been the job of women and children. Wild roots, greens, berries and nuts were gathered in the summer. During spring, sap is tapped from the maple trees and boiled into maple syrup, and herbs are gathered for medicine. After the coming of Europeans, the Iroquois started to grow apples, pears, cherries, and peaches.

As we move from here to find a way to make our world safer, just and better for all, making our Earth healthier,  what kind of commonsense, pragmatic 'intelligence' could we convene to form anew "The Great League of Peace?"

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Competition  (SEE: Cooperation)
[SEE: Notes on Competition/Cooperation: Dichotomy, Dilemma or Paradox? authored by Dan Landrum ]

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Complexity     (SEE: Simplicity)

Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, meaning there is no reasonable higher instruction to define the various possible interactions. The term is generally used to characterize something with many parts where those parts interact with each other in multiple ways, culminating in a higher order of emergence greater than the sum of its parts. The study of these complex linkages at various scales is the main goal of complex systems theory. Science as of 2010 takes a number of approaches to characterizing complexity; Zayed et al. reflect many of these. Neil Johnson states that "even among scientists, there is no unique definition of complexity – and the scientific notion has traditionally been conveyed using particular examples..." Ultimately Johnson adopts the definition of "complexity science" as "the study of the phenomena which emerge from a collection of interacting objects".

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Complexity/Simplicity

"However, what one sees as complex and what one sees as simple is relative and changes with time," Complexity

Simplicity ON THIS SIDE OF Complexity (innocence)
"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me," 1 Corinthians 13:11

"No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them," William Godwin


Simplicity ON THE OTHERSIDE OF Complexity (experience)
“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” — Mark Twain

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

(SEE: William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience)

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Consciousness

"Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things," Yuval Harari

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett puts forward a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, suggesting that there is no single central place (a "Cartesian theater") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain". The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies"; when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one's "self". Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying process in which multiple calculations are happening at once (that is, parallelism).

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Alan Watts, "Generally speaking, we have two kinds of consciousness. One I will call the “spotlight,” and the other the “floodlight.” The spotlight is what we call conscious attention, and we are trained from childhood that it is the most valuable form of perception. When the teacher in class says “Pay attention!” everybody stares, and looks right at the teacher. That is spotlight consciousness; fixing your mind on one thing at a time. You concentrate, and even though you may not be able to have a very long attention span, nevertheless you use your spotlight: one thing after another, one thing after another…

When you focus your consciousness on a particular area, you ignore everything else. That is why to know is at the same time to ignore. The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself."

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Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind is a 1901 book by the psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, in which the author explores the concept of cosmic consciousness, which he defines as "a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man". William James equated Bucke's cosmic consciousness with mystical experience or mystical consciousness. Bucke regarded Walt Whitman as "the climax of religious evolution and the harbinger of humanity's future".

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Terence McKenna
Evolutionary MindTerence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness.

The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit
by Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake | April 1, 2005 (Sheldrake.org)

Stimulating and often startling discussions between three friends, all highly original thinkers: Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna , psychedelic visionary, and Ralph Abraham, chaos mathematician. Their passion is to break out of paradigms that retard our evolution and to explore new possibilities. Their discussions focus on the evolution of the mind, the role of psychedelics, skepticism, the psychic powers of animals, the structure of time, the life of the heavens, the nature of God, and transformations of consciousness.

"A jam-session of the mind, an intellectual movable feast, an on-going conversation that began over twenty years ago and remains as lively and relevant today as it ever was." — Dennis McKenna

Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham:
The Evolutionary Mind Trialogue | Dec 1, 2014
       1 of 3 (Youtube: 1h09m33s)
       2 of 3 (Youtube: 1h07m48s)
       3 of 3 (Youtube: 54m47s)

Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts | April 26, 1993 (Amazon Books)  by O. T. Oss (Author), O. N. Oeric (Author), Terence McKenna (Introduction)

In the 1970s, two of the most influential thinkers of the psychedelic era gathered what was then known about psilocybin botany and culture and presented it in Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide. Writing under pseudonyms, the McKenna brothers provided simple, reliable, and productive methods for magic mushroom propagation, including black-and-white photographs that showed the techniques of the time. Philosophical asides, whimsical illustrations evoking the mystical nature of mushrooms, and speculations about the relationship of these organisms to humankind provide a lasting legacy.

Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations | Mar 4, 2016 | (Youtube: 2h48m43s)
an experimental documentary about the chaos at La Chorrera, the imagination, time, the Logos, belief, hope, madness, and doubt...

McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. In late 1999, McKenna described his thoughts concerning his impending death:

"I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, à la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears."

McKenna died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53.

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Cooperation   (SEE: Community, Competition; Communication)

Yuval Harari, "I totally agree that for success, cooperation is usually more important than just raw intelligence."

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Notes on Competition/Cooperation: Dichotomy, Dilemma or Paradox?  [PDF: 1MB] authored by Dan Landrum

All life, to be life, needs something. Air. Water. Chocolate. To find its place in the Dewey Decimal System. On a planet with limited resources and a growing population of successful life forms, we must compete. But then, we find in forming society, it is to our benefit to cooperate. Thus begins the Compete-Cooperate paradox, which only grows more deep and wide, more confounding as we grow in greater and greater complexity. [...]

[Rate of Change within an Ordered Complexity?]
[Compete-Cooperate Cost/Benefit differential for an Individual within Society?]

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Cooperation vs Corporation

Corporations are NOT people!

"The courts decided that the management of the corporation has the legal responsibility to maximize the yield of the profit to its stockholders, that’s its job. The corporations had already been granted the right of persons, and this basically says they have to be a certain type of pathological person, a person that does nothing except try to maximize his own gain – that’s the legal requirement on a corporation, and that’s a core principle of Anglo-American corporate law." —Noam Chomsky  #Naomi Klein  #thischangeseverything

Does “We the People” Include Corporations? Interestingly, while the Court has concluded that corporations are “persons” within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court has been quite reticent to concede that corporations are “citizens” for the purpose of the Privileges and Immunities Clause.

In Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy From Big Money & Global Corporations, Jeff Clements describes how the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC and related cases has fabricated unprecedented rights and power for corporations and money, at the expense of human beings and democracy itself.

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Are corporations the most ruthlessly efficient form of organizations in history?

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation. 
by Matthew Desmond | AUG. 14, 2019

During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, “Flush Times and Fever Dreams.” That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond.

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.

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Who are "We the People," anyway?   (SEE: We the People)
Patriots, Loyalists, Zealots, Conformists, Dupes, and other Provocateurs

My Thoughts on a Pledge authored by Dan Landrum

In 8th grade at Fort Lauderdale's Sunrise Junior High, I intuitively knew, though I couldn't articulate it into words, that there was something off with the daily ritual of pledging allegiance to the flag. I stood up when told to, but did not put my hand over my heart and did not say the words.

One day my homeroom and math teacher, coach Haywood took me to the side and gave me 24 detentions. He'd been saving them up without mentioning it at each instance. Most of the detentions were for not saying the Pledge of Allegiance. In the permission slip my parents were to sign Coach Haywood gave me 3 options: 24 one hour after school detentions, 24 whacks with a paddle in the principal's office, or 6 super whacks. I took the super whacks, and was deeply saddened that my parents assumed I deserved them, didn't stick up for me or speak to the coach. So much for freedom of speech.

That experience reinforced in me the mistaken notion that discipline means punishment, just or not. Another takeaway: you can't trust authority to be fair and understanding. It inadvertently caused me to question authority and the very basis of all I believe.

Conformity

Solomon Asch's Study on Conformity Explained (Youtube: 4m44s)
Ash's study is an influential and important study in psychology because it shows that we will purposefully do things we know are wrong to conform to the group, we are less likely to conform when we know there's someone else in a group that shares our views or opinions. Conformity is the road of least resistance. There's a cost to 'rebellion' for little perceived reward. Only in extremis do we find rebellion.

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Oathkeepers

Stewart Rhodes Explains Oath Keepers Mission | Mar 28, 2010 (Youtube)
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes explains Oath Keepers mission during the first annual Oath Keepers Conference in October 2009.

Oath Keepers leader and 10 others charged with 'seditious conspiracy' related to US Capitol attack (CNN)
By Hannah Rabinowitz, et al, CNN, Updated Thu January 13, 2022
CNN legal analyst explains what Oath Keepers leader's arrest indicates

(CNN) The Justice Department escalated its January 6 investigation by bringing seditious conspiracy charges against 11 defendants, including the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes. The new indictment brings to light planning the Oath Keepers are accused to have done ahead of the Capitol attack, as they allegedly recruited members, stocked up on weapons and organized to disrupt Congress' certification of the 2020 election. Prosecutors say they also continued to plot "to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power" after the Capitol riot failed to block the electoral college vote, according to a Justice Department statement on Thursday. One Oath Keeper claimed to travel to Washington, DC, for a scouting trip ahead of January 6, according to the indictment. The new court filings also detail accusations that the defendants stashed weapons at a Virginia hotel and that they were prepared to "rapidly transport firearms and other weapons into Washington, D.C." to support the efforts to stop the presidential certification vote.

Rhodes was arrested Thursday in Little Elm, Texas.

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Decision (SEE: "The Preeminence of Awareness"; First Thoughts) (ALSO: choice, options, variables, habits, routines)

How do you decide?

How to decide? Do the next thing,
like being guided by Google Maps.

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Grok /ˈɡrɒk/ is a neologism coined by American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. While the Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically with; also, to experience enjoyment", Heinlein's concept is far more nuanced, with critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observing that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term." The concept of grok garnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. The term and aspects of the underlying concept have become part of communities such as computer science.

Ralph Abraham, "we will use the term Grok as a familiar name for hermeneutics."

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Autonomic Nervous System,  Sympathetic Nervous System, Parasympathetic Nervous System:
The parasympathetic nervous system predominates in quiet “rest and digest” conditions while the sympathetic nervous system drives the “fight or flight” response in stressful situations. The main purpose of the PNS is to conserve energy to be used later and to regulate bodily functions like digestion and urination. Breathing is both automatic and not autonomic. Conscious factors can override or modify automatic functions of the respiratory control system for a limited period. For example, an individual can voluntarily speak, smell, hyperventilate, or hold their breath. However, automatic functions ultimately mandate a return to normal breathing.}

 

I appreciate my autonomic nervous system,
I really do. But
sometimes I just like to breathe on my own.

 

If there is one talisman I walk with, it is the preeminence of awareness. And the everlasting utility of the breath as a focal point of awareness. Ah so, pragmatically useful. That is, you can't take a past breath, you can't take a future breath, you can only take a present breath. And if your focus is present with your present breath, you are in This! place, this humanly scale appropriate place, that is always here and always now. And That! place is where we can begin to sink into the preeminence of awareness. You can go off and describe it, analysis it, is it an in breath or an out breath, is it a long breath or a short breath, is it a cool breath or a warm breath, but all of that is secondary. But of course, you already know all this and will soon dive deeper into this "animating force that moves the body from within" back to the center of your awareness. Yet gratefully, having this particular utility in my pocket, again and again I'm reminded, the wisest choice I can make is to come back to awareness of the sensation of the breath curling around my nostrils, for its own sake and reside there. And that there is where I find the one that is the One, the I am me and we are we and we are all together one, that is the simple neutral awareness, equanimous awareness, best suited for greeting the dawn, for that inner 'hello' greeting of every stranger passing by, the ones I am likely never to see again, who hold the bits and pieces of the wonder, the splendiferous beauty, the unfathomably real we are here for. Because when it comes right down to it, what we are here for is experience, This! experience. authored by Dan Landrum

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Aaron Rodgers dropped the ball on critical thinking – with a little practice you can do better
Joe Árvai, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences | December 1, 2021

For scientists like me whose job it is to unravel how people instinctively make choices, and then to help them make better ones, critical thinking isn’t just a slogan used to score points. It’s not some after-the-fact justification someone makes to convince others – or themselves – that their opinions or behaviors are sound. Instead, critical thinking is a pattern of behaviors that happen before someone makes a judgment, like coming to the conclusion that something is risky. Likewise, critical thinking comes before making a decision, like choosing to avoid something judged to be too risky for comfort. Here’s what it really takes to be a critical thinker.

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Deserts

A desert is a barren area of landscape where little precipitation occurs and, consequently, living conditions are hostile for plant and animal life. The lack of vegetation exposes the unprotected surface of the ground to the processes of denudation. About one-third of the land surface of the Earth is arid or semi-arid.

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Earth (planet) (soil) (clay)

"My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,..." Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Spaceship Earth
"I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth." — R. Buckminster Fuller

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Clay

Clay is a finely-grained natural rock or soil material that combines one or more clay minerals* with possible traces of quartz (SiO2), metal oxides (Al2O3 , MgO etc.) and organic matter. Geologic clay deposits are mostly composed of phyllosilicate minerals** containing variable amounts of water trapped in the mineral structure. Clays are plastic due to particle size and geometry as well as water content, and become hard, brittle and non–plastic upon drying or firing. Depending on the soil's content in which it is found, clay can appear in various colors from white to dull grey or brown to deep orange-red.

Although many naturally occurring deposits include both silts and clay, clays are distinguished from other fine-grained soils by differences in size and mineralogy. Silts, which are fine-grained soils that do not include clay minerals, tend to have larger particle sizes than clays. There is, however, some overlap in particle size and other physical properties. Mixtures of sand, silt and less than 40% clay are called loam. Loam makes good soil and is used as a building material.

Clay minerals are hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, sometimes with variable amounts of iron, magnesium, alkali metals, alkaline earths, and other cations found on or near some planetary surfaces. Clay minerals form in the presence of water and have been important to life, and many theories of abiogenesis involve them. They are important constituents of soils, and have been useful to humans since ancient times in agriculture and manufacturing.

Silicate minerals are rock-forming minerals with predominantly silicate anions. They are the largest and most important class of rock-forming minerals and make up approximately 90 percent of the Earth's crust. For diverse manufacturing, technological, and artistic needs, silicates are versatile materials, both natural (such as granite, gravel, and garnet) and artificial (such as Portland cement, ceramics, glass, and waterglass). The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of manufactured glass are "silicate glasses" based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide, or quartz), the primary constituent of sand. The term glass, in popular usage, is often used to refer only to this type of material, although silica-free glasses often have desirable properties for applications in modern communications technology. Some objects, such as drinking glasses and eyeglasses, are so commonly made of silicate-based glass that they are simply called by the name of the material.

"In geology, Depositional Environment or sedimentary environment describes the combination of physical, chemical and biological processes associated with the deposition of a particular type of sediment and, therefore, the rock types that will be formed after lithification, if the sediment is preserved in the rock record. In most cases the environments associated with particular rock types or associations of rock types can be matched to existing analogues. However, the further back in geological time sediments were deposited, the more likely that direct modern analogues are not available (e.g. banded iron formations)."

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Soil

Soil is a living and life-giving natural resource. 

Soil: relative sizes of sand, silt, clay

What Are Soils?

Soil is a material composed of five ingredients — minerals, soil organic matter, living organisms, gas, and water. Soil minerals are divided into three size classes — clay, silt, and sand (Figure 1); the percentages of particles in these size classes is called soil texture. The mineralogy of soils is diverse. For example, a clay mineral called smectite can shrink and swell so much upon wetting and drying that it can knock over buildings. The most common mineral in soils is quartz; it makes beautiful crystals but it is not very reactive. Soil organic matter is plant, animal, and microbial residues in various states of decomposition; it is a critical ingredient — in fact the percentage of soil organic matter in a soil is among the best indicators of agricultural soil quality (http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/) . Soil colors range from the common browns, yellows, reds, grays, whites, and blacks to rare soil colors such as greens and blues. In the late 1800's soil scientists began to recognize that soils are natural bodies with size, form, and history. Just like a water body has water, fish, plants, and other parts, a soil body is an integrated system containing soil, rocks, roots, animals, and other parts. And just like other bodies, soil systems provide integrated functions that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Soil horizons

It can be difficult to say exactly when some soils were born, but we can say that while some are young, many are very old. The oldest soils on earth may be in Australia, where stable land forms have allowed some soils to age several million years. New soils are born with every landslide, volcanic eruption, or glacial retreat. Soils change over time through a host of biological, chemical, and physical processes. Horizons form, minerals and rocks weather, nutrients leach, and plant communities change. Soil scientists have learned to predict the current stage of these processes if given five key pieces of information about the soil's history — the five factors of soil formation — climate, organisms, topography, parent material, and time.

One is usually able to distinguish different layers within soils, called soil horizons. These horizons interact with each other, and therefore cannot be considered as independent, although they can be very different from each other. There is great complexity and diversity in soil horizons, but in general the surface horizons are dynamic and rich in life and organic matter. The variety of soil formation processes operating on different parent materials under different climatic, topographic, and biological conditions over varying periods of time gives rise to the vast diversity of soils on earth. Soil formation creates a dizzying array of soil horizons.

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Economy

The Accountable Capitalism Act
115th Congress (2017-2018) S. 3348

"...is a proposed federal bill introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren in August 2018. It would require that employees elect 40% of a board of directors of any corporation with over $1 billion in tax receipts, and that 75% of shareholders and directors must approve any political spending. Corporations with revenue over $1 billion would be required to obtain a federal corporate charter. The Act contains a "constituency statute" that would give directors a duty of "creating a general public benefit" with regard to a corporations stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, and the environment, and the interests of the enterprise in the long-term."  {Aug 26, 2018, 6:08 PM}

UPDATE: Jan 16, 2020
116th Congress (2019–2021)
Status: Died in a previous Congress

This bill was introduced on January 16, 2020, in a previous session of Congress, but it did not receive a vote.

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Limitarianism
Limitarianism refers to several different types of ethical theories. Though Limitarianism applies differently to varied fields of study, what is always common is an examination of when it is proper, moral or ethical to interfere and intervene in the lives and freedoms of individuals, in order to benefit society as a whole.

Ingrid Robeyns

Philosopher Wins 2 Million Euros To Study “Limitarianism” | Justin Weinberg | Dec.r 13, 2016 (Daily Nous)
Ingrid Robeyns, professor of philosophy and holder of the Ethics and Institutions Chair at the Utrecht University, has won a 2 million euro grant from the European Research Council to pursue her research on “limitarianism” over the next five years. Her project is called “Can Limitarianism Be Justified? A Philosophical Analysis of Limits on the Distribution of Economic and Ecological Resources,” or Fair Limits, for short.

Inequalities in wealth are significant and on average increasing, and various ecological sinks and resources are overused. These circumstances should prompt us to rethink what fairness entails in the distribution of economic and ecological material resources. In particular, are there good grounds to opt for upper limits in the distribution of those resources? Are there, from a moral point of view, certain limits in our appropriation or use of material resources that should not be crossed? Can we say, either individually or collectively, that at some point we are polluting too much and using too many natural resources, or that we are having too much wealth? If so, why—and if not, why not?…

The Fair Limits project will not only push the boundaries of the philosophy of distributive justice, but also pose some fundamental questions of the contemporary dominant paradigm in thinking about justice. Methodologically, this will be done by developing methods for normative political philosophy in non-ideal conditions. In addition, Fair Limits also entails a critical dialogue with non-liberal philosophies, such as Confucian philosophy, African Philosophy, and Indigenous philosophies, to reconsider the soundness of basic assumptions in contemporary liberal theories of justice. Fair Limits thus has the potential to contribute to a paradigm shift in philosophical analysis of questions of distributive justice.

In contemporary normative political philosophy, questions of distributive justice have focused on meeting minimal needs of persons, prioritizing the worst-off and reducing inequalities. In philosophy, these views are called ‘sufficientarianism’, ‘prioritarianism’ and ‘egalitarianism’. Fair Limits shifts the focus to ‘limitarianism’, the view that there should be upper limits to how much each person could have of valuable goods. In this project, we will investigate the plausibility of limitarianism in the area of economic and ecological resources.

Oxfam report focuses on the wealth gap, which widened during the pandemic | Jan, 18, 2022 (NPR) (BBC: Youtube: 3m40s) :: The pandemic has made the rich much richer — the wealth of the 10 richest men in the world doubled during the pandemic — while the wealth and income of 99% of the rest of the world dropped.

Millionaires petition Rishi Sunak to introduce wealth tax | Rupert Neate | 24 Oct 2021 (Guardian):: Open letter demands that recovery from pandemic is not paid for by ‘care workers, street cleaners and teachers’. :: A group of 30 UK millionaires have called on the chancellor to tax them and other rich people more because they can afford to pay it and “the cost of recovery cannot fall on the young or on those with lower incomes”.

100 Millionaires And Billionaires Sign Open Letter Pleading For Higher Taxes "Tax us, the rich, and tax us now," said the letter. Otherwise, there will be "pitchforks" over the injustice, they warned. | Mary Papenfuss | 01/22/2022 (HuffPost)

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Education

Bootstrapping Education authored by Dan Landrum

I can see, even from my uninformed outsider's perspective, that expanding class size and ensuing teacher workload has long been untenable. But then to pile the pandemic on top of that and the stress has to be unimaginable. It's very understandable that "40% of Colorado teachers say they're thinking about quitting," (Joe McQueen, The Pueblo Chieftain, Feb. 23, 2021) Bless any efforts in developing a remedy. Important work in this vital field.

Thing is, education in America is a common wealth, a socialist undertaking, and we don't do sharing, sharing the commons well at all. Okay, public libraries and fire departments excluded. Those we do a bang-up proper job with. But when it comes to educating our kids sufficiently, appropriately and equitably, not so much.

The simple answer, of course, to expanding class size and teacher workload is to train and hire more teachers and pay them a generously more than living wage, a wage commiserate to their contribution to society. Then, where do all these needed teachers and monies come from? How can we afford that? To which I'd say, how can we not? As it's long been said, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

It's a dilemma that has stymied us for generations.

An 1874 passage (on page 508) in 'The Statistics and Gazetteer of New Hampshire': "Our present free educational institutions are of the highest value to the State. The maintenance of them involves a great expense and much care, but it is a wise outlay. Knowledge is less expensive than ignorance. Ignorance is a dangerous and costly factor under any form of government, and under a republican, destructive."

So how do we afford to educate our children for both the fundamentals and the exploding range of emerging tasks and skills our technical society needs, all the while fairly sharing resources across demographic sectors equitably? And curriculum? With such a philosophically divided population, how do standardize curriculums that would satisfy a vast majority of the republic?

ThinkImpact says, "Homeschooled students perform much better than their counterparts in formal institutional schooling. Peer-reviewed studies indicate that 69% of homeschooled students succeed in college and adulthood." But if there is one thing the global COVID pandemic taught us, most parents are not equipped to homeschool. Good parenting is difficult enough, and the lifestyle of most parents is not conducive for them to take on the extra task of learning the skills required, much less finding the time to properly educate their kids. Homeschooling is a relatively societal luxury for a self-selecting few, or small cultish sub-populations. And homeschooling subcultures run the risk of becoming private silos for radical propaganda and indoctrination. Here, for instance, consider The Alta Academy, located in Salt Lake City, Utah, the school where an entire generation of FLDS children were taught by Warren Jeffs who served there as principal for 22 years.

