big sprouts in big pavement

Susan Freinkel's American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Treet is an easy primer on the situation. Castanea dentata was decimated by a fungus in our great-grandparents' time. Since then, humans who appreciate it's amazing fecundity and generosity have struggled, pulling it off death row and now back into the forest. One way they are doing this, now that the tree is close to having been selectively bred for sufficient blight resistance, is to reclaim abandoned mines by starting chestnut groves on top of the rubble. According to the author, these experimental plantings are growing with tantalizing success. However, she feels that working in tandem with "King Coal" is morally dubious.

Sometimes when idealists get passionate, our eyes lose focus and cause and effect run together. This is useful for seeing that humans have colonized every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, and in too many cases degraded their productivity (a big idea). Retooling for an energy industry that isn't radically unbalancing, and instead is regenerative and extropian, requires planning for the processes that are certain to occur. This applies to small-scale biofuel like our woodburning stoves- timber stand management for the good of all in suburbs- as well as coast-hugging windfarms, and possibly to nuclear reactors whose waste gets pitched into the sun. People at my school are doing scientific legwork on chestnut mine reclamation, and since I want to play with the tree this is interesting work whenever ethical.

Environmentalist get very upset about MTR, and with reason. The local impacts of mountaintop removal are equivalent to carpet bombing. A mountain gets cut in half and out goes the deep seem of coal. Naturally, the absence of any kind of ecosystem will pull down biodiversity in the surrounding forest. The mountaintop gets dumped in streams that were formerly on the mountain's side, and when sulfites decoct out of the tailings, these streams undergo acidification to the point of undrinkability and sterilization. Sludge ponds from coal processing are left behind and pose long-term health hazard to local humans. Also, consider the coal's intended combustion releases serious atmospheric pollution. Katuah coal is high in sulfur, so burning it releases gaseous sulfur oxides resulting in acid rain, carbon dioxide and particulate matter that triggers asthma. A volcano may as well have erupted, except that the fire is in hydrocarbon-burning factories. There are many other effects to consider, but that's a start: a stretch Earth of gets totally wrecked by this resource extraction.

The mining industrialists would like to ignore these problems, in practice. They attempt to meet shallow government-mandated atonement standards, such as planting lawn grass over abandoned mines. In good conscience, we cannot condone MTR until it is has been ceased and made up for. We can't yet forgive them for the what they continue to do. King Coal defends its actions on the basis of its contributing role in domestic energy production, but that's not nearly good enough- didn't keep us out of Iraq! The type of restoration they must undertake is in kind: to truly make amends requires powering the switch to green energy. That's why chestnut restoration should be treated as an honestly separate process. There's a big forest opening in the wake of MTR's ruin, and Nature will take a long time to scab it over. We'll expedite that function, and benefit mutually from a new woody friend. The process is hopeful. After decades of thoughtful work going into this, culmination should be wholesale "green job" creation around chestnut's gifts of nuts and timber. That our Victory occurs on what was once an old killing field shouldn't disgust us- our own bodies are made of recycled material.

Iron John

Just finished reading Iron John, by Robert Bly. He starts off describing most guys today as not having a well-established sense of identity. To change that situation, he reads a Grimm's faerie-tale as an archetypal male initiation sequence which was in effect since the Neolithic, and then unpacks his understanding of it.

I suppose that contemplating these ideas and progressively applying their principles into life, is supposed to catalyze one's personal development comparably to Iron John's initiation. These days, when I feel the force of an impersonal force from without or within I pay attention to it and see what I can learn. That's why I appreciate personal truth in much of Robert Bly's thinking and really enjoyed this book. The names of the days of the week come from Norse and Roman deities, + the 7 ancient astrological planets. Bly's roundup of male archetypes (The Wild Man, the Magician, the Warrior, the Trickster, the King, the Lover, and the Grief Man) enriches that understanding for me. Every day, I am reminded by cosmology to stir up and sip on and embody these previously ignored, hidden or forgotten qualities in my self.

