Open Sesame 04/30/16

Plants, they have decided they would prefer not to, there with the climate change. And so, they are slowing it down.

The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries. It is called "Greening of the Earth and its Drivers," and it is based on data from the Modis and AVHRR instruments which have been carried on American satellites over the past 33 years. The sensors show significant greening of something between 25% and 50% of the Earth's vegetated land, which in turn is slowing the pace of climate change as the plants are drawing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Just 4% of vegetated land has suffered from plant loss.

This is in line with the Gaia [hypo]thesis promoted by the maverick scientist James Lovelock who proposed that the atmosphere, rocks, seas and plants work together as a self-regulating organism.

It is really rather odd, how Lynn Margulis, she has become an unperson. Margulis, together with Lovelock, they developed the Gaia hypothesis. But Margulis, she has since pretty much disappeared from the Gaia discourse. These days, it is Lovelock only.

I suppose this is just another manifestation of The Hairball Effect. In which women are creatures of duality: they are either shit, or penis receptacles. That's it. And visionaries? C'mon. No way. No way at all.

Trust that creepy, sinister vampire, the unholy onanist Zed Crud, to find star_trek_tee_alien_0234-200x185_0.jpghimself a woman who is even more of a maniac than The Mad Bomber.

That would be Star Trek Head. Whom Crud says shall be his vice-president—if there happens to be something like a cataclysmic pole shift, and Crud thus becomes the president.

Michael Dukakis, last seen denouncing American foreign policy as dumbkopf-driven, he describes the Crud selection of Star Trek Head as "incomprehensible."

"Is there anybody in the United States that thinks Star Trek Head would be a first-rate president? I don't think so. Maybe there are five people that do," he said.

"I don't know of anything that qualifies Star Trek Head to be President of the United States, frankly. She's hardly had a distinguished career in business. She had a lot of problems. With all of the great women we have in this country, why would you go to Star Trek Head?"

Actually, Star Trek Head, she is not even a woman. As anyone who has watched the true-life documentary series Star Trek well knows, Star Trek Head is in truth but a fearsome projection, and of a chubby little eight-year-old boy. Clint Howard. Brother of Ron Howard. Who was Opie in The Andy Griffith Show. And there became so terrified, that Barney Fife, he was allowed to handle a gun, even with just the one bullet, that Fife had to keep in his pocket, not in the gun, that all of Howard's hair, it fell out. After which, They, felt Sorry for him. And so allowed him to become a film director. In which trade he has since proceeded to melt all of our minds. With absolute drivel like Grand Theft Auto, Ransom, and Rush.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SycxTpgVFk0]

Eight people were shot to death in rural Ohio, the perpetrators are as of this writing unapprehended, and the Barney Fife of a local sheriff, he says, "if you are fearful, arm yourself."

Right. That is just what the world needs. More people, in fear. And with guns.

These, they are the people of The Hairball.

Dave Duringer is a Laguna Hills attorney with a concealed weapons permit. He shouldered a "Don't Tread On Me" flag at the rally, wore a bulletproof vest and said he carried pepper spray as well as two pistols.

Duringer said the previous week he attended a Costa Mesa Hairball rally visited by gang members. "Given what happened, I think it is important to remind people how hot things can get because Herr Hairball is seeking real change. Gang bangers need to be warned, and ralliers need to be prepared."

The Hairball, he lost himself a voter, when Jakob Wagner, the kid who shot up the Wisconsin prom, he was dispatched unto the big sleep, by responding police officers.

"He was bullied a lot," said Emily Fisher, 19, who graduated from Antigo High School in 2015.

Fisher said students ganged up on Wagner, called him names and may have been violent toward him, in part because of poor hygiene. The bullying occurred since at least middle school and persisted through high school, although to a lesser degree, Fisher said.

Fisher said she was not good friends with Wagner, but that she had given him some car rides home. They also were in the same art class during their senior year of high school.

Wagner would talk about guns and weapons, and made replicas of them in art class, according to Fisher. While she said an interest in guns is not unusual in Wisconsin, which has a strong hunting culture, Wagner's behavior was concerning to her.

"Ever since we were younger, he was one of the kids you kind of watched out for," Fisher said in a phone conversation from Menomonie, where she now lives. "If someone was going to shoot the school, we thought it was going to be him."

Right. "Who would have thought?" Until it happens. And then, it develops, that just about everybody. Thought.

As they just stood aside. And watched. The bullying. For years and years and years. And then the careful crafting, of the replicas. Of the guns.

how would you feel
if the world was falling apart all around you
pieces of the sky were falling
in your neighbor's yard
but not on you

wouldn't you feel just a little bit funny
think maybe there's something
you ought to do

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOg8pY9G1AI]

Plants, they do not have guns. But they do have prions. And with these, they do not, as do the humans, get Mad Cow Disease. Instead, with prions, the plants form memories.

