This summer, for the first time in 16 years, I'm doing a bit of a vegetable garden.  I have two raised beds in a community garden in the "bad" neighborhood, each 4 feet by 16 feet.  I've planted 6 tomato plants, three different kinds of peppers, some zucchini and yellow crookneck squash, and some leaf lettuce and Swiss chard.  That's all I have room for.

It's an organic garden, no chemical fertilizers or pesticides permitted.  So I've been chatting with the guy who got the community garden going - one of life's real unsung heroes - about various natural fertilizers and pesticides.   Earthworms, for example.  Earthworms greatly enrich the soil by aerating it with their burrows, and also by bringing up nutrients from deep in the soil and pooping them out in the vicinity of your plants' roots.  Earthworms, like praying mantises and ladybugs and marigolds and mulch, are one of nature's great allies of the gardener/farmer.

As we talked I realized that it's been years since I've actually seen an earthworm.  When I was a kid growing up on the south side of Chicago, after a heavy rain you'd see dozens of big fat nightcrawlers on the lawn and on the sidewalk, driven to the surface by the rain.  Even if it hadn't rained, you could take a flashlight outside at night and find them in the grass.

As kids we also spent many happy hours collecting grasshoppers and fireflies ("lightning bugs") in jars, chasing butterflies, etc.  One summer, as a sort of impromptu science experiment, I raised about three generations of Colorado potato beetles in a glass jar.  I had found the adult insects, and their eggs, on the leaves of some weeds that grew wild in the alley behind my neighbor's garage, and identified them in a book I treasured which was  entitled "Insects".  Another summer we caught tadpoles and watched them mature into frogs.  All this on the south side of Chicago.

Now I don't get outdoors nearly as much as I used to when I was a kid.  And I am probably not as observant of the mundane, ordinary things all around us that are so fascinating to kids.  But I realize that I haven't seen a nightcrawler or a grasshopper in years and years, and very few fireflies or ladybugs.  Are they disappearing from nature, or is it just me?

In the past year I've watched a couple of documentaries about the "silence of the bees".  It seems that bees, our principal pollinators, are literally disappearing by the millions, pretty much all over the world, with no explanation.  Scientists are feverishly trying to figure it out, because without bees we will eventually lose basically all of our fruits and vegetables.  Do you suppose that other small but significant species are dying off as well?  Or is it just me?  Will we one day be greeted by the Silent Spring that Rachel Carson saw coming back in 1964?  Or is it just me?

In the time it takes you to read this sentence out loud at a normal speaking rate, American taxpayers will have spent just about $50,000 on the war in Iraq.

If you're still with me, and finish this second sentence, the war will have cost American taxpayers roughly another $40,000.

Let's just make it a total of $140,000 with this third short paragraph.  That's right.  $5,000 a second, according to Bill Moyers last night.

**********************************************************************************

Now imagine what life would be like if, instead of engaging in wanton and gratuitous destruction, we had spent that same $5,000 a second for the past five years on research into alternative energy sources, so that perhaps - just perhaps - our far-seeing "leaders" didn't feel the need to exert an illusory and ultimately futile military control over the Middle East.

Pssst.....DO something.

WARNING:  SOME PROFANITY
AHEAD.  PROCEED WITH CAUTION!  NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CHILDREN UNDER 4!

Well, it’s been quite a while since I posted.  Sometimes I got nothin’ to say that hasn’t
already been said a thousand times before. 
Other times the profound insights into the human condition are coming so
thick and fast that I don’t have time to write ‘em down.

But today I got a letter from the odious coprophage Newt
Gingrich, former Speaker of the House. 
The return address is “Hon. Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House
(1995-1999)”.

Upon reading his letter, I learn that there’s a plot afoot
by “radical secularists” to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance,
and “In God We Trust” from our money.  To
counter this nefarious plot, Newt wants to make a documentary film called “Rediscovering
God in America”.  I suspect that the film has already been
made, but Newt says that it hasn’t, and assures me that he’d make the film
himself except that he doesn’t have the financial resources.  He wants me to help him by sending money to
something called the Citizens United Foundation.

I’m going to send Newt 41 cents, in the form of a stamp,
just so that I can extend him the courtesy of a reply.  My reply is already scrawled in my best
crazyman scribble in bold blue Sharpie on the RSVP form he sent me.  It says (and here’s where the profanity comes
in), “Why would a lying-ass, anti-family-values, hell-bound cocksucker like you
care whether the words ‘under God’ are in the pledge of allegiance?  You need to have more concern for the ‘under
dog’.”

