Acceptance without submission, submission without abnegation

Evolve

Raise your consciousness now

Green

Unpowered human flight

h/t Libby Spencer.

It’s life, but not as we’ve known it

Mary-Kate Olsen is all grown up

I’m happy.

Related post:

• Because women don’t smoke pot, part 2

All is full of life

Hat-tip Monkeyfister.

Recommended listening:

• All is full of love,
• Halcyon and on and on

Do not obey, survive until Tuesday.

There is no time. We are here now.

Moonbat @ The Mahablog:

It’s my belief that out of the ashes of the destruction of the current order, a new human race is being born, one whose level of consciousness will be quite different from what created the current order based on fear, which is the basis for the ego. In another hundred or two hundred years, there are going to be a lot of enlightened people on this planet.

I personally believe George W Bush is unconscious and seriously deluded. He thinks he is doing the will of his Father in Heaven (truly a frightening thought given W’s narcissistic, sociopathic personality). However, consider that perhaps God / the universe / life itself really is using W, by forcing us, in a manner similar to Eckhart Tolle’s pressured awakening, to wake up. Childhood is ending, whether we want it to or not.

Share and enjoy?

One world

Permaculture: The Garden of Eden

[Zoom]

Will it work?

Do plants grow?

Hat-tip Monkeyfister.

San Francisco

Things to hear and read

Collective intelligence.

Etz Chaim

[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/12377753/view]

Heal the nation.

Doesn’t Angel Raich have a right to life?

Press release today from the Marijuana Policy Project (h/t FoM):

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — In consultation with her legal team, medical marijuana patient Angel Raich has decided not to pursue further appeals in her litigation seeking the right to protect her life and health through the use of medical marijuana. Lawyers will file a notice of dismissal today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but Raich and her supporters emphasized that her struggle will continue.

“I’m not a quitter, so this was a hard decision,” Raich said. “But I’ve lost all faith in the judicial system. Right now I need to concentrate on my health. Because my brain tumor is beginning to cause damage to the nerves, I will need to undergo radiation treatment and focus on my recovery, but as soon as I’ve recovered I am going to get back to work on taking the fight to Congress.”

“Upon analysis, the avenues left to us did not look fruitful,” said Robert Raich, attorney for the plaintiffs. “It’s a sorry commentary that right now we simply cannot depend on the courts to uphold fundamental rights, even the right to life.”

On March 14, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Angel Raich’s appeal for protection against federal arrest, based on her doctors’ testimony that medical marijuana is essential for her survival. The court left open the possibility that she could successfully raise a medical necessity defense were she to be arrested.

“The battle to protect medical marijuana patients like Angel isn’t ending. It’s simply moving to another playing field — Congress,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C., which has supported and helped to fund Raich’s litigation.

Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that Angel Raich had made “strong arguments … that marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes” and expressed hope that those arguments “may one day be heard in the halls of Congress.” MPP estimates that Congress will be taking up legislation this summer — the fifth summer in a row — to prohibit the U.S. Justice Department from spending taxpayer money to arrest medical marijuana patients and providers in the 12 states where medical marijuana is legal.

Change for the machines

Hat-tip the modern busker.

Support the family farmer, save the earth, listen to Willie

Is that a bustle in your hedgerow?

The arboreal articulture of Axel Erlandson.

Hat-tip ggwfung.

Recommended listening:

• To Bedlam and part way back
• As the Leonids fertilize the earth…

Too busy for poetry?

Don’t click.

Advice from Kurt Vonnegut

Wear sunscreen.

Click.

Update: I have been hoaxed, as Ombudsben points out in the comments below. The commencement address was never given, and it was not by Kurt Vonnegut. Here is one account of the story.

Still, it’s good.

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

Hat-tip Nicole Belle.

This is my church.

Related post:

• Here.

Story of Rabbit

Hat-tip Neil Gaiman.

Recommended viewing:

• Try tempting me with a carrot.

Copyright be damned, and torturers go to hell real quick

Here is Terry Jones. Via Why Now?

Call that humiliation?

