It's good to see you. Come on in, leave your shoes in the hallway, we've got fire on the stove preparing lunch for later. In the meantime, browse the bookshelves and plunk down on the sofa with one, or pick out some tunes from the music library or come in to the kitchen to help with the cooking. Our special blend of tea is steeping and will be right up.

Make yourself at home...

One of the great things about this moment in history you and I are living through right now is the incredible communication methods we have at our disposal and completely take for granted. The fact that we're all gathered here, around a virtual campfire in the ether, each owning computers and phones which are now accessible and affordable to practically anyone, is totally amazing. It allows us to have face-to-face time with anyone around the globe, videotape anything we see in our daily lives and publish to the world and a platform from which to see if anybody cares or shares similar values with you. My infant son will only know of a such a world.

Only a decade ago and many of the things we take for granted, such as YouTube, Skype, Facebook and Twitter, were not even on the radar yet. Mind-boggling features continue to roll in, that somehow keep eclipsing what we had just a few short years ago.

Farcebook is the one that gets me, because it's the Great Missed Opportunity. Finally, a platform with which to communicate personally with people you know or have just met. But we frittered away what could have been an incredible opportunity to undergo an awakening of political awareness and of the existence a utopian world outside of the merciless, ever-churning grinder of unbridled capitalism, that has kept humanity enslaved to debt, without a real sense of community, and dazzled by consumerism. If Twitter is #We, FB is Me, Me, Me.

I tried to tell my "friends" there that we were acting like children who wouldn't eat their food. Didn’t their parents remind them that there's starving people in Africa? Similarly, there are oppressed people everywhere who could really use allies, but we're not acknowledging them on these social media platforms, because the forum has been hijacked by a pathetic strain of self-aggrandizement and "branding." Like kids who refuse to eat, we're wasting this food. On top of which the corporations buy and sell all that personal data we freely put up for the world to see. Lots and lots of "likes" for wedding pictures, vacation photos and pictures of pets; lots of silence when challenged to give a fuck about the current state of the world and politics. I've since given up on Farcebook.

I can't remember where I heard something explaining this era in a way that brought it home to me, but I think it was in this film "2012: Time For Change." Which was that, with the technological age underway, we are at very the beginning of an epoch so significant and as great as the Agricultural Revolution, which took a full millennium to develop, and the Industrial Revolution, which took maybe a couple of centuries to develop. This one has developed in a decade. The staggering part is, some think we're at the Model T stage of technological development.

One feature of the cell phone that has come in handy for me has been the speech-to-text function. When out and about and observing things that rile up some righteous indignation, one no longer has to reach for a stenographers pad or notebook. I still love to see friends putting pen to paper, but I welcome this development. While driving around NYC, for instance, I can dictate into my phone some of the many disastrous Neoliberal developments that catch my eye across the almost completely transformed cityscape.

Meanwhile the video capability, in everyone’s pocket who owns a cell phone, has utterly revolutionized the capacity for protest to become more inspiring, attractive and ingratiating to the masses. In the past, these events weren't getting covered, or slanted negatively. Now we can shoot our own videos and share those of others. And finally, we can hold accountable, or at least impact public opinion in favor of the victims, the previously immunized murderous cops who continue to lie in the face of clear evidence.

I’ll share some of those impressions of the Marie Antoinette-ization of New York City in an upcoming open thread. Like nearly every city and town around the world in this era of financial global elite and corporate plunder, NYC has become an eyesore of new gleaming banks on practically every corner, swaths of monopoly franchises and boutique shopping for the rich. Every day there's not a massive uprising I'm amazed. There won't be, not as long as we expend time and energy getting as many "likes" as we can on our FB pages.

So, what's going on with you?

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:

Reading/Browsing List:

The Zinn Reader, Howard Zinn
"Days of Revolt, Days of Destruction" Chris Hedges
"Last Words" George Carlin (with Tony Hendra)

”Snowed-in” pancakes for breakfast

Trader Joe’s multi-grain pancake mix

Add: sliced banana, ground flaxseed, a few drops of vanilla extract, a dash of cinnamon.

Cook in pan with coconut oil.

Arrange sliced strawberries around the perimeter, lightly sprinkle with confectionary sugar and serve with not more than a tablespoon of pure maple syrup.

Lemongrass Chai Blend

heaping scoop of dried Thai lemongrass
shards of cinnamon bark
a few cardamom pods
a few black peppercorns
A few cloves
fresh chopped ginger