Now that I’ve shared that with you, I’m going to seal the
envelope and mail it.  And let me hasten
to assure those few of you who don’t know me very well that I do indeed believe
in God, very strongly.  I just think that
it’s more important to LIVE a godly life than to merely talk about one.  I despise (hate is too strong a word)
Republicans in general and Newt Gingrich in particular – all those who feel,
though they don’t openly express it in so many words, that the right to life
ends at birth except for rich white people.

**********

In other news, I watched a PBS documentary last night about
nanotechnology.  I thought it was going
to be some sort of science show which would tell me things I didn’t already know
regarding what nanotechnology is now capable of.  Instead, it was a panel discussion
about the ethics of nanotechnology.  And
it was the exact same discussion we hear in so many other contexts.  On the plus side, miniature cameras and
tracking devices can make it possible, or easier, to catch ‘terrorists” and
other ‘criminals’, track stolen vehicles and lost children and wandering senior
citizens, suggest merchandise we might wish to acquire and consume, etc.  On the negative side, the information about
us could (and almost inevitably WILL) fall into the wrong hands and constitute
a serious breach of our privacy.

As I listened to the show, I thought to myself that I would
agree to cameras on every street corner just as soon as our government
officials and corporate executives have them installed in their offices.  For some reason not a single panelist brought
that up.

As I say, it’s the exact same discussion we have in the
political arena.  We need  government for some things – in a word, to provide
all citizens with certain basic services and to protect us from our neighbors,
if not from ourselves.  In a democracy
there will ALWAYS be the dynamic tension between too much government and not
enough government, between the need for regulation and the failure of
government officials to provide the proper regulation.  When we vote, we can only hope that we will
elect persons of integrity who will properly balance the competing interests
and arrive at something approximating the greatest justice for the greatest
number of people.  And we can’t stop at
voting; we as citizens need to monitor the process every step of the way, in
order to provide the final level of checks and balances.

In even the best of democracies, that’s all there is.

"For Eli"

By Andrea Gibson

Some words of wisdom from a young Caucasian man. His name is Dan Charnas, and he calls himself  "Dantrification".  This is apparently his first publicly posted video.  Wisdom is most certainly not the exclusive province of the old.

White People, Get Over Yourselves from Dantrification on Vimeo.

All right, so no one loves me any more.  I get it.  I'm out of the loop for a day or two, and everyone forgets I exist.  No one stops by just to say, "Hey, man, are you still alive?  We miss you."  Instead it's "What have you done for me LATELY??"  "Where's the newest action?"  That kinda deal.

EDIT:  At least two of my readers were grossed out by the graphic image of the autopsy, so I've replaced it with a more benign picture.  Please come back!  I want you to read what I've written.

WARNING: One graphic image below is not for the faint of heart.  Proceed at your own risk.

I have tons of things to say - all of them eminently wise and life-transforming - but rarely the energy or motivation to type it all out.  Depression is a bitch.  I do better on the phone, but only if we talk about YOU.  I care deeply about YOU, and will talk to you as long as you like.  Don't make me talk about me, though, because I don't have much to say unless you get me to reminiscing about the past.

For similar reasons, I suppose, it's easier for me to comment on other people's blogs than to compose an entry of my own.  And occasionally I leave a comment that has sufficient universality to make it worth posting here.  That's what I'm doing now.  Here's a slightly edited, and expanded, version of the comment I just left on someone else's Xanga.  Thanks for supplying the motivation, my dear, even if it was inadvertent.    You know who you are.

**********

I don't know if you're a believer in Jesus the Christ, but whether you are or not, affirmations of faith and courage do work. 

See for yourself.      http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

February 26 2008
BBC News

Turkey in radical revision of Islamic
texts
By Robert Piggott

Turkey is preparing to publish a
document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a
controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.

The country's powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team
of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental
revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.

The Hadith is a collection of thousands of sayings reputed to come from the
Prophet Muhammad.

As such, it is the principal guide for Muslims in interpreting the Koran and
the source of the vast majority of Islamic law, or Sharia.

But the Turkish state has come to see the Hadith as having an often negative
influence on a society it is in a hurry to modernise, and believes it
responsible for obscuring the original values of Islam.

It says that a significant number of the sayings were never uttered by
Muhammad, and even some that were need now to be reinterpreted. . .

**********

Yeah, so I’ve been slowly working my way through Jeremy
Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the
World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. 
If you don’t understand the profound dangers of “privatizing” the waging
of war, contracting it out to mercenaries who are utterly without legal and
moral accountability, you need to read the book.  But there is an even deeper truth contained
in the book, which leaps out at me from the pages like a striking cobra.

First please allow me to digress.  When I was in college back in the late 60’s
there was another war going on, in Viet Nam.  You may have heard of it.  I didn’t serve in the military; I was, in
fact, one of those protesters in Washington D.C.

