Just over a week ago, Dan Gomez sent me a link to an item on StumbleUpon. It was a feature called Don’t Believe Your Eyes featuring the work of Matthew Albanese.
I am not going to reproduce all the images despite them all being on that StumbleUpon webpage simply because I haven’t had time to ask Matthew’s permission. I will just offer a few of them so you may be wowed as I was.
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Matthew Albanese is an artist who fascinates with special effects and magic. Matthew owns a stunning artwork collection of photographs that will blow your mind with their realistic presence. On the left side in the gallery you can see the final image and on the right you will be able to see how image was created using his special effects. Scroll down and enjoy today’s gallery of 15 beautiful artworks.
BOX OF LIGHTNING
Diorama for Box of Lightning.. Backlit etching in plexiglass painted black.
HOW TO BREATHE UNDERWATER
Diorama made out of walnuts, poured and cast candle wax, wire, glitter, peanut shells, flock, plaster, wire, dyed starfish, compressed moss,
Diorama made using painted parchment paper, thread, hand dyed ostrich feathers, carved chocolate, wire, raffia, masking tape, coffee, synthetic potting moss and cotton.
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OK, if you want to see the whole set you will have to go Matthew’s website.
But I will just sneak in the last one from that series of fifteen.
Paprika Mars. Made out of 12 pounds paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder and charcoal
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Matthew Albanese’s fascination with film, special effects and movie magic—and the mechanics behind these illusions—began early. Born in northern New Jersey in 1983, Albanese spent a peripatetic childhood moving between New Jersey and upstate New York. An only child, Albanese enjoyed imaginative, solitary play. He loved miniatures and created scenarios intricately set with household objects and his extensive collection of action figures. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography at the State University of New York, Purchase, Albanese worked as a fashion photographer, training his lens on bags, designer shoes and accessories—this small-object specialization is known in the retail trade as “table top photography.” Albanese’s creative eye soon turned to tabletop sets of a more wildly eclectic nature. In 2008, a spilled canister of paprika inspired him to create his first mini Mars landscape. More minute dioramas—made of spices, food and found objects—followed. In 2011, Albanese was invited to show at the Museum of Art and Design of New York. His work has also been exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Winkleman Gallery, and Muba, Tourcoing France. Matthew is represented at Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York
ALL IMAGES, TITLES, DESCRIPTION AND BIO ARE COPYRIGHT AND IN OWNERSHIP OF MATTHEW ALBANESE WEBSITE
Today is our first anniversary of living in Oregon.
In many ways, it’s difficult to comprehend that we have now lived in our house a few miles from Merlin, OR, for a full year.
There are so many different, wonderful emotions associated with our move from Arizona to Oregon, of moving into a property quite unlike anything that Jean and I have ever lived in before, of seeing our dogs so happy with their surroundings, of being immersed in Nature, and so much more.
But rather than waffle on about everything in general and nothing in particular, I just want to write about the several acres of grassland that slope down from our house towards Bummer Creek, flowing North-South through the Eastern part of the property.
Wild deer feeding in the North-West corner of about 5 acres of our grassland.
Having mown the grassland a number of times in the Spring musing that there must be better ways to spend your time, a few weeks ago we came across an article about not mowing lawns. It was on the Mother Nature Network website and here’s how the article started.
Get off your grass and create an edible lawn
What would happen if you stopped watering, fertilizing, pesticiding and mowing your lawn?
Americans currently spend more than $30 billion, millions of gallons of gasoline, and countless hours to maintain the dream of the well-kept 31 million acres of lawns. An estimated 67 million pounds of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides are applied around homes and gardens yearly. Commercial areas such as parks, schools, playing fields, cemeteries, industrial, commercial and government landscapes, apply another 165 million pounds.
Lawn grasses are not native to the North American continent. A century ago, people would actually pull the grass out of their lawns to make room for the more useful weeds that were often incorporated into the family salad or herbal tea. It was the British aristocracy in the 1860s and ’70s, to show off their affluence, that encouraged the trend of weed-free lawns, indicating one had no need of the more common, yet useful plants. Homeowners were encouraged to cultivate lawns that would serve as examples to passers-by. These types of lawns also lent themselves to the popular lawn sports, croquet and lawn tennis. From the 1880s through 1920s in America, front lawns ceased to produce fodder for animals, and garden space was less cultivated, promoting canned food as the “wholesome choice.” Cars replaced the family horse and chemical fertilizers replaced manure.
It has been estimated that about 30 percent of our nation’s water supply goes to water lawns. In Dallas, Texas, watering lawns in the summer uses as much as 60 percent of the city water’s supply.
