muddy the waters enough and nobody can see thru the murk
human society trying to think together thru the media get sidetracked by street clatter
how do we learn to think together as one Gaian Mind?
how do we debate amongst the dedicated and depreciate the voices of the decietful?
modern media mavens of magic covens of distributive 2.0 function
give humanity voice with elaborate tools of good groupthinking
(please hold the wireless technology that radiates the modernhome)
welcome to the accidental future.
what i meant to say was this:
we need to learn to think clearly together to solve issues like climate change. when
Exxon can shout into the dialogue nursery rhyme facts, it gets hard to think together.
How do we create a fact base without propganda hustlers?
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Revival of the Grateful Dead
Music is mysterious stuff.
The morphogenetic fields of Jerry Garcia are being reactivated.
Check out Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphogenetic fields, a way information is stored, in non-local fields like electrical fields, charged particles of information. These theories work to explain 'morphogenesis' or how-things-grow...
John of Dark Star Orchestra has studied the guitar playing of Jerry so deeply that he's created a new hybrid information-form that activates charges contributes the original morphic fields of the Grateful Dead.
www.rupertsheldrake.com has more info on the original idea.
The morphogenetic fields of Jerry Garcia are being reactivated.
Check out Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphogenetic fields, a way information is stored, in non-local fields like electrical fields, charged particles of information. These theories work to explain 'morphogenesis' or how-things-grow...
John of Dark Star Orchestra has studied the guitar playing of Jerry so deeply that he's created a new hybrid information-form that activates charges contributes the original morphic fields of the Grateful Dead.
www.rupertsheldrake.com has more info on the original idea.
Monday, January 11, 2010
The fierce “Storms of My Grandchildren”
James Hansen, the leading climate scientist, has an excellent new book for understanding the Climate Crisis.
The book’s poetic title “Storms of My Grandchildren” distills the crisis to it’s essence: our society’s failure to address the Climate Crisis creates a situation of “intergenerational remote tyranny” that force upon our descendents a terrible fate, while we blithely doze in a self-absorbed stupor from the intoxicating fumes of the oil age.
Hansen writes movingly about his grandchildren motivating him to make clear his ideas and step up to the fight. He has dropped his scientific autism and has drawn some agreeably radical conclusions: complete stop to burning coal, calling out greenwashing politicians, advocating for nonviolent resistance.
Hansen analyzes the Climate Crisis from the vantage point of scientist, policy advocate, Washington bureaucrat, activist, and the concerned grandfather. Hanson was the guy that Bill McKibben bugged to get the actual number (350 carbon parts per million) for humanity to shoot at, an interesting story for climate activists interested in a little bit of movement history of 350.org.
It is fascinating to follow in the wake of a great mind working at the top of their game with the motivation to save his grandchildren and life on Earth. This creates an energized tone to the writing: caring grandfather going over-the-Rubicon with a now-or-never attitude to speak truth to power.
The Climate Crisis issue is stuck mostly for politics, rather than the science, and so Hansen offers a very useful analysis of the political climate around climate change.
Hansen says that politicians pretend to be green but don’t really put out. ”Most politicians advertised themselves as being “green” but what I learned was that, invariably, it amounted to greenwash, demonstrating token environmental support while kowtowing to fossil fuel special interests.”
Hansen gives us an insider’s view of the underworld of Worshington’s Bushite climate denial. Like touring Dante’s inferno, we get to sit in at the Bush’s Climate Task Force, where he was given a whole 20 minutes and it turns out all the decisions had already been made to totally ignore the science and whore for the oil companies.
The book transmits to us a deeper understanding of the climate system mechanisms: oceans, gases, sunlight, and the carbon cycle. For example, Hansen explains that carbon stays in the air for a very long time. It doesn’t dissipate like a fart, but lingers, silent but deadly, for centuries as a near-permanent new addition to the thin, delicate sky.
Therefore, as one graph shows, though China emits more carbon annually than the US, the cumulative output is more important, because the carbon is still around, and the US is still #1 in this, at 27% of the cumulative carbon pumped into the atmosphere 1795-2008. USA! USA!
And so, energy efficiency is not really a solution, because it stands in the place of getting off fossil fuels entirely, which is what is really required. Hansen writes, “The problem is that the act of slowing down emissions, by itself, does almost no good. The reason is that the lifetime of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere-ocean system is millennia. So it doesn’t matter much whether the fossil fuel is burned this year or next year. Energy efficiency is certainly an essential part of the solution to global warming, but it must be part of a strategic approach that leaves most of the fossil fuels in the round. Yes, most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground. That is the explicit message that the science provides.”
It is beautiful to get new ideas that allow our mind’s eye to see centuries of sky patterns, to see how clouds work, to see what our delicate sky is made of.