Lindquist's team already knew that yeasts use prions as a form of memory, and suspected that plants might too. Unlike in Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human equivalent of BSE or "mad cow disease," where prions multiply in the human brain with terrible consequences, prions in yeast are beneficial. They can help the organism use different nutrients and grow in new places.

Crucially, this ability persists over generations. "It could be a state that only lasts for 50 generations, or it could last for thousands and thousands of generations," says Lindquist.

The team applied techniques developed for 1461887740834_0.jpgfinding prions in yeast to Arabidopsis thaliana, a flowering mustard plant. Their method involves using specialised algorithms to search the full complement of proteins expressed by the plant. The researchers found four proteins involved in flowering that had portions that resembled prion-specific sequences in yeast. Next, the team replaced the prions in yeast cells with the prion-like protein sequences from Arabidopsis, and confirmed that the three of the four plant protein fragments did indeed behave like prions.

Or so, the Science Men, they think. About the prions, and the memory part. Refreshingly, one Science Man, he admits, that the Science Men, they, still, really don't Know.

"We don't know what it's actually doing in the plant. So we are trying to be cautious."

A more benign form of Mad Cow Disease, in the humans, it doesn't actually kill them. Instead, it causes the white people, to get tattoos, on their foreheads.

I have had to learn a fair amount about tattoos. Because many of the clients, they have them. And the police, the prosecutors, and/or the probation officers, they recurrently claim these tattoos, they are sinister—beacons of bad behaviors, that mandate these clients go to the prison. And so, I must needs assert, that this is not so.

Occasionally, I will run across a tattoo that stumps me. Like this one meth person, who had, on his back, a tattoo that read: "Heel Your Bitch."

What, I asked him, is that about?

He looked at me like I was bone-ignorant. "You know," he said, exasperated, "heel your bitch. Like, sometimes, you'll be walking, and your bitch, she'll try to walk right up next to you? Instead of behind you? Which is where the bitch belongs? Then, you need to heel your bitch."

Oh. Okay.

This fellow, he had been convicted of several crimes. Which it was my task to "mitigate." When I quizzed him about these crimes, it developed that, according to him, they were all the fault of some bitch or other.

He went to the prison. But not for long. Soon he was out, and then leading the police on a merry high-speed car chase, after which he ditched the car, and disappeared into the woods. That was the last I heard of him. Until I saw, in a tube, just the other day, that, at last, he has found his true calling. He is now the Northern California co-chair, of The Hairball For President campaign.

So I am reading this book. And it is called The Incredible Book Of Useless Information. And I realize, that the title, it is a Lie. Because the book, it says that "one-half of the human body's weight is oxygen."

And I am remembering about the obese humans, about how they now constitute one of every eight of the humans on the planet, a number which shall become one in five in 2025, and thus, by the Laws of Math, by the end of the century, every human on this earth, shall need to wheel around in a fat-cart.

And I am thinking that, if the obese humans, they each lost, oh, say, 100 pounds, that would mean 50 pounds, from each human, of oxygen, would be released back into the atmosphere. Since half a human's weight, is oxygen. And this oxygen, released from the slimming obese people, it would combine with the oxygen, that the plants are pumping out, as related at the dawn of this piece, above; and so, working together, the plants, and the people, of this here Gaia, they could really retard, climate change!

Gaia! By, gumby! See! She shall surmount this thing! Just like Lynn Margulis. She said!

The probation officers, they periodically go to these special edgar_allan_poe_and_the_raven_by_pakstrax-d5julbg.jpgschools and seminars and classes, where they learn new ways to put the clients in the prison.

A number of years ago, the probation officers, there in their reports, they suddenly started identifying the clients as "sociopaths," and/or "psychopaths." And therefore recommending that the clients, they definitely, needed to be put in the prison.

We knew, then, that the special schools and the seminars and the classes, they had instructed the probation officers, to begin so reporting. And thus it was my task to, as Edgar Allan Poe would say, ride, boldly, ride, to learn about, this sociopath and psychopath business.

What I learned, was that such humans—"sociopaths," "psychopaths"—they are actually exceedingly rare. There are almost none of them on this planet. The usual person, they can live their whole life, without encountering one. This is set forth, for instance, for mass consumption, in the true-life documentary film, Girl, Interrupted.

But oh no. In the years since, the sociopaths, and the psychopaths, they have gotten loose, from the probation officers, and they are now running utterly wild, all over the land. Every time one opens a tube, these days, some new great swath of humans, has been definitively classified as sociopath, or psychopath. CEOs. Politicos. Tubes people. Your boss. Your neighbor. Your cat. You.

I remember, years ago, a woman on Daily Kos, who used to haunt the Criminal Injustice diaries; she had read some living-in-fear tome that shrieked that one in every ten humans is a sociopath. And thus, this woman, she was firmly convinced, that all of the people in the prisons, they needed to be there. Else they might, some night, come, and sociopath her, there in her bed.

Now, today, the sociopath/psychopath, living-in-fear, it has spread, from fearing the prisoners. To fearing all, and every.