I am also thankful for the literary criticism provided by Paul Wolf-Light, and Charles Upton. Society has changed a lot since the Neolithic; that the Wild Man has been going MIA in white culture since the rise of asceticism several thousand years ago reflects it. If there were bad reasons for his disappearance, I assume there were also some good ones. Inequality between the sexes has been rejected, so sexed archetypes that apply to both sexes can seem ridiculous. Also, if you're like me you got sick and spit up lots of the initiation/indoctrination of our native society. With climate chaos, zombies and robots running towards us, we have our work cut out! We are reinventing culture, keeping our subjective reality based on truth, and in the end passing a beautiful, sufficient way of life to our kids. I know my friends in the Little House in the Ghetto are doing this, anyway- investment analysts could learn a lot from you guys! Happy Thanksgiving!

brass jug wonder and a famous Christian reactionary

Talking about sacred use of metals, here's a cool anecdote empty vessels:

"Scientists from Britain and India recently investigated a long-held belief among people in India that storing water in brass pitchers can ward off illness. (Brass is an allow of copper and zinc.) They filled brass pitchers with sterile water inoculated with E. coli bacteria and filled other brass pitchers with contaminated river water from India. In both cases, they found that fecal bacteria counts dropped from as high as 1,000,000 bacteria per mililiter to zero in two days. In contrast, bacteria levels stayed high in plastic or earthenware pots. Apparently, just enough copper ions are released by the brass to kill the bacteria but not enough to affect humans." pg. 327 Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity, 7th edition

In other news, I speculate that Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis was a reactionary by the most basic definition of the word. Unless I miss my mark, Narnia books were created to counter Robert Graves' theories about pre-modern, matriarchal Middle Eastern and European societies which primarily honored female deity. Lewis' first Narnia book was published to years after Graves', in 1950 C.E. Here's my evidence, you be the judge.

"Graves' thesis was, among other things, that greatness was a pathology; “great men” were essentially destroyers and “great” poets not much better (his arch-enemies were Virgil, Milton and Pound), that all real poetry is and has always been a mythic celebration of an ancient Supreme Goddess, of whom Frazer had only confused glimmerings, and whose matriarchal followers were conquered and destroyed by Hitler's beloved Aryan hoards when they emerged from the Ukrainian Steppes in the early Bronze Age (though they survived a bit longer in Minoan Crete). In a book called The White Goddess: An Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, he claimed to map out the rudiments of her calendar rites in different parts of Europe, focusing on the periodic ritual murder of the Goddess‟ royal consorts, among other things a surefire way of guaranteeing would-be great men do not get out of hand, and ending the book with a call for an eventual industrial collapse."
(pg 9-10, "Anarchist Anthropology" by David Graeber)

The first novel in C.S. Lewis' series of 7 is titled "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". In his story, 4 Earth children are transported to a fantasy land of Judeo-Christian humans, animals, satyrs, and centaurs. There, the creator God is a lion named Aslan who deems to leave Narnia to its own devices after he's finished making it. His exit is followed by the inauguration of dictatorship. A near-omnipotent being simply known as "the White Witch" has the place under martial law, and keeps Narnia's seasons from progressing past the heart of winter through her magic. (Later, we are to learn that she is an alien from yet another parallel world, who committed planetary genocide by uttering a forbidden magic word and escaped into Narnia at the beginning of history with Aslan's permission.) Aslan comes back and with the help of the Earth children, kills the White Witch and sets up the 4 children as rulers in her stead and leaves again.

I'm feeling very un-Christian today.

Bone Singer Studio

Loving Susanne Iles' art and prose. For better/worse, "fine art" purchasing is not in this life's budget.

From Susanne's essay "The Dragon and Creation: Reclaiming the Sacred":

"When the work was finished the world was bountiful, but heavily laden with trees and large animals, mountains and villages. The Creator feared the Earth would collapse under its own weight. Aido Hwedo offered to support the world by coiling under it in a circular fashion, its tail in its great mouth. The Creator knew Aido Hwedo detested the heat and created a great cosmic ocean for it to sleep in. Red monkeys who lived in the sea were directed to attend to Aido Hwedo’s needs by feeding the dragon iron bars whenever hunger came. In this myth it was important for the monkeys to keep the dragon eternally fed, otherwise it would start to eat its own tail and the world would surely be destroyed."

