Open Thread 08/29/15
Absorbing, but distressing, piece in the Guardian about how the people of Hawaii are being poisoned unto birth defects and death by pesticide-spewing transnational GMO simians who, controlling both the legislature and the courts, seemingly will not be stopped.
In Kauai, chemical companies Dow, BASF, Syngenta and DuPont spray 17 times more pesticide per acre (mostly herbicides, along with insecticides and fungicides) than on ordinary cornfields in the US mainland[.]
[T]hey are precisely testing the strain's resistance to herbicides that kill other plants. About a fourth of the total are called Restricted Use Pesticides because of their harmfulness. Just in Kauai, 18 tons—mostly atrazine, paraquat (both banned in Europe) and chlorpyrifos—were applied in 2012.
The chemical companies that grow the corn in land previously used for sugar refuse to disclose with any precision which chemicals they use, where and in what amounts, but they insist the pesticides are safe, and most state and local politicians concur.
Today, about 90% of industrial GMO corn grown in the US was originally developed in Hawaii, with the island of Kauai hosting the biggest area. The balmy weather yields three crops a year instead of one, allowing the companies to bring a new strain to market in a third of the time.
Once it's ready, the same fields are used to raise seed corn, which is sent to contract farms on the mainland. It is their output, called by critics a pesticide delivery system, that is sold to the US farmers, along with the pesticides manufactured by the breeder that each strain has been modified to tolerate.
Corn's uses are as industrial as its cultivation: less than 1% is eaten. About 40% is turned into ethanol for cars, 36% becomes cattle feed, 10% is used by the food industry and the rest is exported.
Etc.
Another headline that caught my eye: "A Passion For Hurling, the All-Ireland Game." Cool, I thought, as I clicked through, a piece about vomiting, that well-known Irish pastime. You know: Guinness. Paddy's. Etc. But no. Apparently hurling is a sport.
Thirty men battle on a deep-green field, each one wielding what looks like a field hockey stick moonlighting as a broken oar. They chase a ball that fits snug in the hand, sometimes balancing it on their sticks as they run, sometimes swinging the sticks in midsprint to arc the ball toward a goal’s uprights.
Bursts of "Come on, lads!" erupt from the sidelines, along with an epithet or two, as the players bump shoulders, jab their sticks of ash and do everything allowed to dispossess their opponents of the ball. These efforts, on occasion, draw blood.
Well I'll be. Never heard of the thing. Learn something new every day.
Stephen Hawking has finally learned that a black hole is a portal to another universe.
"If you feel you are in a black hole," he advises, "don't give up. There's a way out."
There are meanwhile butterflies in space.
We already knew about the fireflies. These were observed by astronaut John Glenn, when he was the spam in the can of Friendship 7. Later, the Normal people tried to convince Glenn that these fireflies were actually his own urine, leaking out of the craft. But Glenn knew this was bollocks. For there were and are fireflies. In space.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb0R95R35-k]
What? You doubt this? Fireflies in space? You shouldn't. For anything is possible. In a world where ants self-medicate, a 12-year-old Roma girl is said to be more of a cranial whiz-bang than Hawking or Einstein, parrots are brought in for questioning, and a dog sings the national anthem of Ukraine.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgQNaj8w13I]
In other singers, the city of Minneapolis in Minnesota is devoting a five-story mural to Bob Dylan.
Dylan was not actually born in Minneapolis; he was born in Hibbing, up on the Iron Range; it is that iron, Dylan himself believes, that electrified his mind. But he spent a fair amount of time there, playing coffehouses for five dollars a gig. He lived in the neighborhood of Dinkytown, around the university, which still exists. His "home" was a disused storage room, above a drugstore, that contained but a sink; the toilet was down the hall. It was there that one day a redhead named Flo, who communicated with trees, introduced him to the music of Woody Guthrie. Which eventually resulted in Dylan moving on from Minneapolis to New York, where then was Guthrie.
It's nice of the city to honor Dylan and all, but I don't think anybody needs to be five stories high. Except maybe that lady in Red.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8NU3EYTbFg]
In other music, Van Morrison says that it is good to go from here to there—as Dylan did, from Minnestota to New York, as Morrison did, from Belfast to the US—because in that way one can discover that there is no "there." Only "here."
I think people have a problem if they stay here. If you stay here, everything's out there. [He points off into the distance.] But when you go out there, then you see that everything's in here. [He points to his chest.] So I had to go away to find that it's in here; it's not out there. It's here. It's not out there.