Next, a newsletter from The Xerces Society mentioned bee feed wildflower seed mixes from a company called Sunmark Seeds in Portland, OR. A call to them quickly produced the answer about what we could sow to help our local bees.
Hi Paul:
Upon further searching I did find 2 mixes that might fit what you are looking for. They are attached. The Bee Feed Mixture would be $36 per lb. The Honey Bee Flower Mixture would be $38 per lb. The price is a little higher but you would need a lot less. It is suggested 6-12 lbs per acre. You can still add the clover at $5 per lb and you should add 1 oz per lb of wildflower seed. There is still the option of the Knee High Low Profile mix which would be a little less at $30 per lb but the seeding rate is higher at 8-16 lbs per acre.
I have attached a spec sheet on all three mixes. Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Decision made. Three pounds of Bee Feed Mix to sow on a half-acre area as a test before we do all five acres next Spring.
Thus not so much later a box arrived with our Bee Feed Mix and the next afternoon saw Jean and me marking out the test area and scattering the seed.
3 lbs of wild flower seed for next Spring’s bees!
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Hand-scattering the seeds with Dhalia keeping an eye on things.
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It’s been an amazing year with plenty of challenges as we learnt to be rural people; yet another thing the dogs were able to teach us! However, the joy of living in such beautiful surroundings will last for ever. And more or less picking up on the theme for the week, the sharing, caring community of neighbours around us doubles that joy.
Jean and I consider ourselves two very lucky people. And no more mowing grassland! 🙂
“Minds together do not just bind together, they find together.”
My post last Monday, The lure of patterns, appears to have resonated far and wide. In the sense of many echoes reinforcing the perilous nature of our present times and the desperately uncertain decades ahead. Tomorrow I shall be writing specifically about those echoes.
Today, I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on dogs and communities! After all this blog is called Learning from Dogs!
In Monday’s post I opined that the future may well see a return to people re-evaluating and re-energising the benefits of local communities. Now when it comes to communities, there are no better examples than dogs and, so many thousands of years before dogs, grey wolves. These species have an incredibly strong social structure. I mean, of course, the pack. It’s a shame that the expression ‘pack of wolves’ or ‘pack of dogs’ has such misplaced negative connotations.
Before dogs were domesticated, as in when they first evolved from the grey wolf, they shared with wolves a natural pack size of around 50 animals. There was a very strong social cohesiveness within that pack yet a very ‘light’ status differential between those dogs having pack status and the mass of the pack group. Ditto with wolves.
In fact there were (still are) just three status roles: Mentor/Monitor/Nanny. Or has been described previously on this blog: Alpha/Beta/Omega roles. Even within the domesticated dog, thousands upon thousands of years later, those social instincts are alive and well. Many followers of Learning from Dogs will know that Pharaoh, him of the Home Page, now an elderly German Shepherd is a Monitor or Beta dog. I could write about this aspect of dogs for hours!
Pharaoh being a monitor for young Cleo.
So back to us funny old humans.
I closed last Monday’s post off with three predictions:
That the power of internet communications will allow more people, more quickly, to find their soul-mates wherever they are on this planet.
That the realisation of how dysfunctional many Governments are, of how truly poorly they serve the majorities of their citizens, will lead to mass rejections of these so-called Governments’ policies. Such rejections predominantly peaceful, as in taking the horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
That there will be a new form of localism. At two levels. Literally, people geographically close to each other creating 21st C. versions of local communities. Virtually, those local communities linking to other like-minded communities right across the world resulting in highly effective and innovative learning, accelerated common-sense, (call it wisdom if you wish), and extraordinarily efficient and sustainable ways of living on this planet.
Dear Paul: I like your predictions. They will play some role. But maybe somewhere in the bushes only. I think predictions of the future beyond the next 12 months are obsolete.
Jeremy remarked: (and do click the link and read some of Jeremy’s fantastic poetry)
I am hoping for a new localism. I see signs of this in the local food movement and a growing concern about factory farming, for one thing. I think people are really scrutinizing where their food comes from, where their medicines are made, and I think there also is a dawning awareness of how we are living on the backs of exploited third world workers (and poorly paid service workers here at home). I do see signs of these things permeating the consciousness of many people and leading them to want to become more “local.”
Your predictions are good, and I liked the one of communities from different parts of the world working with each other… that was creatively brilliant.
(Click on their names to see three wonderful blog sites, by the way.)
So my idea of a return to an era of localism, but a 21st C. version reflecting the way so many millions of us are connected electronically, wasn’t immediately rejected.