I enjoyed the whole essay, and appreciated some dragons. Particularly for us, think about Aido Hwedo's diet.

Suppose we are subject to a growing surplus of iron/war/strength during this Kali Yuga. Doesn't feeding it to the foundation of the world, so we can support life and continue the unfolding of existence, sound like a good idea? Better than creating the Military-Prison-Industrial Complex, and more generally straight-jacketing our viewpoints and activities to that of zombies. The Fon people who generated this myth live on the old "slave coast" of Africa, which kind of distracts from the humorous subterranean monkey image.

Hello -- Liberty Is a Pagan Goddess

Filed by: Patricia Nell Warren
October 5, 2008 6:00 PM


o the creators of that Republican campaign commercial that appropriates the Statue of Liberty -- I've got news for you. You're hawking the wrong symbol. In fact, you're stealing a symbol that actually shoots a big hole in all the fundamentalist churchy propaganda put out by your party during this election.

Liberty is a pagan goddess. Obviously you weren't paying attention in history class. It's spelled G-O-D-D-E-S-S. There's a test on this tomorrow.

The Goddess of Liberty isn't found in the Bible. (If you really studied the Bible, you'd know that.) She comes straight out of Greek and Roman pagan tradition, complete with that toga and sandals. Under the name Libertas, She appeared on Roman coins as an emblem of the emancipation of slaves. She often wore a liberty cap that the newly freed Roman was allowed to put on in a special ceremony at Her temple.


Devotion to Her was revived during the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, when Europeans began to kick off the shackles of state Christianity. Finally Liberty made the leap to the Americas with colonists and founders who were educated in that classical tradition of government by republic. Her image was stamped on the very first coins minted by the new republic of the United States, along with the old liberty cap and our new national motto LIBERTY. And She was on our money for nearly two centuries. It took your Bible-believing friends nearly a century of lobbying to get the motto changed to "In God we Trust" (Act of Congress, 1865).

Next it took your Bible lobby nearly another century to to get that "heathen" (as the lobby called Her) removed from our coins entirely. It was done so stealthily that -- even as She became our national icon, with the Statue of Liberty going up in New York Harbor in 1886 -- the public didn't notice. She was off the cent by 1857, off the nickel by 1912, off the quarter by 1930. The last Liberty dollars to be minted for circulation came in 1935. Wearing Her liberty cap, She was still on the dime till 1945. As the Walking Liberty, She was on the half dollar till 1947. How appropriate that She saw us through World War II and the victory over fascism. But our government was evidently not grateful to Her for the victory. After 1947 -- poof! She was gone.

Nations always put their most important symbols on their money. Nearly two centuries of a pagan goddess on our money is proof that the United States of America was not "founded under God." If it was -- if your Bible buddies had that kind of clout in 1776 -- our coins would have showcased Jesus from the start.

Yes, Liberty is a pagan. She keeps company with Isis, and Juno, and Tara, and White Buffalo Woman. She wasn't recommended in any Catholic encyclicals. She wasn't touted by Martin Luther, or Cotton Mather, or R. J. Rushdoony. Anywhere that the love of liberty finally awoke in the hearts of thinking Christians in Europe and the U.S., it was because they borrowed the idea of Her from the pagan ancients -- and they knew it was an idea whose time had come because they'd seen the abuses of non-thinking religion up close. Yet some fundamentalists today are even talking against Her statue in New York Harbor, calling it the "Whore of Babylon." One day, that magnificent monument to the most human side of our history -- immigrants who came here to find liberty -- may also be demolished.

