Changing Places

We’re having our back patio cover repaired this week, and today they’re stripping off the termite-damaged cover. It’s a noisy day here, with lots of interruptions. Number two son is home sick from school, Number one son is off to take his finals. Anyway, not much thinking or writing will be going on here today…

heh.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers. One of my own greatest fears as a mother was that one day my sons would be sent to fight in some stupid, useless war. Happily, they are both too politically aware to volunteer, considering how our country is currently being run, and so far it looks like we won’t have a draft, but you never know for sure. My heart goes out to mothers with sons in the service right now, including a good friend of mine whose son has just signed up to be a Marine. She told me she cried for a week over his decision, but she’s made peace with it now. For those losing children to this war in Iraq — on all sides, there are simply no words that can ever make it right.

As for the moms in Iraq, see here.

Return Mother’s Day To Its Original Intention :: VAIW :: Veterans Against The Iraq War

Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870
by Julia Ward Howe

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

We took Darwin to the off-leash play group last night that his trainer, Joella runs. It’s a blast, with dogs just running around like mad everywhere, and Darwin got good and tired. We got him a new toy from Joella’s — he hasn’t stopped playing with it since, even took it to bed with him last night. It’s starting to miss a lot of its fur already, though….

“Unnecessary dieting is because everything from television and fashion ads have made it seem wicked to cast a shadow. This wild, emaciated look appeals to women, though not so many men, who are seldom seen pinning up Vogue illustrations in a machine shop.”" — Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Cook Book (1960)

The visual messages surround us — be thin, be small, be weak. Whatever you do, don’t be a power with which society must reckon… Rather than allowing the whims of commercialism to shape your views about the shape of your body, invite a standard of health and vitality to influence your thinking. …eat a nutritious diet … exercise moderately and regularly. Your body will take its own natural shape with muscles toned, skin tight, and energy maximized. Rather than lusting after the “thin look” in the misguided belief that you will be lusted after, let your natural curves attract a lover who loves you for who you are, not what you’re trying to be.

Let your body be a powerful force in your life, guiding you to eating and exercising habits that will give your shape a full, healthy form. A loved and empowered body will cast just the right-sized shadow. Your shadow will reflect a powerful you. –Carmen Renee Berry, Coming Home to Your Body

“We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips we lay on ourselves never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of the eye from being fully awake.” — Pema Chodron, Start From Where You Are

“Perfection in an asana is achieved when the effort to perform it becomes effortless and the infinite being within is reached.” — Yoga Sutras

Although Patanjali wrote 196 sutras concerning yoga, only three of them pertain exclusively to the asana. The first concerns the means — firm, relaxed postures; the second concerns the end — effortless oneness with what is. The sutra above speaks to the first stumbling block most of us encounter in our practice: we try too hard… we come to yoga with cultural baggage that says we are not enough and never will be. We must improve, we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we must try harder and make some progress. With more effort, we think, and a little more strain, we will get more out of the posture. The mistake is believing we can get where we are going through effort.

Patanjali defines success as effortlessness. Floating in the center of our postures, the center of our experience, we succeed by moving into harmony with the moment, our limbs, our breath, our awareness. — Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat

I haz a integer!!!

AF 8D 70 E6 EA 08 F7 E8 57 32 29 E1 01 92 58 1E

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » You Can Own an Integer Too — Get Yours Here

… the jasmine’s in bloom!

For those who don’t remember Seals and Crofts, Summer Breeze is one of those songs of my youth that literally brings back tons of memories:

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

My other favorite song of their was “Diamond Girl”. One time, I was riding in the car with my boyfriend and this line of the song came on the radio:

Diamond Girl, roamin’ wild. Such a rare thing, radiant child.
I could never find, another one like you…

And he looked at me and grinned and said, “That’s for sure!”

Mmmm, so many other beauties blooming in the garden today, like this one, a rose called Whisper, which smells as gorgeous as it looks:

And this one is Sheila’s Perfume, which is probably my absolute favorite rose. The scent of this one is amazing!

And so many, many more… I love this time of year!

[ok, a bit early for summer, but it certainly feels like it here already! And the jasmine and Whisper are gorgeous again, so I had to repost this from last year….)

Is this what the future of climate change will bring us? How many more towns will we lose, I wonder?

Wow. Maybe middle America will start to understand what NOLA went through.