Patrice recently published a post called Devils In The Details. I mentioned in a comment to that post that I would be referring to it in this place. Patrice replied [my italics]:
Very good, Paul! No doubt you will bring more common sense to one more of these interesting collaborations you bring together! Internet debates! A long way from the paleolithique cave!… But still the same idea. Minds together do not just bind together, they find together.
I found that last sentence so powerful that it was used as the sub-heading to today’s post. Then Alexi Helligar commented:
The word consciousness, breaks down to con+scious+ness, which literally means together knowing or shared knowledge.
Adding in a subsequent comment:
In other words: Without society there is no consciousness. The sages of old knew this. Why has it been forgotten?
So right before my eyes (and yours!) we are seeing the power of ‘finding together‘.
Finally, just on the spur of the moment, I did a web search under an entry of ‘early caveman social structure’. Guess what! One of the top search returns was an essay by an Erik D. Kennedy under the title of On the Social Lives of Cavemen. From which jumped off the screen:
Human beings are no strangers to group living. Call it a family trait. Our closest animal relatives spend a good bulk of their time eating bugs off of their friends’ back. While I’m overjoyed we’re not social in that manner, I’m less pleased that we’re not social more to that degree. In study after study, having and spending time with close friends is consistently correlated with happiness and well-being. And yet, the last few decades in America have seen a remarkable decline in many things associated with being in a tight-knit social circle—things like family and household size, club participation, and number of close friends. Conversely, we’ve seen an increase in things associated with being alone—TV, commutes, and the internet, for example.
This trend is quite unhealthy. It’s no surprise that humans are social animals—but it may be surprising that we’re such social animals that merely joining a club halves your chance of death in the next year—or that living in a close-knit town of three-generation homes can almost singlehandedly keep you safe from heart disease.
My goodness me, this sharing idea may be core to a healthy society in ways that we need to return to. Erik’s essay goes on thus:
That particular case—of Roseto, Pennsylvania—is mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. In 1950’s Roseto, the incidence of heart disease in men over sixty-five was half the national average (and suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, and serious crime were also basically unheard of[ii]). Bewildered doctors searched for solutions in genetics, diet, exercise, and geography, but finding nothing, reached the conclusion that it was the close-knit social life of the community that kept its residents so healthy. Dinners with grandma, friendly chats between neighbors, and a precocious level of civic involvement were the driving factors in the health of a town that nothing but old age could kill.
The happiness and health I’m describing are not, however, ingredients to a long-lost elixir of well-being. This sort of paleo social life occurs in cultures large and small all over the globe. America just happens to be an enormous exception (and the one that I live in). The whole reason Roseto was an outlier is because it was a town whose inhabitants more or less collectively moved from rural Italy to the middle of Pennsylvania over a few decades. This was basically an Italian village in the American countryside, and it stood out because Italy’s social culture was remarkable compared to America’s—and that was in the 1950’s. America’s social culture has only deteriorated even further since then. We’ve lost a lot, but my thesis is a positive one; we have as much to gain as ever.
So if wolves and dogs naturally settle into packs of 50 animals, what’s the optimum ‘pack’ size for humans? Dear Erik even offers that answer:
Along with that urban emigration came a shrink in residents per household and a widespread decline in community and organization engagement. This isolation has been taxing on our physical and mental health, and the reason has been clear from the beginning: it’s not good for man to be alone.
So we’ll spend more time with other people. Fine. But who should we spend our time with? What kind of groups should we hang out in? And how big of groups? The simple answer is: as long as you’re pretty close to the people you’re with, it hardly matters. Piles of research back up what is essentially obvious from everyday experience: that the more time you spend with people you trust, the better off you are. That’s not to discourage actively meeting new people, but seeing as though close friends push us towards health and happiness better than strangers, there does appear to be a limit on the number of people you can have in your “tribe”.
And that number is about 150, says anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who achieved anthropologist fame by drawing a graph plotting primates’ social group size as a function of their brain sizes. He inputted the average human brain size into his model, and lo and behold, the number 150 has been making a whirlwind tour of popular non-fiction books ever since. Beyond being the upper bound for both hunter-gatherer tribes and Paleolithic farming villages, it appears that everything from startup employee counts to online social networks show this number as a fairly consistent maximum for number of close social ties.
You really must read Erik’s essay in full; it really ‘spoke’ to me and maybe it will do the same for you.
So no other way to close than to say that of all the things we can learn from dogs, the power of sharing, of living a local community life, may just possibly be the difference between failure and survival of us humans.
Dogs and man should never be alone.
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I’ll say it again! Dogs, and man, should never be alone!
Literally, as a long-case clock is tickled back to life.