In your ad, the book that the Statue carries in one arm is not the Bible. It's the pagan Book of Knowledge -- the schoolbook of thinking statespeople who were freeing themselves from coercive belief and enslaving government. The Latin word for book is liber. That's because the great minds of Greece and Rome had figured out that there is no emancipation without education. The torch She carries is another symbol of education. It takes data, not dogma, to shine into the darkness and make things clear for us.

Maybe that's why your party has let American education go to the dogs -- graduating more and more Americans who are ignorant enough to believe all the religious lies and propaganda that they're fed -- including the myth that "America was founded under God."

For us in the LGBT world, the Goddess of Liberty is a life-saving, sanity-saving symbol -- the ultimate icon. To come out, to be honest with ourselves about who we really are, we've had to educate ourselves, little by little. We've had to crack that Book of self-knowledge. We've had to shine that torch into the terrifying, fearful darkness of the closet where we spent so many years.

During LGBT History Month, we deal formally with the tons of old religious dreck that the conservative religion-mongers like you are still try to pile on us -- all the old corrosive, coercive, dark beliefs and misinformation about sexual orientation and gender identity that made each of us live in waking nightmares during childhood and youth in different religions -- that each of us had to leave behind and burst out into our own personal daylight..

It's too bad about you folks who created that campaign ad. You say you want to lead us, but you aren't even free yet.

reprinted from the Bilerico Project: daily experiments in LGBTQ

if your only tool is poetry, all your problems look like

And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

Wallace Stevens
The American Sublime

madness

It's driving me MAD, this cartoonish empire.

There's this martial law stuff;

The prisoner in his own free country being intentionally driven insane by policies being carried out by people who are alarmed at what they're carrying out;

More prisoners, Muslims of Chinese origin, whom a judge orders MUST be released LIKE, RIGHT NOW! They were cleared for release in 2004, but the institutions headed by our elected representatives won't release them to their home country cause, you know, they might be persecuted over there. The judge ordered they be released into good ol' America, and also ordered that on release, they MUST NOT then be detained by immigration officials.

It's such a cartoon of itself, it's too much like Radio Free Albemuth, it's like RoboKeystoneCops. Kafka wrote about stuff like this generations ago. And so did Orwell. Terry Gilliam made a movie of it in the 1980s. And so on and so forth ...

I'm sure if I started voting again, essential change and the triumph of justice would occur before it's too late. But seriously, I'm confident that the Democrats would not hesitate to use that martial law stuff against whomever they deem deserving. I remember learning about the Stanford Prison Experiment and other experiments where ordinary people abuse authority because they're given tacit permission. That seems to be a major part of this whole authoritarian-culture-destroying-the-world-for-10,000-years problem.

So, about 45 minutes ago, I was about to start blogging angrily, but it was time to put dear daughter to bed. I return to the computer and see the weather prediction: highs in the 70s (F), partly cloudy, lows in the 50s, all week. Focus on the positive! Appreciate the abundant blessings of the unnameable divine source!

"Continue planting things that you can eat" still seems to be the most sensible thing to do, no matter what happens in the disconnected consensus realities of finance and government. Trillions of dollars--gone!!

And maybe go get another glass of homebrew.

"Jesus said, lock up all the Muslims!" --Appendix to the Bible, by Brother Mark

physiological importance of the pinneal gland

The Principia Discordia tells us that the pinneal gland is very important. Cool but I didn't really understand the reference. Why people would place this supposed third eye in a gland? Wikipedia said that the cells you'd find in a dissected pinneal gland seem to be closely related to eye cells. I let it go.

Two days ago while taking a nap, I had a vivid dream. The viewpoint appeared in a sunny graveyard, next to an empty hole in the ground that occupied the space directly in front of an old, granite headstone. I found myself there, besides a stooped, hooded figure w/ wide-brimmed hat. He gestured with his left hand to a space in front of us, where a small ball of living, pink flesh appeared. It hung steady 6(ish) feet off the ground. As my mysterious companion wiggled his fingers, it unfolded like a flower. This unfolding revealed that the ball had a cavity inside, a cavity which was filled with black, aetheric vapor.