The sky seems tall and way up there, but it’s really the surface of an apple compared to the earth, a thin film of unusual gases that press against the planet amidst a vast airless space. It is beautiful to contemplate the tremendous complexity of this arrangement of sunlight, funny gases, and human life interacting with it all! Hansen deserves credit for making understandable the complexity of Climate science. May we have a world citizenry that arises in shared knowledge of how our sky works and how we can protect it.
Understanding the Climate Crisis is like walking into a dark room, hands in-front as we look for the light switch. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks of the wisdom of not knowing, of acceptance of the borders of our knowing and not getting uptight at our ignorance. This book is a good place to humbly not-know everything and be willing to learn, and travel behind this dedicated activist as he tries to turn on the lights for us.
The book’s poetic title “Storms of My Grandchildren” distills the crisis to it’s essence: our society’s failure to address the Climate Crisis creates a situation of “intergenerational remote tyranny” that force upon our descendents a terrible fate, while we blithely doze in a self-absorbed stupor from the intoxicating fumes of the oil age.
Hansen writes movingly about his grandchildren motivating him to make clear his ideas and step up to the fight. He has dropped his scientific autism and has drawn some agreeably radical conclusions: complete stop to burning coal, calling out greenwashing politicians, advocating for nonviolent resistance.
Hansen analyzes the Climate Crisis from the vantage point of scientist, policy advocate, Washington bureaucrat, activist, and the concerned grandfather. Hanson was the guy that Bill McKibben bugged to get the actual number (350 carbon parts per million) for humanity to shoot at, an interesting story for climate activists interested in a little bit of movement history of 350.org.
It is fascinating to follow in the wake of a great mind working at the top of their game with the motivation to save his grandchildren and life on Earth. This creates an energized tone to the writing: caring grandfather going over-the-Rubicon with a now-or-never attitude to speak truth to power.
The Climate Crisis issue is stuck mostly for politics, rather than the science, and so Hansen offers a very useful analysis of the political climate around climate change.
Hansen says that politicians pretend to be green but don’t really put out. ”Most politicians advertised themselves as being “green” but what I learned was that, invariably, it amounted to greenwash, demonstrating token environmental support while kowtowing to fossil fuel special interests.”
Hansen gives us an insider’s view of the underworld of Worshington’s Bushite climate denial. Like touring Dante’s inferno, we get to sit in at the Bush’s Climate Task Force, where he was given a whole 20 minutes and it turns out all the decisions had already been made to totally ignore the science and whore for the oil companies.
The book transmits to us a deeper understanding of the climate system mechanisms: oceans, gases, sunlight, and the carbon cycle. For example, Hansen explains that carbon stays in the air for a very long time. It doesn’t dissipate like a fart, but lingers, silent but deadly, for centuries as a near-permanent new addition to the thin, delicate sky.
Therefore, as one graph shows, though China emits more carbon annually than the US, the cumulative output is more important, because the carbon is still around, and the US is still #1 in this, at 27% of the cumulative carbon pumped into the atmosphere 1795-2008. USA! USA!
And so, energy efficiency is not really a solution, because it stands in the place of getting off fossil fuels entirely, which is what is really required. Hansen writes, “The problem is that the act of slowing down emissions, by itself, does almost no good. The reason is that the lifetime of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere-ocean system is millennia. So it doesn’t matter much whether the fossil fuel is burned this year or next year. Energy efficiency is certainly an essential part of the solution to global warming, but it must be part of a strategic approach that leaves most of the fossil fuels in the round. Yes, most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground. That is the explicit message that the science provides.”
It is beautiful to get new ideas that allow our mind’s eye to see centuries of sky patterns, to see how clouds work, to see what our delicate sky is made of.
The sky seems tall and way up there, but it’s really the surface of an apple compared to the earth, a thin film of unusual gases that press against the planet amidst a vast airless space. It is beautiful to contemplate the tremendous complexity of this arrangement of sunlight, funny gases, and human life interacting with it all! Hansen deserves credit for making understandable the complexity of Climate science. May we have a world citizenry that arises in shared knowledge of how our sky works and how we can protect it.
Understanding the Climate Crisis is like walking into a dark room, hands in-front as we look for the light switch. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks of the wisdom of not knowing, of acceptance of the borders of our knowing and not getting uptight at our ignorance. This book is a good place to humbly not-know everything and be willing to learn, and travel behind this dedicated activist as he tries to turn on the lights for us.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Eating Garlic to cure a cold
Eating lots of garlic can stop or shorten a cold.
Sometimes we hear the body whine, “oh no, I’m getting a cold.” At that very first moment, go eat a lot of garlic. The garlic will boost our immune system and stop the cold from settling in.