No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch

Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007
The Guardian

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this – allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world – have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with putting a bag over her head? That’s what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then it’s perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Of course they’d probably find it even harder to breathe – especially with a bag over their head – but at least they wouldn’t be humiliated.And what’s all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It’s time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That’s one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn’t rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it’s just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

What’s more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting “stress positions”, which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It’s all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is “unhappy and stressed”.

What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her “unhappy and stressed”. She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer – whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.

· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
www.terry-jones.net

This is my message to you.

Recommended listening:

• Even the hopeless sinner

Do you prefer plagues of locusts?

Do you follow this one?

Ibex fight one another; my wife is watching on Discovery channel. They have evolved horns, and this is the natural tendency of all warlike species.

Here is your scapegoat. Habeas corpus.

Here is proof.

Here is another picture.

What is six times nine in base thirteen?

The act of writing is the means by which our consciousness can be focused and analyzed for coherence. If our thoughts are jumbled we would write in such a fashion. If we have a point to make, our thoughts can be arranged around that point. If we are searching for something which others could help find, our thoughts might be phrased as questions. If we already know the answer, it might be that in asking it of others we answer it to everyone.

What is the Ultimate Question?

You know. Life, the Universe and Everything.

Can you compute?

Following, the back of the Regional Transit Connection ID Center Processing Fee Receipt calculation, and verified by my wife, the graduate statistician.

Stoner genius

jibbs00 (2 days ago)

this is a true thing that happens! its not a chain letter! its kinda scary at first but it really works!! paste this message into 3 comments and press ALT F1 and your crushes name will appear on the screen!!! its soo wierd

When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Space, the final frontier

Watch this from NASA via Carnacki.

All life is intelligent

Consider a simple plant, which knows at a deep cellular level how to find and transform water, air, sunlight and a few minerals into complex forms of great beauty and practical utility. You may not know how to communicate with all life, but all life communicates in its own way. Herbs put forth scents and spices, which give us pleasure and medicine at once, and we think it an evolutionary accident only if we presuppose no intelligence prior to our emergence as humans.

Related post:

• Here.

What color do you think polar bears should be?

Photo credit: Associated Press

Read more from Mark H.

Hat-tip Mike.

4:20 of Woodstock ’99

A change of perspective — understand highness.

Related post:

• Awesome-o

Chromosphere now playing

At this new website.

No warranty, this has been tested to work only on Firefox 2.0.0.2 on Mac OS X, and might not even so in your case.

To reduce the chance of difficulties, install the JSyn plug-in before proceeding.

Related post:

• Rough sketch of Chromosphere

Climate control

Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, have a certain “half-life” in the atmosphere before they are eliminated by natural processes, such as by plant respiration. When the production of new greenhouse gases has equilibrium with the elimination of circulating greenhouse gases, the climate is kept in balance.

Much discussion of reducing and controlling global warming has focused on how we may regulate the production of new greenhouse gases, and we must do so or we could never eliminate them quickly enough to prevent their building without limit and turning the earth into a place uninhabitable to humans.

It would also be helpful to begin encouraging the reduction of circulating greenhouse gases by broad based home agriculture. One green plant can reduce the carbon footprint of one person by a significant amount. If climate science has taught us anything, it’s that small changes over a large population make a huge difference.

For GenX, this is Woodstock.

I just cried, listening.

You’ll do, the movement you need is on your shoulder

Issa

No time, like the present

Instead of war

Global warming a reality

We might as well make the best of it, and this will probably be good for Finland’s tourism and immigration, if they wanted such things. The downside to tourism (and for that matter, the general warming trend) is that we lose our traditional winter cultures. We need to preserve them, however, for future generations to survive a time when the world might again return to the past or present day temperatures. We as a human species need to be prepared to live in changing environments and teach our descendents how we have fashioned ways of surviving.

That, you see, is the purpose of religion.

It is a survival trait of the human race, and of all species of animal and plant. We alter ourselves by our choices of what we value and pass along to the next generation. In our choices of how and who we conceive with, on a physical plane but also on an intellectual or emotional plane, because these teach others and ourselves to make good or bad choices as we and others have made.

Here’s some pictures of Finland.

I pass along my understanding of the world as I gain it, and sometimes my understanding changes. I am willing to admit that I make mistakes. We all do, but not everyone will say so.