In theory, it's no easy thing to balance a uniformly standard educational meritocracy with individual rights to free thought and speech. Then again, that messy insoluble chaos may very well be the ultimate teacher. "Chaos does not mean disorder... it represents an abstract cosmic principle referring to the source of all creation," says Ralph Abraham. Look at how many disadvantaged talents have bootstrapped themselves out of the most deprived places to make significant contributions. True, not enough to justify the unnecessary suffering of the remaining tens of thousands who didn't make it out. But it is conceptual proof that it is possible. And that possibility gives us something to build on. Doesn't it?

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Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed instructional materials such as text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing, as well as for research purposes. The term OER describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm.

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http://opencontent.org/

Opencontent's 'improving learning' blog is written and maintained by David Wiley, PhD, the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, a company dedicated to increasing student success, reinvigorating pedagogy, and improving the affordability of education using a combination of open educational resources, learning analytics, continuous improvement, and professional development. "The Lumen team brings your institution deep expertise in the adoption and effective use of open educational resources (OER), design of highly effective online and technology-enhanced instruction, learning data analysis with a focus on improving outcomes, and community collaboration."

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UNESCO: Open Educational Resources (OER)
UNESCO is the only UN agency with a dedicated OER program. The term “Open Education Resource” was first coined in 2002 at a forum organised by UNESCO on Open Courseware in Higher Education. UNESCO leads inter-governmental discussions on OER capacity building, policy, sustainability, quality, and accessibility issues and its applications to meet the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

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Education, Student Alliance, Protest

Students don't want to learn in a 'COVID petri dish.' They're walking out to prove their point.
Christine Fernando | Jan 14, 2022 | (USA TODAY)

“We are the ones who have been in this environment every day. It's our bodies that we're putting at risk," said Kayla Quinlan, a 16-year-old student activist at Boston Day and Evening Academy. “Students should have a say in what their learning environment looks like, but our voices are always left out."

“It feels like a breeding ground for COVID, like a COVID petri dish,” she said. “How are you supposed to feel safe?”

This is why students in Boston and elsewhere in Massachusetts staged a walkout Friday, Quinlan said. Similar student walkouts and protests have happened in New York City, Milwaukee, Seattle and Oakland, California. And after returning to class just two days ago, students in Chicago also staged a walkout Friday morning, led by a new organization called Chicago Public Schools Radical Youth Alliance. The alliance has demanded that the school district and government officials “bring students to the bargaining table” in negotiations with teachers, who refused to come to in-person school for a week. Students also want public apologies for comments officials made about the Chicago Teachers Union during the intense standoff last week.

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What life is like for an 11-year-old | Anna Van Dine | Jan. 22, 2022 (NPR)

Avah Lamie

Avah Lamie feels like the world needs a lot of fixing. She feels it when she thinks about melting glaciers and plastic in the ocean. And lately, she's been feeling it at school. "We've had some fights at recess, some physical, some just yelling," she says. "It really just — it gets you down sometimes." The 11-year-old lives in Hartford, a Vermont town of almost 10,000 people near the border with New Hampshire. She's like a lot of kids: She takes dance, likes science and has a little brother. She's in fifth grade at a small public school called Dothan Brook.

"Some people just have rough times at home, I think. It's not really any of my business. And ... some people just, they want to be tough, because we're going through a really hard thing."

That really hard thing is the COVID-19 pandemic. Rates of anxiety and depression among children and youth were on the rise even before COVID, but kids — and the grownups around them — say the past two years have made mental health challenges worse.

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Learning Disabilities (vis-a-vis Neuroplasticity)

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: the Arrowsmith Program
The genesis of the Arrowsmith Program of cognitive exercises lies in Barbara Arrowsmith-Young’s journey of discovery and innovation to overcome her own severe learning disabilities, a description of which appears in the article, Building a Better Brain or in Chapter 2 of the book, “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Dr. Norman Doidge. Diagnosed in grade one as having a mental block, which today would have been identified as multiple learning disabilities. Arrowsmith-Young is recognized as the creator of one of the first practical applications of the principles of neuroplasticity to the treatment of learning disorders. Her program is implemented in 54 schools internationally. In 2012 she published The Woman Who Changed Her Brain which combines an autobiographical account of her own severe learning disabilities and the method she developed to overcome them with case studies of learning disabled children who she claims overcame similar problems by using her method.

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Equality (racism)

In defense of us privileged folk growing up blithely on the white side of the tracks in the 1950's Mayberry USA with our collective heads buried in the beach sand, ... immersed in the thick of it Michelle Alexander says — before she did the research and wrote her seminal book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color blindness, "I was living in Oakland California and I was rushing to catch the bus and as I was hurrying down the street there was this bright orange poster stapled to a telephone pole that caught my eye and on it, it said in large bold print the drug war is the new Jim Crow. And I paused for a minute and scanned the text of the flyer and I saw that some radical community group was holding a meeting several blocks away and they were organizing to protest the new three strikes law in California, the expansion of this prison system, the drug war, racial profiling, police brutality, the list went on and on. And I stood there looking at the flier thinking to myself, 'yeah our criminal justice system may be biased in a lot of ways, but does it help to make such absurd comparisons to Jim Crow, people just think you're crazy.' Then I cross the street hopped on the bus headed to my new job as director of the racial justice project for the ACLU."  authored by Dan Landrum

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The future of race in America: Michelle Alexander at TEDxColumbus (Youtube) | Oct 16, 2013

00:28 ...I want to share with you how my own eyes have been opened and how I have learned to care more about a group of people were supposed to despise people were supposed to hate people are supposed to fear people we are taught are unworthy fundamentally unworthy of our care compassion and concern I'm here to talk about criminals and I'm here to talk about our criminal justice system a system of mass incarceration a penal system unprecedented in world history millions of people are locked up in the United States today overwhelmingly poor people and people of color locked in literal cages often treated worse than animals and then upon their release they're stripped of the basic civil and human rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement like the right to vote the right to serve on juries and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment housing access to education and basic public benefits so many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you've been branded a felon ...

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness  (www.ojp.gov)
This book argues that the U.S. criminal justice system is being used as a contemporary system of racial control even as it adheres to the principle of colorblindness. The author states that despite the election of Barack Obama, the United States has not ended the use of racial caste, instead it has merely redesigned it by targeting Black men through the War on Drugs and the decimation of communities of color. She argues that mass imprisonment of the poor and minorities has exposed the racial and class bias by American politicians and Black leaders, respectively. She notes that the basic structure of legalized discrimination in today's society hasn't changed but instead the language used to justify it has. In today's era of colorblindness, race is no longer used to justify discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Instead, officials use the criminal justice system to label persons of color as "criminals" and then they use this label to continue to use old forms of discrimination: employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service.

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Emotions  

(NOTE: There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition of emotions.)

Richard Price: Psychosis

In 1956, Richard Price, co-founder of Esalen Institute, experienced an episode of manic psychosis in San Francisco which he later described as simply "a state", what he believed was a mental break that was transitory and which he needed to go through and experience rather than repress or manage. His parents involuntarily committed him to an exclusive mental treatment facility in Connecticut. While hospitalized, he was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. He was subjected to physical confinement and major tranquilizers, along with numerous electroconvulsive and insulin shock treatments. While committed, his mother had his marriage annulled. He was released almost a year later on Thanksgiving Day 1957.

Price wrote about his hospitalization experience:

"There was a fundamental mistake being made and that mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease is healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the "psychosis." ... The so-called "psychosis" was an attempt towards spontaneous healing, and it was a movement towards health, not a movement towards disease.... In some categories it would be called mystical, really a re-owning and discovery of parts of myself."

Price never forgave his parents for their actions.

Emotions: Feeling is Healing  (Emotional Release Work)

"Like most of us, my clients had to shut down their emotions when they were young to get their parents’ love and approval. They learned to hold in their anger, sadness and fear and stuff them in their bodies in order to be “good,” first for their parents, then for their teachers, friends, employers and partners. Because they grew up believing they had to avoid their emotions in order to be loved, they spent years distracting themselves, numbing their emotions and medicating them away. But all that does is push them even deeper inside, causing more loneliness, anxiety and depression."

"I have yet to find a quick fix or a magic pill that removes emotions from the body. But I know what works. Feeling is Healing. When my clients release their sadness, anger and fear, these emotions leave their bodies. Just as babies naturally express their emotions, my clients learn to give themselves permission to feel again, in the safety of a healing environment. This is how trauma is healed." — Carol Landrum

"The way mammals solve problems is by feeling things. Our emotions and sensations are really an integral part of the way we solve problems in our lives,"  Yuval Harari

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The best I can hope for is being honest with myself in trusting my perceptions, honoring  the primacy of the instinct, the imminence of raw emotion, the present clarity of sensation, the truth of my feelings.

{The micro to macro movement of emotion from single cell to speaking truth to imperial power...}

There are some 30 trillion organism within our bodies that can be described as human, and some 39 or so trillion organism within our bodies that can NOT be described as human. And that each and every one of those is an intelligent individual 'life bit' with its own drive to survive, its own inherent means to do so – motive and means of motion; and its own peculiar mode of feeling and means to express its feelings – its contribution to emotions. (The prefixes, "e-" indicates out, away, out of or outside. Hence, 'e-motion' indicates a motion, a movement outside itself.) That these 'cells' learn to cooperate in the competition for resources, learn to form colonies, tissues, organs of function within larger systems -- to form blood cells, livers to cleanse, blood streams, hearts to pump blood, lungs to oxygenate, a brain to coordinate sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous networks through which every human life bit can communicate its needs, as well as its current status relationship to the non-human life bits, from which the body whole can then decide its next action -- eat, shit, run, fight, love. And this expression of needs can go out in a cry, a word, a gesture to other like forms. All within coded languages that can construct inner/outer families, societies, nations, empires, and be inherited by the next generation through DNA and compounding thoughts. This micro to macro movement from single cell to speaking truth to imperial power is driven at its core by the perception of the sensations of raw emotion; and processed and conveyed by instinct, gut-feeling and your unadulterated first-thought. — excerpted from On the Nature of Rebalancing authored by Dan Landrum

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First Thoughts INCLUDE all feelings, are driven by emotion. Encoded in your life experience, your DNA. The reasons are their own. How you play with them, your choice.

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Enjamber:  Line Break Poetry

A line break is a poetic device that is used at the end of a line, and the beginning of the next line in a poem. It can be employed without traditional punctuation. Also, it can be described as a point wherein a line is divided into two halves. Sometimes, a line break that occurs at mid-clause creates enjambment. In poetry, enjambment is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning 'runs over' or 'steps over' from one poetic line to the next, without punctuation. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped. The origin of the word is credited to the French word enjamber, which means 'to straddle or encroach'.

The sun sinks
in the west,
in the red sky,
into the long night,
sailor's delight.

The moon rises
in the east
full, lighting the sky
bright, all night,
Sail on, sailor.

Fare thee well, my little girl.
I'll see you in the morning.

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Entertainment

First and foremost,
it's all entertainment.

Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousands of years specifically for the purpose of keeping an audience's attention.

Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in term of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, only less than 1% of the visual input data (at around one megabyte per second) can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness.

Attentional lapses have been found to be as strongly correlated with boredom. In conventional usage, boredom is an emotional and occasionally psychological state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, is not interested in their surroundings, or feels that a day or period is dull or tedious. It is also understood by scholars as a modern phenomenon which has a cultural dimension. "There is no universally accepted definition of boredom. But whatever it is, researchers argue, it is not simply another name for depression or apathy. It seems to be a specific mental state that people find unpleasant—a lack of stimulation that leaves them craving relief, with a host of behavioural, medical and social consequences." Boredom proneness has been found to be as strongly correlated with attentional lapses as with depression. Hence, boredom, and even depression are a form of entertainment. If you have any spark of life in you at all, no matter how excruciating, you're being entertained.

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Eros

"We may summarize the classical Eros as:  . . . drawing things toward unity, bringing order and harmony from chaos, the creative action of the universe,"  Chaos, Gaia, Eros by Ralph Abraham

EROS was the mischievous god of love, a minion and constant companion of the goddess Aphrodite. ... It was he who lit the flame of love in the hearts of the gods and men, armed with either a bow and arrows or a flaming torch. Eros was often portrayed as the disobedient but fiercely loyal child of Aphrodite.

God of: Love, sexual desire
Roman Name: Cupid, Amor
Parents: Aphrodite

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Ethics

"Goodie-goodies are the thieves of virtue."

"Confucius said that the goodie-goodies are the thieves of virtue, meaning that to be wholly righteous is to go beyond humanity," Alan Watts

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson treats the policing mind as an affliction, and goes one further than Confucius while speaking of those who seek whole righteousness and enforce it especially in others. Those possessed by the policing mind are not just thieves of virtue, but enemies of humanity, who are especially dangerous when armed, according to Erikson. Quoting from Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence  (1969), "...One must try to envisage what has become of man as a military, or maybe one should say a policing mind, in the possession of mechanized weapons. Not that one could entertain the idea of a society altogether without police or should indulge in treating policemen as a separate species, like henchmen. They are only the willing puppets serving an overwhelming propensity of human nature, namely, brutal righteousness [...] For we have all become obedient to the policing mind; and once we have learned to reduce the "other"—any living human being in the wrong place, the wrong category, or the wrong uniform—to a dirty speck in our moral vision, and potentially a mere target in the sight of our (or our soldiery's) gun, we are on the way to violating man's essence, if not his very life."

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AlanWatts on Moral Wars
"The most awful wars that are waged are the wars waged for moral principles. 'You' are a lousy communist. 'You' have a philosophy that is destructive to religion and to everything that we love and value and reverence, and therefore we will exterminate you to the last man unless you surrender unconditionally. "Such wars are ruthless beyond belief. We can blow up whole cities, wipe peoples out because 'we' are not greedy. We are 'righteous'. That is why the goodie-goodies are the thieves of virtue. If you're going to do something evil, do it for a plain, honest, selfish motive. Don't do it in the name of God, because if you do, it turns you into a monster who is no longer human, a sadist, a pure destroyer. "So an inflexibly righteous person is not human."

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By war,
everyone is ruined,
there are no heroes.

War makes monsters out of our children.

{and moral wars, all the more.}

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Farming

Rethinking the Farming Economy by Natalie Peart, Jun 29, 2021
A Vermont nonprofit is connecting independent farms with buyers and distributors, reducing food surplus and working to eliminate food insecurity.

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The United Farm Workers of America
The United Farm Workers of America, or more commonly just United Farm Workers (UFW), is a labor union for farmworkers in the United States. It originated from the merger of two workers' rights organizations, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by organizer Larry Itliong, and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. They became allied and transformed from workers' rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when the most Filipino farmworkers of the AWOC in Delano, California, initiated a grape strike, and the NFWA went on strike in support. As a result of the commonality in goals and methods, the NFWA and the AWOC formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966. This organization was accepted into the AFL-CIO in 1972 and changed its name to the United Farm Workers Union. 

The Delano Grape Strike

The Delano Grape Strike began on September 8, 1965. The strike lasted for five years and was characterized by its grassroots efforts—consumer boycotts, marches, community organizing and nonviolent resistance—which gained the movement national attention. On July 1970, the strike resulted in a victory for farm workers, due largely to a consumer boycott of non-union grapes, when a collective bargaining agreement was reached with major table grape growers, affecting more than 10,000 farm workers. The Delano Grape Strike is most notable for the effective implementation and adaptation of boycotts, the unprecedented partnership between Filipino and Mexican farm workers to unionize farm labor, and the resulting creation of the UFW labor union, all of which revolutionized the farm labor movement in America.

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Food (Sustainable Diets) (cooking) (raw) (omnivore)(vegetarian) (vegan) (fruitarian) (fungi) (breatharian) (paleo, ketogenic, fermentation, enzymes, etc)

Inedia (Latin for 'fasting') or breatharianism is the claimed ability for a person to live without consuming food, and in some cases water. ... The terms breatharianism or inedia may also be used when it is practiced as a lifestyle in place of a usual diet. Fruitarianism is a fad diet related to veganism that consists primarily of consuming fruits and possibly nuts and seeds, but without any animal products. Fruitarian diets are subject to criticism and health concerns. Fungus, plural fungi, any of about 144,000 known species of organisms of the kingdom Fungi, which includes the yeasts and mushrooms.

A vegan diet excludes all meat and animal products (meat, poultry, fish, seafood, dairy and eggs), whereas a vegetarian diet excludes meat, poultry, fish and seafood. However, there are a few variations of a vegetarian diet that depend on whether you eat or exclude eggs, dairy and fish. Ovo-vegetarian diets exclude meat, poultry, seafood and dairy products, but allow eggs. Lacto-ovo vegetarian diets exclude meat, fish and poultry, but allow dairy products and eggs. Pescatarian diets exclude meat and poultry, dairy, and eggs, but allow fish.

A paleo diet typically includes lean meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds — foods that in the past could be obtained by hunting and gathering. A paleo diet limits foods that became common when farming emerged about 10,000 years ago. These foods include dairy products, legumes and grains. The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that forces the body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates. Raw foodism, also known as rawism or following a raw food diet, is the dietary practice of eating only or mostly food that is uncooked and unprocessed. Fermentation is a metabolic process in which an organism converts a carbohydrate, such as starch or a sugar, into an alcohol or an acid. For example, yeast performs fermentation to obtain energy by converting sugar into alcohol. Bacteria perform fermentation, converting carbohydrates into lactic acid. Omnivores will eat foods of both plant and animal origin, or just about anything.

Cooking? For cooking SEE: Food Network

What are enzymes?  (Youtube: 3m19s)
"Enzymes are built of proteins folded into complicated shapes; they are present throughout the body. The chemical reactions that keep us alive - our metabolism - rely on the work that enzymes carry out." Enzymes (wikipedia), "Enzymes are known to catalyze more than 5,000 biochemical reaction types. Most enzymes are proteins, although a few are catalytic RNA molecules. The latter are called ribozymes. Enzymes' specificity comes from their unique three-dimensional structures."

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Sustainable Diets
Michael Pollan's Food Rules Sustainable Diets are defined as "those diets with low environmental impacts that contribute to food and nutritional security and to healthy lives for present and future generations. Sustainable diets are protective and respectful of biodiversity and ecosystems, culturally acceptable, accessible, economically fair and affordable, are nutritionally adequate, safe, and healthy, and optimize natural and human resources." These diets attempt to address nutrient deficiencies (e.g., undernourishment) and excess (e.g., obesity), all of the while covering ecological phenomena such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and land degradation. Sustainable diets frequently seek to reduce the environmental impact of the whole contributing food system. These efforts can tackle anything from production practices and distribution to other economic or systems considerations (such as food waste). However, most sustainable diets include reducing consumption of meat, dairy and eggs, because of the broad negative environmental impact of these industries. As a theme, it also covers the study of eating patterns that take into account the impact food consumption has on planetary resources and human health, all of the while promoting the needs of the environment, society and the economy. This growing body of research is recognized by a variety of international bodies such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

In his 2009 book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual  Michael Pollan provides a simple framework for a healthy  and sustainable diet, explicately furthering the principles of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

What is a healthy and sustainable diet? The EAT-Lancet Lecture | Jan 29, 2019 | (Youtube: 27m17s)
EAT gathered 37 of the planet’s foremost experts who, for the first time ever, propose scientific targets for what constitutes both a healthy diet and a sustainable food system. The EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health delivered the first full scientific review of what constitutes a healthy diet from a sustainable food system, and which actions can support and speed up food system transformation.

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Macrobiotics: Michio Kushi, George Ohsawa, William Dufty and Sugar Blues
. . .and short grain brown rice became the center of his universe

Michio Kushi
Michio Kushi (久司 道夫, Kushi Michio) (born May 17, 1926, in Japan, died December 28, 2014) helped to introduce modern macrobiotics to the United States in the early 1950s. He lectured all over the world at conferences and seminars about philosophy, spiritual development, health, food, and diseases. After World War II, Kushi studied in Japan with macrobiotic educator, George Ohsawa.

George Ohsawa
George Ohsawa, born Nyoichi Sakurazawa (櫻澤 如一), October 18, 1893 – April 23, 1966, was the founder of the macrobiotic diet. He wrote about 300 books in Japanese and 20 in French. He defined health on the basis of seven criteria: lack of fatigue, good appetite, good sleep, good memory, good humour, precision of thought and action, and gratitude. In 1961, he wrote Zen Macrobiotic, referring to the macrobiotic diet that had been advocated by Christoph Hufeland in Germany since 1796. Subsequently, the philosophy of Ohsawa has been referred to as Macrobiotics. Ohsawa created a philosophy and lifestyle that was new and innovative during his time. In his book, Zen Macrobiotics, he was not only promoting prevention of diseases and prolonged life but also for spiritual awakening. Here are some takeaways on his zen macrobiotic practices and ideas on diet, water intake, and spirituality.

William Dufty's Sugar Blues

William Dufty
William Dufty, who, finding relief in the brown rice diet recommended by Ohsawa, became an advocate of macrobiotics, and traveled to Paris to meet with Ohsawa and publisher Felix Morrow. Ohsawa handed Dufty a package, and said, "Here is a lifetime of writing. Do your best with them. It's your turn."

Sugar Blues (Amazon Books)
Sugar Blues, a book by Dufty released in 1975 has become a dietary classic. According to the publishers, over 1.6 million copies have been printed. Dufty uses the narrative form to delve into the history of sugar and history of medicine. He mentions whistle blowers, such as Semmelweiss, to remind readers of the discontinuities in standard science. He also delves into the history of Cuba, history of slavery, history of tobacco and tobacco curing to present the sociology of sugar. The status of sugar, as a product of refining, was compared to drugs.

MJoy Reads Sugar Blues by William Dufty | Feb 26, 2021 (Youtube: 11m24s)
"This is a super interesting historical & health conscious piece to reflect on. I highly recommend this old school classic. Let’s get sugar free."

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New Foods

Cultured meat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
Cultured meat (also known by other names, see below) is a meat produced by in vitro cell cultures of animal cells. It is a form of cellular agriculture. Cultured meat is produced using tissue engineering techniques traditionally used in regenerative medicines. The concept of cultured meat was introduced to wider audiences by Jason Matheny in the early 2000s after he co-authored a paper on cultured meat production and created New Harvest, the world's first nonprofit organization dedicated to in-vitro meat research. Cultured meat may have the potential to address substantial global problems of the environmental impact of meat production, animal welfare, food security and human health.

In 2013, professor Mark Post at Maastricht University pioneered a proof-of-concept for cultured meat by creating the first hamburger patty grown directly from cells. Since then, other cultured meat prototypes have gained media attention: SuperMeat opened a laboratory restaurant called "The Chicken" in Tel Aviv to test consumer reaction to its "Chicken" burger, while the "world's first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat" occurred in December 2020 at the Singapore restaurant "1880", where cultured meat manufactured by the US firm Eat Just was sold.

While most efforts in the space focus on common meats such as pork, beef, and chicken which comprise the bulk of consumption in developed countries, some new companies such as Orbillion Bio have focused on high end or unusual meats including Elk, Lamb, Bison, and the prized Wagyu strain of beef. Avant Meats has brought cultured grouper fish to market as other companies have started to pursue cultivating additional fish species and other seafood.

The production process is constantly evolving, driven by multiple companies and research institutions. The applications of cultured meat have led to ethical, health, environmental, cultural, and economic discussions.