Garlic contains 30 antiviral and antibacterial compounds. Garlic is a bulb, like a daffodil, that lives underground. When the bulb gets nicked or cut by a bug, it creates strong chemicals that resists unhelpful bacteria so the plant survives. Also, living underground, the plant needs to have strong anti-decaying properties so it doesn’t rot.
Garlic has different properties cooked and raw. Garlic is more powerful when raw, but it’s harder on the stomach. It’s good to a few cloves raw, and then a few full heads of garlic cooked. (The individual garlic bulbs are called cloves and the clusters of a dozen or so cloves are called heads of garlic.) If I’m trying to block a on-setting cold, I’ll eat two cloves raw, and two or three heads of garlic cooked, which is about 30-40 cloves. If I’ve got an established cold, I’ll eat this regiment everyday.
Here are a few ways to prepare garlic.
When cold fighting, I like to eat one or two cloves chopped fine and mixed with a spoonful of raw honey.
The easiest way to eat a bunch of garlic is to chop it and put it atop toast in the toaster over. As the bread toasts, it usually cooks the garlic enough to take the acidic burn off the garlic. After toasting, add some olive oil, sea salt, and nutritional yeast atop the “garlic bread” sweetens the deal.
Another way to cook voluminous garlic is to bake it covered in olive oil. Peal a couple heads of garlic, put it in over-safe bowl, cover it in cheaper olive oil. Try 300 degrees for 20 or so minutes until spreadable by fork. Add sea salt. The leftover oil can be reused for cooking and bread dipping.
Another easy way to eat your medicine is cooking garlic amidst fried eggs. In the sauté pan, add some olive oil and the garlic. Crack the eggs into the pan atop the garlic. Throw in some sea salt and herbs. Flip it overeasy. Done.
The easiest way to peel garlic is to squash the garlic glove with the tail of a big knife until the peal loosens. Another method is chopping off the knobby root end of the garlic and then pealing back the paper. The knobby bottoms are worth the effort to cut off if they are big and unpalatable.
Interestingly, garlic doesn’t respond to human breeding attempts, and so the plant we see are similar to what our Italian caveman ancestors ate.
Garlic is easy to grow. Stick single cloves in the ground, six inches apart. Plant four-to-six weeks before the ground freezes hard in the fall. Garlic likes hay mulch, as the delicate roots benefit from lack of weed-pressure competition. Harvest in the beginning of August when the leaves go brown.
Throw out moldy garlic and be sure to cut away any imperfections from the white flesh of the garlic where decay has started. Any mold that grows on antibacterial garlic is strong and we certainly don’t want to eat it or even breathe it too much.
It’s probably best not to eat tons of garlic all the time, though. As a medicine, we want to let our body reset. Though our body does appreciate antiviral and antibacterial boosts when needed, in general we are trying to cultivate in the body a garden of good bacteria. Kombucha, probiotic supplements, yogurt, fermented foods all create digester allies that that help our body. When a lot of garlic hits the digester gullet of the large intestine, our natural microherd of intestinal flora will notice.
Some people say garlic makes us smell, but I think it just makes us smell of garlic, and I like that smell. Perhaps garlic’s odorous reputation has been amplified by Big Pharma to keep people buying cold medicine that works less well than garlic.
Garlic is a helpful ally in stopping a cold, but it should be used along with other practices too. Other helpful cold-defeating habits include Echinacea tea with raw honey, rest, water. Vitamin C in large quantities can help. I like the fizzy Emergence-C packets. And it’s good to keep warm, and ideally, raise the body’s heat up, as some viruses live at lower temperatures. A good hot shower,or a sauna, or even being bundled up beneath ten blankets, can hot box our bodies to encourage the baddies move out.
Good luck and be well!
Sometimes we hear the body whine, “oh no, I’m getting a cold.” At that very first moment, go eat a lot of garlic. The garlic will boost our immune system and stop the cold from settling in.
Garlic contains 30 antiviral and antibacterial compounds. Garlic is a bulb, like a daffodil, that lives underground. When the bulb gets nicked or cut by a bug, it creates strong chemicals that resists unhelpful bacteria so the plant survives. Also, living underground, the plant needs to have strong anti-decaying properties so it doesn’t rot.
Garlic has different properties cooked and raw. Garlic is more powerful when raw, but it’s harder on the stomach. It’s good to a few cloves raw, and then a few full heads of garlic cooked. (The individual garlic bulbs are called cloves and the clusters of a dozen or so cloves are called heads of garlic.) If I’m trying to block a on-setting cold, I’ll eat two cloves raw, and two or three heads of garlic cooked, which is about 30-40 cloves. If I’ve got an established cold, I’ll eat this regiment everyday.