We are experiencing a period of foggy mornings giving way to brilliantly clear and sunny afternoons.
Yesterday was no exception.
Looking out to the North-East with Mt. Sexton behind the mists.
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Having walked some of the dogs around 9am it seemed a good idea to find a task indoors for the morning. How about sorting out the ‘grandfather’ clock, or long-case clock in proper speak!
Every since we came up from Arizona to settle here in Southern Oregon, now almost a year ago, that clock had not been running well. It’s nothing special in terms of its lineage but over many years of collecting and repairing clocks in my earlier days in Devon, UK, I’ve always had a soft spot for the long-case clock.
The project!
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This particular clock, as seen in the above picture, is a real hotch-potch. The original face is nothing special and somewhere along the line a previous owner came across a more ‘antiquey’ face and screwed it over the original.
Possibly the original face?
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Old over new!
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Anyway, the first task was to even up the movement, again a real mess.
A long way from how this clock was originally built!
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All this a long-winded way of saying that by the time the clock seemed to be running in a settled fashion it was coming up to 4pm and my creative juices for blog writing, such as they are, had evaporated.
Hence the clock story!
And in answer to those who might wonder why so much time and effort went into such a dreadful jumble of a clock, the one thing I adore about mechanical clocks is the sound of the ‘tick’ and the chimes.
There is no better sound than the steady tick of a long-case clock and those haunting chimes on the half-hour and on the hour.
The video below is a wonderful example of a real vintage clock!
This is a client’s beautiful longcase clock that I serviced not long ago. The clock is by J. Woolfenden – Royton and it dates to roughly 1785 (based on some research that was done on it).
In this video, you hear the clock striking 11 o’ clock on a nice original bell. The clock was running during testing, but it was not in beat (I had to fix the leveling later).
Somewhere in my aged brain cells is the memory of having heard that humans are great lovers of patterns. In other words, patterns are deemed to be very important for the progress and evolution of homo sapiens. Of course, it is not just humans who learn from patterns; I’m sure most of the animals who live around us are great pattern matchers. To support that proposition, anyone who has owned a dog or cat will have spotted how quickly they learn patterns. (As an aside, some months ago our puppy German Shepherd, Cleo, work me at around 4am because she needed to go outside for a ‘call of nature’. I now get woken every single night variously between 2am and 5am for Cleo’s benefit!)
The British mathematician G. H. Hardy who lived from the last quarter of the 19th Century well into the 20th Century, reputedly said (and I cheated and looked it up!):
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
So why has this post opened with the theme of patterns? Because, call it coincidence or what, within the last couple of weeks there have been three articles, each from very a different source, predicting that the present levels of inequality in society are both unsustainable and the beginning of the end.
Global wealth inequality: top 1% own 41%; top 10% own 86%; bottom half own just 1%
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Just 8.4% of all the 5bn adults in the world own 83.4% of all household wealth (that’s property and financial assets, like stocks, shares and cash in the bank). About 393 million people have net worth (that’s wealth after all debt is accounted for) of over $100,000, that’s 10% own 86% of all household wealth! But $100,000 may not seem that much, if you own a house in any G7 country without any mortgage. So many millions in the UK or the US are in the top 10% of global wealth holders. This shows just how little two-thirds of adults in the world have – under $10,000 of net wealth each and billions have nothing at all.
This is not annual income but just wealth – in other words, 3.2bn adults own virtually nothing at all. At the other end of the spectrum, just 32m people own $98trn in wealth or 41% of all household wealth or more than $1m each. And just 98,700 people with ‘ultra-high net worth’ have more than $50 million each and of these 33,900 are worth over $100 million each. Half of these super-rich live in the US.
Michael Robert’s essay closes:
All class societies have generated extremes of inequality in wealth and income. That is the point of a rich elite (whether feudal landlords, Asiatic warlords, Incan and Egyptian religious castes, Roman slave owners, etc) usurping control of the surplus produced by labour. But past class societies considered that normal and ‘god-given’. Capitalism on the other hand talks about free markets, equal exchange and equality of opportunity. But the reality is no different from previous class societies.
The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.
We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.
The PRI editor’s preamble to the Chris Hedges essay included a couple of videos that he recommended watching. One was a talk by Robert Reich: How Unequal Can America Get Before We Snap?
The other one was a recent TED Talk by Richard Wilkinson (his profile is here).
Mr. Wilkinson explains that for the majority of people there is an instinctive feeling that societies with huge income gaps and corresponding high levels of social inequality are somehow going wrong. He charts the hard data on such economic inequality and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: ergo, the very real effects on health, lifespan, and even such basic values as trust.