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Fusarium Venenatum
Fusarium Venenatum is a microfungus of the genus Fusarium that has a high protein content. One of its strains is used commercially for the production of the single cell protein mycoprotein Quorn. Fusarium venenatum was discovered growing in soil in Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom, in 1967 by ICI as part of the effort during the 1960s to find alternative sources of food to fill the protein gap caused by the growing world population. It was originally misidentified as Fusarium graminearum. The strain Fusarium venenatum A3/5 (IMI 145425, ATCC PTA-2684[4]) was developed commercially by an ICI and Rank Hovis McDougall joint venture to derive a mycoprotein used as a food. Because the hyphae of the fungus are similar in length and width to animal muscle fibres the mycoprotein is used as an alternative to meat and is marketed to vegetarians as Quorn. It is also suitable as a substitute for fat in dairy products and a substitute for cereal in breakfast cereals and snacks

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Algae
A Simple Guide To Eating Algae by Ariel Kusby | October 11, 2017

Algae contains high levels of calcium, iron, vitamins A, C, and K, potassium, selenium, and magnesium. Most importantly, it is one of the best natural sources of iodine, a nutrient that is missing from most other foods, and is also essential for a healthy functioning thyroid gland. It also contains high levels of Vitamin B12, which is great news for vegetarians and vegans because it is one of the few plant sources of this essential nutrient. Seaweed is also low in fat and high in fiber, making it a great weight loss aid. Two similar superfood algaes with substantial health benefits, both chlorella and spirulina grow in freshwater and are jam-packed with nutrients that help support a healthy body. With powerful health benefits, chlorella and spirulina have the ability to bind with heavy metals and other harmful chemicals to remove them from the body. They both also contain high levels of protein, essential fatty acids, fiber, iron, and B vitamins.

Algae… the next big thing in plant-based seafood? by Elaine Watson | 22-Mar-2021
Triton Algae Innovations gears up for commercial launch

Plant-based tuna featuring protein-packed red algae from Triton Algae Innovations could hit the market by the end of the year, says the San Diego-based firm, which says the ingredient could add an exciting new dimension to the small – but fast-growing – seafood alternatives market. Founded in 2013 as a spin off from UC San Diego, Triton Algae Innovations​​ utilizes Chlamydomonas reinhardtii​, a single-celled freshwater green algae species that can grow heterotrophically in fermentation tanks, with the ability to express multiple proteins found in plants and mammalian cells. Triton is building a b2b business, and will "commence commercial-scale production of red and green algae this year,​" but also plans to road test its wares through a consumer launch (tuna) to show consumers what’s possible, said the firm: "Retail would be first, but discussions are also underway over potential foodservice pathways."​ Triton has three Non GMO C. reinhardtii product streams it believes could have significant potential.

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Freedom

Freedom, generally, is having the ability to act or change without constraint. Something is "free" if it can change easily and is not constrained in its present state. In philosophy and religion, it is associated with having free will and being without undue or unjust constraints, or enslavement, and is an idea closely tied with the concept of liberty. A person has the freedom to do things that will not, in theory or in practice, be prevented by other forces. Outside of the human realm, freedom generally does not have this political or psychological dimension. A rusty lock might be oiled so that the key has the freedom to turn, undergrowth may be hacked away to give a newly planted sapling freedom to grow, or a mathematician may study an equation having many degrees of freedom. In physics or engineering, the mathematical concept may also be applied to a body or system constrained by a set of equations, whose degrees of freedom describe the number of independent motions that are allowed to it. The first known written reference to freedom appears during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 BC – c. 2004 BC) as Ama-gi, in the sense of freedom from bondage or debts, and literally meant "return to mother."

Freedom, generally, is having the ability to act or change without constraint, yes,...but  the willful resistance to adhere to best practices during a deadly global pandemic of masking and social distancing for some misguided libertarian notion of "my body, my choice" is a sense of personal freedom tantamount to shitting in the community well. authored by Dan Landrum  {SEE: Cooperation > Notes on Competition/Cooperation > [Compete-Cooperate Cost/Benefit differential for an Individual within Society?] }

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Just Like a Bird (a walking song)  authored by Dan Landrum

Just like a bird is bound to the sky,
the fish is bound to the sea.
Just like a tree is bound to the earth,
we all struggle ... to be free.

Can't be free 'til we're all free.
Guess I'll be me 'til then.
To spark a life is no small thing,
just learnin' to play again.

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The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit
For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest.
By Michael Finkel | August 4, 2014 | [GQ, Gentlemen's Quarterly]

"I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing — when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."

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Gaia

In Greek mythology, Gaia (from a poetical form of Ancient Greek, "land" or "earth") is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenogenic—of all life. She is the mother of Uranus (the sky), from whose sexual union she bore the Titans (themselves parents of many of the Olympian gods), the Cyclopes, and the Giants; as well as of Pontus (the sea), from whose union she bore the primordial sea gods. Her equivalent in the Roman pantheon was Terra. Beliefs and worship amongst neopagans regarding Gaia vary, ranging from the belief that Gaia is the Earth to the belief that she is the spiritual embodiment of the earth or the goddess of the Earth.

The mythological name was revived in 1979 by James Lovelock, in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth; his Gaia hypothesis was supported by Lynn Margulis. The hypothesis proposes that living organisms and inorganic material are part of a dynamical system that shapes the Earth's biosphere, and maintains the Earth as a fit environment for life. In some Gaia theory approaches, the Earth itself is viewed as an organism with self-regulatory functions. Further books by Lovelock and others popularized the Gaia Hypothesis, which was embraced to some extent by New Age environmentalists as part of the heightened awareness of environmental concerns of the 1990s.

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Glass

The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of manufactured glass are "silicate glasses" based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide, or quartz), the primary constituent of sand. Silicate minerals are the largest and most important class of rock-forming minerals and make up approximately 90 percent of the Earth's crust. The term glass, in popular usage, is often used to refer only to this type of material, although silica-free glasses often have desirable properties for applications in modern communications technology. Some objects, such as drinking glasses and eyeglasses, are so commonly made of silicate-based glass that they are simply called by the name of the material. For diverse manufacturing, technological, and artistic needs, silicates are versatile materials, both natural (such as granite, gravel, and garnet) and artificial (such as Portland cement, ceramics, glass, and waterglass).

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Half-Earth Project

E. O. Wilson co-founded the Half-Earth Project in 2016 to “protect half the Earth in order to preserve habitat and safeguard the bulk of biodiversity. "With science at its core and our transcendent moral obligation to the rest of life at its heart, the Half-Earth Project® is working to conserve half the land and sea to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity, including ourselves."

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Health (Well-being) (Human Potential)

Health, according to the World Health Organization, is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity".A variety of definitions have been used for different purposes over time. Health can be promoted by encouraging healthful activities, such as regular physical exercise and adequate sleep, and by reducing or avoiding unhealthful activities or situations, such as smoking or excessive stress. Some factors affecting health are due to individual choices, such as whether to engage in a high-risk behavior, while others are due to structural causes, such as whether the society is arranged in a way that makes it easier or harder for people to get necessary healthcare services. Still other factors are beyond both individual and group choices, such as genetic disorders.

Well-being, also known as wellness, prudential value or quality of life, refers to what is intrinsically valuable relative to someone. So the well-being of a person is what is ultimately good for this person, what is in the self-interest of this person. Well-being can refer to both positive and negative well-being. In its positive sense, it is sometimes contrasted with ill-being as its opposite. The term "subjective well-being" denotes how people experience and evaluate their lives, usually measured in relation to self-reported well-being obtained through questionnaires Sometimes different types of well-being are distinguished, like mental well-being, physical well-being, economic wellbeing or emotional well-being. The different forms of well-being are often closely interlinked. For example, improved physical well-being (e.g., by reducing or ceasing an addiction) is associated with improved emotional well-being. As another example, better economic well-being (e.g., possessing more wealth) tends to be associated with better emotional well-being even in adverse situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic.Well-being plays a central role in ethics since what we ought to do depends, at least to some degree, on what would make someone's life go better or worse. According to welfarism, there are no other values besides well-being.

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Esalen

Esalen Institute
Esalen, "There’s the wonder of the place itself, 120 acres of fertile land perched between mountain and ocean, with hot mineral springs gushing out of a seaside cliff. The delicate Big Sur air ... reminding you you’re one part of something much bigger. And then there are the people — the people who live there and love the land. The philosophers and sociologists and theologians and psychologists and artists and dancers and writers who each have something unique to teach us about what it means to be human. And the 750,000 more who have come from all over the world for the inspiration, intellectual freedom, and opportunity to explore the deepest self as part of a community of seekers."

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (2008) by Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal (Amazon Books)
Jeffrey Kripal here recounts the spectacular history of Esalen, the institute that has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education and stands today at the center of the human potential movement. Forged in the literary and mythical leanings of the Beat Generation, inspired in the lecture halls of Stanford by radical scholars of comparative religion, the institute was the remarkable brainchild of Michael Murphy and Richard Price.

Sample WORKSHOP:

Transformative Practice Meets the Scientific Method, January 2022, with Pam Kramer, Josh Brahinsky and Michael Lifshitz  (Esalen Workshops)

"Want to witness science in action while engaging in mind-body practices for greater balance, vitality, and wellbeing? Research on the effects of contemplative practices is rapidly transforming science and medicine. There is now growing consensus among scientists about the viability of healing through mind-body practices. However, researchers are only just beginning to examine how individual differences (such as personality differences) might influence who is likely to benefit most from various forms of transformative practice. In this workshop, you’ll learn how Stanford University researchers approach the scientific method through an onsite pilot study, exploring the ways individual traits predict change through practice, in particular, Integral Transformative Practice (ITP). Created in 1992 by Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy and former Esalen President George Leonard, ITP is a research-based program for realizing human potential and awakening our extraordinary capacities through dedicated practice."

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Mark Vonnegut Mark Vonnegut: Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So
Mark Vonnegut (born May 11, 1947) is an American pediatrician and memoirist. Son of writer Kurt Vonnegut, he described himself in the preface to his 1975 book, The Eden Express, as "a hippie, son of a counterculture hero with a BA in religion and a genetic disposition to schizophrenia."

"Most diseases can be separated from one's self. Schizophrenia is something we are." So begins Mark Vonnegut's depiction of his descent into, and eventual emergence from, mental illness. As a recent college graduate, self-avowed hippie, and son of a counterculture hero, Vonnegut begins to experience increasingly delusional thinking, suicidal thoughts, and physical incapacity. In February 1971 he is committed to a psychiatric hospital. The Eden Express is his honest, thoughtful, and moving account of the illness of schizophrenia. Required reading for those who want to understand insanity from the inside." — The New York Times.

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir (2010) by Mark Vonnegut M.D. (Goodreads)

More than thirty years after the publication of his acclaimed memoir The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut continues his story in this searingly funny, iconoclastic account of coping with mental illness. Here is Mark’s life after being released from a mental hospital. At the late age of twenty-eight and after nineteen rejections, he is finally accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gains purpose, a life, and some control over his condition. There are the manic episodes, during which he felt burdened with saving the world, juxtaposed against the real-world responsibilities of running a pediatric practice. Ultimately a tribute to the small, daily, and positive parts of a life interrupted by bipolar disorder.

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Emotional Release Work

Emotional Release Work — Carol Landrum

"I tell my clients that their emotions are just as important as their physical, mental and spiritual well-being. Each part has a purpose, and each wants to be taken care of. I say that their emotions tell them the truth about their lives and offer valuable information about themselves and how they're being treated. That’s why they have them. And although some of their emotions are messy, uncomfortable, painful and difficult to feel, they can be trusted."

"Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the renowned psychiatrist who pioneered the hospice movement and wrote the book On Death and Dying, created the Emotional Release Technique I use in my Wholistic Counseling practice. Elisabeth knew that talking alone won’t heal emotions. Neither will drugs. After leaving the medical profession, Elisabeth held workshops around the world, teaching thousands of people how to release their backlog of emotions safely and appropriately. I did her workshop, then took her Facilitator Training in 1984. Since then I’ve been taking care of my emotions and helping my clients take care of theirs. Of all the healing modalities I learned over twenty years, this is the only one that directly addresses emotions. And it’s the one that has transformed my life and my clients’ lives the most. Like doing anything worthwhile, emotional release work requires patience, perseverance and commitment, but the benefits are invaluable. Because when people take care of their emotions, they free themselves to be who they truly are—trusting, joyful and loving."

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Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity can be viewed as a general umbrella term that refers to the brain's ability to modify, change, and adapt both structure and function throughout life and in response to experience.

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Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself

Norman Doidge:  The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (2007)

An astonishing new science called "neuroplasticity" is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. In this revolutionary look at the brain, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., provides an introduction to both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they've transformed. From stroke patients learning to speak again to the remarkable case of a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, The Brain That Changes Itself will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.

The Brain That Changes Itself. Documentary (2008) | (Youtube: 51m51s)
There's so much about the human brain that continues to baffle and mystify our top medical researchers, but one aspect of its complex design is starting to come into focus. Contrary to previous widely held beliefs, the human brain exists in a perpetual state of constant change. The documentary The Brain That Changes Itself explores these groundbreaking findings as heralded in a book of the same title by psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Norman Doidge.

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Vaccines are a tool, not a silver bullet. If we’d allowed more scientific debate, we would have realized this earlier  |  Norman Doidge  |  Jan 22, 2022 (The Globe and Mail) :: More than two years since COVID-19 emerged, our kit of solutions – and the mindset needed to use them – is too small. It’s time to listen to the science in a broader way.

[...] military metaphor seems second nature in medicine. We are always in a “war against cancer,” or “combatting” heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and AIDS. But this way of thinking only became common in medicine several hundred years ago, after the philosopher Francis Bacon argued the goal of science should change from what it had been – “the study of nature” – to the very practical “conquest of nature.” Soon physicians were speaking of “conquering” disease, with “magic bullets.” We increasingly left behind the original Hippocratic mindset of medicine as an extension of nature, which involved working with it, as an ally, wherever possible – not to conquer, but to heal, often with the help of the patient’s own healing capacities.  [...]  This, in medicine, is called the problem of “medical reversal.” An approach thought to be helpful is proven to be harmful, and vice versa. Sometimes two studies can contradict each other even on the same day. Physician-scientist Vinayak Prasad, of UC San Francisco, argues it is the most important problem facing medicine today. The problem of medical reversals didn’t disappear the day the virus landed on our shores. We had not only a virus problem, but a medical reversal problem.  [...]  In a recent Munk Debate, Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and vaccine safety specialist, argued that mandating vaccines for the naturally immune “actually creates problems because when people see that they are forced to take a vaccine that they don’t need because they already are immune, that causes a lot of distrust in public health. And we have seen during this last year and a half that all the hard work we’ve done over many decades to build trust in vaccines is now disappearing because we’re making these mandates that make no sense from a scientific or public health perspective.” Public health moves at the speed of trust, as physician Rishi Manchanda wrote.

COMMENT: "Finally a pushback to mainstream media experts and politicians who have bought into the pseudo-science of this virus and our blind love of vaccines and endless boosters. I am surprised it got published in the Globe and Mail without censorship. If reflects many of the doubts of our profession around vaccine efficacy and the hard fisted politics around lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Being a good Canadian can also mean questioning authority of our leaders and the small cadre of sycophant-scientists who surround them. It is amazing that several countries along with our own provincial data now show the unvaccinated have many advantages over the vaccinated, and that repeat boosters may be doing more harm with minimal improved long term efficacy." — Ross Claybo MD FRCP

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Relational Reality

Relational Reality: Charlene Spretnak at TEDxManhattanBeach | Dec 27, 2013 (Youtube: 13m25s)
Charlene Spretnak is an author and activist who has long been fascinated with the subject of interrelatedness. In her talk, Charlene cites several recent discoveries indicating that all of physical reality, including humans, is far more dynamically interrelated than our modern schooling had supposed. These new discoveries reveal the impact of our relationships — with other people and with nature — on childhood development, intelligence, healing, and our life-long health and well-being.

Relational Reality (Book)
“Our hypermodern societies currently possess only a kindergarten-level understanding of the deeply relational nature of reality.”

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Ashtanga Vinyasa — Ty Landrum

Ty Landrum

Ashtanga Vinyasa "remains as captivating to me as ever before. And what is most alluring, what draws me back with magnetic force, is the movement of creative energy that it so graciously evokes. The experience of that movement is naturally described as a kind of quickening, in which something sweet and generous pours forth from the depths of the heart. That sweetness is always familiar, as if it belongs to our most elemental part. But it rises with a grace that we cannot imitate, and a spontaneity over which we have no control. It moves outside of what we ordinarily think of as “me" and yet saturates the atmosphere of our experience. When it pours forth, the entire world seems to breathe with the same circular movement, and to be refreshed and renewed. My fascination is to connect the bodily movements of Ashtanga to the natural flowing of that energy, and so to use Ashtanga to participate more consciously in the internal process of Hatha Yoga. In wanting to share this fascination, and to share the exhilaration of touching that elusive energy through the Ashtanga ritual, I have recently recorded a set of practical and philosophical and mythological explorations, designed to encourage the integration of these distinct modes of reflection on the source."

Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is a style of yoga as exercise popularised by K. Pattabhi Jois during the 20th century, often promoted as a modern-day form of classical Indian yoga. The style is energetic, synchronising breath with movements. The individual poses (asanas) are linked by flowing movements (vinyasas).

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Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh on The Practice of Mindfulness  (LionsRoar) | Thich Nhat Hanh | October 25, 2021

Mindfulness is the energy that helps us recognize the conditions of happiness that are already present in our lives. You don’t have to wait ten years to experience this happiness. It is present in every moment of your daily life. The great meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches five mindfulness exercises to help you live with happiness and joy.

The First 8 Exercises of Mindful Breathing | Thich Nhat Hanh | Jun 14, 2021 (Youtube: 24m25s)

Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk and peace activist, dies at 95 | January 21, 2022 (NPR)
"I try to live every moment like that, relaxed, dwelling peacefully in the present moment and respond to events with compassion."

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Vision Quest with Apache medicine woman Kachinas "Kute" Kutenai  authored by Dan Landrum

Kachinas Kutenai

I was introduced for a day to the most enlightened being I'd ever meet during a Vision Quest in a Manzanita forest northeast of Los Angeles led by Apache medicine woman Kachinas "Kute" Kutenai. A handsome fellow, 12 to 18 inches long of a lizard species I couldn't name. Most of the day was spent being, just being. Then occasionally he'd put his tail in his mouth making a hoop of himself and roll care-free down the leaf covered slope of the rolling hills. He'd roll and roll until he'd 'splat down' on the flats. Then he's laugh and laugh. I swear, pure, unmistakable mirth laughing silently out loud for minutes on end. Next a little snooze, then up he'd scamper back up to the top of the shaded slope, and do it all again. And again. Simply caught in the act of being.

When I first arrive at my three day, three night Vision Quest's self-selected 'camp site', I found shade from the hot, drying sun and a flat bit of ground under the low canopy of the endless Manzanita forest. Sitting on a spread out tarp, I took off my shoes, put my gallon jug of water within arm's reach and began to survey my surroundings in more detail. Within seconds I frozen stock still. Not three feet away a loosely curled, distinctly patterned snake with a rattle sticking up top. Not here for a trauma drama, I didn't want to disturb. Yet I was too close for comfort. It felt like stillness was my best option at this point. Eyes softly fixed, alert, I waited. I waited for what seemed like hours. Finally, at first slowly, movement, then more purposefully the snake slithered graceful away, thankfully in another direction. But!, turns out, it was not one rattlesnake, but two intertwined. One left behind, still snoozing. I wait again. Eventually the second one would follow the path of the first, and I could breathe a sigh of relief. I had the place to myself.

When I recounted these stories for Kute, even in the total darkness of the sweat lodge, I could feel her smiling knowingly.

It's my 'stoned' experience that rocks have "mind" with 'other' relationships to time than we do, and my 'vision quest' experience that the interwoven root network of fields upon fields of Manzanita have open and direct lines of communications with distant stars, and my 'meditative' experience that ultimately contentless space of inner consciousness is too vast to navigate, and it too also has relationships to time than we can't fathom. Makes me think we need to rethink both "mind" and "evolution." I can well imagine that the vast, deep, and living microbial biosphere, the "subsurface microorganisms in hydrothermal vents/springs, cold methane seeps, deep oceanic sediments, coastal estuaries and bays, and subduction zones" underneath all the world's oceans that Karen Lloyd speaks of from her Lloyd lab is a persistent form of intelligence worlds apart from our own. And there's much we can learn by sitting with it, eyes softly fixed, alert, waiting. Then again, no, not waiting, ...not impatiently poking, proddding, or curiously sampling, ...rather simply watching, witnessing and seeing where we meet, how we connect.

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Alternative Medicine

Functional Medicine
"Functional medicine determines how and why illness occurs and restores health by addressing the root causes of disease for each individual. Functional medicine doctors use specialized training and techniques to find the root causes of complex illnesses. They may investigate multiple factors causing a condition, or they may look into multiple conditions causing one symptom. A doctor in functional medicine works holistically, considering the full picture of your physical, mental, emotional, and sometimes even spiritual health."

The Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine — inspiring the pursuit of health and the transformation of healthcare"The Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine is internationally recognized for its innovative educational programs, evidence-based clinical practice, and research that substantiates the field of integrative medicine and influences public policy. Since its creation in 1994, the Center's vision of making integrative care available to all is being realized worldwide. Graduates of our programs are now guiding more than 8 million patients to take a greater role in their health and healing."

Creating A New Generation of Doctors | Andrew Weil, M.D. | Feb 23, 2010 (Youtube: 2m05s)
The key to reforming medicine in the United States is by reforming medical schools. This has been Dr. Weil's focus and passion for nearly two decades as he continues to highlight the benefits of integrative medicine

NOTE: As of 1/1/22, WIKIPEDIA labels Functional Medicine and Integrative Medicine "as pseudoscience, quackery, and at its essence a rebranding of complementary and alternative medicine." Apparently with the presumption that all "alternative medicine" is out of hand pejoratively illegitimate. authored by Dan Landrum

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Andrew Weil
Andrew Weil's The Natural Mind Andrew Thomas Weil (born June 8, 1942) is an American celebrity doctor who advocates for alternative medicine including the 4-7-8 breathing technique. Weil has been criticized for specific cases where he has appeared to reject aspects of evidence-based medicine, or to promote unverified beliefs. Critiques by scientific watchdog organizations have cited his downplaying, by himself and his peers, of the social, structural, and environmental factors that may contribute to the etiology of disease [the science of causes] in the West. In 1971-1972 Weil began his practices of vegetarianism, yoga, and meditation, and work on writing The Natural Mind (1972). At the same time, Weil began an affiliation with the Harvard Botanical Museum that would span from 1971 to 1984, where his work included duties as a research associate investigating "the properties of medicinal and psychoactive plants". His interests led him to explore the healing systems of indigenous people, and with this aim, Weil traveled throughout South America and other parts of the world, "collecting information about medicinal plants and healing", from 1971 to 1975, as a fellow for the Institute of Current World Affairs. In 1994, Weil founded the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, Arizona, where he serves as its director. Andrew Weil is the founder of True Food Kitchen, a restaurant chain serving meals on the premise that food should make you feel better. There are currently [2022] 32 restaurants in the chain.

