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...

Everything here is picking up pace, and I'm beginning to feel slightly overwhelmed at the reality of becoming a father to yet a second child, at my age and present station. All the preparations are being made, including outfitting the place again for a newborn, making concessions with a lifelong collection of music to accommodate a NYC apartment, focusing more on work and home-related prospects, etc. On top of which are some ailments that have been nagging me for quite some time of which I need to attend.

It's for these reasons that I'm going to have to go on hiatus with my Open Thread. Which also means cutting down my time online. I'll miss both, though I'm certain I'll still be checking in regularly to read, occasionally to post a comment. C99 has become an oasis, but moreover you all have become my online family. It's pretty much the only place I have any interest in going, with Farcebook having solidified itself long ago as the Great Missed Opportunity. There's a kinship here that feels good, and a camaraderie that feels real. To that end, I sincerely hope that someday soon some of us may be able to get together. I intend to participate in helping that to become a reality.

Sometimes when I'm in need of some comfort, when contemplating the often lonely place of feeling an outsider in a world dominated by self-interest/aggrandizement, consumerism, commodification, status and greed, I reach for Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread."

It reminds me that through the ages, and across all borders, creeds, languages, cultures, etc., there remains a central human spirit that I believe resides in all of us. Sometimes it's most accessible in the dead of night, alone in bed, when the universal thread is foremost acknowledged. In the light of day it is more obscured, often completely opaque, while we scurry forth hoping to secure a more favorable position in the capitalist death trap of relentless competing for money.

Millions of human beings have laboured to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves today. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labor to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins.

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.

Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment....

Every machine has had the same history—a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle—all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say—This is mine, not yours?

The Anarchist/Socialist theory recognizes the inhuman, undignified, parasitic nature of capitalism as the core problem.

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger.

The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.

The working people cannot purchase with their wages the wealth which they have produced, and industry seeks foreign markets among the monied classes of other nations. In the East, in Africa, everywhere, in Egypt, Tonkin or the Congo, the European is thus bound to promote the growth of serfdom. And so he does. But soon he finds that everywhere there are similar competitors. All the nations evolve on the same lines, and wars, perpetual wars, break out for the right of precedence in the market. Wars for the possession of the East, wars for the empire of the sea, wars to impose duties on imports and to dictate conditions to neighbouring states; wars against those "blacks" who revolt! The roar of the cannon never ceases in the world, whole races are massacred, the states of Europe spend a third of their budgets in armaments; and we know how heavily these taxes fall on the workers.

Education still remains the privilege of a small minority, for it is idle to talk of education when the workman's child is forced, at the age of thirteen, to go down into the mine or to help his father on the farm. It is idle to talk of studying to the worker, who comes home in the evening wearied by excessive toil, and its brutalizing atmosphere. Society is thus bound to remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions freedom is a vain word. The Radical begins by demanding a greater extension of political rights, but he soon sees that the breath of liberty leads to the uplifting of the proletariat, and then he turns round, changes his opinions, and reverts to repressive legislation and government by the sword.

A vast array of courts, judges, executioners, policemen, and gaolers is needed to uphold these privileges; and this array gives rise in its turn to a whole system of espionage, of false witness, of spies, of threats and corruption.

Such a society is protected by the false veneer of "law and order," when in truth all justice abides a two-tiered system, not unlike medieval times. It's one that immunizes political and financial elites, and the police and military. While those not connected, especially minorities and the poor, feel the Iron Heel of injustice, along with debt slavery to medical payments, bank usury, consumer purchases, college-educated loans, taxation and rising cost of living, pressed hard upon the necks of the 99%.

The system under which we live checks in its turn the growth of the social sentiment. We all know that without uprightness, without self-respect, without sympathy and mutual aid, human kind must perish, as perish the few races of animals living by rapine, or the slave-keeping ants. But such ideas are not to the taste of the ruling classes, and they have elaborated a whole system of pseudo-science to teach the contrary.