All of the mythologies are history. None of them are false, in the sense that they aren’t talking about real things, but they are metaphors to some extent, due to the limitations of human language. When and as we overcome our communication barriers, our language becomes stronger and our stories become better.

Not every story is a good example to follow. You need to be discerning. Consider whether the source is trustworthy. Test for yourself. What do you want to be when you evolve?

Whose example do you follow? Do you evolve beyond that?

What will humanity be like in the future? What do you think we can do right now?

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

— Mohandas Gandhi

Is it A.D. yet?

John Edwards for president

Not an endorsement, but a consideration.

Melissa McEwan, also known as Shakespeare’s Sister, is going to be working for his campaign.

Shakes has my endorsement, as you already know. I’m not making decisions on who I think should be president in 2009, when the question of who should be president in 2007 is more, shall we say, urgent.

I have to make one point and that is I would like a clear statement from John Edwards on medical marijuana. It would be helpful if he would state his own use, and if he has ever tried cannabis, whether he believes it should be prohibited.

My opinion is largely contingent upon his willingess to state a position on this issue.

Hat-tip Skippy.

Related post:

• Speculation on 2008

A few days late

NTodd has an interesting perspective on the issue of birth control, of which abortion is only one component. I tend not to write about this issue often because it is so deeply a matter of personal conscience what determines the relative value of a given human life over another. I also take a Monty Pythonesque view on the issue of contraception, which is to say their true view and not the view they satirize by their famous song.

Let me take a moment to point out the obvious hypocrisy of anyone with a purportedly pro-human life outlook being advocates of war. Obviously they value some lives more than others, and some are entirely dispensable to them.

No sane person wants there to be unwanted children or abortions, if it were possible to avoid having them without doing violence to women (or men). We should not want to mutilate people’s genitals, we should not want there to be any harm done to the innocent.

We don’t often enough stop to consider that the cause of violence is usually violence. Stop non-consensual sex and you will stop most or all of the abortions that occur. Stop adultery and you will stop the rest.

Oh, but you don’t want to stop adultery, going by what I see.

Except to punish the woman, because she is the one who is subject to violence from her spouse if she is caught with child.

We have to end the violence done to women, and you know that divorce must be a right for that very reason. But what many of you don’t know or publicly admit due to the risk of persecution is that violence can be tamed by cannabis — marijuana. It is a lie and an obvious one at that when prohibitionists associate cannabis with violence, when the only violence is involved in the criminal aspects of prohibition itself.

End cannabis prohibition and you will see that the very thing you criticize about “hippies” is their non-violence.

End cannabis prohibition and you will end the war in Iraq and in the rest of the middle east. Cannabis can be grown to fuel our economy. Cars and trucks can run on clean biological oils. Paints and chemicals can be made from it. Cannabis may be sacred but she is also profane. We have a petroleum economy today but we cannot have a petroleum economy forever.

Turn this mutha out.

Breakdown tonight

If the man on the television tonight who calls himself the president goes for his surge, remember: the media may back him up. Fox “news” surely will. The consciousness of the American people is being divided and the minds of those who are still faithful to the Republican order are going to be snapped to one side very harshly by this propaganda wave.

Are we prepared to endure this and how do we bring them back to reality? (If you could get them to watch Jon Stewart, they would think he was unfunny because he would be mocking their beliefs.)

Soon they will be given a new word for some impressment, a draft by any other name. There is no surge without the increase of “voluntary” enlistment, and while most current enlistees were only forced into the service by economic circumstances, the ability of brownshirts to press people is a well established historical phenomenon.

Of course it is absurd and insane that they think they can do this, in the face of reality. Today we have ways of communicating, through the internet. Too much depends upon the internet for them to cut it off, or prevent us from having conversations. Yes, of course the administration reads our mail, we write it out in public and put it on our blogs.

And there are not one or two of us, or hundreds, but literally hundreds of thousands of bloggers. In every city and part of the country, and in every country that has internet, we have a free press. If we can keep it.

Oh, but most of you cannot talk about the benefits of cannabis without confessing to something you might be persecuted for. That’s part of why cannabis prohibition has to end, people need to be able to be honest about who they are and what they do if we’re going to have a real discussion about how to fix this country.

New day