Kansas.com
| 05/06/2007 | Greensburg is gone; its future, unknown

GREENSBURG – This sun-baked High Plains town no longer has a grade school, a high school, a City Hall, a hospital, a water tower, a fire station, a business district or a main street.
It has people, but all 1,400 of them live elsewhere today. The homes they kept, the rooms where they were born, where they grew old together, now lie in millions of pieces, some of them as small as matchsticks. Tatters and shards of Greensburg flew for miles across the shortgrass and sage and yucca outside town on Friday night. Their branches now hold the shreds of housing insulation, pieces of tin, pieces of twisted roofing, crumpled family photographs, torn documents, and bits and pieces of belongings.
The Kiowa County courthouse still stands. The grain elevator still stands. The water tower, as a highway patrol trooper said, “is not just down — it is completely destroyed.”
“This is so surreal,” city administrator Steve Hewitt said. “I don’t know what to expect tomorrow. I’m worried about two weeks from now, when the volunteers go home. I think we have a tough road ahead of us.”
The day after
Greensburg has 40 National Guardsmen guarding its streets.
There is a curfew.
About 200 people were expected to stay in three shelters Saturday night in Haviland and Mullinville, according to the American Red Cross Midway-Kansas Chapter.
While townspeople looked on from afar Saturday, a second powerful storm rolled through, spawning more tornadoes and pouring inches of rain on windblown possessions.
The wind that took Greensburg away came in a wedge tornado nearly a mile and a half wide. Ninety-five percent of Greensburg took off with it.

A truly rare sight – me in make up (not that you can tell, which is sort of the point for me when I do wear it…)

Off to a party in a little while…

I save a lot of money by not buying things marked “Made in China”. If I don’t really really need it and that’s what’s on it, I won’t buy it. I’m sure a lot of things are made there that aren’t marked as such, though.

Via Brilliant at Breakfast.

Johann Hari: We shop until Chinese workers drop – Independent Online Edition > Johann Hari

Over the past decade, an old word once used in the Maoist gulags has come back to China. It is “gulaosi” – and it is used to describe the men and women who are literally being worked to death producing clothes, electronics and toys for you and me.

Wie Meiren was a standard-issue gulaosi, the kind you can find in every Chinese town. She was a 32-year-old woman with three kids who left her hungry village and travelled to Dongkeng, where she got a job assembling the toy cars for the British kids’ market.

There, she was expected to work 360 days a year, from 7.30am to as late as 9.30pm, with only a half-hour break for lunch and fines for taking too long on the toilet. As in many Chinese factories, military drills were often yelled: “Long live the company!” If anybody argued back to the managers, they could be punched in the face.

One day, Meiren had a family crisis at home. She was forbidden by her bosses from going to take care of it – so she became angry and fainted. She forced herself to keep going to work for the next fortnight, but eventually she became so exhausted she collapsed – and died before she reached the hospital. The autopsy indicated gulaosi – heart and organ failure caused by extreme exhaustion.

Some 50,000 fingers are sliced off in China’s factories every month. Tao Chun Lan was a 20-year-old woman from Sichuan province at the heart of China who moved to Shenzhen and got a job working in a handicrafts factory. One night, she discovered the factory was filling with smoke – and the workers were locked inside. Some 84 workers were burned or trampled to death. Lan jumped out of a window, irreparably damaging her legs. She has received no compensation. “They don’t care if I am crippled for life,” she says.

Society does not want individuals who are alert, keen, revolutionary, because such individuals will not fit into the established social pattern and they may break it up. That is why society seeks to hold your mind in its pattern, and why your so-called education encourages you to imitate, to follow, to conform. — J. Krishnamurti

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn — Gloria Steinem

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.

Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

The world is ruled by letting things take their course.
It cannot be ruled by interfering.

– Tao Te Ching, 48

As commonly used, individual refers to a person or to any specific object in a collection. In the 15th century and earlier, and also today within the fields of statistics and metaphysics, individual means “indivisible”, typically describing any numerically singular thing, but sometimes meaning “a person”. (q.v. “The problem of proper names”). From the seventeenth century on, individual indicates separateness, as in individualism. (Abbs 1986, cited in Klein 2005, p.26-27) — Wikipedia

For those who have come to grow, the whole world is a garden. For those who have come to learn, the whole world is a university. For those who have come to know God, the whole world is a prayer mat. — M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

Relax, and take this in before you practice today. Breathe into these words. this idea. Feel the difference. Most of the time, when I come to the mat, the whole world is a place to confirm my low self-esteem. I come to the mat to strive, to control, to win. Coming to the mat to win, I lose. What if I came to the mat to grow, to learn, to know God? — Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat

And all I got was this frou-frou drink..

and a stay in this hotel…

(this is the view from our room)

and an Imac…

Bush to veto Iraq bill, make statement on Tuesday – Yahoo! News

President George W., Bush plans on Tuesday to veto a war spending bill that imposes timelines
for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, and will then explain his action in a statement at the White House, an administration official said.