Here are a few ways to prepare garlic.
When cold fighting, I like to eat one or two cloves chopped fine and mixed with a spoonful of raw honey.
The easiest way to eat a bunch of garlic is to chop it and put it atop toast in the toaster over. As the bread toasts, it usually cooks the garlic enough to take the acidic burn off the garlic. After toasting, add some olive oil, sea salt, and nutritional yeast atop the “garlic bread” sweetens the deal.
Another way to cook voluminous garlic is to bake it covered in olive oil. Peal a couple heads of garlic, put it in over-safe bowl, cover it in cheaper olive oil. Try 300 degrees for 20 or so minutes until spreadable by fork. Add sea salt. The leftover oil can be reused for cooking and bread dipping.
Another easy way to eat your medicine is cooking garlic amidst fried eggs. In the sauté pan, add some olive oil and the garlic. Crack the eggs into the pan atop the garlic. Throw in some sea salt and herbs. Flip it overeasy. Done.
The easiest way to peel garlic is to squash the garlic glove with the tail of a big knife until the peal loosens. Another method is chopping off the knobby root end of the garlic and then pealing back the paper. The knobby bottoms are worth the effort to cut off if they are big and unpalatable.
Interestingly, garlic doesn’t respond to human breeding attempts, and so the plant we see are similar to what our Italian caveman ancestors ate.
Garlic is easy to grow. Stick single cloves in the ground, six inches apart. Plant four-to-six weeks before the ground freezes hard in the fall. Garlic likes hay mulch, as the delicate roots benefit from lack of weed-pressure competition. Harvest in the beginning of August when the leaves go brown.
Throw out moldy garlic and be sure to cut away any imperfections from the white flesh of the garlic where decay has started. Any mold that grows on antibacterial garlic is strong and we certainly don’t want to eat it or even breathe it too much.
It’s probably best not to eat tons of garlic all the time, though. As a medicine, we want to let our body reset. Though our body does appreciate antiviral and antibacterial boosts when needed, in general we are trying to cultivate in the body a garden of good bacteria. Kombucha, probiotic supplements, yogurt, fermented foods all create digester allies that that help our body. When a lot of garlic hits the digester gullet of the large intestine, our natural microherd of intestinal flora will notice.
Some people say garlic makes us smell, but I think it just makes us smell of garlic, and I like that smell. Perhaps garlic’s odorous reputation has been amplified by Big Pharma to keep people buying cold medicine that works less well than garlic.
Garlic is a helpful ally in stopping a cold, but it should be used along with other practices too. Other helpful cold-defeating habits include Echinacea tea with raw honey, rest, water. Vitamin C in large quantities can help. I like the fizzy Emergence-C packets. And it’s good to keep warm, and ideally, raise the body’s heat up, as some viruses live at lower temperatures. A good hot shower,or a sauna, or even being bundled up beneath ten blankets, can hot box our bodies to encourage the baddies move out.
Good luck and be well!
Friday, November 6, 2009
A Statewide Conversation on Building Vermont’s Food System
How can we build Vermont’s food system in the next ten years?
That’s the central topic of a well-organized conversation that’s happening in 8 places across Vermont in the next month.
The Farm to Plate Initiative and the Sustainable Agriculture Council are organizing local food summits. Farmers, food businesses and other stakeholders are being invited to say their piece. In the end, the state will spend some loot to make it happen. It sounds like government at it's best: trying to do good stuff by listening to the people doing the work.
An email from organizers says the events purpose is “to gather input from regional stakeholders as part of the Farm to Plate (F2P) strategic planning process whose goal is to enhance Vermont’s food system over the next 10 years. Not only will these events help in determining the contents of the strategic plan for Vermont’s farm and food sector, but it will also provide an opportunity for participants to learn more about what is happening in their region related to farms and food production.”
Distilled findings will be presented the VT legislature and the governor later this year. The eight events are designed to gather good ideas about where we want to go, what we need, what needs to increase, etc.
The conversation for southwestern Vermont is happening in Bennington, on Saturday Nov 14th, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, at 200 Pleasant St., from 5:30- 8:30. There will be a nice dinner, prepared with food from local farmers. Info is on the web at http://www.vsjf.org/sustainable_agriculture/farm2plate.shtml. Farm to Plate Local Food Summits contact person is Heather Pipino, 828-1121, heather@vsjf.org
Here’s what I think we need to improve Vermont’s food system over the long haul. We need better winter storage capacity. We could use a carbon tax on vegetables grown over a thousand miles away (regardless of whether this violates the WTO’s “rules.”) We should have inexpensive tractor rentals for young/poor farmers to use during the spring. We should increase the flow of local food to schools by having portions of the school lunch budget set aside for local food. We should have a food co-op in every town.