Fine sermons have been preached on the text that those who have should share with those who have not, but he who would carry out this principle would be speedily informed that these beautiful sentiments are all very well in poetry, but not in practice. "To lie is to degrade and besmirch oneself," we say, and yet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.

But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth, or cease to exist.

Thus the consequences which spring from the original act of monopoly spread through the whole of social life. Under pain of death, human societies are forced to return to first principles: the means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth.

All things for all. Here is an immense stock of tools and implements; here are all those iron slaves which we call machines, which saw and plane, spin and weave for us, unmaking and remaking, working up raw matter to produce the marvels of our time. But nobody has the right to seize a single one of these machines and say: "This is mine; if you want to use it you must pay me a tax on each of your products," any more than the feudal lord of medieval times had the right to say to the peasant: "This hill, this meadow belong to me, and you must pay me a tax on every sheaf of corn you reap, on every brick you build."

All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!

Was listening to the great, legendary radio station WBAI last week, and the show's host had on an expert on Henry David Thoreau, on whose life she had written a book. I especially was interested because having been an admirer of him I have also been reading more about John Brown. Both Thoreau ("A Plea For Captain John Brown") and Frederick Douglass had written such powerful testaments to his amazing and noble life.

Yet there's a profound sense of bittersweetness to be found in such places, when one contemplates the lives of the most courageous, the visionaries, the truth seekers and such. Especially the loneliness with which one burning with the truth can no doubt ignore, resulting as it does sometimes in the detachment from those often thought to be real friends, who are either lacking in the courage to submit their own consciences to acknowledge their own part in a malignant status quo or insist on a willful ignorance preventing a engagement on a deeper level, intended to absolve those from doing anything about that which you have chosen to align yourself strongly. Thoreau was vilified by the peers of his time for what people in his day thought were taking outlandish stands against taxation and an increasingly commodified way of living. John Brown was vilified by many Abolitionists who quickly sought to disassociate themselves from his "insane" and "desperate" act, except for the few who rose up to speak of his unparalleled selflessness in bringing the cause to its natural collision course conclusion. MLK was despised by the majority of Americans by the time he was speaking out against the capitalist and imperialist notions of the Vietnam War, fed by a spineless media who vilified him for stepping outside of the bounds of the Civil Rights movement for which they were only slightly less uncomfortable.

It goes on and on this way with the great activists, organizers, truth-tellers, socialists and anarchists, whose visionary ideals are embraced more easily often only when a half a century or so has past and they're no longer a threat to the status quo and to the consciences of middle class Americans, who are too easily content with falsity of perceived conveniences and a soft way of life, their souls bought out by access to cheap consumer goods. It's making sure that this history is told which is most important. It can not go down the Memory Hole; it must instead be taught far and wide to buoy the spirits of the next generation of advocates and radicals. Especially as future radicals will also be forced into a beleaguered corner of a world overrun by even more vicious propaganda, designed as it is by the power elites to pit one's self against each other in the quest for ever more money, property, material goods and status in this construct of hierarchy.

Transcendentalism. The Thoreau author mentioned the father of that movement was really Bronson Alcott, the father of Louise Mary Alcott. So I looked him up and downloaded a book of his in the public domain for free onto the iPad, called "Tablets." And the very first chapter, called "Antiquity," begins with this passage:

I never had any desire so strong and so like to covetousness," says Cowley, "as that one which I have had always that I might be master at last of a small house and ample garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there to dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature. Virgil's first wish was to be a wise man, the second to be a good husbandman. But since nature denies to most men the capacity or appetite, and fortune allows but to very few the opportunities or possibility of applying themselves wholly to wisdom, the best mixture of human affairs we can make, are the employments of a country life. It is, as Columella calls it, the nearest neighbor or next in kindred to philosophy. And Varro says the principles of it are the same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature; earth, water, air, and the sun. There is no other sort of life that affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist; the utility of it to a man's self, the usefulness or rather necessity of it to all the rest of mankind, the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity."

