EXPERTS

Also starting to reread Frances Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet. She had an interesting take on experts in her introduction. The experts we find quoted in the mainstream is almost automatically a servant of the status quo. That's what he or she is an expert in. It's very hard for them to think outside the definitions they are used to. They aren't likely to look for a new way of doing things because then they wouldn't be an expert anymore. Takes a lot of guts to say "hey, I don't know everything. What can you teach me?"

FROM THE DESK OF TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Found this in the intro section of Overdo$ed America by Dr. John Abramson.

It is no limitaion upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing buisness under corporate form....they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations....Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.

Theodore Roosevelt

PBS PROGRAM

I'm assuming that all PBS stations will be carrying this program at 9 tonight. We keep hearing about how Muslims are all fanatics, fundamentalists and generally bad news. And many of them are. Want to know how we ended up with the fundamentalist survivors? Watch the PBS special on the Moorish kingdoms in Spain. Many of these kingdoms were reletively enlightened and fairly tolerant. Especially compared to their Christian counterparts further north. Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in "relative" harmony. At least they were allowed to live together.

The last independent Moorish kingdom was Grenada, and it fell in 1492. The year Columbus sailed for the so called New World Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the last 200,000 Jews from Spain. Many killed by the ships captains who charged rip gut fees for passage, sold into slavery, shipwrecked, or never even got the chance to book passage. They were killed on the way to the ports for the treasure they supposedly were carrying.

Something tells me we've inherited some seriously bad karma. The Moorish citizens of Spain were at least allowed to remain in Spain but were subject to perscution. Moorish converts to Christianity were in constant danger of being denounced to the Inquisition for practicing their old faith. The persecution finally led to a revolt in 1568 during the reign of Phillip II. The last survivors were expelled in the early 1600's. Funny how fanatics breed fanatics like flies hatching out of spoiled fruit.

ALERTS AND RECALLS

Got a little start on Twilight of Empire. Got through the intro and the first chapter anyway. Fairly dense prose and a lot of things to chew on. Remember all those color coded security warnings that kept popping up before the 2004 election? Funny how every time Bush was down in the polls Homeland Security upped the security warnings. Anyway, there’s a peace movement named  Code Pink. http://www.codepink4peace.org/article.php?list=type&type=3As a play on words it’s about as subtle as a sledge hammer. Effective, but so not subtle. But, subtle doesn't get you noticed, so hey go with what works.

 

Has anyone else heard of this group? If you haven’t, it doesn’t surprise me. The elected hired help and their corporate masters have learned a valuable lesson. You don’t have to go out of your way to censor speech on the local level. All you have to do is make sure it doesn’t make the evening news or the front page of the paper.

 

While the current head of Homeland Security keeps surfacing periodically with vague warnings of threats from overseas terrorists think about the actual threats we’ve faced the past year or so.

 

The people who used to live in New Orleans are still waiting for promised help to rebuild their city. Good thing the Caribbean Islands aren't part of the US. They get hit with severe storms far more often than the continental US does. They'd never get rebuilt. Granted they don't have as much to rebuild. But still, after two years.

 

Recalls of contaminated meat products don’t even make the headlines anymore. And e coli is so common in the beef supply that you’re safer treating any and all vegetables as if you were in a third world country. When in doubt wash it. If not in doubt, wash it anyway.

 

The FDA has announced that it’s scrapping the closure of several of its labs because of fears over imported food products, wheat gluten with melamine in it for example.

 

There’s just been a huge recall of commercially canned products processed in the US because of fears of botulism. I’ve never heard of botulism in commercial products (doesn’t mean it never happened, I just never ran across it). Botulism was something that happened with badly processed home canned products.

 

The latest recalls have parents digging through their kids toy boxes looking for long list of Chinese made toys with lead paint and little tiny easy to remove magnets. Among other problems.

 

I don’t dismiss the possibility of another attack in the US by overseas terrorists. But, those airplane hijacking psychos weren’t attacking people, they were attacking symbols. I don’t think they even gave the people on the planes or in the twin towers a second thought. The human casualties were a useful bonus. It upped the terror value of the exercise.

 

 I’m not going to call the people running the businesses responsible for all these recalls psychos, but I don’t think they’re giving the people affected by these problems a second thought either.