This sociopath/psychopath bollocks, it is just another Science Man fad. Which, in the course of things, shall inevitably recede. Into something resembling sanity. Like the Science Man fad, that the earth is flat. That maggots, they spontaneously leap forth, from meat. That, using mirrors, it is possible to write on the moon. That the "four humours," they are the fount of all Medicine. That "bleeding," it is the root of all healing. That the surface of the sun, it is cool, and is inhabited by aliens, with really enormous heads. That all women, they suffer from "penis envy." That black people, they are all dumber than monkeys, and should therefore be sterilized. That animals, they do not feel pain, and so it is a-okay to vivisect them, and all the live-long day, and well into the night. That human infants, they, too, do not feel pain, and so it is alright, to rip off parts of the penis, from the male ones, shortly after birth, and without anesthesia. That there are no other planets, in all the universe, but this one. That it is not possible, for consciousness, to travel faster than the speed of light. And that there is no life, anywhere at all, in all the universe(s), except on a modest little soundstage, tucked away, behind the palms, in Burbank, California.

And that it is an easy thing, to triumph, in the summer's sun, and in the vintage, and to sing on the wagon, loaded with corn; that it is an easy thing, to talk of patience to the afflicted, to speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer, to listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season, when the red blood is filled with wine, and with the marrow of lambs; that it is an easy thing, to laugh at wrathful elements, to hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan, to see a god on every wind, and a blessing on every blast, to hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm, that destroys our enemies' house, to rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children, while our olive and vine sing and laugh 'round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers; then the groan and the dolor are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill, and the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field, when the shattered bone hath laid him, groaning, among the happier dead; that it is an easy thing, to rejoice in the tents of prosperity; thus, could I sing; and thus, rejoice; but it is not so, with me.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-97XNCyAm5c]

In the meantime. We shall endure. Bollocks like this. That creative people, they are psychopaths.

Researchers at De La Salle University in Manila believe that psychopathic traits might actually be key to creativity.

The researchers, who examined 503 participants with gambling tasks and questionnaires, believe that impulsive risk-taking—a psychopathic trait—might be key to creative people's success.

The researchers said, "We argue that emotional disinhibition, in the form of psychopathic boldness, is actually integral to some creative personalities and functionally related to the creative process.

"Generally then, a creative field might not just shape a person into a more arrogant or dishonest personality, it might be actively selecting them, not for the sake of having disagreeable traits, but because such traits meaningfully co-vary with creativity itself."

This should certainly be heartening news for the Russian government. Which is fed up with Artyom Loskutov. Maybe, now, with this, the Science Men determining all the creative people, they are psychopaths, there is, at last, Reason, to shove Loskutov, into the psychiatric hospital. Like in the Old Days.

A creative person, a performance artist, Loskutov is today completely against the law in Russia. His very person, it is a violation.

Because, beginning in 2004, he inaugurated, in the Russian-occupied Siberian city of Novosibirsk, a May Day "Monstration," to mock, in absurdist terms, the clinically insane May Day parades, of Thanatos weaponry, through Moscow's Red Square.

Because everyone knows these government parades are both stupid and insane, Loskutov's annual Novosibirik Monstrations, they have, each year, attracted ever-more adherents.

But then Luskotov moved to the big no-no. Suggesting—politely, absurdly—that the Russians, maybe should get their occupying asses, the hell and gone, out of Siberia.

Loskutov has, in the years since, been eternally recurring in and out of various Russian pokeys. He is a man who information_items_1585.jpgawakes, each day, not knowing if this is the day that the occupiers will, again, take him away. For uttering such perfectly reasonable and sane remarks as, in the wake of Russia's reabsorption of Crimea, "they decided to tell us how great it is when some republic moves for self-determination. Okay, well let's apply this to other regions. Can Siberia allow itself this same rhetoric? It turns out it can't."

He has also faced the big house for selling Pussy Riot t-shirts, and placing icons of the then-imprisoned musicians out and about. Said icons, which equated the Pussy Rioters with the Virgin Mary, foamingly condemned, by the 10th Century Orthodox Church longbeards, who have brutally raped their way, with serene government approval, into every orifice of Russian life, as "desecrating venerated symbols."

Loskutov's planned August 2014 Monstration, which was intended to, again, publicly raise the smoke-signal of a Siberian Republic, was not only disallowed, but Russian authorities threatened to kick the BBC right out of the country, if it reported on it. The Russian government then further told the BBC to bung down the memory hole an interview with Loskutov. While meanwhile heaving into the hoosegow domestic Russian journalists who had spoken to Loskutov.

The Russian propaganda portal Sputnik News was in this melee deployed to try to subsume the BBC crisis, claiming Luskotov had emitted to the BBC words "which contained extremist views and calls for mass riots."

This was simply a lie. But then the nature and purpose of Sputnik, it is to lie. Sputnik, it is run by the babbling 12th Century baboon Dmitry Kiselyov. Who believes gay people who die in car accidents should have their hearts and other internal organs burned or buried, so as not to be inadvertently transplanted into The Normal People; that in the libertine homo-overrun Sweden "at age 12 there is already child impotency"; and that a 22 year-old murdered Russian, in coming out as gay, "provoked" his own slaying.