Dr. Weil explains how to do his 4-7-8 breathing technique. | Jan 15, 2019 (Youtube 2m21s)
A relaxation technique as demonstrated by Dr. Weil, 4-7-8 breathing is a daily practice that can bring great calmness to the body. This main takeaway here is to do 4 cycles of these breaths, not necessarily sticking to the exact count down to the second. It's more of a guideline. Feel free to experiment with your own cadence.

The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (Amazon Books)
Weil's first bestseller, the classic work on the principles of consciousness, offers a new model for solving the drug problem by acknowledging our intimate yearnings and offering an alternative.

Summary of "The Natural Mind" by Andrew Weil — Ivan Kenneally, updated 2017 (The Pen & The Pad)

Why Do We Take Drugs? — The natural tendency of the human mind is to seek out ways to move beyond the world as it appears to us in search of greater spiritual depth and meaning.

Straight vs. Deep Thinking ("stoned thinking") — Weil distinguishes between two distinct modes of cognition: straight thinking and deep thinking. Straight thinking interprets the world in purely dualistic terms, positing a hard distinction between the self and others. The straight thinker’s classic tendency is to interpret the high from drugs as a way to escape the world, finding sanctuary from pain and disappointment. Conversely, deep thinking is more intuitive and understands the self as fully integrated into the world, aiming at a spiritual oneness that all things participate in. Weil argues that drug use can be good if the user understands the narcotic as a tool to forward the aims of deep thinking.

The Path to Weilness by Robert Pela | 2003, reviewed 2016 (Psychology Today)

Conventional medicine and its indifferent bedside manner have finally pushed Americans into the arms of alternative therapies. Andrew Weil, the father of natural living, has been patiently waiting. For starters, Weil says, we should forget about being healthy all the time. "It's unrealistic to imagine that you can never be sick. Health is cyclical: It breaks down; it reforms. Being sick is part of being alive."

Weil's critics claim that his ways are much like snake oil. They point repeatedly to his unproven therapies, which they say aren't based on any objective evidence or science. Weil's most devoted critic is former New England Journal of Medicine editor Arnold Relman, whose broadsides tend to hammer on Weil's refusal to deliver scientific evidence. "He's ambivalent, and he plays both sides of the street," Relman says of Weil. "He's smart enough to know that when he's talking to scientists and physicians, he has to offer evidence based in medical science. But when he talks to the public, he talks in a weird way, as if he believes in miracles and healing at a distance and all sorts of clearly irrational modes of therapy. What's most irritating is that he pretends he doesn't know the difference." Weil finds Relman's ire amusing. "He's a dinosaur," Weil says. "He's the essence of that old-style, paternalistic, authoritarian physician. He always says, 'Show me the evidence, and I'll believe you.' But when I do, he says, 'You call that evidence?' I can't win." Let others gather medical proof, says Weil, who waves away requests for an explanation of how or why any of his treatments work. "I'm not a researcher, but I'm great at coming up with hypotheses to test. When you see a recovery from a serious illness that doesn't fit your model, it should be taken seriously. They're living examples of people who've had what you have and done very well. I may not know how to make the same cure happen in you, but at least I can show you it's possible."

He'd like to see the word anecdotal (as in anecdotal evidence) stricken from the medical vocabulary, because it trivializes what he calls "uncontrolled clinical observation" (meaning undocumented incidences of healing). There are plenty such Weilisms to choose from.  In his 1986 book Health and Healing, he writes, "Sickness is the manifestation of evil in the body." He has mentioned that he'd prescribe the club drug MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy) as a painkiller, if it were legal. And then there's the matter of "stoned thinking," to which he still subscribes.

Despite his loud opinions about Western medicine and its practitioners, Weil claims a love of medical professionals and worries that doctors are as unsatisfied with the state of the medical industry as are patients. "The unhappiness of physicians is at an all-time high," he moans, "and significant numbers are leaving the profession — becoming pizza chefs or going into nonclinical medicine — because everything that made medicine satisfying is disappearing." But ask Weil what will become of doctors once we all learn to heal ourselves, and he frowns and sighs. "I'd like to see more doctors become guides, teachers, lifestyle consultants, people who you can partner with to decide on treatment options," he says. "That's what patients want, but doctors aren't trained to provide that."

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History

People's History of the United States

A People’s History of the United States
Since the original landmark publication in 1980 of Howard Zinn's, A People’s History of the United States it has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools–with its emphasis on great men in high places–to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.

The People Speak Sneak Peek | Mar 15, 2010 (Youtube: 3m32s)
THE PEOPLE SPEAK is a powerful film inspired by Howard Zinn's groundbreaking books A Peoples History of the United States and Voices of a People's History of the United States. THE PEOPLE SPEAK brings to life our nations rich history of dissent and shows its importance for todays movements.

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We the People
We the People is a nonpartisan campaign dedicated to igniting a national dialogue about American identity and values through public art and story sharing. The day before the inauguration of President Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, Shepard Fairey — who also created the iconic “Hope” portrait of President Barack Obama in 2008 — released a series of posters called “We the People” that featured Muslim, Latina, and African American women.

We the People

Here's a slideshow of one of these We the People images placed around town.

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Historical Bias
Regardless of whether they are conscious or learned implicitly within cultural contexts, biases have been part of historical investigation since the ancient beginnings of the discipline. As such, history provides an excellent example of how biases change, evolve, and even disappear.

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Holism

“Reductionism is one of those things, like sin, that is only mentioned by people who are against it.” — Richard Dawkins

Reductionistic and Holistic Science |  Ferric C. Fang |  2011 Feb 14 (National Center for Biotechnology Information)

Few scientists will voluntarily characterize their work as reductionistic. Yet, reductionism is at the philosophical heart of the molecular biology revolution. Holistic science, the opposite of reductionistic science, has also acquired a bad name, perhaps due to an unfortunate association of the word “holistic” with new age pseudoscience. However, fortunately there is an increasingly popular euphemism that lacks the pejorative connotations of holism for scientists—“systems biology.”

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Holism versus Reductionism  (psychology)

Reductionism and holism are two different approaches in psychology that researchers use to create experiments and draw conclusions. Reductionism likes to divide explanations of behaviour into separate components, whilst holism likes to look at the picture as a whole. In brief, reductionism holds that the nature of complex entities can always be understood by breaking them down into simpler or more fundamental components. Holism takes the contrary view that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts. Reductionistic and Holistic Science: A reductionistic approach to science, epitomized by molecular biology, is often contrasted with the holistic approach of systems biology. However, molecular biology and systems biology are actually interdependent and complementary ways in which to study and make sense of complex phenomena. [...]  In the end, the test of both reductionistic and holistic paradigms is their ability to explain and make useful predictions about the real world. No one said it would be easy. As Douglas Adams said, “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision”.

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"This 'rebalancing' view of nature and man's relationship to it, appears to put humans somehow outside of nature, and makes the Anthropocene somehow an event that isn't part & parcel of the planets evolution. It seems to suggest that rather than a dynamic ever evolving mega-system of interplay, there was at some point a particular preferred balanced status quo for the life forms here, an ideal garden that we should be striving to get back to. Such a view would be tenable if we accepted a Cartesian view that life and nature is at base a reductive coded machine that we can take apart like an automobile motor, rebuild and put back together again, better than ever. Not so much from a holistic view that sees if you try to take apart, rebuild and put a cat back together again, you will have lost what animates that lifeless corpse, and no longer have a cat. In its deductive, reductionism, Cartesians fail to take responsibility for the whole being greater than the sum of its part." — excerpted from On the Nature of Rebalancing  authored by Dan Landrum

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Fritz Perls
Friedrich (Frederick) Salomon Perls (July 8, 1893 – March 14, 1970), better known as Fritz Perls, was a German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. While in South Africa in 1942, Perls was influenced by the "holism" of Jan Smuts. Perls coined the term 'Gestalt therapy' to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s. The core of the Gestalt Therapy process is enhanced awareness of sensation, perception, bodily feelings, emotion, and behavior, in the present moment. Relationship is emphasized, along with contact between the self, its environment, and the other. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964, and he lived there until 1969.

Jan Smuts
Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts (24 May 1870 – 11 September 1950) was a South African statesman, military leader and philosopher. He served as prime minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and 1939 to 1948. While in academia, Smuts pioneered the concept of holism, which he defined as "[the] fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe" in his 1926 book, Holism and Evolution.

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Indra's Net

In this metaphor, Indra's net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels. "Indra's net" is an infinitely large net of cords owned by the Vedic deva Indra, which hangs over his palace on Mount Meru, the axis mundi of Buddhist and Hindu cosmology. Indra's net (also called Indra's jewels or Indra's pearls, Sanskrit Indrajwāla) is a metaphor used to illustrate the concepts of Śūnyatā (emptiness), pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination), and interpenetration in Buddhist philosophy. The metaphor's earliest known reference is found in the Atharva Veda, compiled 1200 BCE – 1000 BCE.

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Intelligence

"Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things," Yuval Harari

Alan Watts  (from a 1960 lecture):

"The meaning of life is just to be alive.
It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic
as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."

And in those moments when our inner turmoil has really quietened, we find significance in things that we wouldn’t expect to find significant at all. I mean this is after all the art of those photographers who have such genius in turning the camera towards such things as peeling paint on an old door, or mud and sand and stones on a dirt road, and showing us there that if we look at it in a certain way those things are significant. But we can’t say significant of what so much as significant of themselves. Or perhaps the significance then is the quality of a state of mind in which we notice that we’re overlooking the significance of the world by our constant quest for it later.

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An Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, is a measure of what psychologists call our “fluid and crystallized intelligence.” Put simply, an IQ test measures your reasoning and problem-solving abilities. An IQ score doesn’t measure your practical intelligence: knowing how to make things work. It doesn’t measure your creativity. It doesn’t measure your curiosity. It doesn’t tell your parents or teachers about your emotional readiness. Maybe as a 5-year-old, you can read and understand The Economist. But are you prepared to deal with stories about war-torn countries or prisoners on death row? — Jacque Wilson, CNN, Wed February 19, 2014

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Media

The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association.

National Public Radio (NPR) is an American privately and publicly funded non-profit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. (often called the "mothership" of NPR), with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other non-profit membership media organizations such as Associated Press, in that it was established by an act of Congress, and most of its member stations are owned by government entities (often public universities). It serves as a national syndicator to a network of over 1,000 public radio stations in the United States.

The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference."

The Conversation is a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good. We publish trustworthy and informative articles written by academic experts for the general public and edited by our team of journalists.

YES! Magazine @yesmagazine
Award-winning national media organization. Reframing the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions since 1996. Nonprofit, reader-supported.

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Propaganda & The (mainstream) Media | September 5, 2021 authored by Dan Landrum

Writ large our mainstream media is based in fear culture. That's all we knew. It was the very water our school of fish swam in. To become a flying fish takes an unimaginable leap of faith. To teach yourself to think and act independently of the society you grew up in and are surrounded by, and not to succumb to the fear molding, or the reactionary outrage molding is the miracle performed by the few who can successfully transverse the path less travelled by. The most successful person I know in this regard, and the most informed about the social and political reality of the USA in the past 50 years is Noam Chomsky.

As a network MSNBC, like CNN, has a very specific point of view. And virtually all the anchors hammer away on the same stories, with the same in-house pundits for weeks, months at a time. Though it can get very tedious, each anchor has a clear brand that appeals to slightly different audiences. With opinion journalists, it's what current issues they do and don't focus on that speaks to their bias and motivations -- the agenda they are pushing, as well as the ones they ignore. 

Chris Cuomo is the no non-sense "let's get after it" with integrity brand. Until he's caught back-handedly helping his brother not come clean, but perversely fight multiple sexual harassment allegations. Does Don Lemon call Chris on it in their usually frank 'bro talk' during the hand-off between their shows? Hell no! It's a good ole boy boy's club tacitly agreeing boys will be boys.

Rachel Maddow's brand is the wholesome exhaustive Oxford trained nerd. She's not simply giving us a detailed reading of the daily news, she's developing a somewhat factual, somewhat innuendo, somewhat nerd-fest snarky narrative to carry her audience along show after show. Personally, Maddow wears me out with her tedious redundancy. Like a preacher from the pulpit she chants in measured repetition, a rhetorical device used less for informing and more for persuasive indoctrination. If Maddow  presented with the simple straight forward  clarity of PBS NewsHour's Judy Woodruff, she could condensed her show to ten commercial free minutes. Democracy Now!'s  Amy Goodman has a fraction of the staff Maddow has, yet she consistently provides a densely thoughtful, historically astute assessment, which is far more informative on a much wider array of topics. Spend an hour with the well-studied richness of a Fresh Air Terry Gross interview and see how it compares to the effect of Maddow's soft-balls to the home team.

Maddow and other MSNBC anchors had the telegenic lawyer Michael Avenatti on as their pitbull attacking Trump guest over 108 times starting in March 2018, CNN had more than 121 Avenatti appearances, until Avenatti was convicted of extorting Nike -- then not a word. With all the resources that Maddow has at hand, why didn't anyone catch Avenatti for the sensationalist scam artist that he was, and after he was exposed as such, why didn't any of the cable anchors go back and do a thorough mea culpa examination of Avenatti's contribution to their show? Because it didn't fit their narrative.

In an interview on network TV promoting his 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky's interviewer empathically stated, "As a journalist I don't have a bias, I work hard to be objective and report all the facts for all sides!" Chomsky replied, "You may not recognize it, but you have a clear bias, and if you didn't, your corporate employers wouldn't have hired you." For high-relief contrast study the focus, narrative and presentation styles of corporate news agencies to and non-corporate ones, such as the Associated Press and NPR/PBS.

For instance, in the 20 years of the US war on Afghanistan did you once hear the cable or network media dive into the reality on the ground, much less assess, as NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes does in her Ides of August essay:

Rachel Maddow is thinking about leaving MSNBC and starting her own media venture | August 12, 2021 | (CNN)
It's telling that Rachel Maddow is considering striking out on her own. I'd be curious to see how different not serving the interests of NBCUniversal, but rather a "direct relationship with paying subscribers" would alter her focus and presentation style.

Other recent examples of topics barely, if ever touched by the mainstream corporate media:

Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed | August 23, 2021 |  (The Guardian)
British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It’s here that BP first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life – going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling – is largely responsible for heating the globe.

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled | September 11, 2020 |  (NPR)
The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. And notice how, when corporate media does report on topics of personal interest to workers vis-a-vis the oligarch, it doesn't examine the policies of what we, the USA are doing to balance the inequity, but how the heavy hand of our communist enemy rules:

China blasts '996' excessive work culture | August 27, 2021 |  (CNN)
The China's top court on Thursday issued a lengthy condemnation of what's commonly known in China as "996," the practice of working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week that is said to be common among the country's big technology companies, startups and other private businesses. "Recently, extreme overtime work in some industries has received widespread attention," the Supreme People's Court wrote in its statement, which it issued with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. Workers deserve rights for "rest and vacation," adding that "adhering to the national working hour system is the legal obligation of employers," the court wrote.

Xi Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1 Trillion Reckoning | August 01, 2021 |  (Bloomberg News)
While Xi’s comments went largely unnoticed by global investors at the time, the crackdown on tutoring companies that followed has become the starkest illustration yet of the Chinese president’s commitment to a sweeping new vision for the world’s second-largest economy — one where the interests of investors take a distant third place to ensuring social stability and national security.

Explainer & Background

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media  (Wikipedia)
A 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to the consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922). Lippman argues that, when properly deployed in the public interest, the manufacture of consent is useful and necessary for a cohesive society, because, in many cases, "the common interests" of the public are not obvious except upon careful analysis of the collected data, a critical intellectual exercise in which most people are uninterested or are incapable of doing. Therefore, most people must have the world summarized for them by the well-informed, and will then act accordingly.

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{Dear Sherry Turkel,
Did you read Noam Chomsky's 1967 "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" at the time?
Thoughts?}

The Responsibility of Intellectuals by Noam Chomsky
The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967

TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history. To an undergraduate in 1945-46—to anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the “China Incident,” the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them—these questions had particular significance and poignancy.

With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

[...]

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Metal

A metal is a material that, when freshly prepared, polished, or fractured, shows a lustrous appearance, and conducts electricity and heat relatively well. Metals are typically malleable (they can be hammered into thin sheets) or ductile (can be drawn into wires). A metal may be a chemical element such as iron; an alloy such as stainless steel; or a molecular compound such as polymeric sulfur nitride.

In physics, a metal is generally regarded as any substance capable of conducting electricity at a temperature of absolute zero.In chemistry, around 95 of the 118 elements in the periodic table are metals (or are likely to be such). The number is inexact as the boundaries between metals, nonmetals, and metalloids fluctuate slightly due to a lack of universally accepted definitions of the categories involved. In astrophysics the term "metal" is cast more widely to refer to all chemical elements in a star that are heavier than helium, and not just traditional metals. In this sense the first four "metals" collecting in stellar cores through nucleosynthesis are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and neon, all of which are strictly non-metals in chemistry. Metals, as chemical elements, comprise 25% of the Earth's crust and are present in many aspects of modern life.

The strength and resilience of some metals has led to their frequent use in, for example, high-rise building and bridge construction, as well as most vehicles, many home appliances, tools, pipes, and railroad tracks. Precious metals were historically used as coinage, but in the modern era, coinage metals have extended to at least 23 of the chemical elements. The history of refined metals is thought to begin with the use of copper about 11,000 years ago. Gold, silver, iron (as meteoric iron), lead, and brass were likewise in use before the first known appearance of bronze in the 5th millennium BCE. Subsequent developments include the production of early forms of steel; the discovery of sodium—the first light metal—in 1809; the rise of modern alloy steels; and, since the end of World War II, the development of more sophisticated alloys.

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Minerals (crystals) (geology) (rocks)

A mineral is a naturally occurring inorganic element or compound having an orderly internal structure and characteristic chemical composition, crystal form, and physical properties. Common minerals include quartz, feldspar, mica, amphibole, olivine, and calcite.

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Cavern of Crystal Giants, Naica Mine, Chihuahua, Mexico (wikipedia) (youtube)
The chamber contains giant selenite crystals (gypsum, CaSO4 · 2 H2O), some of the largest natural crystals ever found.

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Music

Music is the art of arranging sounds in time through the elements of melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. It is one of the universal cultural aspects of all human societies.

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Joan Baez and her sister Mimi Farina, or sit Zazen? authored by Dan Landrum

A traveller I picked up in my hippy van driving up the Pacific Highway towards Big Sur invited me to take him to the Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness area of the Los Padres National Forest, southeast of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Roshi Shunryu Suzuki, whose book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind had left an lasting impression on me, was the Center's abbot. There I'd take my first instruction in sitting in the Sōtō Zen Buddhist style, or for that matter, any formal sitting meditation. Moments before the afternoon zazen sitting session my new found friend told me, in hushed tones, that singers Joan Baez and her sister Mimi Farina were skinny-dipping just down the path in the Tassajara Hot Springs. It suddenly became one of those moments. It was the early 1970s, and with the voice of an angel Joan was at the peak of her popularity, as well an iconic inspiration for values dear to me, social justice, civil rights and pacifism. I had a choice to make. I had to choose in this moment to sit and do nothing, or go skinny-dipping with two of the most seraphic sirens on the planet. Fortunately for me, I was shy by nature. The choice was made before it arose. And thus began a 35+ year sitting practice.

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In the 2007 PBS American Masters episode 'Pete Seeger: The Power of Song '(Youtube: 1h37m44s), Seeger said it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome". The film includes interviews with Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary), Natalie Maines, and numerous Seeger family members.

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Singer/Songwriters, Folk Storytellers:

Carole King and James Taylor: The Troubadour Reunion Tour (Wikipedia)
The Troubadour Reunion Tour was a 2010 international concert tour by Carole King and James Taylor. It celebrated the 40th anniversary of their first performance together at The Troubadour in November 1970, and was a continuation of their reunion at the Troubadour in November 2007. The tour was announced on November 12, 2009. Over 50 dates were scheduled in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and North America. The final performance of the tour was on July 20, 2010 at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California. In an interview with Carole King and James Taylor for Billboard Magazine, Taylor stated there will probably never be another Troubadour Reunion Tour. However, he mentioned that a European tour was possible.

Typical Set list included: "Blossom" "So Far Away ", "Machine Gun Kelly" "Carolina in My Mind ", "Sunshine Sunshine" "Smackwater Jack ", "Country Road ", "Where You Lead ", "Your Smiling Face ", "Song of Long Ago" "Long Ago and Far Away ", "Beautiful ", "Shower the People ", "Way Over Yonder" "Copperline" "Crying in the Rain ", "Mexico ", "Sweet Baby James ", "Jazzman ", "Will You Love Me Tomorrow ", "Steamroller Blues ", "It's Too Late ", "Fire and Rain ", "I Feel the Earth Move ", "You've Got a Friend ", "Up on the Roof ", "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You) ", "You Can Close Your Eyes ", "The Loco-Motion ", Other songs played included "Honey Don't Leave L.A.", "Sweet Seasons", and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" (as the first-set closer). The second or third song of the second set was a "fan request" slot, taken from a web poll for that show from a constrained list and alternating between King and Taylor.

James Taylor and Carole King - Troubadour Reunion Tour - Duluth, GA | June 3, 2010 (Youtube: 10:40)

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Arlo Guthrie Arlo Guthrie (born July 10, 1947) is an American retired folk singer-songwriter. He is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice, and storytelling while performing songs, following the tradition of his father Woody Guthrie. Guthrie's best-known work is his debut piece, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", a satirical talking blues song about 18 minutes in length that has since become a Thanksgiving anthem. His only top-40 hit was a cover of Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans". His song "Massachusetts" was named the official folk song of the state, in which he has lived most of his adult life. Guthrie has also made several acting appearances. He is the father of four children, who have also had careers as musicians.

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Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand
You got all the love
Honey baby, I can stand

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain't no monkey but I know what I like
I like the way you love me strong and slow
I'm takin' you with me
Honey baby, when I go

Joan Baez, an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist whose contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest and social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing over 30 albums. Joan Baez was one of the first major artists to record the songs of Bob Dylan in the early 1960s; Baez was already an internationally celebrated artist and did much to popularize his early songwriting efforts. Baez first met Dylan in April 1961 at Gerde's Folk City in New York City's Greenwich Village. At the time, Baez had already released her debut album and her popularity as the emerging "Queen of Folk" was on the rise. Baez was initially unimpressed with the "urban hillbilly", but was impressed with one of Dylan's first compositions, "Song to Woody" and remarked that she would like to record it.

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman; May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, author and visual artist. Often regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture during a career spanning 60 years. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" (1963) and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (1964) became anthems for the civil rights and anti-war movements. His lyrics during this period incorporated a range of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture. In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

Baez wrote and composed at least three songs that were specifically about Dylan. In "To Bobby", written in 1972, she urged Dylan to return to political activism, while in "Diamonds & Rust"  (Youtube: 4m46s), the title track from her 1975 album, she revisited her feelings for him in warm, yet direct terms. "Winds of the Old Days", also on the Diamonds & Rust album, is a bittersweet reminiscence about her time with "Bobby".