TWILIGHT OF EMPIRE

Those who are familiar with the Rings movies would recognize Viggo Mortensen as the actor who played Aragorn. He's also something of an artist, photographer, and poet. He has also founded a small publishing house called Perceval Press. Their major output art books, cd's and poetry but they do a small number of politically oriented books. http://www.percevalpress.com/twilight.html?-session=pp_sc:CFC8744413ec7317ECUKs1E905D8

Follow this link to Twilight of Empire:responses to occupation. A collection of essays and photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan. The press just brought out the second edition of this book and believe in it enough to offer it for the cost of shipping. Which is $5.95 or so. I just got our copy today and mom's been leafing through it ever since. For anyone who is interested I just thought I'd provide the link. This is not a book you can read cover to cover in a few sittings. And be sure there's nothing breakable close at hand while you are working on it.

There is also a link under my favorite sites that will take you to their homepage. There are usually links to news stories and articles from US and foreign sources. More than a few are in Spanish. Not suprising when you consider that the founder speaks English, Spanish and Danish. And us stuck with the Current Occupant who has trouble communicating in one language. Have fun and watch out for your blood pressure.

GOOD WEEKEND

On the whole a good weekend. Made a bit more progress on getting the yard in shape. One of my nephews lives down her while he’s in school and he put in a couple of good clean up sessions in the yard. He gets a good meal and about ten bucks an hour. He got the patio area around the crawl space in back set up so we can camouflage it. Relocated some of our surplice blocks and bought some landscape timbers to go on top of them. Make a nice set up for pots and garden art. It took some patience and doing one at a time but we got those babies where they needed to be.

 

Local nursery had a nice sale on their pottery so we were able to pick up some planters for our new creation. And picked up a couple of trellises to match the ones we already have. We’ll set those up on the other side of the house to screen part of that back yard. Honeysuckles or trumpet vines or some darn thing. We’ll worry about that next spring. Just getting them up will be job enough.

 

NN1 has been doing summer school this summer up in Corvallis. His little brother (who’s taller than him, I know the feeling and who will be known as NN3) came down this weekend to visit and they both came down for dinner. Other grandma lives all of two blocks from us so we had a nice party. Then between errands NN3 called to tell us they were on their way down again. Seems he’d brought graduation pictures to share and forgot to bring them Friday. Apparently he told sis he forgot to bring them and she told him to get them down P D Q. He brought down shots for both families and the grandmas did a good job of divvying up the goodies. He’s finally growing into his ears and hands. All five boys are going to be six foot or better. I feel like such a shrimp sometimes. Oh, and N3 will be going to school in Portland this year so we might actually get to see him more than once a year.

 

Weather’s great and it looks like it’s going to hold out for the low eighties for next weekend’s Scandinavian Festival. Four days of everybody claiming to be honorary Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes. The Broiler Festival, the Filbert Festival and some of the others have come and gone while this celebration of good food, wonderful crafts, singing, dancing and people watching keeps going strong. Looking forward to it.

WHAT COMES FIRST

You can still find sections of the roads that the Romans built two thousand years ago. Clear away the brush, two thousand years of plant debris, replace a few stones and they could probably be used today. In some old cities you could probably use the old sewers and water systems. For all I know, some of the old towns still are using them.

Over five centuries ago craftsmen built cathedrals to the glory of God and perhaps to their own genius. Most of those cathedrals are still standing. Most of those cathedrals will probably still be standing five hundred years from now. If we don’t blow them up in a frenzy of self destruction or sheer stupidity.

A freeway bridge built forty years ago, pronounced deficient in 1990, collapses “unexpectedly.” The gist of state officials explanations is that “nobody told us it was that bad.” I don’t know what to do first; laugh, cry, scream or pray.

Laugh, because somehow I’m not really that surprised. Cry for the drivers who depended on that bridge and assumed it was safe, scream because I suspect it didn’t have to happen, and pray not only for the families left behind but for ourselves.

If your house has a leaky roof or termites you deal with the problem and repair the damage. Well, this country is our "house." It's time for the government (us) to tell the elected hired help to quit playing idealogical games and for us to get our heads out of the sand. The house is falling down around our ears.