Knowing all this, President Vladmir Putin in December 2013 nonetheless personally appointed Kiselyov to head the 2300-person news agency Rossiya Segodnya, which includes Sputnik.

Yeehaw.

Loskutov is these days meanwhile still regularly revolving in and out of the prisons. He was last in the cooler in May 2015. His crime then was "an estimated 5,000 monstrators chanting nonsensical slogans and wearing bizarre brightly coloured costumes."

Loskutov is, in his place, in his time, so complete, so powerful, so right, that "[i]n 2013, Loskutov was informed by Russian authorities that he is no longer allowed to practice art and to perform as an individual artist."

No longer allowed to practice art and to perform as an individual artist.

He is, to them, that scary.

No longer allowed to practice art and to perform as an individual artist.

People, here, in these United States, they sure can talk tough. Let them, really, be tough. Let them be someone

No longer allowed to practice art and to perform as an individual artist.

The 2016 Novosibirsk Monstration, it was initially debarred, on the grounds that it would "pose a threat to public order and safety of citizens, generally accepted norms of morality, and religious values ​​of the Orthodox inhabitants of the city."

The Russian Orthodox longbeards, swinging their incense-reeking mircopeni, nauseatingly to and fro, again.

But then it was determined—once Loskutov had removed his name as one of the three petitioners for the Monstration; he is a non-person, don't you know—that the inside the crowd.jpgMonstrators, they would be permitted to march, but only wholly enveloped in the ranks of the newly-created, by the government, Vseshestvie, a pathetic cohort that attempts to co-opt Monstration, consisting of a "fresh look at May Day," where, like, the region's Young People, they can, you know, "go it alone, or the crowd in suits or without, with streamers, balloons and all that comes to mind."

What the government, it has here created, with its Vseshestive, is the equivalent of Spiro Agnew, in 1970, marching in an anti-Vietnam war demonstration, shyly flashing the peace sign, and chanting, every now and again, "right on."

It doesn't matter. The Monstrators, they are already triumphant. They have won. Already happened. The Russian government, it is over. Like all of the governments. There are, today, May Day Monstrations, in more than 20 Russian cities. Where the people bear signs, reading sentiments like "You Can't Paint The Seals In Purple." "Peace! Work! Meow!" "We Have The Right To Call An Avocado." "It's All Because Of Old Spice." "Forward To The Dark Past." "I Carnivaled This City." And "We Did Not Watch Fifty Shades."

These, are my people.

I remember, many years ago, the white people, there on Daily Kos, furiously arguing, over days and days, about whether it was the socialists, or the communists, or the anarchists, or the mainline union people, who first came up with the May Day labor holiday.

And I was like: who gives a shit? Whoever they were, they were totally Wrong. And should go in the corner, and sit there, under the duncecap. Because, May Day, it is not about some horror and anathema and mind- and soul-killing death-breath like working. May Day, and for millennia, it has been about fucking.

Details, they vary. In some places, particularly in the Celtic realm, this day was known as Beltane. Sometimes a woman and a man, recognized as particularly sympathetic to or skilled in the magic arts, would, representing the goddess and god themselves, couple in a ritualized ceremony, either observed or alone, and most often in a freshly seeded field.

Very often, "[y]oung couples were encouraged to test their fertility with Beltane trysts, and any babies born from Beltane were believed to be blessed by the Goddess herself." Pretty magical. Such witch children.

The traditional maypole, this represents the phallus, and the ribbons adorning it, they denote the labia. Christians, when they came to infect the world, they knew this, which is why they worked like twelve bastards, to get rid of the things. The medieval church tumblr_lm1k3iUAkE1qcfftgo1_500.jpgtried to rename Beltane, calling it Roodmas, and urging people to shift their focus from the maypole to the cross. Didn't work out too well. Nobody, today, knows what the hell is a Roodmas. While everyone knows, what is a maypole.

When Protestants, they invented themselves—because Luther, he wanted to kill more Jews, and Henry, he wanted a different-one wife—May Day, it filled them with fury. "Men doe use commonly to runne into woodes in the night time, amongst maidens, to set bowes, in so muche, as I have hearde of tenne maidens whiche went to set May, and nine of them came home with childe,” grumped one Puritan. Another complained that, of the girls who go into the woods, “not the least one of them comes home again a virgin.”

Where they could, Puritan-type people commenced a crackdown—declaring maypoles illegal, dousing the traditional bonfires, stomping on those fetching and flirty garlands of flowers, wading in to put a stop to all that dancing, posting dour guards, to prevent any persons, with throbbing loins, from sneaking into the woods or the fields.

Such suppression is the reason why relatively little is really known about this day, and its once and future meanings and ceremonies. People had to keep quiet about it. For a long time. But the spirit remembers. And so does the body.