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Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell

Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell (née Anderson; born November 7, 1943) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and painter. Drawing from folk, pop, rock, classical, and jazz, Mitchell's songs often reflect on social and philosophical ideals as well as her feelings about romance, womanhood, disillusionment and joy. She has received many accolades, including nine Grammy Awards and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Rolling Stone called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever",and AllMusic has stated, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century." Some of her original songs include: "Urge for Going", "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", "The Circle Game". Mitchell helped define an era and a generation with popular songs like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock". Her 1971 album Blue is often cited as one of the best albums of all time. In 1974 she began exploring more jazz-influenced melodic ideas, by way of lush pop textures, on her Court and Spark album, which featured the radio hits "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris" and became her best-selling album. Mitchell has designed most of her own album covers, describing herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance".

Joni Mitchell ~ Big Yellow Taxi + Both Sides Now | BBC - 1969 (Youtube: 7m14s)
"They paved paradise, put up a parking lot..."

Joni Mitchell, Turbulent Indigo

Joni Mitchell -- Paintings
"Think of Joni Mitchell and you think primarily of her incredible career as a singer, songwriter, musical innovator and trailblazer. Much less has been written of her life as a painter. We've been collecting images for years and have organized 321 pieces of Joni's artwork here for all to enjoy."

Turbulent Indigo,1994
(from 'I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy' by Deirdre Kelly, Toronto Globe and Mail, June 8, 2000)

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Showing a neighbor my doodles, he asks how I learned. In big part I say, I must attribute them to the round well-formed handwriting of my mother. Which caused me to think what I owe my life line of expression to... authored by Dan Landrum

I am to be found in the lineage of
humanist, transcendental to realist
American Bohemians ala Walt Whitman
(with a pinch of Mark Twain,)
through the post World War 2 beatniks,
spiritual-poets and hipsters melding Alan Watts,
Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac,
twisting with social-political renegades in the ilk of
Abby Hoffman, Ram Dass (nee Richard Alpert)
and roshi Joan Halifax —
of course too,
the sirens of my day,
Joan Baez, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins
and Bob Dylan teased me to open
and be with myself on the Us-Them odyssey —
careful to be on alert not to try to dissolve
the boundaries between,
but rather to ever be expanding
the inclusive facets of what belongs within us.

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Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour

The Beatles

The Beatles (thebeatles.com)
The Beatles (wikipedia)
List of songs recorded by the Beatles (wikipedia)

The impact of the Beatles' music 55 years later:

authored by Dan Landrum  I write, "with love, gratitude and what is the first of a long, long #7 series of expressions of appreciation and admire in expressing my final good-bye...

I say good-bye, you say hello.

You say, "Goodbye" and I say, "Hello, hello, hello"
I don't know why you say, "Goodbye", I say, "Hello, hello, hello"
I don't know why you say, "Goodbye", I say, "Hello"
I say, "High", you say, "Low"
You say, "Why?" And I say, "I don't know"
Oh no..."

My sweet sister replies, "I laugh as I read your Beatles’ lyrics . . . As I am, currently a Beatles’ song . . .

When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a Valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine
If I'd been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four

. . . No need to say goodbye . . . Just say hello . . . hello . . . hello

And thus on I go on the Magical Mystery Tour, "I Am the Walrus" ...

I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
See how they fly
I'm crying

I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob, goo goo goo g'joob

(John Lennon wrote the song to confound listeners who had been affording serious scholarly interpretations of the Beatles' lyrics. He was partly inspired by two LSD trips and Lewis Carroll's 1871 poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter".)

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Eric Clapton Isn't Just Spouting Vaccine Nonsense — He's Bankrolling It
Eric Clapton went from setting the standard for rock guitar to making ‘full-tilt’ racist rants to becoming an outspoken vaccine skeptic. Did he change? Or was he always like this? By David Browne | October 10, 2021 (rollingstone)

Eric Clapton

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Nature (Wilderness)

Regarding, "This 'rebalancing' view of nature and man's relationship to it, appears to put humans somehow outside of nature." See: On the Nature of Rebalancing

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Gary Synder: Practice of the Wild

The Wilderness Vs. The Wildness About Us
Adam Frank | February 21, 2017 (NPR)
According to Gary Snyder, the wild is all around us, ...

As Snyder tells us: "Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that everything is natural. By these lights there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy..." I agree, the parking lot is just as natural as the stand of trees. It's made of the same basic elements — and it's a product of the same cosmic evolutionary forces. But if that's true, then what makes the strip mall seem so sad compared to the forest? For Snyder, the answer is about inclusiveness:

"So we can say that New York City and Tokyo are 'natural' but not 'wild.' They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd. Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order."

Thus, for Snyder, the wild is not about pristine landscapes. Instead, it's about landscapes that are rich and diverse enough to be interesting for everybody, human and non-human alike. He writes: "When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness."

The Practice of the Wild (Vimeo: 52m41s)
A profile of the poet and ecologist Gary Snyder. He has been a Zen monk, a fire lookout, and a confidant of beat authors like Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg — also a back country hiker, writer and essayist. The interviewer is Montana poet and novelist Jim Harrison.

Place

Be a species. authored by Dan Landrum

Be a species.
Be 7 generations of a species reincarnate.
Be of the world.
Be one with the world for an epoch or two.

"Think globally, act locally", as Bucky Fuller says.
Be the local go-to guy.
The guy who knows downtown like the back of their hand, as well,
knows the deep back-country, the watershed, the watercourse ways,
the guy who goes 'Botanizing,' as John Muir talks about, just for the hell of it.
(Not to label and catalog other species for exploitation),
go to see and be with, to admire, to adore the dickens out of life
living, yearning to live on, muster on no matter what comes this way.

Be the guy who doesn't sell fishhooks anymore, as Rumi says:

Tending two Shops
Don’t run around this world
looking for a hole to hide in.
[...]
Keep open the shop
where you’re not selling fishhooks anymore.
You are the free-swimming fish.

In short, be a citizen, good
with pathos-centric caring,
native of the commonwealth.

In this body, in this place!

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An album made entirely of endangered bird sounds beat Taylor Swift on a top 50 chart
January 9, 2022 | Megan Lim and Patrick Jarenwattananon, NPR Music

Songs Of Disappearance was released with a university report that found 1 in 6 Australian bird species are now threatened. The album captures 53 of those species. Some sing what you might think of as bird songs, but not all of them. "When people hear that imperial pigeon, they swear that it's a human making silly noises," Dooley said. "They're quite magnificently ridiculous." Sean Dooley represents the conservation organization Birdlife Australia.

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Open-source Intelligence  (wisdom of the crowd)

Open-source intelligence is a multi-factor methodology for collecting, analyzing and making decisions about data accessible in publicly available sources to be used in an intelligence context. In the intelligence community, the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources, in a business setting it may imply that each person is empowered to think and act as independently as possible. The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (abbreviated CatB) is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design. The essay was first presented by the author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in Würzburg (Germany) and was published as part of the same titled book in 1999.

The essay contrasts two different free software development models:

The essay's central thesis is Raymond's proposition that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (which he terms Linus's law): the more widely available the source code is for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, the more rapidly all forms of bugs will be discovered. In contrast, Raymond claims that an inordinate amount of time and energy must be spent hunting for bugs in the Cathedral model, since the working version of the code is available only to a few developers.

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Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few ... (wikipedia)

"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest not consensus or compromise." [...] "Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible," James Surowiecki

In the early '90s I helped form the City Greens in San Diego and was active at the County and State level efforts to get the Green Party on the California ballot. At the time we used a very specific form of consensus decision making. I actually ran an 8 hour California statewide plenary session of around 90 representative using this exacting and tedious method. (If that alone does not make me a candidate for a green, if not purple heart, I don't know what does.) Through it we reached a consensus agreement that we'd neither receive nor spend money in our effort to gather the signatures required to qualify the Green Party for the State ballot. Rather than be beholden to moneyed interests, we all agreed we wanted the Party to grow in a grassroots fashion to become a truly participatory democracy. With weeks to go before the deadline, we were short by a significant number of needed signatures. At the rate we were going, we would not reach our goal and would have to sit it out and not run candidates for this election cycle. Suddenly a few individuals, including some who had acquiesced to the initial consensus agreement, infused a large sum of money into the effort, paying signature gatherers and organizers. The goal was easily reached, the Green Party was officially on the California ballot. But many of the those that had hammered out the consensus agreement felt betrayed. The fragile core of Party faithfuls was fractured. I know it broke my heart for the wily nature of politics, even when applied to a most idealistically inclusive self-selecting body.

I think Surowiecki's "the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest not consensus or compromise" point is well taken. I ALSO feel it's not as useful to try to lead the group/crowd in some artificial method of decision making, AND most importantly, it becomes imperative to learn ways to measure and accurately understand what the collective wisdom of the crowd is actually saying. authored by Dan Landrum

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Pace of Life

One of the values of Yuval Noah Harari's budding initiative, Sapienship:

SLOW DOWN
"Many of the world’s problems
– from ecological degradation to individual stress –
result from the accelerating pace of life.
The search for solutions should not involve further acceleration."

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The Good Samaritan Experiment

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Paper (Corrugated Cardboard)

Corrugated Cardboard
Corrugated Cardboard ( also called corrugated fiberboard) is a material consisting of a fluted corrugated sheet and one or two flat linerboards. It is made on "flute lamination machines" or "corrugators" and is used for making cardboard boxes. 'Fluted' is the corrugated (wavy arched) kraft paper sheet sandwiched between flat sheets that gives cardboard its characteristic strength. Viva the Triumph of the Arch! The flat sheets are slightly textured with uniform parallel grooved lines where the arches are glued to them with a water soluable glue. By soaking corrugated cardboard in water for a few minutes and peeling the layers apart, you can reclaim the kraft paper it's made of — it's is a great material to paint on or for fold-sculpting, expressing folded/unfolded 'crumpled' topography or crisp edged geometry. Kraft tubes (also called 'spiral paper tubes') are tubes made from high quality kraft paper. They are very resilient and are capable of enduring the stress and pressure, especially in its length. Unlike corrugated boxes, spiral paper tubes do not have industry standard crush strengths. Paper tubes with thicker walls are stronger than paper tubes with thinner walls.

Kraft Paper is paper or paperboard (cardboard) produced from chemical pulp produced in the kraft process with high elasticity and high tear resistance, designed for packaging products with high demands for strength and durability. Pulp produced by the kraft process is stronger than that made by other pulping processes; acidic sulfite processes degrade cellulose more, leading to weaker fibers, and mechanical pulping processes leave most of the lignin with the fibers, whereas kraft pulping removes most of the lignin present originally in the wood. Low lignin is important to the resulting strength of the paper, as the hydrophobic nature of lignin interferes with the formation of the hydrogen bonds between cellulose (and hemicellulose) in the fibers.

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My Quest to Turn Smart Craft into a Sustainable Business making a line of eco-friendly, laser cut corrugated cardboard lamps and decor accessories, which I called The Rounded Flute Collection — MAKE Magazine 2014   [PDF: 1MB]   #MakerMovement # DIY #MarketingCraft

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Shigeru Ban: Emergency shelters made from paper | Aug 13, 2013 (Youtube: 11m42s)
Long before sustainability became a buzzword, architect Shigeru Ban had begun his experiments with ecologically-sound building materials such as cardboard tubes and paper. His remarkable structures are often intended as temporary housing, designed to help the dispossessed in disaster-struck nations such as Haiti, Rwanda or Japan. Yet equally often the buildings remain a beloved part of the landscape long after they have served their intended purpose. (Filmed at TEDxTokyo.)  [ALSO in Shelter]

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People (human)
 
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman  (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989) was an American political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies") and was a member of the Chicago Seven, who were charged by the United States federal government with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, and other charges related to anti-Vietnam War and countercultural protests in Chicago, Illinois during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He was also a leading proponent of the Flower Power movement. In 1971's Steal This Book in the section "Free Communication," Hoffman encourages his readership to take to the stage at rock concerts to use the pre-assembled audience and PA system to get their message out. However, he mentions that "interrupting the concert is frowned upon since it is only spitting in the faces of people you are trying to reach." Hoffman continued his activism into the 1970s, and remains an icon of the anti-war movement and the counterculture era. He died of a phenobarbital overdose in 1989 at age 52.

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Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularizing Indian and Chinese traditions of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Watts gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley. He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the emerging hippie counterculture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), he argued that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, "from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written". He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in works such as The New Alchemy (1958) and The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

Alan Watts – The Tao of Philosophy (Full Lecture)
Tao of Philosophy is part of the 1972 Essential Lectures Collection. The series looks at issues of identity, our place in nature, and the limits of symbolic thinking.

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Alfred W. McCoy
Harrington Professor of History

Historian Alfred McCoy Predicts the U.S. Empire Is Collapsing as China’s Power Grows | Nov 16, 2021
To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change  – Nov 16, 2021

In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of catastrophes—from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders.

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Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Her investigative journalism career includes coverage of the East Timor independence movement and Chevron Corporation's role in Nigeria. Since 1996, she has been the main host of Democracy Now!, a progressive global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the Internet. She has received awards for her work, including the Thomas Merton Award in 2004, a Right Livelihood Award in 2008, and an Izzy Award in 2009 for "special achievement in independent media". In 2012, Goodman received the Gandhi Peace Award for a "significant contribution to the promotion of an enduring international peace". She is the author of six books, including the 2012 The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and the 2016 Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America. In 2014 she was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation.

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Bernie Siegel
Bernie Siegel (born October 14, 1932) is an American writer and retired pediatric surgeon, who writes on the relationship between the patient and the healing process. In his best-selling book "Love, Medicine and Miracles", Siegel gives an inspirational, first-hand account of how patients can participate in their own recovery. Unconditional love is the most powerful stimulant of the immune system. The truth is: love heals. Miracles happen to exceptional patients every day — patients who have the courage to love, those who have the courage to work with their doctors to participate in and influence their own recovery.

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Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller  (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity". Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983.

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Carol Landrum

Carol Landrum
Carol Landrum, "From the time I learned to read and write I wanted to be a teacher. At twenty I began teaching seventh grade and for eleven years I cared for my students. Then deeply buried emotions were triggered by my mother’s passing and I didn’t know what to do with them. I had constant nightmares and felt lost. Since I didn’t want to live like that, I looked for help. That was the beginning of my healing journey. I took a year off and studied Reflexology, nutrition and vegetarian cooking. I changed my diet and my food allergies disappeared. I lost weight, had more energy and was excited about life again. I started to share what I was learning with my friends, and to my surprise, a new career was born. In 1984 a friend handed me a brochure for a five day workshop with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the hospice pioneer, and I intuitively knew I had to go. Instead of talking about death and dying, Elisabeth taught us how to fully live by safely releasing our repressed emotions. It was exactly what I needed to learn! I also knew it was what I’d come here to teach. That year I did her Emotional Release Facilitator Training. My life began to change in profound ways after that. Instead of holding my emotions in and staying stuck, I let them out. And as I released the backlog of sadness, anger and fear from my childhood traumas, I felt lighter, clearer and happier."

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Cesar Chavez
Cesar Chavez (born Cesario Estrada Chavez, March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993) was an American labor leader and civil rights activist. Along with Dolores Huerta, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW) labor union. Ideologically, his world-view combined leftist politics with Roman Catholic social teachings. In September 1965, Filipino American farm workers, organized by the AWOC, initiated the Delano Grape Strike to protest for higher wages. Chavez and his largely Mexican American supporters voted to support them.

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Charlene Spretnak

Charlene Spretnak
Charlene Spretnak (born January 30, 1946) is an American author who has written nine books on cultural history, social criticism (including feminism and Green politics), religion and spirituality, and art. Spretnak was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She earned degrees from St. Louis University and the University of California, Berkeley. She is a professor emerita in philosophy and religion.Throughout her life as a writer, speaker, and activist, she has been intrigued with dynamic interrelatedness, which plays a central role in each subject to which she has been drawn. She is particularly interested in 21st-century discoveries indicating that the physical world, including the human bodymind, is far more dynamically interrelated with nature and other people than modernity had assumed. Several of her books also proposed a "map of the terrain" of emergent social-change movements and an exploration of the issues involved. She has helped to create an an eco-social frame of reference and vision in the areas of social criticism (including feminism and ecofeminism), cultural history, critique of technology, and women's spirituality. Since the mid-1980s, her books have examined the multiple crises of modernity and furthered the corrective efforts that are arising. Her book Green Politics (1984) was a major catalyst for the formation of the U.S. Green Party movement, which she cofounded in the months following its publication. Her essay A View from the Chute (2018) proposes a possible new approach in talking to climate-change deniers about climate-change action.

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Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. As of 2017, he is the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett is a member of the editorial board for The Rutherford Journal. Dennett is an avid sailor.

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E.O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson was an American biologist, naturalist, and writer. His specialty was myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he was called the world's leading expert, and he was nicknamed Ant Man. He taught at Harvard for 46 years and was one of the world's leading experts on biodiversity. "Wilson, who died Dec. 26, 2021 at the age of 92, discovered the chemical means by which ants communicate. He worked out the importance of habitat size and position within the landscape in sustaining animal populations. And he was the first to understand the evolutionary basis of both animal and human societies," Doug Tallamy. Wilson co-founded the Half-Earth Project in 2016 to “protect half the Earth in order to preserve habitat and safeguard the bulk of biodiversity.”

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Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American man of letters. Perhaps best known as a poet (his early work has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance), he is also an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist with anarchoprimitivist leanings. He has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Titles By Gary Snyder, included: The Practice of the Wild and Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. (SEE: Practice of the Wild)

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Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics (1941–1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences. He was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology. His association with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped widen his influence.

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Bubsey Levy

Herman "Bubsey" Levy
"Bubsey" Levy was my mentor.authored by Dan Landrum  First a tennis buddy, then my college professor, then when I dropped out — my mentor through a life transforming passage — the entrance to the 1970s revolutions, coinciding with my personal ones. My guide to pressure cooking short grain brown rice, protesting for Peace, Civil Rights, Women's Rights and encouraging better health through fasting, vegetarianism, Macrobiotics and yoga. But mostly he taught me, in that way that can only be taught with your whole being, that's it's enough to live life as you are. Bubsey shared his home, his heart and his innate wisdom with me in an indelible way, in a way inseparable from who I am.

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Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn  was a historian, author, professor, playwright, and activist. His life’s work focused on a wide range of issues including race, class, war, and history, and touched the lives of countless people. Zinn was the author of dozens of books, including A People’s History of the United States.

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James Lovelock
Originator of Gaia theory and inventor of the electron capture detector.

"We aim to add further content – articles, scientific papers and speeches – over coming weeks and months," personal website of James Lovelock

James Ephraim Lovelock (born 26 July 1919) is a British independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system. With a PhD in medicine, Lovelock began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, including successfully thawing frozen specimens. His methods were influential in the theories of cryonics (the cryopreservation of humans). He invented the electron capture detector, and using it, became the first to detect the widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. While designing scientific instruments for NASA, he developed the Gaia hypothesis. In the 2000s, he proposed a method of climate engineering to restore carbon dioxide-consuming algae. He has been an outspoken member of Environmentalists for Nuclear, asserting that fossil fuel interests have been behind opposition to nuclear energy, citing the effects of carbon dioxide as being more harmful to the environment, and warning of global warming due to the greenhouse effect. He has written several environmental science books based upon the Gaia hypothesis since the late 1970s.

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Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American geographer, historian, ornithologist, and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005), The World Until Yesterday (2012), and Upheaval (2019). Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA. In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. Diamond is married to Marie Cohen, granddaughter of Polish politician Edward Werner. They have twin sons, born in 1987.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (previously titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.

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Joan Baez
Joan Chandos Baez (/baɪz/; born January 9, 1941) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist. Her contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest and social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing over 30 albums. Fluent in Spanish and English, she has also recorded songs in at least six other languages. When Baez was 13, her aunt and her aunt's boyfriend took her to a concert by folk musician Pete Seeger, and Baez found herself strongly moved by his music. She soon began practicing the songs of his repertoire and performing them publicly.

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Joan Halifax
Joan Jiko Halifax (born July 30, 1942) is an American Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist, hospice caregiver, and the author of several books on Buddhism and spirituality. She currently serves as abbot and guiding teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a Zen Peacemaker community which she founded in 1990. Halifax-roshi has received Dharma transmission from both Bernard Glassman and Thich Nhat Hanh, and previously studied with the Korean master Seung Sahn. In the 1970s she collaborated on LSD research projects with her ex-husband Stanislav Grof, in addition to other collaborative efforts with Joseph Campbell and Alan Lomax. She is founder of the Ojai Foundation in California, which she led from 1979 to 1989. As a socially engaged Buddhist, Halifax has done extensive work with the dying through her Project on Being with Dying (which she founded). She is on the board of directors of the Mind and Life Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the relationship of science and Buddhism.

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Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn (born Jon Kabat, June 5, 1944) is an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a student of Zen Buddhist teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Philip Kapleau, and Seung Sahn, and a founding member of Cambridge Zen Center. His practice of yoga and studies with Buddhist teachers led him to integrate their teachings with scientific findings. He teaches mindfulness, which he says can help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain, and illness. The stress reduction program created by Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), is offered by Mindfulnesscds.com, medical centers, hospitals, and health maintenance organizations, and is described in his book Full Catastrophe Living.

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Jonathan McReynolds, Mali Music - Miracle (Live Performance)
Premiered Sep 30, 2021

"I look right at you
Let me tell you what you are
Mm
You’re a miracle"

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John Muir
John Muir (/mjʊər/ MURE; April 21, 1838 – December 24, 1914), also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks", was an influential Scottish-American  naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America. His letters, essays, and books describing his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada, have been read by millions. His activism helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park, and his example has served as an inspiration for the preservation of many other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he co-founded, is a prominent American conservation organization. A 1916 book by John Muir:. A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf — excerpt October 16, 1867, pages 93-101.

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John Wesley
 John Wesley (28 June 1703 – 2 March 1791) was an English cleric, theologian, and evangelist, who was a leader of a revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism. The societies he founded became the dominant form of the independent Methodist movement that continues to this day. Wesley was one of the most articulate early adopters of Socially Responsible Investing. Wesley's sermon "The Use of Money" outlined his basic tenets of social investing – i.e. not to harm your neighbor through your business practices and to avoid industries like tanning and chemical production, which can harm the health of workers. Some of the best-known applications of socially responsible investing were religiously motivated. Investors would avoid "sinful" companies, such as those associated with products such as guns, liquor, and tobacco.

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Kachinas Kutenai

Kachinas S. Kutenai
Kachinas "Kute" Kutenai, “I am an Apache and proud of it. Indian native from nowhere. Another woman for peace.” Raised at her grandmother’s knee on the Gila River Reservation, she followed the path of the Apache medicine woman. In the 1990s, Kute guided me through a Vision Quest in a manzanita forest northeast of Los Angeles. Books she published include: "The Book of Love," "American Indian Healing" and "Medicine Woman Speaks."

Her car is fiery red. Bumper... by G. Jeanette Avent | Nov. 25, 1990 (LA Times)
"Realize that we are all going to die. But you should know that you have a choice as to how you will live or die. To be about the business of living, you must protect your body from as much pollution as possible. Figure it out. Is it better to fight cancer with preventive measures such as a good diet, natural herbs, mineral and vitamins?"