Some of these goals could overlap. Today, in early November in Vermont, I found an apple from Chile in my kitchen. This is prime Vermont apple season, but somehow, this carbon-drenched apple appeared, looking agreeably crunchy. It got me grumbling about the meagerness of our food system and the hidden carbon costs in the industrial food economy.
Let Vermont start by being self-sufficient in apples. There should be large apple storage sheds, with the pumped in CO2 for preservation, and every Vermont student should have access to handfuls of fresh, local apples everyday.
The development of a healthy food system will mean challenging one of the main philosophies of modern economics: free-market fundamentalism. Let’s drop the free market economy doctrinaire rhetoric that everything functions better when we slut ourselves out to big corporations, economies of scale and the profit motive. Not every system works best purely with the profit motive as the driving force.
Take those apples for example. Say we wanted to provide every Vermont student one Vermont apple everyday, all school year long. We could do that, with some math, some storage sheds and some public/private organization. Free-market fundamentalism would say, if Chilean apples were cheaper, buy those. Further, the government shouldn’t be involved in apple storage, because all things function better under the benevolent gaze of businessmen. This is nonsense. To save the planet, we need to do a million things that can’t be coaxed into existence by the profit motive.
Last night I read “Now or Never: Why we must act now to end climate change and create a sustainable future” by Tim Flannery. This excellent little book reminded me that the stakes are very, very high. Humanity may totally wreck our delicate terrerium. We really need to get it together, and create systems that meet our needs without blowing so much smoke into the sky. A thriving local food system puts less carbon into the air, and so it’s a key to the living future.
Let us build a local food system that brings together farmers, government people and eaters. Come to these discussions in your part of the state and daydream with us about the food system that saves the future.
That’s the central topic of a well-organized conversation that’s happening in 8 places across Vermont in the next month.
The Farm to Plate Initiative and the Sustainable Agriculture Council are organizing local food summits. Farmers, food businesses and other stakeholders are being invited to say their piece. In the end, the state will spend some loot to make it happen. It sounds like government at it's best: trying to do good stuff by listening to the people doing the work.
An email from organizers says the events purpose is “to gather input from regional stakeholders as part of the Farm to Plate (F2P) strategic planning process whose goal is to enhance Vermont’s food system over the next 10 years. Not only will these events help in determining the contents of the strategic plan for Vermont’s farm and food sector, but it will also provide an opportunity for participants to learn more about what is happening in their region related to farms and food production.”
Distilled findings will be presented the VT legislature and the governor later this year. The eight events are designed to gather good ideas about where we want to go, what we need, what needs to increase, etc.
The conversation for southwestern Vermont is happening in Bennington, on Saturday Nov 14th, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, at 200 Pleasant St., from 5:30- 8:30. There will be a nice dinner, prepared with food from local farmers. Info is on the web at http://www.vsjf.org/sustainable_agriculture/farm2plate.shtml. Farm to Plate Local Food Summits contact person is Heather Pipino, 828-1121, heather@vsjf.org
Here’s what I think we need to improve Vermont’s food system over the long haul. We need better winter storage capacity. We could use a carbon tax on vegetables grown over a thousand miles away (regardless of whether this violates the WTO’s “rules.”) We should have inexpensive tractor rentals for young/poor farmers to use during the spring. We should increase the flow of local food to schools by having portions of the school lunch budget set aside for local food. We should have a food co-op in every town.
Some of these goals could overlap. Today, in early November in Vermont, I found an apple from Chile in my kitchen. This is prime Vermont apple season, but somehow, this carbon-drenched apple appeared, looking agreeably crunchy. It got me grumbling about the meagerness of our food system and the hidden carbon costs in the industrial food economy.
Let Vermont start by being self-sufficient in apples. There should be large apple storage sheds, with the pumped in CO2 for preservation, and every Vermont student should have access to handfuls of fresh, local apples everyday.
The development of a healthy food system will mean challenging one of the main philosophies of modern economics: free-market fundamentalism. Let’s drop the free market economy doctrinaire rhetoric that everything functions better when we slut ourselves out to big corporations, economies of scale and the profit motive. Not every system works best purely with the profit motive as the driving force.
Take those apples for example. Say we wanted to provide every Vermont student one Vermont apple everyday, all school year long. We could do that, with some math, some storage sheds and some public/private organization. Free-market fundamentalism would say, if Chilean apples were cheaper, buy those. Further, the government shouldn’t be involved in apple storage, because all things function better under the benevolent gaze of businessmen. This is nonsense. To save the planet, we need to do a million things that can’t be coaxed into existence by the profit motive.