Just 16 minutes long, it’s a very revealing talk. Do watch it.
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The final, third piece of the pattern was me coming across an essay on the blog DeflationLand, not a blog I had come across before, on the same day that I saw the PRI article. This essay, published just two days before the PRI article, was about patterns; the patterns of the centuries. More specifically, how the characteristics of a century generally evolve to a new culture within the first 10 to 15 years of the following century. It was a most interesting proposition and, to my delight, I was given permission to republish that essay here on Learning from Dogs. So here it is.
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Why I stopped worrying and learned to love the currency collapse
For the past 300 years, the historical pattern has been for the era marked by a century to continue into the following century by fourteen or fifteen years. Let me explain. Everyone knows that the 19th Century, its uprightness, its optimism and sense of purpose, the halcyon days of British Empire, came to an end with World War I, starting in 1914 and building to a nasty crescendo by 1916. The 20th Century had arrived, and it had some real horrors in store for us.
Germans before Kraftwerk
But if we return back another hundred years, we notice that the 18th Century ends in 1815 with the final defeat of Napoleon, that final project of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution. With the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, we have a new Europe along the lines of Metternich’s plan, and the 19th Century at last is here.
“Sorry, guys. My bad.”
In 1713 and 1714, we have the Treaties of Utrecht, Baden, and Rastatt, bringing an end to the era of Spain as a major power, and the rise of the Habsburgs. Louis XIV dies in 1715, after reigning for 72 years. The Baroque period is over, and we are now firmly in the 18th Century.
War of Spanish Succession
We still live in the 20th Century. Nothing much significant has changed in our lives in the past twenty years. Symptoms of a deeper rot are appearing here and there, foreshadowing a larger crisis, but the crisis itself has not arrived yet. We still live in an era of Pax Americana, the old republic very much a strained and tired Empire now, with the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
That is going to change.
The next task for History is to dismantle the untenable structures and institutions put in place by late Modernity, which have been extended now as far as they can go. Our debt-based monetary system will collapse, our unbacked fiats will be worthless. The debts and unmeetable obligations will all default.
There are ironies and great contradictions as the former home and hope of Liberty becomes viciously unfree and increasingly despotic. Our leaders no longer govern, but try instead to rule us — they are less legitimate with each passing day, their laws corrupt or worse. They are nearly finished, and will be swept away with the tide.
Just as in 1914, the internationalist system will break down, dashing the hopes of the would-be first-world nations. We will probably have a pretty good war as well, or many local ones worldwide. These transitions tend to involve war.
Deflation first — it clears the way for the complete loss of faith and hyperinflation that will follow. The next big wave down in the financial markets is the battering ram. The U.S. national debt is about faith, so is quantitative easing, and so is the very idea of magical coins that could ever be “worth” a trillion dollars. When this faith breaks, in concert with loss of faith in perpetual growth and unlimited cheap energy, then things will move very, very quickly.
There is nothing any of us can do at this point, except navigate the rapids as well as possible, and to stay out of the way of a dying empire, which is still very dangerous in its death throes. We are actually very privileged to be alive and witnessing this next transition, to what we do not know just yet. But what an honor to live at this time, not in ignorance but with an existential resolve to come out of it alive and much the wiser.
Ass Americana.
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** Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former international correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
I am neither a scientist nor a historian; just someone who has lived in and observed the world for coming on for 60 years.
So you have to understand that my prediction is hardly worth the ‘paper I write upon’ (which certainly dates me!). But, undaunted, here are my predictions for the 21st Century:
That the power of internet communications will allow more people, more quickly, to find their soul-mates wherever they are on this planet.
That the realisation of how dysfunctional many Governments are, of how truly poorly they serve the majorities of their citizens, will lead to mass rejections of these so-called Governments’ policies. Such rejections predominantly peaceful, as in taking the horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
That there will be a new form of localism. At two levels. Literally, people geographically close to each other creating 21st C. versions of local communities. Virtually, those local communities linking to other like-minded communities right across the world resulting in highly effective and innovative learning, accelerated common-sense, (call it wisdom if you wish), and extraordinarily efficient and sustainable ways of living on this planet.
The ride of Paul Revere is a famous poem by Longfellow, as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It commemorates the American patriot Paul Revere who on the 18th April, 1775 rode furiously across Middlesex County, Massachusetts spreading the alarm that the British were approaching.
Spreading the alarm throughout Middlesex County, Massachusetts.
In 1774 and the Spring of 1775 Paul Revere was employed by the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety as an express rider to carry news, messages, and copies of resolutions as far away as New York and Philadelphia.