This wish of the poet's appears to be nearly universal. Almost every one is drawn to the country, and takes pleasure in rural pursuits. The citizen hopes to become a countryman, and contrives to secure his cottage or villa, unless he fail by some reverse of fortune or of character. 'Tis man's natural position, the Paradise designed for him, and wherein he is placed originally in the Sacred Books of the cultivated peoples; their first man being conceived a gardener and countryman by inspiration as by choice.

Gardens and orchards plant themselves by sympathy about our dwellings, as if their seeds were preserved in us by inheritance. They distinguish Man properly from the forester and hunter. The country, as discriminated from the woods, is of man's creation. The savage has no country. Nor are farms and shops, trade, cities, but civilization in passing and formation. Civilization begins with persons, ideas; the garden and orchard showing the place of their occupants in the scale; these dotting the earth with symbols of civility wherever they ornament its face. Thus by mingling his mind with nature, and so transforming the landscape into his essence, Man generates the homestead, and opens a country to civilization and the arts.

This passage had me longing for a different life. Though if I'm to honor my naturally rebellious spirit, such a welcomed and soothing life of contemplation in harmony with nature could have me restless in no time, wishing to be back on the ramparts, where I feel we're all going to be soon enough. The grass is always greener I suppose.

These days I'll find myself fairly often daydreaming of Intentional Communities, and what it would be like to share a real life community with my kindred spirits here and the activists and truth-seekers I've met in my life already. Resilience and all the more dignified ways of living that are discussed here at C99.

Passing the bookshelf in the living room I reached for the Howard Zinn book "The Twentieth Century, flipping to the chapter "Self-Help in Hard Times." It begins by telling the amazing story of the 1919 General Strike in Seattle in which various unions successfully shut down the entire city, save for a few select services as to not endanger the civilian population but crippling business. A poem was written by someone named Anise, published in a labor paper called "Union Record," about what the city felt like during those few days. It was redolent in spirit of the feeling of community, empathy and compassion Occupy conjured:

What scares them most is
That NOTHING HAPPENS!

They are ready For DISTURBANCES.

They have machine guns

And soldiers,

But this SMILING SILENCE

is uncanny.

The business men

Don't understand

That sort of weapon...

It is your SMILE

That is UPSETTING

Their reliance

On Artillery, brother!

It is the garbage wagons

That go along the street

Marked "EXEMPT

by STRIKE COMMIITED."

It is the milk stations

That are getting better daily,

And the three hundred

WAR Veterans of Labor

Handling the crowds

WITHOUT GUNS,

For these things speak

Of a NEW POWER

And a NEW WORLD

That they do not feel

At HOME in.

It feels like I've been looking for an environment such as these since at least the 5th grade, when I sketched for an assignment my family's house, but with all of my friends and I living in it instead. As a child fun was paramount. As an adult it's a deeper philosophical connection that is most important. But it always has to be fun too. It's that match that I'll always be seeking.

Such contemplations will be abundant in the coming months, as I soon enter yet another phase of life, becoming one part of the four of us.

So, whats going on with you?

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:

"After the Gold Rush"

Reading/Browsing List:
Eduardo Galeano "Upside Down"
Kurt Vonnegut "A Man Without A Country"
Upton Sinclair "The Jungle"
"Neil and Me" Scott Young

Chicken Soup
In a big pot, sauté chopped onions, carrots and celery. Add full chicken to the pot for a 5 minutes or so. Add water, garlic and peppercorns and let simmer for 45 minutes or so. Remove chicken to one pot and drain vegetables to make a broth.

In same pot sauté onions, carrots, and celery until slightly browned. Add ginger, garlic, mushrooms, and peas. Add broth and cut-up chicken. Near the end, add generous handfuls of dill and parsley.

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