Last night I read “Now or Never: Why we must act now to end climate change and create a sustainable future” by Tim Flannery. This excellent little book reminded me that the stakes are very, very high. Humanity may totally wreck our delicate terrerium. We really need to get it together, and create systems that meet our needs without blowing so much smoke into the sky. A thriving local food system puts less carbon into the air, and so it’s a key to the living future.
Let us build a local food system that brings together farmers, government people and eaters. Come to these discussions in your part of the state and daydream with us about the food system that saves the future.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Getting the Generals to Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans
It is time to give Afghanistan back to the Afghan people and let them sort it out.
This means letting the Taliban “win”, an unpleasant prospect for a propagandized America, just like “losing” to the Viet Cong.
Afghanistan and Vietnam run so grimly parallel that we are fools not to remember our lessons.
Lesson #1: Don’t drag out a losing war indefinitely just because we can’t stomach the political pain of acknowledging a lost war.
Lesson #2: The native people support the insurgency because the Taliban/Viet Cong represent the people’s struggle for national independence, they speak the same language, and they are sick of Americans bombing their wedding parties.
Let us set down our doctrinaire US/Them propaganda and see who the Taliban are. The Taliban are the armed nationalist indigenous resistance movement against foreign occupation. They have set up a shadow government that issues passports, that calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Truck drivers who bring supplies to NATO bases must carry an IEA passport, and also pay a stiff tax to the Taliban. (See Patrick Cockburn’s excellent reporting at Counterpunch.org.) When Quadaffi spoke at the UN, he advocated for the Taliban’s right to set up the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Taliban (aka the I.E.A.) have a website, where the war is sold from their point of view. It is an Orwellian experience to read celebratory comments about blowing up American conveys.
(Here’s a good place as a disclaimer as any: All things being equal, I’d like America to “win” in Afghanistan and establish equal rights for women, but since that’s not going to happen, screw it, let’s go.)
We can’t eliminate the social movement called the Taliban, because the Taliban are Afghans, largely comprised of Afghan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, who are 42% of the population. The Taliban are Afghans acting as the legitimate indigenous nationalist military force resisting the foreign occupation. It is also clear, that the US has lost the opportunity to “win” in Afghanistan. What is winning? Defeating the Taliban? Oh really. Good luck with that. The Taliban are the Afghan people. Further, the Taliban movement is very resilient, surviving a crushing defeat in 2001, by just heading up into those endless, freezing mountains to regroup and eat their goat yogurt. Or maybe they ate Belgian chocolate airlifted in by the ISI paid for by wayward US tax dollars.
American money created the Taliban when they were America’s proxy army in fighting the Soviets partners. Once they were our allies, and perhaps they can be again. Surely, the Orwellian demonization of the Taliban can wear off after a few washes in the news cycle.
Americans live inside a bubble of propaganda that only extended living abroad can make clear. When one leaves the US, suddenly one decompresses from the Groupthink atmospheric pressure. The debate in the media about Afghanistan has been so strange. People pontificating like armchair 19th century English imperialists, twirling their handlebar mustaches while loaded on gin & tonics, talking about “our responsibility to the Afghan people” like it was our “white man’s burden.” Americans live behind enemy lines in a Thought War. PR firms catalog grumpy anti-war tracts like this one because they have Information War contracts to monitor and shape US public opinion.
The Afghan war is based on wrong foundational ideas: that America is the global cop, that America should be an occupying force, that America is the backbone of a global economic order that props up pliant crooks like Karzai. All this is wrong. Let us move towards a multi-polar world where the problems of the Age are settled by diplomacy and international organizations. Let’s start by handing Afghanistan to the UN.
Of course, the Taliban have many backward ideas about women, homosexuality, modernity, and music. I wouldn’t want to live next door to them. I’m just saying, let’s make peace with the Afghans and their armed advocates, the Taliban, and let Time and the awesomeness of Internet and pop music (and international aid and reparations) drag Afghanistan into the 21st century.
All this seems logical to me, a civilian who makes no money off the military, who wants peace, who generally likes Islam, and who is generally sympathetic with other countries that don’t want the US military stationed there.
Unfortunately, the Taliban are only half the problem in the Afghanistan war. The other half is the American military’s general.
The career militarists at the Pentagon want to extend the war in Afghanistan. The military-industrial complex wants to wring a few more years of billions out of the Afghan. Like Vietnam, a long war is a good paycheck. One military talking head said that winning would cost 5 billion a month for 10 years! I disagree that we can spend our way to victory there, though I agree that Halliburton would be willing to try.
Robert Drefeus has a smart article in the new Rolling Stone, where he writes of the difficulty Obama is having with the Generals.