On the evening of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere was sent for by Dr. Joseph Warren and instructed to ride to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them. After being rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown by two associates, Paul Revere borrowed a horse from his friend Deacon John Larkin. While in Charlestown, he verified that the local “Sons of Liberty” committee had seen his pre-arranged signals. (Two lanterns had been hung briefly in the bell-tower of Christ Church in Boston, indicating that troops would row “by sea” across the Charles River to Cambridge, rather than marching “by land” out Boston Neck. Revere had arranged for these signals the previous weekend, as he was afraid that he might be prevented from leaving Boston).
On the way to Lexington, Revere “alarmed” the country-side, stopping at each house, and arrived in Lexington about midnight. As he approached the house where Adams and Hancock were staying, a sentry asked that he not make so much noise. “Noise!” cried Revere, “You’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out!” After delivering his message, Revere was joined by a second rider, William Dawes, who had been sent on the same errand by a different route. Deciding on their own to continue on to Concord, Massachusetts, where weapons and supplies were hidden, Revere and Dawes were joined by a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott. Soon after, all three were arrested by a British patrol. Prescott escaped almost immediately, and Dawes soon after. Revere was held for some time and then released. Left without a horse, Revere returned to Lexington in time to witness part of the battle on the Lexington Green.
I mention all this simply because when John Hurlburt recently sent me a guest post his email opened with these words: “Thanks for the call. Hopefully, we are beginning to turn a global corner. Here’s a slightly modified version of “the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”.”
So with no further ado, here is John’s essay.
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Random Thoughts
The United States is a two hundred-year-old modern experiment in Democracy. Democracy is an inclusive government by a majority of equal citizens. Oligarchy and plutocracy are forms of government by the few rich people. Both have historically ended in chaos. Our hearts and our souls are deeply saddened by the ignorance and lack of compassion of a technologically enhanced corporate struggle against the earth and humanity.
Dualism is divisive. We’re butting heads over false equivalencies which have very little if anything to do with the true nature of a global environmental, cultural and economic melt-down. People who believe that money makes the world go round either don’t know much or don’t care at all about the realities of physics.
Sooner or later, fundamentalism self-destructs as a result of a failure to adapt to change. The longer we continue to push Nature’s envelope, the longer it’s going to take the earth to recover. Our hope is that we won’t destroy human culture and the sustaining crust of mother earth in the process of regaining our balance.
Most animals live primarily by instinct. Humans have added discernment. Today is the tomorrow we dreamed of yesterday. Who knows if we’ll get another opportunity to do what we are still capable of doing as a species today? Unfortunately, the last thing that many Americans truly cared about was when the “Twinkie” factories temporarily shut down.
It is far better to live into solutions then it is to live with problems.The spiritual energy of life is as warm and welcoming as the sun. The first step is to accept that Nature requires life to adapt. We need to see the integral vision beyond ourselves and live into that vision.
What we can’t accomplish alone we can accomplish together.
Ne cede malis!
an old lamplighter
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Fabulous words, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Oh, and if you like me didn’t understand that Latin expression ‘Ne cede malis’, it means yield not to misfortunes.
Let me close with that Longfellow poem.
Paul Revere’s Ride
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,–
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
Then he said “Good-night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,–
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,–
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.
A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.
It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.
It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.
You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
There’s been a couple of posts that I want to refer to because they underline the fact that humans are so prone to forgetting that we are of the wild, from the wild and connected to the wild.
The first of those posts was a recent essay by Patrice Ayme under the title of Rewilding Us and is republished on Learning from Dogs with the kind permission of Patrice.
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Rewilding Us.
REALITY IS WILD & FEROCIOUS. IGNORING IT IS INHUMAN.
And Presents A Civilizational Risk.
Princeton is freaking out. Flesh devouring aliens are lurking out in the woods, threatening academia’s fragile thoughts. Krugman:
A growing population of coyotes in the wooded area bordering the Institute for Advanced Study has motivated the Princeton Animal Control Advisory Committee to recommend that sharpshooters be hired to help handle the problem. “There is a big pack over at the Institute Woods,” officer Johnson said this week. “I’m having a lot of complaints that they follow people around.”‘
You Can’t Always Eat Who You Want
The “Mountain Lion”, is a relative of the Cheetah (erroneously put in the cat family, felis, until last year or so). It has 40 names, in English alone, and is found from the American Arctic to Patagonia, from the sea shore to the high mountains. The weight above is that of the female. Males are heavier (typically up to 100 kilograms). The heaviest puma shot in Arizona was 300 pounds (136 kilos).