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Michael Pollan
Michael Kevin Pollan (born February 6, 1955) is an American author and journalist, who is currently the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Pollan is best known for his books that explore the socio-cultural impacts of food, such as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan's book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, released on January 1, 2008, explores the relationship with what he terms nutritionism and the Western diet, with a focus on late 20th century food advice given by the science community. In 2009, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual was published intending to provide a simple framework for a healthy and sustainable diet, further explicating Pollan's principles of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In 2018, Pollan wrote How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, a book about the history and future of psychedelic drugs.

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Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander (born October 7, 1967) is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — the bestselling book that helped to transform the national debate on racial and criminal justice in the United States, and has been cited in judicial decisions and adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads, and has inspired a generation of racial justice activists motivated by Alexander’s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” Over the years, Alexander has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinic. Currently she is a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

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Naomi Klein
Naomi A. Klein (born May 8, 1970) is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of ecofascism, organized labour, left-wing politics and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascismand capitalism. On a three-year appointment from September 2018, she was the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. Klein first became known internationally for her alter-globalization book No Logo (1999). The Take (2004), a documentary film about Argentina's occupied factories, written by her and directed by her husband Avi Lewis, further increased her profile, while The Shock Doctrine (2007), a critical analysis of the history of neoliberal economics, solidified her standing as a prominent activist on the international stage. Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) was a New York Times non-fiction bestseller and the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

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Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye  (Arabic: نعومي شهاب ناي; born March 12, 1952) is an American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poem at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. In 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated Nye the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.

Naomi Shihab................ Nye reads "For Mohammed Zeid, of Gaza, age 15"  |  Jan 2, 2008 | (Youtube: 2m0s)

 

Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky  (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. One of the most cited scholars alive, Chomsky has influenced a broad array of academic fields. He is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. In addition to his continued scholarship, he remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.

The Noam Chomsky Website: chomsky.info
Noam Chomsky appearances on Democracy Now.

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Norman Cousins
Norman Cousins (June 24, 1915 – November 30, 1990) was an American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate. Cousins did research on the biochemistry of human emotions, which he long believed were the key to human beings' success in fighting illness. It was a belief he maintained even as he battled in 1964 a sudden-onset case of a crippling connective tissue disease, which was also referred to as a collagen disease. Told that he had one chance in 500 of recovery, Cousins developed his own recovery program. He took massive intravenous doses of Vitamin C and had self-induced bouts of laughter brought on by films of the television show Candid Camera, and by various comic films. His positive attitude was not new to him, however. He had always been an optimist, known for his kindness to others, and his robust love of life itself. "I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep," he reported. "When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval." His struggle with that illness and his discovery of laugh therapy is detailed in his 1979 book "Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient", the first book by a patient that spoke to our current interest in taking charge of our own health. It started the revolution in patients working with their doctors and using humor to boost their bodies' capacity for healing.

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Norman Doidge
Norman Doidge's first book The Brain that Changes Itself (2007) was an international bestseller and widely recognized to have introduced the concept of neuroplasticity to broader scientific and lay audiences alike. It showed people with learning disorders, blindness, balance and sensory disorders, strokes, cerebral palsy, chronic pain, chronic depression and anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorder being helped by neuroplastic interventions. He started out as an award-winning poet and a student of philosophy. A profile he once wrote of the novelist Saul Bellow won the President’s Medal for the best single article published in Canada in the year 2000. He is persuasive and curious as a writer, and rigorous as a thinker, though what he writes about is at the edge of our current understanding of mind and body. In the 1990s, Doidge authored empirically based standards and guidelines for the practice of intensive psychotherapy that have been used in Canada and America. These were published in the "Standards and Guidelines for the Psychotherapies." (ALSO see: Barbara Arrowsmith-Young)

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Pete Seeger
Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American folk singer and social activist. A prolific songwriter, his best-known songs include "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with additional lyrics by Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (with Lee Hays of the Weavers), "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (also with Hays), and "Turn! Turn! Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement. Seeger was one of the folk singers responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists), which became the acknowledged anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist introducedGuy Carawan it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS American Masters episode "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song", Seeger said it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome".

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Ralph Abraham
Professor of Mathematics: Chaos Theory, Computation

Dr Ralph Abraham, Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series:
Euclid's Voyage into Chaos | Dec 21, 2018 | Youtube: 1h51m

Chaos, Gaia, Eros: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Three Great Streams of History

A world-renowned mathematician unveils his theory of the All-and-the-Everything--a dramatic synthesis reexamining history and the inventions of the mind for readers who were fascinated by Euclid, Godel, Escher, Bach.

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Be Here Now

Ram Dass
Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert; April 6, 1931 – December 22, 2019), also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and author. His best-selling 1971 book, Be Here Now, which has been described by multiple reviewers as "seminal", helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. He authored or co-authored twelve more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill (1977), How Can I Help? (1985), and Polishing the Mirror (2013). Love Serve Remember Foundation is dedicated to preserving and continuing the teachings of Ram Dass and his guru, Neem Karoli Baba.

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Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg (born August 5, 1952) is a New York Times bestselling author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices in the West.In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Her emphasis is on vipassanā (insight) and mettā (loving-kindness) methods, and has been leading meditation retreats around the world for over three decades. All of these methods have their origins in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Her books include Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (1995), A Heart as Wide as the World (1999), Real Happiness - The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program (2010). She runs a Metta Hour podcast.

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Shigeru Ban
Shigeru Ban (坂 茂, Ban Shigeru, born 5 August 1957) is a Japanese architect, known for his innovative work with paper, particularly recycled cardboard tubes used to quickly and efficiently house disaster victims. Many of his notable designs are structures which are temporary, prefabricated, or incorporate inexpensive and unconventional materials in innovative ways. He was profiled by Time magazine in their projection of 21st-century innovators in the field of architecture and design. [SEE in Paper and Shelter]

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Stephen Killelea
Stephen Killelea is an Australian IT entrepreneur and founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace, a global think tank. Killelea is the creative force behind the Global Peace Index study, launched in May 2007, that ranks the world's nations’ and regions’ peacefulness. The Index has been endorsed by the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter. Killelea is the founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) which is "analyzing the impact of peace on sustainability, defining the 'Peace Industry', estimating the value of peace to the world economy, and uncovering the social structures and social attitudes that are at the core of peaceful societies."

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Dharma Punx

Stephen Levine
Stephen Levine (July 17, 1937 – January 17, 2016) was an American poet, author and teacher best known for his work on death and dying. He is one of a generation of pioneering teachers who, along with Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, have made the teachings of Theravada Buddhism more widely available to students in the West. Like the writings of his colleague and close friend, Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert), Stephen's work is also flavoured by the devotional practices and teachings (also known as Bhakti Yoga) of the Hindu Guru Neem Karoli Baba. His books include "A Year to Live," "A Gradual Awakening," and, with his wife Ondrea, "Embracing the Beloved." His son, Noah Levine (born 1971) is an American Buddhist teacher and author. As a counselor known for his philosophical alignment with Buddhism and punk ideology. Noah has written several books including Dharma Punx.

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Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh
Thích Nhất Hạnh (born as Nguyễn Xuân Bảo on October 11, 1926) is a Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition, historically recognized as the main inspiration for engaged Buddhism. A Mindfulness Meditation master, Nhất Hạnh is active in the peace movement and deep ecology, promoting nonviolent solutions to conflict and raising awareness of the interconnectedness of all elements in nature. He is the founder of the largest monastic order in the West. He also refrains from consuming animal products, as a means of nonviolence toward animals.

Thich Nhat Hanh, who worked for decades to teach mindfulness, approached death in that same spirit | Brooke Schedneck | January 21, 2022 (The Conversation)  · Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk who popularized mindfulness in the West, died in the Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam, on Jan. 21, 2022. He was 95.

 

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Ty Landrum

Ty Landrum
Ty Landrum, ". . . learned yoga from pain and heartache, loss and confusion, old books, lost tapes, full moons, long bouts of silence, cold winds, simplicity, forgiveness, surrender, and the caring words of a few good friends. He draws inspiration from children, saffron, sage, carob, almonds, chocolate, wise women, gnarled old men, olive trees, deep rivers, steep mountains, quaking aspen, honeybees, love songs, sunrises, laughter and deep breath."

Ty Landrum . . . Words
Ty Landrum . . . Workshop
Ty Landrum . . . Ashtanga Vinyasa

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Vanessa Nakate
A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis
https://www.riseupmovementafrica.org/

From a shy little girl in Kampala to a leader on the world stage, A Bigger Picture is part rousing manifesto and part poignant memoir, and it presents a new vision for the climate movement based on resilience, sustainability, and genuine equity.

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William James  
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the "Father of American psychology." Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. James's work has influenced philosophers and academics such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Marilynne Robinson.

Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James. James trained as a physician and taught anatomy at Harvard, but never practiced medicine. Instead he pursued his interests in psychology and then philosophy. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology, a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology; Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy; and The Varieties of Religious Experience, an investigation of different forms of religious experience, including theories on mind-cure.

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Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman  (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in its time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sensuality.

"Song of Myself," included in Whitman's work Leaves of Grass, has been credited as "representing the core of Whitman's poetic vision."

I Celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

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Winslow Eliot
Winslow 'Ellie' Eliot, (born August 19, 1956) is an award-winning author of ten novels, which have been translated into twelve languages and metaphysical practitioner who offers clairvoyant readings through tarot, palmistry, astrology, angels and the akasha, as well as writing mentoring. She loves poetry, belly-dancing, singing, people, sacred places, teaching, writing, and sleeping. Most of all, she loves stillness. [SEE: "not waiting – but watching"]

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Yuval Noah Harari

"Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things."

"I totally agree that for success, cooperation is usually more important than just raw intelligence."

Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי [juˈval ˈnoaχ haˈʁaʁi]; born 24 February 1976) is an Israeli public intellectual, historian and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). His writings examine free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness and suffering. Harari writes about the "cognitive revolution" occurring roughly 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens supplanted the rival Neanderthals and other species of the genus Homo, developed language skills and structured societies, and ascended as apex predators, aided by the agricultural revolution and accelerated by the scientific revolution, which have allowed humans to approach near mastery over their environment. His books also examine the possible consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world in which intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said, "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so". In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari surveys human history from the evolutionary emergence of Homo Sapiens to 21st Century political and technological revolutions. The book is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. He completed his D.Phil. degree at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2002, under the supervision of Steven J. Gunn. From 2003 to 2005, he pursued postdoctoral studies in history as a Yad Hanadiv Fellow. While at Oxford, Harari first encountered the writings of Jared Diamond, whom he has acknowledged as an influence on his own writing. At a Berggruen Institute salon, Harari said that Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel “was kind of an epiphany in my academic career. I realized that I could actually write such books.”

Harari is gay and in 2002 met his husband Itzik Yahav, whom he calls "my internet of all things". Yahav is also Harari's personal manager. They married in a civil ceremony in Toronto, Canada. Harari says Vipassana meditation, which he began whilst in Oxford in 2000, has "transformed my life". He practices for two hours every day (one hour at the start and end of his work day), every year undertakes a meditation retreat of 30 days or longer, in silence and with no books or social media, and is an assistant meditation teacher. He dedicated Homo Deus to "my teacher, S. N. Goenka, who lovingly taught me important things", and said "I could not have written this book without the focus, peace and insight gained from practicing Vipassana for fifteen years." He also regards meditation as a way to research. Harari is a vegan, and says this resulted from his research, including his view that the foundation of the dairy industry is breaking the bond between mother cow and calf. As of May 2021, Harari does not have a smartphone. Harari lives in Karmei Yosef, a community settlement in central Israel.
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People            (non-human)Wildlife


NPR wildlife photography 2021

 

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Permaculture

An environmental sociologist explains how permaculture offers a path to climate justice | Nov. 17, 2021
Christina Ergas, environmental sociologist, University of Tennessee

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Plants (wild) (weeds) (cultivated) (poisonous) (Edible: Grains– seeds of grass-like plants: rice, wheat, amaranth, quinoa, millet, sorghum, maize (corn), barley, oats, rye, spelt; Brassica Oleracea: Irish Green cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, chard, collard greens; Grasses: sugarcane; Roots: potatoes, carrots, ginger, turnips, beets; Fruit: grapes, olives, coconut; Berries: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, currants, and elderberry – though poisonous when unripe, but edible when ripe.) [NOTE: belladonna or deadly nightshade, is a poisonous perennial herbaceous plant, which also includes tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplant.]

Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclude the fungi and some algae, as well as the prokaryotes (the archaea and bacteria). By one definition, plants form the clade Viridiplantae (Latin name for "green plants"), a group that includes the flowering plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns and their allies, hornworts, liverworts, mosses, and the green algae, but excludes the red and brown algae.

Most plants are multicellular organisms. Green plants obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts that are derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria. Their chloroplasts contain chlorophylls a and b, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic or mycotrophic and have lost the ability to produce normal amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize, but still have flowers, fruits, and seeds. Plants are characterized by sexual reproduction and alternation of generations, although asexual reproduction is also common.

There are about 320,000 species of plants, of which the great majority, some 260–290 thousand, produce seeds. Green plants provide a substantial proportion of the world's molecular oxygen, and are the basis of most of Earth's ecosystems. Plants that produce grain, fruit, and vegetables also form basic human foods and have been domesticated for millennia. Plants have many cultural and other uses, as ornaments, building materials, writing material and, in great variety, they have been the source of medicines and psychoactive drugs. The scientific study of plants is known as botany, a branch of biology.

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Pragmatism

The Pragmatism of William James: particularly that "meaning is best viewed in terms of practical uses."

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes. Pragmatism began in the United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. In 1878, Peirce described it in his pragmatic maxim: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."

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Religion (Metaphysics)

"There are three classes of people in the Western world: the aristocrats, the proletariat, and the bourgeoisie. The aristocrats live on the past because they come of noble family, and they’re like potatoes because the best part of them is underground. The proletariat live in the present because they have nothing else. And the poor bourgeoisie live for the future; they are the eternal suckers. They can always open to a con-game. So when they find out that, really, there isn’t much of a future (you're gonna die), they transpose the future into a spiritual dimension. And they figure that this material world is not the real world, but that the spiritual world is the real world – and there will be somewhere, somehow an eternal life for me." —Alan Watts

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{Four pertinent Rough Rant bits} authored by Dan Landrum

If you are a gazelle
and there is a lion chasing you
in hot pursuit, now is not the time
to ponder the meaning of life.
Such is the proletariat.

. . .

Let's be honest.
We don't know squat about the afterlife.
All the knowing we know of is in this one.

. . .

If you knew with certainty that you would live,
healthy & prosperous, for the next 300 years,
what would you be doing tomorrow?
If you knew with certainty that you will die
tomorrow, what would you be doing today?
These questions measure not only your belief
in an afterlife, but your fearlessness
in living this one.

. . .

The thing with classic Religions, the focus on the invisible — spirit, souls, the promise of an eternal afterlife is a wholly different scope than the thing with classic Science with its empirical focus on what our senses can perceive, even when amplified with tools we can make and embellished with abstract imagination. Even the overlap of those domains don't begin to touch on what lays beyond our senses, our perceptions. We know Bats use sonar to navigate space, but nothing of that experience. Much less other consciousness that perceive in means beyond our imaginings, like the Sun and stars. As JBS Haldane puts it, "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

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Alan Watts – Nature of God  (Youtube)
TRANSCRIPT (alanwatts.org): 1.3.1. – Images of God

Now I’m sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut who went far out into space and was asked on his return whether he had been to heaven and seen God and he said yes. And so they said to him, “Well, what about God?” And he said “She is black.” And although this is a very well known and well worn story, it is very profound.

Because if this world 'peoples', as a tree brings forth fruit, then the universe itself, the energy which underlies it, what it’s all about, ‘the ground of being’ as Paul Tillich called it, must be intelligent. Now when you come to that conclusion you must be very careful. Because you may make an unwarranted jump. Namely, the jump to the conclusion that that intelligence, that marvelous designing power which produces all this, is the biblical God. Be careful. Because that god, contrary to his own commandments, is fashioned in the graven image of a paternal authoritarian, beneficent tyrant of the ancient Near East. And it’s very easy to fall into that trap. Because it’s all institutionalized in the Roman Catholic Church, in the synagogue, in the Protestant churches, all there ready for you to accept. And by the pressure of social consensus and so on and so on, it is very natural to assume that when somebody uses the word God it is that father figure which is intended, because even Jesus used the analogy the Father for his experience of God. He had to. There was no other one available to him in his culture. But nowadays, we are in rebellion against the image of the authoritarian father. Especially this should happen in the United States, where it happens that we are a republic and not a monarchy. And if you, as a loyal citizen of this country, think that a republic is the best form of government, you can hardly believe that the universe is a monarchy. But to reject the paternalistic image of God as an idol is not necessarily to be an atheist. Although, I have advocated something called atheism in the name of God. That is to say, an experience, a contact, a relationship with God, that is to say, with the ground of your being, that does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific image.

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Sapienship
Sapienship is a multidisciplinary organization co-founded by Yuval Noah Harari and Itzik Yahav in 2019. It advocates for global responsibility through its mission: to clarify the global conversation, to focus attention on the most important challenges, and to support the quest for solutions. There are many challenges facing the world today, and Sapienship highlights three: technological disruption, ecological collapse, and the nuclear threat. To follow Sapienship’s journey as it develops, and to contact the company about possible collaborations, please visit:  https://www.sapienship.co/   

Initiatives as of 1/1/22:

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Scale

From atoms to black holes: the scale of the universe and how we fit in
Kimberly Krayacich | March 18, 2019  (map from macro to micro)

The universe is a massive, mysterious place; our solar system, and specifically the human race, plays only a minor role in the greater span of the universe. The observable universe, 45.7 billion light-years large, is only what humans have been able to discover. But the entire universe is thought to be more than 250 times larger than that. Much of what we do know about the observable universe has been documented by telescopes, such as the Hubble Space telescope, since the universe is too vast for human exploration. Our solar system is one of many solar systems within our galaxy, and our galaxy is only one of many galaxies within our universe. Stacker researchers investigated different structures in the universe and ranked them in order from largest (universe) to smallest (subatomic) and everything in between. These rankings include structures found in outer space, such as nebulae, galaxies, and planets, as well as such things as Mount Everest, human beings, and elements on our home planet Earth. While researching structures or particles that are much smaller than we may have ever thought possible, such as quantum foam, performing research on the depths of space has proven to be much more challenging. Through our understanding of the world around us on Earth, we can use science to deepen our understanding of events that happen on even subatomic levels. The same cannot be said for certain parts of outer space and our universe. Scientists are always learning new things about what's “out there,” and no sort of guidebook exists for what to expect. Read on to learn about the scale of the universe.

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Human Scale

Us humans are tiny, fragile beings with tiny, ever-diminishing attention spans. We can withstand only a minute fraction of ton-force pressure, a very narrow range of temperature, and naked, only the briefest of encounters with the elements. But then, we are also clever monkeys, and we have learned to make armor, clothes, shelter, space heaters, air conditioners and heavy equipement to move the earth we ourselves couldn't, and yes, bombs. But then again, let's not fool ourselves into a false promise. Though the average human weighs a million times more than the average ant and there are probably about 1 trillion atoms in an ant, the mere 13,890 or so atomic warheads we currently have in the world could wipe out all of humanity in no time. Fragile. Fragile and tenuous. So humbly take stock in remembering, the Earth is composed of upwards of 133 Octillion atoms — you play nice.  authored by Dan Landrum

Human Scale

Human scale is the set of physical qualities, and quantities of information, characterizing the human body, its motor, sensory, or mental capabilities, and human social institutions. Many of the objects of scientific interest in the universe are much larger than human scale (stars, galaxies) or much smaller than human scale (molecules, atoms, subatomic particles). Similarly, many time periods studied in science involve time scales much greater than human timescales (geological and cosmological time scales) or much shorter than human timescales (atomic and subatomic events). Mathematicians and scientists use very large and small numbers to describe physical quantities, and have created even larger and smaller numbers for theoretical purposes. Human scale measurements, however, are more in the order of:

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Appropriate scale (Applied Math & Data Privacy: how software behaved as problems became larger or smaller.)
John D. Cook, posted on 23 March 2011

How do you determine an appropriate scale? This suggestion from Andrew Kern is a good starting point: "There is an appropriate scale to every human activity and it is the scale of personal responsibility."

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On the Nature of Rebalancing: a rough rant  authored by Dan Landrum

YOU: {
"I keep thinking that those tornadoes in the midwest were part of the rebalancing."

"I hope this pandemic can be a kind of turning point for us all in some way, that we may begin to find a deeper reciprocity with nature, and a reverence for these miraculous and beautiful human lives."

"...how we might better position ourselves into balance with the natural world, rather than continue our path of manipulation and destruction."
}

ME: {
This "rebalancing" view of nature and man's relationship to it, appears to put humans somehow outside of nature.
}

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If evolutionary theory is to be believed, it took over 100 million years of being bombarded by icy comets and asteroids and a lot of cooling, before our dinged-up third rock from the sun planet could hold a water-based atmosphere that would sustain the kind of life form organisms we would grow into. Even then, the first self-replicating forms on earth would be waterless carbon compounds, graphite. Though you may be enthralled with the climate and all the life that springs from the clouds, it's not unfair to say your primary person zero ancestor is akin to a #2 pencil. And I don't think anyone of us wants to go back to that.

This "rebalancing" view of nature and man's relationship to it, appears to put humans somehow outside of nature, and makes the Anthropocene somehow an event that isn't part & parcel of the planets evolution. It seems to suggest that rather than a dynamic ever evolving mega-system of interplay, there was at some point a particular preferred balanced status quo for the life forms here, an ideal garden that we should be striving to get back to. Such a view would be tenable if we accepted a Cartesian view that life and nature is at base a reductive coded machine that we can take apart like an automobile motor, rebuild and put back together again, better than ever. Not so much from a holistic view that sees if you try to take apart, rebuild and put a cat back together again, you will have lost what animates that lifeless corpse, and no longer have a cat.

In its deductive, reductionism, Cartesians fail to take responsibility for the whole being greater than the sum of its part. It fails to take responsibility for the 30 some odd trillion organism within our bodies that can be described as human, much less for the 39 or so trillion organism within our bodies that can NOT be described as human. And that each and every one of those is an intelligent individual 'life bit' with its own drive to survive, its own inherent means to do so – motive and means of motion; and its own peculiar mode of feeling and means to express its feelings – its contribution to emotions. (The prefixes, 'e-'  indicates out, away, out of or outside. Hence, 'e-motion' indicates a motion, a movement outside itself.) That these 'cells' learn to cooperate in the competition for resources, learn to form colonies, tissues, organs of function within larger systems -- to form blood cells, livers to cleanse, blood streams, hearts to pump blood, lungs to oxygenate, a brain to coordinate sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous networks through which every human life bit can communicate its needs, as well as its current status relationship to the non-human life bits, from which the body whole can then decide its next action -- eat, shit, run, fight, love. And this expression of needs can go out in a cry, a word, a gesture to other like forms. All within coded languages that can construct inner/outer families, societies, nations, empires, and be inherited by the next generation through DNA and compounding thoughts. This micro to macro movement from single cell to speaking truth to imperial power is driven at its core by the perception of the sensations of raw emotion; and processed and conveyed by instinct, gut-feeling and your unadulterated  first-thought.