Obama is smart, and living the world of Realpolitik, not in the Ideal world of the Leftist blogosphere, and so knows some history. Civilian presidents who resist the power of our military and our secret police (CIA) have often faced internal sabotage. Jimmy Carter was harpooned by the CIA spooks because they thought he was naïve for wanting to do the right thing, the Christian thing, even at the expense of short term loses in the field. Who knows about JFK, but the CIA certainly has been reluctant to release their files about Oswald.
So let’s have some patience with Obama, that in the first year, he hasn’t dismantled the entire apparatus of military conquest. We want Obama to go the distance and have a product 8 years, not throw a rod early and get coup de ta’d by the Raytheon heathens.
And of course, the good people in the military may honestly believe that we could still “win” in Afghanistan. The problem with military people can be caught in the proverb: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” However, there is no military solution to hammer the situation in Afghanistan with.
Politically, there will be a high cost if America is still in this new Vietnam in four years. The progressives are already getting grumble. We are starting to feel like we got played during the election, and a great disappointed watchfulness has set in. People voted for Obama as the anti-war candidate. Now, we’re still in all these wars! Recently I was at a gathering of progressives, and when people said Obama’s name, there was a new hesitancy has replaced the unbridled enthusiasm. Obama and the Democrats should know that extending the war in Afghanistan would hurt their chances in the long haul.
Most people don’t care about the nuances of world domination/geo-politics, they just want out. Here, the Americans and the Afghan people are in agreement: US out of Afghanistan.
And I’m with them. Out!
This means letting the Taliban “win”, an unpleasant prospect for a propagandized America, just like “losing” to the Viet Cong.
Afghanistan and Vietnam run so grimly parallel that we are fools not to remember our lessons.
Lesson #1: Don’t drag out a losing war indefinitely just because we can’t stomach the political pain of acknowledging a lost war.
Lesson #2: The native people support the insurgency because the Taliban/Viet Cong represent the people’s struggle for national independence, they speak the same language, and they are sick of Americans bombing their wedding parties.
Let us set down our doctrinaire US/Them propaganda and see who the Taliban are. The Taliban are the armed nationalist indigenous resistance movement against foreign occupation. They have set up a shadow government that issues passports, that calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Truck drivers who bring supplies to NATO bases must carry an IEA passport, and also pay a stiff tax to the Taliban. (See Patrick Cockburn’s excellent reporting at Counterpunch.org.) When Quadaffi spoke at the UN, he advocated for the Taliban’s right to set up the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Taliban (aka the I.E.A.) have a website, where the war is sold from their point of view. It is an Orwellian experience to read celebratory comments about blowing up American conveys.
(Here’s a good place as a disclaimer as any: All things being equal, I’d like America to “win” in Afghanistan and establish equal rights for women, but since that’s not going to happen, screw it, let’s go.)
We can’t eliminate the social movement called the Taliban, because the Taliban are Afghans, largely comprised of Afghan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, who are 42% of the population. The Taliban are Afghans acting as the legitimate indigenous nationalist military force resisting the foreign occupation. It is also clear, that the US has lost the opportunity to “win” in Afghanistan. What is winning? Defeating the Taliban? Oh really. Good luck with that. The Taliban are the Afghan people. Further, the Taliban movement is very resilient, surviving a crushing defeat in 2001, by just heading up into those endless, freezing mountains to regroup and eat their goat yogurt. Or maybe they ate Belgian chocolate airlifted in by the ISI paid for by wayward US tax dollars.
American money created the Taliban when they were America’s proxy army in fighting the Soviets partners. Once they were our allies, and perhaps they can be again. Surely, the Orwellian demonization of the Taliban can wear off after a few washes in the news cycle.
Americans live inside a bubble of propaganda that only extended living abroad can make clear. When one leaves the US, suddenly one decompresses from the Groupthink atmospheric pressure. The debate in the media about Afghanistan has been so strange. People pontificating like armchair 19th century English imperialists, twirling their handlebar mustaches while loaded on gin & tonics, talking about “our responsibility to the Afghan people” like it was our “white man’s burden.” Americans live behind enemy lines in a Thought War. PR firms catalog grumpy anti-war tracts like this one because they have Information War contracts to monitor and shape US public opinion.
The Afghan war is based on wrong foundational ideas: that America is the global cop, that America should be an occupying force, that America is the backbone of a global economic order that props up pliant crooks like Karzai. All this is wrong. Let us move towards a multi-polar world where the problems of the Age are settled by diplomacy and international organizations. Let’s start by handing Afghanistan to the UN.
Of course, the Taliban have many backward ideas about women, homosexuality, modernity, and music. I wouldn’t want to live next door to them. I’m just saying, let’s make peace with the Afghans and their armed advocates, the Taliban, and let Time and the awesomeness of Internet and pop music (and international aid and reparations) drag Afghanistan into the 21st century.