As it is written, "ancient peoples believed in sympathetic magic: that practice of a small, symbolic action representing a larger one. By making love in the fields, human beings believed they were helping make the earth more fertile, blessing it with their own activity of producing new life and abundance."

For many centuries, Science Men scoffed at such notions. Human beings, fucking in a field: they couldn't possibly have any effect on any crops planted therein! What dunces, those idjits were!

Except, even the Science Men, they just aren't so sure, about that, anymore. As Robert Anton Wilson observed:

Marcel Vogel has been studying plant consciousness and vegetative "telepathy" for ten years now. In one experiment, Vogel and a group of psychologists tried concentrating on sexual imagery while a plant was wired up with a polygraph to reveal its electrochemical ("emotional"?) responses to their thoughts. The plant responded with the polygraph pattern typical of excitement. Vogel speculates that talking of sex could stir up in the atmosphere some sort of sexual energy, such as the "orgone" claimed by Dr. William Reich. If this is true, the ancient fertility rites in which humans had sexual intercourse in freshly seeded fields might indeed have stimulated the fertility of the crops, and the shamans are not as naive as we like to think.

"Well," as a lover once murmured to me, as we lay, conjoined, in a freshly furrowed field, one fine May Day, doing our best, our part, for and of and with and from and being, Gaia, "what do you know."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0sd8lML-S8]

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featheredsprite's picture

tomorrow to wish you a happy May Day. Alas, I have no furrowed fields but I might be tempted to lie down in the flower beds and think dirty thoughts. Smile

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Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.

hecate's picture

Dirty thoughts. Gaia spins round, on those, too. ; )

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riverlover's picture

Depending on air temp, I can go sit in my yard and hear the green things surfacing, making popping noises through the leaves. Between rain drops down.

Morel harvest of my closest patch today, first food product from my woods. I can think dirty thoughts, plucking those expanding black masses from the earth. Wink

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

hecate's picture

admittedly having "black masses," and these drawn from the earth. Don't let the longbeard incense-swingers in on this. They will put you in the pokey. ; 0

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The Empire Doesn't Care Who You Vote For from The Corbett Report (not to be confused with the Colbert Report). The guest is essayist and libertarian Dan Sanchez. He explains why elections rarely result in changes in government policy, especially foreign policy, and what it really takes for the people to force the government to change course. Lots of food for thought.

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hecate's picture

of balding babblers, fulsomely fellating Hayek. Not, at all, my bag. I would prefer, with those same twenty-some minutes, to go somewhere—yer mileage, it may, of course, & always, vary—like, mebbe, here:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eZsNPlifSQ]

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enhydra lutris's picture

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

hecate's picture

to say, to a person.

Let's go, you and I, together, to Franklin's Tower.

And, there, roll away, all the dew.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwaLHp8_fY8]

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Citizen Of Earth's picture

25 minutes with Jerry and the Boys is always time well spent.

Strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hands.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

gulfgal98's picture

of our hecate!!! Good

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Bisbonian's picture

yes.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

LeChienHarry's picture

where all over Western Europe. In one more or less Pagan place, Autun in France, it was most recently in high hills East of Vichy the seat of the Resistance. But before that, and before Medieval and Dark Ages was Roman. But how did those Romans take over so fast? Did Caesar build roads in a day? No. The Celts/Gauls built roads on Solstice lines and angles Discovery of Middle Earth, Graham Robb

A treasure hunt that uncovers the secrets of one of the world’s great civilizations, revealing dramatic proof of the extreme sophistication of the Celts, and their creation of the earliest accurate map of the world.

Fifty generations ago the cultural empire of the Celts stretched from the Black Sea to Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. In six hundred years, the Celts had produced some of the finest artistic and scientific masterpieces of the ancient world. In 58 BC, Julius Caesar marched over the Alps, bringing slavery and genocide to western Europe. Within eight years the Celts of what is now France were utterly annihilated, and in another hundred years the Romans had overrun Britain. It is astonishing how little remains of this great civilization.
While planning a bicycling trip along the Heraklean Way, the ancient route from Portugal to the Alps, Graham Robb discovered a door to that forgotten world―a beautiful and precise pattern of towns and holy places based on astronomical and geometrical measurements: this was the three-dimensional “Middle Earth” of the Celts. As coordinates and coincidences revealed themselves across the continent, a map of the Celtic world emerged as a miraculously preserved archival document.

Robb―“one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet” (New York Times)―here reveals the ancient secrets of the Celts, demonstrates the lasting influence of Druid science, and recharts the exploration of the world and the spread of Christianity. A pioneering history grounded in a real-life historical treasure hunt, The Discovery of Middle Earth offers nothing less than an entirely new understanding of the birth of modern Europe.
50 illustrations

Then there's Lynn Margulis. She said something to the effect that studying and writing about anything more recent than 3 million years in evolutionary history brought more and more politics and fights the closer in time to today. She died November, 2011.

We had dinner with Paul Ewald author of the "laymans" book on the evolution of infectious disease "Plague Time" and acquaintance of Lynn Margulis. His ideas that microbes and environment play larger roles in human disease than genetics and that we have the funding going disproportionately to genetics is interesting and possibly prescient.