The lion/cougar/puma is capable of jumping up twenty feet from a standstill (yes, 6 meters; horizontally, 14 meters). It is capable of killing a grizzly (pumas and ‘golden bears’ were famous for their naturally occurring furious fights to death in California). The feline’s crafty method consisted into jumping on top of the bear, and blinding him with furious pawing. Top speed: 50 mph, 80 km/h. (By the way, there used to be pure cheetahs in North America, recently exterminated by man. I propose to re-install the Asian cheetah in the USA, in a sort of cheetah diplomacy with Iran.)
The philosophical question here is: what is this world all about? Is it about living on our knees, or ruling among animals and wilderness?
Why would Princeton panic about small canids? Because they don’t obey the established order?
Coyotes are totally clever, and not at all dangerous (being so clever). They have very varied voices, when in packs. Going out and shooting them is really primitive, and misses the main point of having nature around. That is: to teach humility, and teach the richness of our planet, visit hearts with emotional diversity, and minds with complexity.
Bears and Mountain Lions are a completely different matter. They are both extremely clever too, but can be very dangerous.
Running and hiking in the Sierra, I got charged by scary bears several times. I view this dangerosity as a plus, but it never loses my mind, and I got scared nearly out my wits more than once.
Once, in a national Park on the coast, I literally ran into two large lions in 30 minutes! Then I got charged by a large elk before he realized I was not a lion. Other high notes were finding a bear cub on the trail in the near vertical mountain side, on the way down, as dusk was coming.
Another high point was the large bear by the trail, who was lying like a bear rug, at 9pm, in an apparent ruse to let me approach until he could jump at his prey, as he did, before realizing that I was not a deer, something that obviously infuriated him. He was torn between making the human into dinner, and the instinct that this would turn badly for him.
In Alaska I was charged by a moose with her progeny… although I did not go as fast as an experienced mountain biker who happened to be there too, the anti-grizzly cannister in my hand emboldened me to succeed in a circuitous move to proceed towards my distant destination, something facilitated by the calf’s crash into some obstacle, drawing his mother’s concern. Mountain running often requires to proceed, no matter the obstacles in the way, when one is too far to turn around.
Bears know rocks, they have been hurt by them, and so they fear airborn rocks (throw the rock on something noisy, to impress; I had to hit, with a very large rock, a charging bear directly, once; it fled; it was killed by rangers later after he caused a flesh wound to somebody else; some will find all this very violent; well, it is, that’s part of the whole point).
Mountain Lions are better charged and/or, roared or barked at. They fear insane behavior.
In general making lots of noise helps, with bears and lions. I don’t have clever tricks to suggest for bathing safely in the murky icy Pacific. Although I assume that the presence of sea lions bobbing on the surface placidly is indicative of the absence of an obvious white shark prowling… In any case the pacific is so cold, you will probably die of cardiac arrest before you are devoured.
In Africa, there are about 500,000 elephants. 25,000 to 30,000 are killed, a year, to send the ivory to east Asia (China, Vietnam). So African elephants may disappear. This is beyond tragic, it’s irreplaceable. Elephants understand people’s gestures, without any learning (they apparently learn to use trunk gestures among themselves). One is talking about extremely intelligent animals here. (In contrast, chimpanzees have great difficulties understanding human gestures.)
Intelligence and culture are dominant among apex mammals. That’s what makes them so superior. Washington State had the smart idea to shoot full grown adult male mountain lions. Thus mountain lion society and culture collapsed, uneducated teenagers took over, and incidents with humans exploded (something about the quiet macho society!).
A Japanese specialist of chimpanzee intelligence who happens to have a bear in his lab, found that the bear did not underperform chimpanzees on mental tasks (that’s actually a problem with bears; being so clever, they can be unpredictable, one can never know what they have up their sleeve, like the one who mimicked a bear rug, above, or one who drove a car in Tahoe). A number of social mentally advanced animals (sea mammals, parrots) use advanced languages.
So what are my recommendations? The Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies ought to realize that, if it wants to become really brainy, it ought to give our fellow species a chance. They are part of what make our minds, in full.
Elephants and rhinoceroses used to be all over Europe and North America. They ought to be re-introduced right away, using Indian and African species (rare camels too; later, thanks to genetic engineering, part of those could be replaced by re-engineered ancient species, such as the Mammoth). Lions and leopard like species ought to be reintroduced too.
It can work: in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is an impressive population of mountain lions. I had many close calls (in the most recent incident, a few weeks ago, a lion peed an enormous and dreadfully smelling amount on a trail I was making a loop on, obviously to show me he owned the territory, a total wilderness reserve a few miles from Silicon Valley… especially at dusk).