Recently, my hermit time has brought on deep, midbrow sensations that I had never felt before. More lately, these uncanny vibes have occurred while I sit typing, or contort my body into yoga poses. I decided that perhaps, this third eye activity had a known physiological manifestation. Pinneal gland? I trust the Taoist hsien's wisdom, and they do indeed have much to tell us on the subject.

From what I've read so far, they call the pinneal gland one of "9 gems that distill essence". The melatonin it synthesizes, late at night and early in the morning, is one of the self-begotten longevity medicines that Taoist sages cultivate. Hmm. Melatonin is a powerful anti-oxidant, which means it dismantles "free radicals" and prevents them from destroying one's DNA. What an evil thing to call those troublesome oxygen molecules. Melatonin is also a hormone that keeps you happy.

I have been skipping sleep, lately. This first chapter of Ohio University has important distractions- homework, fun, etc.- and it felt like I had to just keep going. Now I am re-prioritizing. For purposes of life improvement/extension, I have to maintain a core period of darkness and relaxation so my third eye can distill more essence.

They Live (the movie)

Greetings, Noble Savages.

The other day someone linked to this article on the Monkeysphere, which is funny and cute and still explains a lot about homo sapiens sapiens sapiens. The Monkeysphere happened to mention They Live, a film about learning to see the "real" reality and the subtle forces of control controlling us ignoramuses. (Ignorami?)

I had had a hectic day bucketing tropical depression water out of the sump and pouring it down the sewer drain in the basement, and then installing the new sump pump Sharqi got at the hardware store (taking a taxi there, as the buses don't run on Sundays). Then, I helped spread gravel that a friend brought over into the puddles out by the street--to make a less muddy parking/walking surface, and give our friend something to do with the gravel they didn't want. (Even better than freecycle, it's friendcycle!)

Late that afternoon, I had a couple hours to recharge, with the house to myself even! As I've been craving movies lately (I think my brain is tired), I took the opportunity to watch They Live. It was OK. Not a must-see, but still entertaining. It's too simple to be very intellectually engaging, but an interesting and fun portrayal of a Philip-K.-Dick style "learning to see the Matrix" kind of story. It owes a lot to PKD! A lot of the acting is that kind of pseudo-acting sometimes put on by soap opera actors & professional wrestlers. There was an absurdly long drawn out brutal fistfight between two of the main characters. I get the feeling the director meant it to be absurd, but a lot of troglodyte ignorami would just cheer and/or groan in sympathy as they beat the crap out of each other. All to get him to try on those sunglasses.

Wouldn't it be nice if it were so easy to "wake up" that we could just put on special sunglasses, and see that all the signs and ads everywhere really say things like "OBEY" or "NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT" or "CONSUME", or one of my favorites, "MARRY AND REPRODUCE"?

The movie does have some subversive content; pirate broadcasters who've learned to "see" hack the TV signals and try to spread the word about how there's no middle class any more, and we're all under the control of the secret power elites. In the 20 years since They Live came out, though, I see that not much has really changed in society. Except, the 80s are back in fashion.

The most fun stuff was seeing the difference between "normal" reality and the real reality, where the ads and products are all full of mind control messages, and the uptight rich people turn out to be ugly aliens. The second most fun stuff was the glorious, totally naive/not ironic, 80s-ness of all the fashion. Whew! Those were the days.

od arises

Randoming through the internet, I see a post by some delusion person:

As leader of the Zombanian delegation to your planet, I am hereby announcing my people's endorsement of Barack Obama as the nominee for the Democratic party.

When he makes his first state visit to Zomba, I will be proud to crown (then) President Obama with the Golden Colander as well as the equally coveted platinum egg-whisk.

"Zombans unite! You have nothing to lose but your marbles..."

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If President Obama ever makes it to central zomba proper, he'll be more likely welcomed with rotting tomatoes. Unless he makes the ice caps stop melting. Then I'll part with my golden colander. I refuse to give up the platinum egg-whisk, however.