All this seems logical to me, a civilian who makes no money off the military, who wants peace, who generally likes Islam, and who is generally sympathetic with other countries that don’t want the US military stationed there.
Unfortunately, the Taliban are only half the problem in the Afghanistan war. The other half is the American military’s general.
The career militarists at the Pentagon want to extend the war in Afghanistan. The military-industrial complex wants to wring a few more years of billions out of the Afghan. Like Vietnam, a long war is a good paycheck. One military talking head said that winning would cost 5 billion a month for 10 years! I disagree that we can spend our way to victory there, though I agree that Halliburton would be willing to try.
Robert Drefeus has a smart article in the new Rolling Stone, where he writes of the difficulty Obama is having with the Generals.
Obama is smart, and living the world of Realpolitik, not in the Ideal world of the Leftist blogosphere, and so knows some history. Civilian presidents who resist the power of our military and our secret police (CIA) have often faced internal sabotage. Jimmy Carter was harpooned by the CIA spooks because they thought he was naïve for wanting to do the right thing, the Christian thing, even at the expense of short term loses in the field. Who knows about JFK, but the CIA certainly has been reluctant to release their files about Oswald.
So let’s have some patience with Obama, that in the first year, he hasn’t dismantled the entire apparatus of military conquest. We want Obama to go the distance and have a product 8 years, not throw a rod early and get coup de ta’d by the Raytheon heathens.
And of course, the good people in the military may honestly believe that we could still “win” in Afghanistan. The problem with military people can be caught in the proverb: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” However, there is no military solution to hammer the situation in Afghanistan with.
Politically, there will be a high cost if America is still in this new Vietnam in four years. The progressives are already getting grumble. We are starting to feel like we got played during the election, and a great disappointed watchfulness has set in. People voted for Obama as the anti-war candidate. Now, we’re still in all these wars! Recently I was at a gathering of progressives, and when people said Obama’s name, there was a new hesitancy has replaced the unbridled enthusiasm. Obama and the Democrats should know that extending the war in Afghanistan would hurt their chances in the long haul.
Most people don’t care about the nuances of world domination/geo-politics, they just want out. Here, the Americans and the Afghan people are in agreement: US out of Afghanistan.
And I’m with them. Out!
Monday, October 19, 2009
Learning to see Nature so we Awake
When we learn to look really closely at Nature, secret doors open to knowledge, biology, art, and mystery.
When our awareness steadies in focused observation, colors deepen, shapes define, strange relationships develop, and patterns emerge.
It takes bravery to receptively witness the beauty of the world. It takes a refined, disciplined, masocism to endure the pleasures of percieving the gorgeousness of our burning world.
We must willfully shake off our everyday daze and be voluntarily tazed by the miracles blooming and swooping all around.
A long, thorough, multi-seasonal contemplation of Nature in Her many forms brings ever deepening revelation.
Humans need these skills for appreciating Nature, so we’ll turn less Nature into parking lots, so we’ll be content with non-consumptive pleasures like looking at the subtle colors of sunset.
We take the right posture when we adopt a reverent appreciation for the great beauty that surrounds us in the Web of Life.
The skill of deep appreciation of Nature offers necessary skills that humans need in our effort to create planetary survival.
When we see Nature, when we learn to really open up to Nature’s beauty in her delicate and useful shapes/colors/forms, we are gifted with appreciation for the Lifeweb that supports us. And we need that gratitude for Life, in all her stunning complexity, because it strengthens our connection to the Earth that we need to work fiercely to protect.
When our awareness steadies in focused observation, colors deepen, shapes define, strange relationships develop, and patterns emerge.
It takes bravery to receptively witness the beauty of the world. It takes a refined, disciplined, masocism to endure the pleasures of percieving the gorgeousness of our burning world.
We must willfully shake off our everyday daze and be voluntarily tazed by the miracles blooming and swooping all around.
A long, thorough, multi-seasonal contemplation of Nature in Her many forms brings ever deepening revelation.
Humans need these skills for appreciating Nature, so we’ll turn less Nature into parking lots, so we’ll be content with non-consumptive pleasures like looking at the subtle colors of sunset.
We take the right posture when we adopt a reverent appreciation for the great beauty that surrounds us in the Web of Life.
The skill of deep appreciation of Nature offers necessary skills that humans need in our effort to create planetary survival.
When we see Nature, when we learn to really open up to Nature’s beauty in her delicate and useful shapes/colors/forms, we are gifted with appreciation for the Lifeweb that supports us. And we need that gratitude for Life, in all her stunning complexity, because it strengthens our connection to the Earth that we need to work fiercely to protect.
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