The neurons in your head have marvelous perceptive tools for sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, which can see and hear off into the far distance, objectify and construct symbols for what it sees, less well but like a dog, pick up the scent in the air and know something present, otherwise invisible, is near in the world, or like an ant, communicate to another direct experience without symbols by passing specific molecular compounds, such as sugar, turnips or cooked rice from tongue to tongue. It can be a grand harmonic orchestration, it can be a bloody hell civil war within and/or without. Here is where I caution: don't let a belief system hijack your lived experience.

And what is within and what is without anyway? If the neurons in your gut feeling are deciphering what's called for, what's needed here next, to fuel this sovereign body wonderful, if the population in its sphere is vastly more non-human than human, what is within and what is without anyway, what is me and what is thee?

That's where I depart with Descartes. I want to assume sovereign responsibility for this holistic ship, I/we call Dan. This one man that is me ever learning to better care for this sovereign body wonderful. And take my place within a society, a body politic that chooses better and better, rather than worse and worse, and to calm the faster and faster urge to create, to destroy, to maintain, to make, to rend asunder, to sustain ourselves at every kaleidoscopic unfolding of elemental electrons, nuclear radiating, electrified anatomy, earth, sky, water faring jazz dancing, pencil pushing, car driving, plane flying citizen. And yes, I, as we, are mostly animal, hungry and afraid, grabbing inequitably, unjustly, greedily for me and mine. But I/we are more, we have potential! Potential to do it differently. To individually/collectively think it through, feel it through, be the evolutionary change agent. If we take responsibility, we can decide to align our inner/outer nature to #SustainablePlanet. And that is where we have to begin, if we are to begin our true stewardship.

We can invite the ecstatic natural harmony we feel within our personal body temple space to begin the international give and take conversation for a true form of Democratic governance that includes all sentient beings. A governance that eschews power for power sake, evades control for fear of lack of control, a governance that respects appropriate scale, sees and is humbled by our caring place within the global nature of our individual nature, the galactic nature, our glucose-powered nature. We are that nature. Wherever on balance we are, we are that nature that is becoming anew. There is no guarantee of what we become. It depends on how we choose, or if we fail to choose, if we fail to frame the answers to the correct questions. This planet will go on in perfect balance of what it is in every instance with or without us. But we are not passive observers. The 'with us,' 'with us, ''with us' part is up to us.

If nature is ever rebalancing, it's our job first to take care of our unique autonomous sovereign "cell' selves first, yes. AND THEN expand, expand, expand to include the nature of the inner/outer 'others' in our ever expanding spheres of symbiotic influence forming togetherness. For it is life itself we are interested in saving. True, there is life in every 'thing,' but you, my friend, are captain of This! ship within the tumultuous seas we are sailing in, and I am looking to you to help navigate this flotilla back to safe harbors.

"So we can say that New York City and Tokyo are 'natural' but not 'wild.' They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd. Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness," Gary Snyder

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Alan Watts – The Tao of Philosophy
"Every inside has an outside, and what goes on inside your skin is inseparable from what goes on outside your skin."

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Poetry (Poets)

Poetry (derived from the Greek poiesis, "making") is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language – such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre – to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, utilising this principle. Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in Sumerian.

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Smokey the Bear Sutra
The Smokey the Bear Sutra is a 1969 poem by Gary Snyder which presents environmental concerns in the form of a Buddhist sutra, and depicts Smokey as the reincarnation of Buddha Vairocana. Snyder composed the poem for a February 1969 Sierra Club Wilderness Conference, at which he distributed the first copies. The poem "may be reproduced free forever," and has since been widely disseminated in print and electronic forms.

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Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder

"In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open–hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever–deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age."—Orion Magazine

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Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

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Science

authored by Dan Landrum  If Politics of Power is superseding Religion and Science with Big Data in the Information Age:

Scientists can only hypothesize, put forward a theory, experiment a proof until it's disproven. It's belief, never actually true. It may be pragmatic for now, but its logic is limited to an objective belief explaining an object narrative with empirical illustration, as far as the senses go. As distinct from religions' subjective trans-sensory moral experience, trans-logical ethical beliefs, coercing mythological psychosocial narratives with rhetoric and dialectics. Both rational and irrational, with nothing verifiably ever true, it all becomes the fodder for the opportunists' power plays.

Science is all about Falsifications: Karl Popper's Falsification applied to Marxism

Karl Popper's Falsification | Aug 5, 2015 (BBC: Youtube: 1m50s)
Science is based on fact. Isn't it? Karl Popper believed that human knowledge progresses through 'falsification'. A theory or idea shouldn't be described as scientific unless it could, in principle, be proven false.

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I have too much faith
in my doubt
to follow doctrine!

There is good heretical thinking that views much of what we swallow as science as actually being assumed truth, nothing more than spurious gossip based on wrong-headed conclusions -- group think at it's most wry deviation from what actually is.

Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK | Mar 15, 2013 (Youtube: 18m19s)
The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. This is a very widespread belief in our society. It's the kind of belief system of people who say "I don't believe in God, I believe in science." It's a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world. But there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry based on reason, evidence, hypothesis and collective investigation, and science as a belief system or a world view. And unfortunately the world view aspect of science has come to inhibit and constrict the free inquiry which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavour. [...]

TED decided to censor Rupert and remove this video from the TEDx youtube channel. SEE: TED's statement on the matter and Dr. Sheldrake's response here.

Though I sadly decry our kinds' pernicious deforestation throughout the world, throughout history, our treatment of animals, cattle, chickens, lambs, though I sadly decry our means and use of mass destruction, wars, the wholesale extinction of other species... I have to say in the end analysis, I really don't know. I really don't know our means of measuring, the actual consequences or an accurate interpretation. Or what the end results should be. I tend to hold in soft belief the idea that there are no constants, no absolutes, no perfection, embrace the motto: it's all relative. Which suggests it's more about which side you're on, who you're for, what you want, for whatever reasons, the outcome to be. The religion you adhere to, and science is today's power-dominate religion, defines the truths you see and the truths you don't more than any other worldview shaping force. So I prefer to make my home in the "I don't know" and keep asking annoying questions. authored by Dan Landrum

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Then where do the wise find the true in the unknowable:

The equanimity of awareness, simple neutral awareness, choiceless awareness, bolstered with resilience, the flexibility to adapt to newness appropriately, and find balance, harmony and a satisfying narrative of being on the other side of this ever-accelerating, ever-evolving becoming — somewhere in that dynamics can we find a process for wisdom that is fresh, and open, yet somehow knows from past experience and the present condition, and knows with conviction that it knows what is true? Knows what is true and is a truth that is transferable to others?

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In Psychology And Other Social Sciences, Many Studies Fail The Reproducibility Test
Many social sciences experiments couldn't be reproduced in a new study, thus calling into question their findings. The field of social science is pushing hard to improve its scientific rigor.

"The way to get ahead and get a job and get tenure is to publish lots and lots of papers," says Will Gervais*. "And it's hard to do that if you run fewer studies, but in the end I think that's the way to go — to slow down our science and be more rigorous up front," Will Gervais   {SEE: Pace of Life }

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Anatomy

What Do You Know About the Female Body?    @Kimmel

Cervix

"Where is the cervix?"

With so many Americans playing doctor, we wanted to put their knowledge of human anatomy to the test. Specifically, the female human anatomy. So we went on the street to ask men what they know about women’s bodies and this is what we learned.

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Geography

@Kimmel, "It is imperative that America has strong relationships with and knowledge about other nations, and that responsibility extends to all of us. So we came up with a test and went out on the street to ask people passing by, to name any country on a map. It didn't go well."

{ SEE: Education }

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Math

How to account for all of your ancestors? authored by Dan Landrum
The human population in 0 BCE is estimated to be around 188,239,090.

You have 2 parents, who each had 2 parents (2 exponent 2) , who each had 2 parents (2 exponent 3), etc. Assuming 5 generations per century (5x20) back to 0 BCE is 100 generations or (2 exponent 100) parents.

(2 exponent 100) parents is 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 ... how is that possible?!

I asked this question at (wyzant.com):

Bilingual math tutor replied, "That's a crazy number isn't it! And good for you to question this number!!! Here's the catch. If all your ancestors were immortal, the earth would be a very crowded place. You may want to look up the average life span of those times. 35 was old. Some years the death rate was larger than the birth rate......war, disease, natural disasters...

That is, however, how many ancestors you've had.....kind of amazing!!!

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Self-governance

Self-governance, self-government, or self-rule is the ability of a person or group to exercise all necessary functions of regulation without intervention from an external authority. It may refer to personal conduct or to any form of institution, such as family units, social groups, affinity groups, legal bodies, industry bodies, religions, and political entities of various degree. Self-governance is closely related to various philosophical and socio-political concepts such as autonomy, independence, self-control, self-discipline, and sovereignty. In the context of nation-states, self-governance is called national sovereignty which is an important concept in international law. In the context of administrative division, a self-governing territory is called an autonomous region. Self-governance is also associated with political contexts in which a population or demographic becomes independent from colonial rule, absolute government, absolute monarchy or any government which they perceive does not adequately represent them. It is therefore a fundamental tenet of many democracies, republics and nationalist governments. Mohandas Gandhi's term "swaraj" is a branch of this self-rule ideology. Henry David Thoreau was a major proponent of self-rule in lieu of immoral governments.

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Self-organization

Self-organization, also called (in the social sciences) spontaneous order, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Self-organization occurs in many physical, chemical, biological, robotic, and cognitive systems. Examples of self-organization include crystallization, thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation, animal swarming, neural circuits, and black markets.

Self-organization in Computer Science

Phenomena from mathematics and computer science such as cellular automata, random graphs, and some instances of evolutionary computation and artificial life exhibit features of self-organization. In swarm robotics, self-organization is used to produce emergent behavior. In particular the theory of random graphs has been used as a justification for self-organization as a general principle of complex systems. In the field of multi-agent systems, understanding how to engineer systems that are capable of presenting self-organized behavior is an active research area. Optimization algorithms can be considered self-organizing because they aim to find the optimal solution to a problem. If the solution is considered as a state of the iterative system, the optimal solution is the selected, converged structure of the system. Self-organizing networks include small-world networks self-stabilization and scale-free networks. These emerge from bottom-up interactions, unlike top-down hierarchical networks within organizations, which are not self-organizing. Cloud computing systems have been argued to be inherently self-organising, but while they have some autonomy, they are not self-managing as they do not have the goal of reducing their own complexity.

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Shelter [SEE: Trees]

San Diego Housing Among Nation's Least Affordable  (Youtube: KPBS)
What is Affordable Housing?  (sandiego.gov)

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Shigeru Ban: Emergency shelters made from paper | Aug 13, 2013 (Youtube: 11m42s)
Long before sustainability became a buzzword, architect Shigeru Ban had begun his experiments with ecologically-sound building materials such as cardboard tubes and paper. His remarkable structures are often intended as temporary housing, designed to help the dispossessed in disaster-struck nations such as Haiti, Rwanda or Japan. Yet equally often the buildings remain a beloved part of the landscape long after they have served their intended purpose. (Filmed at TEDxTokyo.)  [ALSO in Paper]

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Simplicity  (SEE: Complexity)

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Simple Living (Voluntary Simplicity [as distinct from 'vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience']

Simple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one's lifestyle. These may include, for example, reducing one's possessions, generally referred to as minimalism, or increasing self-sufficiency. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they have rather than want. Although asceticism generally promotes living simply and refraining from luxury and indulgence, not all proponents of simple living are ascetics. Simple living is distinct from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice. Adherents may choose simple living for a variety of personal reasons, such as spirituality, health, increase in quality time for family and friends, work–life balance, personal taste, financial sustainability, increase in philanthropy, frugality, environmental sustainability, or reducing stress. Simple living can also be a reaction to materialism and conspicuous consumption. Some cite sociopolitical goals aligned with the environmentalist, anti-consumerist or anti-war movements, including conservation, degrowth, deep ecology, and tax resistance (anti-war).

The Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen warned against the conspicuous consumption of the materialistic society with The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); Richard Gregg coined the term "voluntary simplicity" in The Value of Voluntary Simplicity (1936). From the 1920s, a number of modern authors articulated both the theory and practice of living simply, among them Gandhian Richard Gregg, economists Ralph Borsodi and Scott Nearing, anthropologist-poet Gary Snyder, and writer Ernest Callenbach, known for his semi-utopian novel Ecotopia (1975).  E. F. Schumacher argued against the notion that "bigger is better" in Small Is Beautiful (1973); and Duane Elgin continued the promotion of the simple life in Voluntary Simplicity (1981). The Australian academic Ted Trainer practices and writes about simplicity, and established The Simplicity Institute. In the United States voluntary simplicity started to garner more public exposure through a movement in the late 1990s around a popular "simplicity" book, The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs. Around the same time, minimalism (a similar movement) started to feature in the public eye.

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Simplicity/Complexity

Something easy to understand or explain seems simple, in contrast to something complicated. Alternatively, as Herbert A. Simon suggests, something is simple or complex depending on the way we choose to describe it.

Simplicity ON THIS SIDE OF Complexity (innocence)

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me," 1 Corinthians 13:11

"No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them," William Godwin


Simplicity ON THE OTHERSIDE OF Complexity (experience)

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” — Mark Twain

(SEE: William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience)

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Simple Gifts, a Shaker song

'Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

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William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Blake wrote Songs of Innocence as a contrary to the Songs of Experience. "The Lamb" is the counterpart poem to Blake's poem: "The Tyger" in Songs of Experience.

Little Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Tyger Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

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Socially Responsible Investing 

Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), social investment, sustainable socially conscious, "green" or ethical investing, is any investment strategy which seeks to consider both financial return and social/environmental good to bring about social change regarded as positive by proponents. Socially responsible investments often constitute a small percentage of total funds invested by corporations and are riddled with obstacles. The origins of socially responsible investing may date back to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). In 1758, the Quaker Philadelphia Yearly Meeting prohibited members from participating in the slave trade – buying or selling humans.

John Wesley (1703–1791) was one of the most articulate early adopters of Socially Responsible Investing. Wesley's sermon "The Use of Money" outlined his basic tenets of social investing – i.e. not to harm your neighbor through your business practices and to avoid industries like tanning and chemical production, which can harm the health of workers. Some of the best-known applications of socially responsible investing were religiously motivated. Investors would avoid "sinful" companies, such as those associated with products such as guns, liquor, and tobacco.

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Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), also known as social investment, is an investment that is considered socially responsible due to the nature of the business the company conducts. Common themes for socially responsible investments include socially conscious investing.
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Social Justice Investing

Adasina founder & CEO Rachel Robasciotti, explains “social justice investing” and how Adasina advances social justice beyond existing ESG (environmental, social, and governance) approaches.
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Socio-Politics (Political Sociology) (Social) (Politics)

Political Sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how power and oppression operate in society across micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the State as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.

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Unintended Consequences
Unintended Consequences in the social sciences are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was popularised in the twentieth century by Robert K. Merton, a founding father of modern sociology.

Unintended consequences can be grouped into three types:

When Bulls Fight

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Peace,  Non-Violence,  Ahimsa,  Civil Disobedience,  Compassion

"We need to rekindle our own age-old Ahimsa and Karuna traditions. In order to create a peaceful and joyful environment, human nature needs to be more sympathetic. Together, Ahimsa and Karuna in our culture may teach the world a path of tolerance, thoughtfulness, and compassion," Dalai Lama, Dec 23, 2021 (New Delhi Television)

Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama is a title given by the Tibetan people to the foremost spiritual leader of the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism, the newest and most dominant of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th and current Dalai Lama is Tenzin Gyatso, who lives as a refugee in India. The Dalai Lama is also considered to be the successor in a line of tulkus who are believed to be incarnations of Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. "His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, describes himself as a simple Buddhist monk. Firstly, as a human being, His Holiness is concerned with encouraging people to be happy—helping them understand that if their minds are upset mere physical comfort will not bring them peace, but if their minds are at peace even physical pain will not disturb their calm. He advocates the cultivation of warm-heartedness and human values such as compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline. He says that as human beings we are all the same. We all want happiness and do not want suffering. Even people who have no religious belief can benefit if they incorporate these human values into their lives. His Holiness refers to such human values as secular ethics or universal values. He is committed to talking about the importance of such values and sharing them with everyone he meets."

Mother Teresa
Mother Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu (born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, Albanian: 26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), honoured in the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. In 1950, Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation that had over 4,500 nuns and was active in 133 countries as of 2012. The congregation manages homes for people who are dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis. It also runs soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, children's and family counselling programmes, as well as orphanages and schools. Members take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and also profess a fourth vow – to give "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor."

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman and leader in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. He was the son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr.

Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (GAHN-dee; 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule, and to later inspire movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (Sanskrit: "great-souled", "venerable"), first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa, is now used throughout the world. One of the books that influenced Gandhi most was Henry David Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849).

Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living [SEE: Simple Living] in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

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Sovereignty  (SEE:  Self-governance)

Civil Rights vs. Civil Liberties

"It is a fair summary of constitutional history that the landmarks of our liberties have often been forged in cases involving not very nice people." —Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter was a huge influence on the Supreme Court in the years he sat on the bench, 1939– 62. He is noted for his civil rights and anti-trust decisions.

Civil liberties are protections against government actions. For example, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights guarantees citizens the right to practice whatever religion they please. ... Civil rights, in contrast, refer to positive actions of government should take to create equal conditions for all Americans. Protection of civil liberties and civil rights is perhaps the most fundamental political value in American society. And yet, as former Justice Frankfurter explained in the quote above, the people who test liberties and rights in our courts are not always ideal citizens. Consider some of these examples:

Each of these people made sensational headline news as the center of one of many national civil liberties disputes in the late 20th century. They became involved in the legal process because of behavior that violated a law, and almost certainly, none of them intended to become famous. More important than the headlines they made, however, is the role they played in establishing important principles that define the many civil liberties and civil rights that Americans enjoy today.

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Sugar

Sugar Rush, articles: SEARCH: "Sugar"  on The Conversation from October 31, 2021 to January 7, 2022

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Sugar/Headache Theory  authored by Dan Landrum

My best guess is that my brothers', cousins', nephews' cluster headaches, as well as my own in 5th, 6th & 7th grades, and my mother's ice pick headaches are not so much hereditary as cultural. I lay the prime cause at the feet of refined sugar. I am from an affluent family of sugar addicts. Refined sugar was cheap and ubiquitous, we bought it in 5lbs bags and cases of soda pop. Consuming it on demand, we began to blow out our neural sugar pathways well before we were out of the crib. For the origins of our culture's addiction to refined sugar, look to the slave driven rum trade in the 17th century Caribbean sugarcane plantations.

Refined sugar is vastly more potent than natural sugars in foods. If you chew on sugar cane to get the juice, you also get other compounds that naturally limit how much you'll consume. These so called "impurities" are what are refined out of natural sugar, including molasses, which plantation slaves discovered could be fermented into alcohol, making rum.

An increasingly important distinction among sugars as they pertain to health is whether they occur naturally in foods such as fruit, vegetables, and dairy, or whether they are added sugars, added to foods and beverages during manufacturing, processing, or preparation. Though glucose is food for the brain, our bodies do not need, or benefit from, eating added sugar.

The effects of too much sugar are well documented. webmd.com says, "Chances are you already know that eating too much sugar isn’t good for you. Yet you’re probably still overdoing it."

In short, it’s best to limit all sources of added sugar to within the recommended intake level. For most people, one type of sugar isn’t better than another. High refined sugar intake leads to the “sugar high”/ "sugar crash" syndrome. Habitual high refined sugar intake blows out your neural sugar pathways leading to chronic physical, mental and emotional disease. "Glucose level fluctuations affect your brain more than any other organ. Sugar causes hormonal changes, specifically with epinephrine and norepinephrine. Those shifts change blood vessel behavior in the brain, causing a headache."

Sure there are many other mitigating factors, but the high, particularly fast burning refined sugars leave us increasingly less resilient and more prone to an array of debilitating health issues, including severe and chronic headaches.

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NOTES:
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How common is a headache?

Headache is one of the most common pain conditions in the world. Up to 75% of adults worldwide have had a headache in the past year. Headaches are a major cause of absenteeism from work and school. They also take a toll on social and family life. Jun 3, 2020. Half to three quarters of adults aged 18–65 years in the world have had headache in the last year and, among those individuals, 30% or more have reported migraine. Headache on 15 or more days every month affects 1.7–4% of the world's adult population. Apr 8, 2016

Why do I get a headache after I eat sugar?

Glucose level fluctuations affect your brain more than any other organ. Sugar causes hormonal changes, specifically with epinephrine and norepinephrine. Those shifts change blood vessel behavior in the brain, causing a headache. Dec 28, 2019. Sugar is a vital component of your body chemistry. Too much or too little sugar can cause problems, including headaches. This is because sugar has a direct effect on your brain and nervous system. Learning how to maintain a proper level of sugar in your diet may prevent future headaches.

For the origins of our cultures addiction to refined sugar, look to the slave driven rum trade in the 17th century Caribbean sugarcane plantations. The first distillation of rum in the Caribbean took place there. Plantation slaves discovered that molasses, a by-product of the sugar refining process, could be fermented into alcohol. Then, distillation of these alcoholic byproducts concentrated the alcohol, and removed some impurities, producing the first modern rums. Tradition suggests this type of rum first originated on the island of Nevis. A 1651 document from Barbados stated: "The chief fuddling they make in the island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divil, and this is made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor."

Natural vs Added sugars

An increasingly important distinction among sugars as they pertain to health is whether they occur naturally in foods such as fruit, vegetables, and dairy, or whether they are added sugars, added to foods and beverages during manufacturing, processing, or preparation. Sugary beverages are the greatest source of added sugar in the diet, followed by sweets and grains such as ready-to-eat cereals. Intake of added sugar, particularly from beverages, has been associated with weight gain, and higher risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Natural and added sugars are metabolized the same way in our bodies. But for most people, consuming natural sugars in foods such as fruit is not linked to negative health effects, since the amount of sugar tends to be modest and is "packaged" with fiber and other healthful nutrients. On the other hand, our bodies do not need, or benefit from, eating added sugar.

Are certain types of sugars healthier than others? - Harvard Health

Is glucose food for the brain?

Brain functions such as thinking, memory, and learning are closely linked to glucose levels and how efficiently the brain uses this fuel source. If there isn't enough glucose in the brain, for example, neurotransmitters, the brain's chemical messengers, are not produced and communication between neurons breaks down. Glucose, a form of sugar, is the primary source of energy for every cell in the body. Because the brain is so rich in nerve cells, or neurons, it is the most energy-demanding organ, using one-half of all the sugar energy in the body.

From Sucrose to Glucose

As with other sugars, sucrose is digested into its components via the enzyme sucrase to glucose (blood sugar). The glucose component is transported into the blood where it serves immediate metabolic demands, or is converted and reserved in the liver as glycogen. For human consumption, sucrose is extracted and refined from either sugarcane or sugar beet.

Too much sugar

"Chances are you already know that eating too much sugar isn’t good for you. Yet you’re probably still overdoing it."