It’s also that there is no—you're not going anywhere. There isn't anywhere to go. You're always here. When you live outside of your home country you realise there isn't anywhere to go. It's all the same. And it's like that with success: there isn't anything to achieve, because it's all the same. It's degrees of the same thing. You might have more money, less money, but there isn't anywhere to go. You're always here, you are always you, and that's all you have. All you have is you. That's it. There isn't anywhere to go.
Comments
Good morning - dog can carry a tune better than me.
Here and there is what my day today is all about.
I was so successful at getting my oldest grandchild to travel (New Zealand, Panama, and much of Europe) that his recently moved to his next here, University of Colorado Boulder. Today the youngest has a farewell family dinner before he moves to his second here, Michigan State University to being his undergrad. So besides installing a replacement printer that HP sent me to replace the one that broke, I am also off to the farmer's market and bakery to buy fresh bread, basil and tomato for our meal. Hope you all have a great day. Sounds like summer is on its way back to Michigan.
dk
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
it is not always easy
to know what a dog is about, when the dog is sounding along with human music. Sometimes the dog is in pleasure, liking the sounds: "singing along." But sometimes the dog is actually in pain. It is possible that the animal embedded above, in hearing the national anthem of Ukraine, is, in truth, in objection, in distress, because a partisan of "Donbass."
And good for you, in giving your children, and grandchildren, wings.
Good Morning hecate and 99%'ers!
We just got in from walking our dogs over at the college and now I am getting ready for dinner guests tonight. Tomorrow evening we have been invited for dinner over at another couple's house. They completed the pilgrimage to Santago de Compostelo earlier this year so it should be an interesting evening. She is in her seventies and he is eighty and they did up to 26 miles in a day. On Monday we will be heading back to Florida and will be traveling for the week. So I have a busy next several days coming up.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
did
the dinner guest complete the entirety of the Walk? If so, that is indeed impressive. My companero attempted not long ago, with his son, but a section, and came up hard against the fact he is now in his 60s. We are still trying to help him to psychically recover.
Good Morning hecate and caucus citizens
The last paragraph in your last quote is ringing not only a bell, but a whole bunch of them.
A lot of pain to come to that conclusion. And you can go also that long and that far. There is a point you stop walking and either die or get real and live with what you find where you are and remind yourself that what's count is what you have inside you.
I just wanted to point to this article in the WP, because it has some good maps with statistics about the migrant crisis as it presents itself in Germany. Lotlizard might have much more insight in this, as she is living there. I am just reading US sources about what used to be my home country. Nowadays I don't know anymore where that so-called home actually is. I feel estranged and can't relate anymore. My folks in Germany that are cousins and extended family are not capable to understand me and relate to my pov. So ...
The migrant crisis is dividing Germany all over again. There is also a good map here, showing in which region of Germany how many refugees are living.
One of the last paragraphs in that article ties in to the fact that there is no place to go. You are always "here", mentioned in hecate's quote above.
The last paragraph of this quote reminds me always that having been a victim of any sort of oppression is not a guarantee that same victims can be part of the new oppressors, a subject that in a horrible way I can't get out of my mind and therefore want to study... one day.
Have a wonderful weekend and all get back on their feet, please. So, what is harder to do, to keep yourself cool and healthy in hot, humid or dry weather, or to keep yourself warm in very cold weather. I say it's easier to keep yourself warm. My son doesn't believe me. And I am looking for ways to get him out of his mindset which is that he is scared to freeze to death. Wow. I never knew I would have that kind of problems to solve as a mother.
https://www.euronews.com/live
you say:
Who does?
Some people say Home Is In Your Head:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLBjtP9galg]
Some say home, it is on the wind:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeGcAYgNKQ0]
And a (temporary) human monikered Alexi Murdoch, he knows:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYq3mIBZLw]
foresterbob has a new diary today at dkos on the wildfires
in Washington state. In each diary he links his previous ones in which he details his experiences up close and very personal with the wildfires in Washington state. He is an excellent writer and I have found them to be very compelling reading. Also he includes many photos in each one. Here is the link to the latest in this series of diaries. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/29/1416564/-The-Accidental-Refugee...