The study of L. Borreliosis and co-infections (known disparagingly in the US as Lyme Disease) has led us down many paths.

Beltane in the heart of Bourgogne (Burgundy). We need to find out where those bonfires will be.

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You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again you did not know. ~ William Wiberforce

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riverlover's picture

whose first marriage to Carl Sagan may have been a fruitful relationship for each of them intellectually.

At least in the US it wasn't named Connecticut fever.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

hecate's picture

on her marriages: "I quit my job as a wife twice. It is not humanly possible to be a good wife, a good mother, and a first-class scientist. No one can do it—something has to go."

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Leema's picture

I had (and still have years later, although now under control with pulsing antibiotics) borreliosis (although it is called Lyme disease here...thereby downplaying its infectious nature) Some years back, knowing that Lynn had dealt with non pathogenic spirochetes, I contacted her by email asking if she might do some research with borrelia. She responded by email with interest. Following that brief interchange I noted that she did do some work on Borrelia and round bodies. I like to think I had something to with that...but it might have just been coincidence. Smile

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When wealth rules, democracy dies.

Gerrit's picture

And for the music. Sunny day in SE Ontario, cool breeze. It all goes down well with my morning coffee while I watch the regular birds at the feeder outside the window. And the rainbow streamers we hung on all the trees and shrubs in the front yard to welcome our two daughters now home to live with us. Enjoy your day, folks,

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3D+: developing language for postmodern spirituality.

NCTim's picture

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The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -

hecate's picture

beautiful. Thank you.

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Gerrit's picture

Have a great day, mate,

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enhydra lutris's picture

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

ChemBob's picture

But I'm so dopey and in so much pain from my shoulder surgery, shoulder replacement actually, that my attention span is quite low at the moment. I hope I remember to come back to it when I'm less whatever I am right at the moment.

I am sentient enough currently to know that I should thank you for posting here like you are.

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Martha Pearce-Smith's picture

holding good thoughts for your speedy, and uncomplicated recovery... ((((gentle hug))))

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Bisbonian's picture

the Farmers Market (outside our front door every Saturday) will be doing the Maypole this morning. If so, I will get pictures.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

hecate's picture

if, there, the dead can dance. As the maypole, spins.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f4U-EA2uuI]

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Gerrit's picture

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Bisbonian's picture

I was stuck in Dallas. Scheduling snafu.

I have video from a couple years ago, but I would have to edit it, make it into a YouTube, go through all the rigamarole. And I've got work to do...so maybe later.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

hecate's picture

that all the airports in Texas, they are Closed?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0s38kCAEo]

Fly it home. Land. Walk away. Write.

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NCTim's picture

The missle is loaded for the parade.

Plant protein -> So I started using an organic amino acid fertilizer once a month. The plant response is easily discernible.

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The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -

hecate's picture

the Soviets, they simply had to go, based solely, on that shiveringly embarrassing, parade.

More. Ready. For. May Day.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmvQH1OoqLM]

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Lookout's picture

We had our own version of Barney here in the third world state. He pulled over a car with out of state plates. After getting his driver's license he asked,"Where are you from?" "Chicago", replied the driver. "Heh", said the Barney character thinking he really had him "Then why are you running them Illinois plates?"

Geography wasn't his forte. When someone told him they were going to Germany, he asked, "You ain't going to drive are you?" Quality police here in the south you know.

I don't know if plants sense our thoughts, but I do know being around green growing living things improves my thoughts.

Have a great Beltane Hecate! I'll leave you with a poor picture of the giant where we encountered a crowd heading up to have a drink in the willy. A equinox ritual rather than Beltane.

the giant.jpg

crowd at the giant.jpg

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

hecate's picture

not only sense our thoughts, they think, feel, and learn. They scream in pain, knowing they are dying, when they are ripped from the earth. Which is why it amuses me. The vegetarians. The vegans. Thinking, they are infliciting less pain, than meat-eaters. They are not. The truth of this world, it is this:

The Creator is a cruel god who made a world in which nothing can live but by destroying life through the killing of other living beings. Thus, no being can exist except by devouring other forms of life, whether vegetable or animal, and this is one of the fundamental aspects of created nature. Life in the world, both animal and human, is nothing but an interminable slaughter. To exist means to eat and to be eaten. All living beings feed on other beings and themselves become food for other beings in an ecological cycle. This is why the Creator himself defines his nature as devouring and devoured. "I am the food, food, food, and I am the eater, eater, eater . . . from food are born living beings. Those who are on the Earth live only by food and become themselves food in the end." (Taittiriya Upanishad, III, 2 and 10, 6.)

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Gerrit's picture

have no choice in this carbon mode of existence but to slaughter other sentient beings in order to eat.