I was vehemently against the war in Viet
Nam, just as I now am against the war in Iraq.  And a large part of my rationale was based on
the expansion of my intellectual and moral horizons which college made
possible.  Among other things, I had a
Japanese roommate, and I spent a semester in France
living with a French family.  It didn’t take
long to realize that the Japanese and the French, as personified by the people
I was privileged to meet and live with, were decent human beings, people just
like me in all essential respects.

It wasn’t a great leap from there to extrapolate to people
of other nations and cultures.  I
reasoned that if the French and the Japanese were essentially like me, then the
Vietnamese people were probably essentially like me also.  The ordinary people, as opposed to a few
individuals in power, probably just wanted to live their lives in peace, to
enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness free from outside
interference.  Does that sound vaguely
familiar?  The obvious corollary of that
realization was my determination to not let my government define my enemies for
me, for nefarious purposes of its own, and order me to murder them.

Reading, of
course, confirmed that our own war in Viet Nam
didn’t happen in a vacuum, and we weren’t there for the stated reasons.  Viet Nam
had been a colony of France
for a great many years, until the French were finally driven out by the
Vietnamese, at which point the United States
moved in.  Ho Chi Minh was an indigenous
Vietnamese leader with great popular support, who was fighting a war of liberation
against our puppet government in South Viet Nam.  Not unlike our own Founding Fathers.

Now let’s go back to Iraq,
and try a little experiment in “walking in another person’s moccasins”.  Imagine that you’re living here in America,
minding your own business, just trying to make it from day to day.  Suddenly a stronger nation – let’s say China,
just for the sake of this little exercise – decides that our leader, George W.
Bush, is a dictator whom it, China,
can no longer tolerate.  It doesn’t
matter whether China
is right or wrong; China
has made the unilateral determination, and has decided to act on it.  It’s going to fight a “pre-emptive war”
against America,
whom its leaders perceive as being part of the Axis of Evil.  After all, the United
States has nuclear weapons, which China
is uncomfortable with, and it also has natural resources which are
indispensable for China’s
continued economic growth and “way of life”. 
Besides, the Americans are fanatical barbarians, clearly inferior to
those who follow the wiser and more civilized path of Confucianism or Buddhism.

So China
sends a massive military force to invade the United
States and depose our leader George W. Bush,
the dictator who has executed his own citizens.  (If your imagination fails you here, think
capital punishment in Texas, the
Execution Capital of the World, and Governor Bush saying, “There has NEVER been
an innocent person put to death on my watch!”)

Most Americans would be extremely unhappy about the Chinese
invasion, to put it mildly.  They wouldn’t
agree with China’s
rationale.  Those of us who most clearly recognize
that Bush is a fascist war criminal might welcome China’s
invasion initially (though it’s highly doubtful), provided that Bush/Cheney’s
removal was quick and no civilians got hurt. 
But imagine our consternation – our FURY – if thousands of civilians
were getting killed and maimed by China’s
“smart bombs”.  Imagine our increased
fury if, after deposing Bush/Cheney (which was their stated mission), the
Chinese military stayed and stayed and stayed, for years and years, patrolling
our streets with tanks and soldiers armed to the teeth under the guise of
maintaining “order”.  Installing a puppet
government with whom it negotiated unconscionable access to our national
resources, while pretending that we weren’t yet “ready” to conduct our own
elections.  Building vast military installations
which gave every indication of being permanent. 

Would we become “insurgents”?  Would we fight both against the Chinese and
among ourselves?  Does a bear defecate in
the forest?  You bet your sweet ass we
would!

What I see reflected in Jeremy Scahill’s book is what has
been termed “American exceptionalism” – the profoundly, fatally arrogant
assumption that America somehow has the moral right to meddle in the affairs of
other people and nations, to unilaterally determine whether their leaders are “legitimate”
or not and whether or not they are capable of self-government, to take what it “needs”
in order to protect its “interests”  irrespective
of the cost in human suffering to others. 
Dress it up in whatever language you want, it’s nothing more than the
old, savage principle that “might makes right”.

Bluntly stated, there is no such thing as a monolithic group
of “Islamofascists”, or an Axis of Evil as defined by the United
States. 
There are only human beings of all colors and languages and cultures,
engaged in the pursuit of happiness just as we are.  Imperfect human beings who are nevertheless
entitled to self-determination and respect just as much as we are.

The truth is that Iraqis, and most of the rest of the world,
do not hate ordinary Americans, and they do not hate freedom.  They love freedom just as much as we do.  They embrace, in fact, the ideals embodied in
our own Constitution and Declaration of Independence.  What they hate is a government that blatantly
disregards its own stated principles whenever it feels like doing so.  And we too should hate such a government,
with a pure and revolutionary passion.