I highly recommend you read them.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
I am all in for Bernie
Put up a website : http://westchester4bernie.org/ Just got a voter list from the state, that will be filtered down into walk lists. Bought a new printer and an extra black ink cartridge, 5 reams of paper. A Bernie Tee Shirt and button. Planning 2-3 major canvasses, 2 minor canvasses, 2 visibility events (Bern The Boulevard), 1 voter reg training event, 2 street voter reg events, just thru the start of Oct. The plan is to recruit 1000 volunteers and do 100,000 voter IDs before Bernies staff moves in for the NY primary in April. We can't control how many debates there are. One thing we can control is how many doors we knock on for Bernie. Keep your eye on the target. #EnoughIsEnough #YouCannotHaveItAll #FeelTheBern
FDR 9-23-33, "If we cannot do this one way, we will do it another way. But do it we will.
Obama says,
"we're all pro-Israel". Evidently he was referring to all United States of Imperialism politicians because he surely can't
be stupid enough to be referring to all USI citizens. I know he doesn't speak for me.
But as it's turning out, this Iran deal is simply a change in imperialist tactics to try to accomplish regime change in Iran
from the inside instead of using brute force from the outside. Not that they won't be doing that also as Obama is
warning people every chance he gets.
There are indications this is a setup before the kill.
http://presstv.ir/Detail/2015/08/28/426753/Obama-Israel-Iran-nuclear-agr...
Sane folks would ask Obama: "What you mean 'we', kemosabe?" n/t
Good Morning, and thank you Hecate
I'm just reeling from the numbers on the pesticide use in Hawaii. i had no idea but imagine using a virtual paradise to test poisons. The industry needs a lot of GMO seeds because the seeds are terminal and are thrown out every year, making good profits for the seed producers. Amazing that only 1% is used for food and the rest for biofuels.
There's another lucrative market for Monsanto and its pesticides and that is, wiping out invasive species. In a Harper's article "Weed Wackers: Monsanto, glyphosate, and the war on invasive species" the writer exposes the wide use of Roundup across the country. He comes down pretty hard on "nativists" those who want to get rid of all non-native species and I don't agree with his extremism but he is sounding the alarm about the prolific use of Roundup by governments.
To thine own self be true.
it is fitting,
I suppose, that, as the Guardian article explains, the GMO simians are grandfathering in upon the wide-open exemptions once granted the sugar companies . . . which also cared not about workers, residents, random humans, or any other life-form, whatsoever.
Only for money, did they care. Moneymoneymoney.
There was no sugar in Hawaii, before white people. There were no GMOs, no pesticides, in Hawaii, before white people.
The white people do not belong in Hawaii, and are but an aberration thereon.
White people are just a blip in the history of those islands. And it is long past time for them to, just, get out.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgWQI8VUPyE]
What to do? I am white and feel I don't belong
there into Hawaii, my son is black and believes it's the place he wants to belong and it's one big, bad struggle. If I see Hawaii's population and what the corporations (and probably the Mormon church heavily embedded in that, not sure though) is doing, it's all the colonial, corporate imperial and racist attitudes hidden under the surface all over again. Many want to fight it, but it's there, dormant, driven by money and the longing for a piece of land and nature, which only the very rich white folks and some very rich black folks (Oprah) can afford. Hollywoods celebrities all ove the place, it's their refuge and escape. Not that I really begrudge them for seeking their little hide-away place in nature, but at the same time, their money damages the islands intent to share the land with all the people equally. If they hadn't the rule that some of the land can't be bought, if you are not 50 percent native Hawaiian, I believe 80 percent of native Hawaiians might be homeless. And then you have to listen to those ignorant, greedy and feisty tourists talking about the homeless in Hawaii and the homeless Veterans who make all those who are not homeless feel "uncomfortable".
Lady of Equality, you need to take care of all your poor.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Hey thanks for the story on
Minneapolis and Dylan. Must add a correction, however. In MN we never say "out in the Iron Range" we always say "up on the Iron Range."
Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.-Lucy Parsons
oops
Having never been there, except in glancing astral flight, I was ignorant of this important neighborhood distinction. And I surely know whereof you speak, for I once lived near the town of Guerneville, where, if the outlanders passing through, pronounced it as Gern-EE-ville, rather that Gern-ville, all the locals would snort in complete disgust. So, with your permission, I will edit, to reflect the Reality of "up on," rather than "out in."
And this sorta stuff is important. As in, it just wouldn't really work, if it was "out in," rather than "up on," Cyprus Avenue.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2iEQXKbfcM]
Butterfly's are everwhere
including the star dust. Nice OT thank you hecate. I read a Bob Dylan book or heard a musicians tall tale that in Hipping he stole a collection of Woodie Guthrie's recordings. He then assimilated them and learned to be more Woody then Woody. My parents had a big Woodie Guthrie and also the Weavers collection. They used to go to folk music concerts and hootenanny's back in their youth. The day's before the FBI and the commie hunters threatened my mad scientist, weapon designing, Dad's security clearance. We still listened to Woodie and the Weavers but in the privacy of our suburban home.