Your Mood: the occasional candy or cookie can give you a quick burst of energy (or “sugar high”) by raising your blood sugar levels fast. When your levels drop as your cells absorb the sugar, you may feel jittery and anxious (a.k.a. the dreaded “sugar crash”). But if you’re reaching into the candy jar too often, sugar starts to have an effect on your mood beyond that 3 p.m. slump: Studies have linked a high sugar intake to a greater risk of depression in adults.

Neural pathways that control the glucose counterregulatory response

Glucose is an essential metabolic substrate for all bodily tissues. The brain depends particularly on a constant supply of glucose to satisfy its energy demands. Fortunately, a complex physiological system has evolved to keep blood glucose at a constant level. The consequences of poor glucose homeostasis are well-known: hyperglycemia associated with uncontrolled diabetes can lead to cardiovascular disease, neuropathy and nephropathy, while hypoglycemia can lead to convulsions, loss of consciousness, coma, and even death. The glucose counterregulatory response involves detection of declining plasma glucose levels and secretion of several hormones including glucagon, adrenaline, cortisol, and growth hormone (GH) to orchestrate the recovery from hypoglycemia. Low blood glucose leads to a low brain glucose level that is detected by glucose-sensing neurons located in several brain regions such as the ventromedial hypothalamus, the perifornical region of the lateral hypothalamus, the arcuate nucleus (ARC), and in several hindbrain regions. This review will describe the importance of the glucose counterregulatory system and what is known of the neurocircuitry that underpins it.

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Sunshine (ALSO: Sunlight)

"My Revelation came in that dazzling, Nataraj,
if you will, moment when I first realized:
I AM the Dancing Sun!" authored by Dan Landrum

I am the dancing sun, albeit on a somewhat of a D-cell battery scale, needing to recharge from the source on a daily basis. Early to bed, early to rise to maximize efficiency. The need for sunlight – physically, emotionally, for the spirit, for clear thinking, ...such a radiant source. The difference in sunlight gain is palpable in all of those dimensions. No wonder we, as a culture, have institutionalized the sugar rush from Halloween to Valentine's Day to, at least somewhat, capture the energy, though that second hand source is truly no substitute for the ecstatic real thing. But then again, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) "winter blues" is a real thing. Don't take it lightly, or rather do take it lightly, ...get out in the winter sun every chance you get. Careful now, with your doseage of the ecstatic real thing, sunshine, especially in the noon day summer sun. Sometimes too much can be too much. And skin is thin.

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All told, we human-hell-bent-on-world-domination-maniacs have in store nearly 7,000 megatons of nuclear bombs. A 'one megaton nuclear bomb' is the equivalent of a million tons of TNT. The amount of energy emitted by the Sun is equivalent to exploding 100 BILLION one-megaton nuclear bombs — every second! And we think we're something?
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No Longer Troubled (a walking song)  authored by Dan Landrum

There's really nothing to it.
We're just going through it.
So let your heart be like the sun,
shine alike on everyone.
Let your heart be like the sun,
shine alike on  e v e r y o n e.

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Sunlight and Your Health medically reviewed by Sabrina Felson, MD on February 08, 2020

The sun’s UV rays help your body make Vitamin D, which is important for your bones, blood cells, and immune system. It also helps you take in and use certain minerals, like calcium and phosphorus. And while most people get enough vitamin D from food, children who don’t can get rickets, which softens and weakens their bones.

Your eyes need light to help set your body’s internal clock. Early morning sunlight in particular seems to help people get to sleep at night. This may be more important as you age because your eyes are less able to take in light, and you’re more likely to have problems going to sleep.

Morning light also seems to help people keep the fat off. You need 20 to 30 minutes between 8 a.m. and noon to make a difference, but the earlier you get it, the better it seems to work. Scientists think the sun’s rays may shrink fat cells below your skin’s surface. More sunshine means you’re probably getting more exercise too, which is good for you in lots of ways, including shedding pounds.

Moderate amounts of sun over your lifetime, especially in your teen and young adult years, might make you less likely to have problems seeing things at a distance (nearsightedness). But too much direct sunlight can hurt your eyes. It can lead to blurred vision and raise your chances of cataracts.

In addition to some skin issues, filtered sunlight also can be used to treat a condition called jaundice that mostly affects newborns. It happens when there’s too much of the chemical bilirubin in the blood, and it makes a baby’s skin look slightly yellow. Putting the baby in sunlight behind a window (to filter out the harmful kinds of rays) may help get rid of the bilirubin. Never put a newborn in direct sunlight outside.

How Much Is Enough?

This answer is different for everyone. It depends on your skin tone, age, health history, diet, and where you live. In general, scientists think 5 to 15 minutes -- up to 30 if you’re dark-skinned -- is about right to get the most out of it without causing any health problems. Theoretically, you can stay out longer and get the same effect if you use sunscreen.

Emotional Well-Being

Sunlight helps boost a chemical in your brain called serotonin, and that can give you more energy and help keep you calm, positive, and focused. Doctors sometimes treat seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and other types of depression linked to low levels of serotonin with natural or artificial light.

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"Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high"
                                                      — John Denver
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The Mayo Clinic tells us, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that's related to changes in seasons — SAD begins and ends at about the same times every year. If you're like most people with SAD, your symptoms start in the fall and continue into the winter months, sapping your energy and making you feel moody. These symptoms often resolve during the spring and summer months. Less often, SAD causes depression in the spring or early summer and resolves during the fall or winter months.

Treatment for SAD may include light therapy (phototherapy*).

Don't brush off that yearly feeling as simply a case of the "winter blues" or a seasonal funk that you have to tough out on your own. Take steps to keep your mood and motivation steady throughout the year.

* Besides treating SAD, Light Therapy is the use of ultraviolet (UV) light for its healing effects. Phototherapy has been used worldwide for nearly a century to treat chronic skin conditions such as psoriasis, vitiligo and severe eczema.

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Sustainable

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or Global Goals are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a "blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all"  The SDGs were set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly (UN-GA) and are intended to be achieved by the year 2030. The 17 SDGs are: (1) No Poverty, (2) Zero Hunger, (3) Good Health and Well-being, (4) Quality Education, (5) Gender Equality, ( 6) Clean Water and Sanitation, (7) Affordable and Clean Energy, (8) Decent Work and Economic Growth, (9) Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, (10) Reduced Inequality, (11) Sustainable Cities and Communities, (12) Responsible Consumption and Production, (13) Climate Action, (14) Life Below Water, (15) Life On Land, (16) Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, (17) Partnerships for the Goals.  Though the goals are broad and interdependent, two years later (6 July 2017) the SDGs were made more "actionable" by a UN Resolution adopted by the General Assembly. The resolution identifies specific targets for each goal, along with indicators that are being used to measure progress toward each target.  The year by which the target is meant to be achieved is usually between 2020 and 2030.

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Sustainable Land Management

Sustainable Land Management (SLM) refers to practices and technologies that aim to integrate the management of land, water, and other environmental resources to meet human needs while ensuring long-term sustainability, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and livelihoods. The term is used,for example, in regional planning and soil or environmental protection, as well as in property and estate management. In September 2020, scientists published an interactive world map of terrestrial regions where protected areas acting as a "Global Safety Net" or -as a gradual improvement - more sustainable management would help achieve various climate and conservation goals. Furthermore, the Economics of Land Degradation (ELD) Initiative seeks to establish a cost benefit analysis on the practice of sustainable land management highlighting its economic benefits. This economic analysis will help decision makers to take appropriate measures to combat land degradation globally. Additionally, the Initiative supports regional case studies focusing on Africa and Central Asia.

Goats: Environmental Land Management  

The other day I was making a delivery out in Lemon Grove, as I came around the bend, what did I see cascading down the hillside? A herd of 200 goats. And a happy lot they were, frolicking, butt butting and kicking up their heels. Turns out the city hires a company called Environmental Land Management Goats to run the goats, overseen by human handlers and a Great Pyrenees livestock-guard dog, as a simple and convenient way to clear brush and implement preventative measures to control fire outbreaks. They say, "Goats can be used effectively in almost any location or terrain type, especially in terrain too rocky or steep for human or machine clearing. Because these goats are tightly managed by highly trained handlers, they are kept from overgrazing and make a wonderful option for brush abatement and weed control." With all the wildfires we're prone to here in California, you can imagine why seeing a herd of happy goats scampering down the hillside would bring a smile to the face.

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Thinking (First Thoughts)  (misinformation, disinformation)  [SEE: Awareness]  [SEE: Decision — choice, options, variables, habits, routines]

How do you decide?

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First Thoughts  authored by Dan Landrum

The thought is the thought.
Yes or no is secondary.

If I say,
"Don't think about monkeys."
You think about monkeys.

For or against, attend to your first thoughts.
Don't think twice, it's all right.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there," Rumi

The best I can hope for is being honest with myself in trusting my perceptions, honoring  the primacy of the instinct, the imminence of raw emotion, the present clarity of sensation, the truth of my feelings.'

First Thoughts are the culmination, the gestalt of all feelings in this moment. The whole, not the divided, categorized, analyzed, prioritized segments. Not impulsive, not compulsion.  But rather the distilled consensus of all time, all experience suggesting: This!

"This!" may be right, may be wrong. It's an experiment. Let's try This! And then we have a clear basis of an unequivocal contemporaneous trial to base our understanding on.

Steven Pinker, say no, you better stop, reflect, dissect, analyze. The problem is, when you put 'things' in compartmentalized boxes, into categories you limit them to a finite data set for the analysis. Your conclusions can only be constructed in a glass bell jar separate from the whole of your reality. “No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical,” as Niels Bohr might caution. Without the feelings that mortar the bricks of all your experience across time and place you are left with a token model of your reductive reasoning.

First Thoughts INCLUDE all feelings. Encoded in your life experience, your DNA. The reasons are their own. How you play with them your choice.

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Winslow Eliot: The Way of Stillness
FB dialog: "not waiting – but watching"  |  March 18, 2015

• Dan Landrum: Brava, Winslow Eliot! A marvelous accomplishment: "not waiting – but watching."

Winslow writes, "I have recently emerged from a four-month retreat in which I explored being very still. During this retreat, I accomplished very little in terms of visible display. But it’s turned out to have been one of the most significant periods of my life. I have reached a place of calm, pleasure, and peacefulness that I never felt before. I highly recommend it!"

COMMENTS:

• Dan Landrum: Daydreaming is different than 'no mind' -- aware, wordlessly witnessing -- the aim of Zen (what you attain effortlessly, not to be confused with the practice of Zen, which is an effort to quiet the monkey mind). No mind feels like simply resting in beingness, where as daydreaming feels like becoming with an edge of emerging creation. Both can move in 'Big Mind', use the whole brain, unlike the narrow focus on a specific task, especially tasks that are motivated by 'I have to do this or ... or I won't eat, won't have roof over my head, etc. What a delightful luxury to spend long stretches of time in no time, whether it's no mind or daydreaming. Peculiar how daydreaming has been demeaned as a trifling while No Mind has been exalted as a near religion. Maybe because daydreaming can go beyond monkey mind, but can't be culturally controlled. I'm not exactly sure what Winslow's experience was, but I've always been a big natural fan of daydreaming and could have a lot to say about that particular brand of nothingness.

I'm personally in a flow of mental effortlessness in my day to day. The state is not entirely my choice, but more my choice of how I adapt to the incremental loss of short term memory. At the core is trust -- trusting everything will take care of itself satisfactorily if I only fully attend to this moment. And that's one of the fringe benefits of short-term memory loss, getting closer to the witness in the moment without the constant shoulda, haveta nag screens. It's more about sinking into the feeling, the feeling that everything is alright. At the creative end it's a pleasure, as most everything emerges (or unwittingly reemerges) surprisingly anew and I get to take a fresh look at it and see how it fits into all else that is going on in this now.

There is that adage, 'use it or loss it', but it would feel like a reaction to fear for me to start trying to solve sudokus, crossword puzzles or other brainteasers. I've never liked that kind of exercise. So the flow of solving and resolving the imbalances that arise in the dialog of my own art making, even if it, the flow, feels easy is plenty good enough for me.

• Winslow Eliot: I haven't been daydreaming - just returned from a brief absence! What a great discussion. I do agree that moderation in all things is good – I wouldn't want to only daydream! I also think there isn't nearly enough value given to it these busy, overscheduled days – especially in children's lives. And in grownups' too.

• Dan Landrum: When starting new work I have a strong bias to 'do as little a possible' in hopes for the Zen Simple resolution to the idea. If the image doesn't 'snap to grid' and come together with all the ingredients of fresh art, I take a new tack, adding more "noise" in hopes of finding the balance. I also have to keep my audience in mind. Many of the emerging subtle perceptions that I revel in would be just too boring for the majority of my target audience. Perhaps this speaks to your point regarding moderation, Winslow – the dance becomes the accord between the quiet signal offset with that certain pop of busy noise that will satisfy a 'daydream' mind in a public space.

It's a provocative dance. Like impulsive thoughts, bold "look at me" statements come right at you, grabbing attention, and as the psyche rises to meet the gaze, it can pull you defensively out of yourself, but within delicate subtle perception, just the opposite. The allure of an oddly curious quiet space can invite you into the picture while simultaneously allowing you the safe space to go within yourself.

Simple impressions seem more impactful for simple ideas, but there is something special about embedding slightly outrageous subtle perception within the noise of the complex day to day hurly burly. I'm hoping to discover more of that in my painting process.

• Gail Parker: Dan, you've brought up what to me is a very important point. You've articulated it as "the dichotomy between bold impression and subtle perception," as a specific manifestation of "push/pull". That's a highly intriguing concept to play with! I have always been inspired by various kinds of push/pull where artistic expressions are concerned. The first I can recall was when I sewed most of my clothes in my early 20s. My favorite creation was a shirtwaist dress (very tailored and serious design) done in a kind of frivolously girly print. Opposites brought together in a synergistic and highly individual way. That is why I was so delighted with that one woman's comment about a masculine subject done in feminine colors.

I can see that you've explored this dynamic at a much deeper level than I ever have. I've never really thought about it much, it has just always been a really powerful impulse. It is interesting to put thoughts to it. Thanks for the provocation to do that.

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Gapminder Foundation

"The mission of Gapminder Foundation is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. We started the Ignorance Project to investigate what the public know and don’t know about basic global patterns and macro-trends."

TED video: How not to be ignorant about the world | Hans and Ola Rosling

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Alligator Lizard “Misinformation” vs. “Disinformation”
Misinformation is “false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead.” Disinformation means “deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda.” So, disinformation is knowingly spreading misinformation. There are many nefarious motivations lurking behind the creation of disinformation.

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Yuval Noah Harari: In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power
"How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children? Yuval Noah Harari explores the immediate future of humankind through his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century."

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Why do we love nonsense?

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Why do we love nonsense? Why do we love Lewis Carroll with his “‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe…”? Why is it that all those old English songs are full of “Fal-de-riddle-eye-do” and “Hey-nonny-nonny” and all those babbling choruses? Why is it that when we get “hep” with jazz we just go “Boody-boody-boop-de-boo” and so on, and enjoy ourselves swinging with it? It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world, not necessarily going anywhere. It seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is non-sense. Still, we want to use the word “significant.” Is this significant nonsense? Is this a kind of nonsense that is not just chaos, that is not just blathering balderdash, but rather has in it rhythm, fascinating complexity, and a kind of artistry? It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we come to the profoundest meaning." —Alan Watts

 

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Trees (wood) (paper) (shelter) (shade)
Areca Palm {Fruit trees: Avocado, Lemon, Apple, Pear, Olives, Coconut, Date palm, Areca palm} {Hardwood trees: Walnut, Maple, Oak, Mahogany, Teak, Hickory} {Softwood trees: Cedar, Douglas Fir, Juniper, Pine, Redwood, Spruce, Yew} {Arecaceae} {Poaceae}

In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only wood plants with secondary growth, plants that are usable as lumber or plants above a specified height. In wider definitions, the taller palms, tree ferns, bananas, and bamboos are also trees. Trees are not a taxonomic group but include a variety of plant species that have independently evolved a trunk and branches as a way to tower above other plants to compete for sunlight. Trees tend to be long-lived, some reaching several thousand years old. Trees have been in existence for 370 million years. It is estimated that there are some three trillion mature trees in the world.

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Viruses (Biological Viruses) (Computer Virus)

Coronavirus epidemic: authored by Dan Landrum

Apparently, us humans are the pantry for viruses.
And a certain family of SARS-CoV-2 are having a feast.

Thing is, the lizards in our garden are oblivious.
Going about their business like it's a heyday.

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Biological Viruses
A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms (including marine), from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. More than 9,000 virus species have been described in detail of the millions of types of viruses in the environment.Viruses are found in almost every ecosystem on Earth and are the most numerous type of biological entity. The study of viruses is known as virology, a subspeciality of microbiology. Virus classification is the process of naming viruses and placing them into a taxonomic system similar to the classification systems used for cellular organisms. Viruses are classified by phenotypic characteristics, such as morphology, nucleic acid type, mode of replication, host organisms, and the type of disease they cause.

The Common Cold, also known simply as a Cold, is a viral infectious disease of the upper respiratory tract that primarily affects the respiratory mucosa of the nose, throat, sinuses, and larynx. People usually recover in seven to ten days, but some symptoms may last up to three weeks. Occasionally, those with other health problems may develop pneumonia. Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses being the most common.

Influenza, commonly known as "the flu", is an infectious disease caused by influenza viruses (Orthomyxoviridae).

Coronaviruses are a group of related RNA viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans and birds, they cause respiratory tract infections that can range from mild to lethal. Mild illnesses in humans include some cases of the common cold (which is also caused by other viruses, predominantly rhinoviruses), while more lethal varieties can cause SARS, MERS and COVID-19, which is causing an ongoing pandemic. In cows and pigs they cause diarrhea, while in mice they cause hepatitis and encephalomyelitis.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease has since spread worldwide, leading to an ongoing pandemic.

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Are you as likely to die from a common cold as COVID-19?
by Health Desk | Updated on September 18, 2020

COVID-19 is far more lethal than the virus that causes the common cold, even though the vast majority of COVID-19 patients only experience mild or no symptoms. The best available current evidence indicates that the novel coronavirus is easily transmissible in the absence of social distancing and mask wearing, and is responsible for more than 900,000 deaths globally.

“The common cold is generally not lethal, with some rare exceptions”, the Digital Health Lab explains. “The flu, which is deadlier than the common cold, killed 0.1% of the people who contracted it in 2019. It is still too early to discern accurate global death estimates for people who have contracted COVID-19, but estimates have ranged from 1% to 25% of all cases, depending on the country”.

The common cold is generally not lethal, with some rare exceptions. The flu, which is deadlier than the common cold, killed 0.1% of the people who contracted it in 2019. It is still too early to discern accurate global death estimates for people who have contracted COVID-19, but estimates have ranged from 1% to 25% of all cases, depending on the country. Even conservative COVID-19 death rates (around 1% ) would mean that the novel coronavirus is at least 10 times as deadly as the flu, and significantly more lethal than the common cold.

Compared to the common cold, COVID-19 kills more people in every age group, and is especially more lethal in the oldest age groups. However, it is important to note that actual case numbers and the ability to accurately attribute cause of deaths to COVID-19 is still evolving. As the pandemic progresses and scientists receive a complete picture of all known infections, the risk of death will become more clear.

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Computer Virus
A computer virus is a type of computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected" with a computer virus, a metaphor derived from biological viruses.

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Water (ice) (steam) (dewdrop) (teardrop) (rivers) (lakes) (oceans)

Water (chemical formula H2O) is an inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living organisms (in which it acts as a solvent). It is vital for all known forms of life, even though it provides no calories or organic nutrients. Its chemical formula, H2O, indicates that each of its molecules contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, connected by covalent bonds. The hydrogen atoms are attached to the oxygen atom at an angle of 104.45°. "Water" is the name of the liquid state of H2O at standard conditions for temperature and pressure.

Mark Ruffalo, Water Defense
Water Defense, founded in 2011, was a Brooklyn-based activist group founded by actor Mark Ruffalo that worked to ban hydraulic fracturing in New York as well as backing of Frack Free Colorado. Ruffalo’s www.waterdefense.org website is now defunct. Frack Free CO was a collaborative, grass roots movement that worked to raise awareness about the dangers of fracking and enlighten Coloradans on ways that we can accelerate our move to renewable energy and sustainable living. Frack Free CO's website is also now defunct, its last twitter posting was Feb 12, 2018.

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Toilets

Come to think of it, it's odd that we would send our personal excrement to pass for miles under our cities, using tons of potable water in the process. It's fast becoming time we deal with our own shit.

Constructing an ecosan toilet -- A film from UNICEF | (Youtube) Aug 19, 2009
Ecological Sanitation is an important new approach to sanitation, which is truly sustainable. It uses almost no water in its operation, and human waste products are used as fertilizer.

"As it turns out, it is essential for human health to flush lots of water down the drain. If you do not, the volume of water in the sewage system would not be able to move away waste, like excrement, fast enough, which would lead to a myriad of sanitation problems," Neil B. Chambers’ Urban Green, pg 45

How Waterless Toilets Work

You probably visit the restroom several times a day. While you're there, do you ever consider the technology at work around you? And do you ever think about how much water is used to make it all work? The world, in fact, flushes up to 20 percent of its drinking water down various drains. That's a lot of water going to waste.

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Wild  (Wilderness)

Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively more primitive and wild in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. -- (wikipedia: Jack London's The Call of the Wild)

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Wilderness Therapy
Wilderness therapy, also known as outdoor behavioral healthcare, is a treatment option for behavioral, substance, and mental health issues in adolescents. Madolyn M. Liebing, Ph.D. (of Aspen Achievement Academy then, and currently of Juniper Canyon Recovery) was the first clinical psychologist to integrate clinical therapy with wilderness programming.

NOTE: Abusive situations have been reported and several children have died in wilderness therapy programs. Many participants also say that they are left with lifelong trauma from the experience.

‘Almost everyone is left with trauma’: The impact of American’s unregulated wilderness teen therapy industry
Hosted by Jonathan Bastian Jul. 31, 2021 (KCRW radio, Santa Monica College)

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“Go forth under the open sky and listen to nature’s teachings.” — William Cullen Bryant

Open Sky Wilderness
Open Sky "assists early adolescents, adolescents, and young adults struggling with difficult challenges and life circumstances. Nestled in the mountains of southwest Colorado and the canyon country of southeast Utah, the Open Sky approach transcends traditional wilderness therapy by emphasizing treatment for the whole family. We provide a life-changing opportunity to discover and create a healthy life that is an intelligent and authentic expression of one’s true nature. We invite you to explore our comprehensive website to learn more about the Open Sky experience."

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Mary Sweeney

Way of the Wild (WOW)
"Way of the Wild is dedicated to helping people realize their identity. Expanding one’s awareness leads the way to sense of identity and the deep intuition that comes with this. Our organization provides nature based programs for youth and adults that afford people the chance to understand who they are in the world and lead from that place. I founded Way of the Wild in 2011 in response to a need — it is the need to recognize that our individuality, our uniqueness and not only what we share, is what actually creates connection. There are many tools that can bring us to this realization, but I have found that regular extended periods of time in nature is best. It is the most natural, efficient and effective way to get to the awareness required to develop both a sense of self and connection to everything else." — Mary Sweeney

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prequel: Retro30  |  PROJECT Way Out  |  Preface  |  Page 3  |  Projects  |  Notes 

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