First, as to the follies of vegeterians, they are Legion :=) I know, I've committed most of them these past 25 years.
Vegetarian hunter_0.jpg
The reason we vegetarians eat a mostly plant-based diet is not because we are "holier-than-thou," but because we choose to eat as low on the carbon range of sentience as we possibly can. In order to inflict less torture and slaughter than we would otherwise.

We're not saying that plant sentience is of a lesser "quality" than animal sentience. Or of less worth. We say that, from our limited, limited, human perspective, we try to slaughter food that is further away in the range of sentience in this carbon mode of existence.

We slaughter and eat plant food with as much conscious attention and from out of as much gratitude as we can muster. For we also understand, and very much sense, that the plants and us are in a symbiotic relationship, that we together inter-exist, co-be, that we inter-be before, during, and after the slaughter and consumption. When we slaughter and eat plants, or animals, we slaughter and eat ourselves-in-the-universe.

Oh my, look how far I've gone already. Best wishes, enjoy your day :=)

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hecate's picture

judgement—that plants are "low[er] on the carbon range of sentience"—that I do not believe that humans, are awake enough, to truly, fully, accurately, appreciate.

There is a grape hyacinth, out there, right now, that I planted, too late, in February, and it is, now, here in April, awake and alive, having pushed through the earth, and now, it is so proud, and so happy, as it prepares to flower.

And I cannot say. That it is any less awake and alive. Than am I.

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Gerrit's picture

any hierarchy at all. The meaning is more one of further and nearer, not of hierarchy or quality or such. There is no hierarchical difference between human and hyacinth at all: we are modes of being within the matrix, we inter-be, as Thich Nhat Hanh explains. We vegetarians try to eat further away within the matrix of interbeing. But there is no qualitative difference of existence and sentience between being/eating animal or plant.

And we ourselves are not conscious enough to say anything declarative, we can speak only in provisional, open-to-correction, open-to-change, open-to-wider meanings, words and sentences.

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hecate's picture

it is superior to me. Because it is Young.

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shaharazade's picture

judgement? A form of psychosis about something or another that science man will find a category for and then diagnose you as a Narcissus. They will be wrong as the genus Hyacinthus is about jealousy and cutting down youth. Zephyr killed a handsome young Greek training to be a discus thrower called Hyakinthos

Zephyr, who was the god of the west wind, was overwhelmed with jealousy and he blew the discus back. It struck Hyakinthos on the head and killed him. From his blood grew a flower, which the sun god Apollo named after him.

As for narcissist's they have a completely different complex or psychosis. They are named after some Greek youth that was more interested in gazing at his image of youthful beauty then in throwing a discus or competing in sports.

How do you measure the little Hyacinthoides's life span? It's a perennial bulb that has been around forever.

The word 'Hyacinth' has also surfaced in an ancient language (called 'Thracopelasgian') which was spoken 4,000 years ago.

The wild Hyacinth is a native of Turkey and the Middle East, along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Hyacinths were grown in Europe in the time of the Greeks and Romans. Both Homer and Virgil noted its sweet fragrance.

After this, the Hyacinth faded from history and did not reappear until the 16th century when it was reintroduced into Western Europe from Turkey and Iran.

So your hyacinth plant's may be young this spring season as they folic and bloom every spring but the bulbs could be centuries old.

I have wild grape hyacinths that come up every year. They were planted, according to my 92 year old neighbor in 1910, or thereabout by the same mad gardener that planted ivy around the base of the lilac tree/bush. It was a left over Victorian fad to unleash ivy to prey on and eventually strangle the lilac tree which was in my back yard. The nasty toxic ivy roots stretched across the entire back yard like itchy living electrical cords. In order to get the ivy out I had to take out the lilac tree bush as they had planted the ivy in the roots of the lilac.

When I was tripping in my youth the only bad trip I had was looking at what humans had done to the plants, trees and bushes where I was waking. They had tortured them into shapes they thought were an aesthetic improvement on nature.

At least when growing annual vegetables to devour we don't eat them until they produce then we eat the fruit of their wombs. Well, lettuce or some greens we just uproot and eat the whole damn plant. The roots crops are most painful to harvest as you yank them right up out of the dirt which is their existence. Carrots do scream. I've never heard beets scream but I'm sure they do.

I had a tree I tortured. I planted a tiny young lace leaf Japanese maple in a pot to try my hand at bonsai. I placed in my cement patio/driveway. It was there for 5 years and one day I decided to move it. The 4 ft.? tap root had grown through the clay pot and through the old cement. It screamed when I tried to move it. I knew that i had to somehow release it from my foot binding torture. I busted up the pot and the old cement and got as much of the root as could and planted it in my front yard. It was so happy it quivered with glee. 12 years later it's a gorgeous big tree that is up to the porch roof and is still reveling in it's roots being released. I trim it sparingly and let it rip. I hear it singing.

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hecate's picture

such a bold and feisty wench. With what Extreme Powers, does shah possess and manifest, to manage to remain with you? ; )

There is no ageism. There is simply Fact. I am a male, over 45, by a pretty good margin, and, so, my teeth are going, my head-hair is graying, as meanwhile mutant hairs are disgustingly sprouting from ears and noseholes, while the pee, it is starting to do the dribbling, and the sleep, it is long over, etc., etc.