My dad was the one that told me butterfly's are everywhere including in the atoms of a giants big toe. He also had in his bathroom L Ron Hubbard's science fiction and to give him credit a fair amount of JG Ballard. I read his SF stash when I tired of my beloved pulp mysteries. About that time I tired of rock and roll which had degenerated to being a bunch of interchangeable Bobby's ie. Bobby V or Rydell. So I turned folksy and bought a Bob Dylan. This one was the first...
Followed by this great album a year later
Here's another folky that I liked when Rock and roll got too much to bear.....
well of course
there are an infinitude of stories about Dylan, and who knows what is truly Reality (Pilate asked "What is truth?" and then didn't stay to here the answer).
But the consensus, as I understand it, is that Dylan was unaware of Guthrie until arriving in Minneapolis. Where, in the course of things, as described above, the witch-woman Flo opened Guthrie to him.
As for Dylan "learn[ing] to be more Woody than Woody," Dylan, in Minneapolis, after having Flo-learned Guthrie, tried in the coffeehouses that—being more Woody than Woody—but was soon arrested by Jon Pankake, "part of the folk police, if not the chief commissioner."
Who snorted that Ramblin' Jack Elliott—formerly Elliott Chales Adnopoz—had got there before Dylan. And then spun, for Dylan, Elliott's discs. At which time Dylan realized "Elliott was far beyond me," "you could hear that he had Woody Guthrie's style down pat and more," and he was "so confident it made me sick."
But Dylan, young, male, infinitely ambitious, brain still not fully formed, took the Greyhound to New York anyway . . . where, while he was hunting up Woody, the next witch-woman, Suze Rotolo, took Dylan to Rimbaud (Dylan says Rimbaud's je est un autre split his mind), the multimediast Red Grooms (whom Dylan has said he has tried to emulate in lyrics and music), and Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's "Pirate Jenny" (which Dylan says influenced him more than any single tune).
John Hammond meanwhile played for Dylan: Robert Johnson. And Dylan thereby heard: "Nothing shackles him. As great as the greats were, he goes one step further. You can't imagine him singing, 'Washington's a bourgeois town.' He wouldn't have noticed it or if he did, it would have been irrelevant."
Which of course it is.
As for the "tall tale that in Hipping he stole a collection of Woodie Guthrie's recordings," I would suspect this is a garbled version of the story that, in the course of Dylan visiting Guthrie out in the Queens hospital, Guthrie suggested that Dylan—of whom by all accounts Guthrie grew very fond—go to a certain house where were stored a smattering of Guthrie lyrics never set to music. Dylan one day went there, but nobody was home. Dylan, then in the white-hot-fire of melting and melding Guthrie with Johnson and Weill and Brecht and Flo and Rotolo and his own fine self, never went back. Those lyrics would, some years later, become the lyrical basis for a series of Wilco albums.
In the end, of course, it doesn't really matter, all the stories and suggestions, or even slurs or slanders, because Dylan, as in the song below, and however he got there, successfully fused Guthrie and Johnson and Grooms and Brecht and Weill and a thousand others, and moved them on up the spiral, and now it us up to somebody else, to, as they will, and are willing even now, take it furthur.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAPv7xWQzgs]
And as for this:
He was, and is, absolutely right. There can be no giant, ever, without butterflies. When the Science Men finally opened their eyes to what they call "chaos" theory, it was through the Reality that a flap of a butterfly's wings in one region of the world, can, in the course of things, generate a hurricane, on the other side of the globe.
That's where we are.
And you know? Really? It's a fine place to be.
It's all "chaos," it's all wind, and it's all rain, and yet it it's all of butterflies. And our fun is, we get to ride it.
a great while ago the world began
with a hey ho the wind and the rain
but that's all one my tale is done
and i'll strive to please you every day
and i'll strive to please you
every day
every day
every day
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhSfZplNbN0]
thanks hecate
you added to my collection of Dylan lore. Excellent comment.
Van Morrison short form
..."remember, no matter where you go, there you are."
- Buckaroo Banzai
Contrariwise:
"Be here now."
= Baba Ram Dass
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 --
read your sig line for the first time consciously - nice one/nt
https://www.euronews.com/live
Thanks.
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 --