Explain his actions? Easy. He doesn’t want to leave Iraq. It’s just too important to keep stealing their oil. Our troops deaths aren’t important enough to worry his beautiful mind with – their blood is only good enough for his veto stamp. It’s not important to him that we actually let the Iraqis rule their own country – that’s why the plan is to keep permanent military bases there. Halliburton is making billions, just as planned. Who cares what the American people think? No one suffers more than George and Laura.

Mission Accomplished.

Ah. Here we are:

“It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing,” Mr. Bush said from the White House.

One wonders who “the enemy” is. The Democrats? The American people? The troops?

Mr. Bush, “the terrorists” don’t care when we withdraw – they’re perfectly happy that we’re spending our fortune and lives in Iraq. The ones who care when we withdraw are the ones who pay your salary – us, the American people.

4 years on, we have no answer to that question.

The President vetoed our troops and the American people. His stubborn commitment to a failed strategy in Iraq is incomprehensible. He committed our great military to a failed strategy in violation of basic principles of war. His failure to mobilize the nation to defeat world wide Islamic extremism is tragic. We deserve more from our commander-in-chief and his administration.
–Maj. Gen. John Batiste, USA, Ret.

This administration and the previously Republican controlled legislature have been the most caustic agents against America’s Armed Forces in memory. Less than a year ago, the Republicans imposed great hardship on the Army and Marine Corps by their failure to pass a necessary funding language. This time, the President of the United States is holding our Soldiers hostage to his ego. More than ever apparent, only the Army and the Marine Corps are at war – alone, without their President’s support.
–Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, USA, Ret.

The president wants a blank check. The Congress is not going to give it to him. The president said, in his comments, he did not believe in timelines, and he spoke out very forcefully against them. Yet in 1999, on June 5th, then-Governor Bush said, about President Clinton, “I think it’s important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they would be withdrawn.” Despite his past statements, President Bush refuses to apply the same standard to his own activities. Standards — that’s the issue.

If the president thinks that what is happening on the ground in Iraq now is progress, as he said in his comments tonight, then it’s clear to see why we have a disagreement on policy with him. I agree with Leader Reid. We look forward to working with the president to find common ground, but there is great distance between us right now. — Nancy Pelosi

You can veto the bill, but you can’t veto the truth.

Update:

By the way, in the report it said, it is — the government may have to put in more troops to be able to get to that position. And that’s what we do. We put in more troops to get to a position where we can be in some other place. The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear — I’m the commander guy. – George W. Bush

OK “Commander Guy”, get your ass over in Iraq already – and please – don’t come back until you “win”.

Pelosi’s response:

Today, the President faces consequences of his own making. This is the seventh supplemental for the war in Iraq. Certainly, somebody was planning something at the White House and could have put, over the years, the funding necessary for this war into the budget. Instead the President did not do that. I don’t know why, maybe they don’t want the American people to see the real cost of this war in dollars. Certainly, we know the price that we have paid more seriously, in lives, in health, in reputation, in the readiness of our military and in probably two trillion dollars now for this war. — Nancy Pelosi

War on Terror? Nope, it’s a war on tourists. Heck, *I* worry about traveling in my own country. When my mom died and I had a one-way ticket to Phoenix since I didn’t know when I would head home, I got the full search (not strip searched, thank goodness). I was crying my eyes out at the airport, upset enough over my mom’s death and then having to go through the search procedure. When the U.S. is afraid of a 45 year old American housewife, we’ve officially gone over the edge. TSA is a joke, a nightmare for travelers, and a waste of money and resources.

And now they are destroying our tourism industry.

America’s war on tourists – 28 Apr 2007 – NZ Herald: World / International News

In a recent poll of international travellers, commissioned by Discover America Partnership, a coalition of US tourist organisations, 70 per cent of respondents said they feared US officials more than terrorists or criminals. Another 66 per cent worried they would be detained for some minor blunder, such as wrongly filling out an official form or being mistaken for a terrorist, while 55 per cent say officials are “rude.”

Such fears are fuelled by the horror stories. Earlier this year a friend of mine was detained for hours and strip-searched at LAX for a minor visa infraction. He was finally allowed to enter the US, on the condition he departed the next day. “I won’t be coming back,” he said.

In a January Listener article New Zealand journalist Marilyn Head described how she missed a flight after being treated like a criminal by US airport guards.

“I left the US vowing never to return,” she wrote. “I’m not alone.”

This song had me LOL-ing….

Jonathan Coulton celebrates May 1st (NSFW)

woke up this morning
I had a scone and a large house blend
And then a little conversation with my squirrel and chipmunk friends
I said I’m sick and tired of winter
And I wish that it was spring
And then a little fellow named Robin Redbreast
Began to sing

And he sang
Ooh ooh child, what’d you think the cold winter’s gonna last forever?
Ooh ooh child, now’s the time for all the people to get together
Outside…