Until the 20th Century, humans did not mostly live, past 35. That's just the way it was. It's nice, for me, to still be here. As I finally approach something like maybe crawling towards being wise. Even as the corporeal container, it is falling apart. But that doesn't mean that I don't recognize, that a sprouting shoot of grape hyacinth, this is, now, more that plant's world, than mine.

And, I know, that the grape hyacinth, now that it has bloomed, even through my neglect, and my abuse, it will continue, each year, to bloom, forever and ever, as long as doltish nimrods, they don't come through, with the goddam lawnmowers. That is why I planted it. To be here. When I'm gone. Because I am nothing. Just a wink and a flash. And then back again. Let us: hope. To the great wide open.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXc3Y4IOOCA]

And you are a Right person. Because you understood about the bonsai. And freed it. And now hear it. Singing.

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Shahryar's picture

oo-ee! (I say to her)

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shaharazade's picture

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Miep's picture

I planted some grape hyacinths here maybe eight years ago, under the pomegranate, and they reliably come up and flower every year. I don't much water them or the pomegranate either, they both tough it out here in the desert.

I didn't know that about their history. Thank you.

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Stay on track. Stay in lane. Don't throw rocks.

Gerrit's picture

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Miep's picture

They're way ahead of us.

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Stay on track. Stay in lane. Don't throw rocks.

A goodly number of traditional religions incorporate reincarnation or transmigration of souls. Who are we to be certain that is wrong?

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Euterpe2

Gerrit's picture

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Miep's picture

Plants communicate with a quite sophisticated language. It's made out of chemicals. Also mycelium are involved with this.

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riverlover's picture

as opposed to a red lab (you can figure that one out, but most of my red things were cellular), we had a joke about the PLF. Plant Liberation Front: "Save us from the herbivores!!!!!!". I hear plants screaming or cheering all the time, until winter.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

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Don't be left out in the cold on this one, they are disappearing fast.

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21st Century America: The distracted, superficail perception of a virtual reality.

Miep's picture

Are you hiring?

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Stay on track. Stay in lane. Don't throw rocks.

I keep looking for a hedge fund manager in my lineage who might not be feeling too well.

But alas, seems my family tree blew it's wad circa 1066.

Still, it's worth the effort to encourage friends, family and neighbors to plant trees anywhere they have available dirt.

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21st Century America: The distracted, superficail perception of a virtual reality.

gulfgal98's picture

Beautiful writing, hecate. I am watching spring here with most of the azaleas nearly finished but the rhododendrons are just coming into their glory. Beautiful day, this day before the first of May, but rain is coming later today and probably tomorrow. It is hard to believe, but we need it here even though we are one of the wettest counties outside the Pacific Northwest.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

hecate's picture

I think there should always be, at least a little bit, of rain.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G89Qxv2LO0s]

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Martha Pearce-Smith's picture

Naomi Klein and special guest Keith Stewart from Greenpeace Canada are holding a facebook live chat at 6.30pm ET. They will be discussing the upcoming launch of the Break Free from fossil fuels campaign.

Join via https://t.co/H97s6UFTT5

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Miep's picture

I've seen arguments that just restoring grasslands would help a lot in restoring carbon balance, if done in a large enough scale. It's inescapable that the people most effective at doing this are vegetative. Just get out of their way and let them do their thing.

I really doubt anybody can predict anything too precisely about climate change except short term. There is only one consistent parameter, which is a corollary of Murphy's law: climate disruption aspects will worsen faster than expected, even if you take this law into account.

I've also seen research suggesting that the plants who adapt to increase CO2 most effectively are "weed species," meaning plants whose evolution has not been heavily interfered with by humans, the more adaptable plants who already have wider ranges and the ability to survive on their own without human assistance. That's not a bad thing in an absolute sense, but it does not bode particularly well for agriculture.

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poet

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Euterpe2

Miep's picture

As a person who has no conscience about any other living creature other than him or herself. "This is all here for me to use."

Defined thusly, these are indeed rare creatures. But where you run into trouble is with the selective sociopaths. When someone is in a category of creature who are considered thusly by larger cohorts of other people, can you really blame them for not distinguishing their particular human abusers from the rarer, all-encompassing human ones?

Also I think a lot of narcissists get misidentified as sociopaths. They are less lacking in conscience than inclined towards kind of compulsively trolling their own lives. They do a lot of overcompensating and can be really hurtful towards anyone who becomes invested in them emotionally.

And then there are the people with attachment disorders, I bet they get read as sociopaths sometimes too. So, you do have a point, but still it depends on one's perspective. Anyone who thinks you are just for using is pretty easy to see as a sociopath.

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I really look forward to your posts. I learn multiple somethings every time. It's inescapable to me that your writing brings out the creativity in the commenters. Well heck, Hecate you change how I write.

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“The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us”
― Voltaire