However, the lions are extremely good at avoiding people (although one got killed by police in downtown Berkeley in the wee hours of the morning). They will all be collared in the next ten years, to find out what is going on. With modern technology (collars!) and sophisticated human-animal culture, there is no reason why extremely dangerous, but clever species could not live in reasonable intelligence with humans.
So rewilding is possible. It’s also necessary. Why? So we humans can recover our hearts, and our minds.
Whether we like it or not, we are made for this wild planet. By forgetting how wild it is, by shooting it into submission, we lose track of the fact human life, and civilization itself, are much more fragile than they look.
And thus, by turning our back to the wilds, we lose track of what reality really is. Worse: we never discover all what our minds can be, and how thrilling the universe is. We are actually bad students who refuse to attend the most important school, that taught by reality itself.
Rewilding is necessary, not just to instill a mood conducive to saving the planet, but also to remake us in all we are supposed to be.
Expect Evil, And Don’t Submit.
These are the times when, once again, the plutocratic phenomenon is trying to take over. That’s when the few use the methods of Pluto to terrorize and subjugate the many (to constitute what is variously named an elite, oligarchy, or “nomenklatura“, or aristocracy, that is, a plutocracy).
And how is that possible? because the many have been made into a blind, stupid, meek herd (I refer to Nietzsche for the condemnation of the herd mentality).
How do we prevent that? Nietzsche advocated the mentality of the “blonde beast“. That meant the lion (and not what the Nazis claimed it was; few were as anti-Nazi as Nietzsche). Why lion? Because lions are domineering. I learned in Africa that one could go a long way with wild lions, as long as one gave them respect, and time to get out of the way. However, disrespecting a lion means death.
Lions don’t accept to live on their knees. When abominable forces from the giant Persian theocratic plutocracy put the tiny Athenian democracy in desperate military situations, Athenians fought like lions. And democracy won.
Yet, 150 years later, when fascist, plutocratic, but apparently not as abominable, Macedonian forces put Athens in a difficult situation, Athenians surrendered. They did not fight like lions. Democracy would not come back to Athens for 23 centuries (and only thanks to the European Union).
We will not defeat plutocracy if we do not rewild ourselves. First. Let there be lions.
***
Patrice Ayme
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What I read in Patrice’s essay is this. Man is, by definition, part of nature. Yet man, uniquely of all the natural species on this planet, has contrived to ‘evolve’ a set of beliefs that run counter to the core integrity of nature. Perhaps more accurately put: sections of modern man have evolved this way.
I have a background piece on Learning from Dogs called Dogs and integrity. Here’s an extract:
value and cherish the ‘present’ in a way that humans can only dream of achieving
are, by eons of time, a more successful species than man.
And have poetry written for them:
Inner Peace
If you can start the day without caffeine,
If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it,
If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can conquer tension without medical help,
If you can relax without liquor,
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,
You are probably the family dog!
Those words apply equally to all the animals on this planet; all of Nature’s animals. In other words, integrity must be and has to be the one and only framework within which we live.
I occasionally read sad stories in my local media of senseless cruelty against wildlife around my town of Colchester: the smashing of barn owl eggs; people suffocated badgers by closing their den up. People have no opportunity to expose themselves to nature, and thus connect with nature, some experts call “Nature Deficit Disorder.”
Technology, far from liberating, enslaves the individual to a relentless need for entertainment and personal validation, backed by demands of television, homework, cellphones and money earning. Many view nature as a health and safety risk, so that it is either managed or avoided. The situation is best illustrated in a satirical YouTube video called“The discovery of the last child in the woods.”
The solution is simple: expose yourself to nature.
The indigenous Native American expresses a connection to nature in this video:
Here is that video. Watch it without interruption. In less that 3 minutes it spells out everything that we humans have to relearn about the world we live in; the world we are part of. The integrous world we must fight for. Fight for as lions!
When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money. ~ Cree Prophecy ~
A warning of the dangers of cell phones and the like!
Yesterday, I simply ran out of time to write to write a more personal post for today. So I looked at some of the news items that I had collected recently and two jumped out as being both deeply connected and worthy of posting.
The first was an item that was seen on Natural News a little more than a couple of months ago. It had the title of EMF exposures destroy health and well-being, claims panel of top international scientists. The link to that article is here. It opens, thus:
(NaturalNews) Nearly 8 million people worldwide die from cancer on an annual basis. Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death, killing almost 17 million people in 2011; both of these statistics are spiraling out of control. Now three top scientists, Dr. Panagopoulos of the University of Athens , Associate Prof. Johansson of the Karolinska Institute, and Dr. Carlo of the Science and Public Policy Institute, are sounding the alarm bell.
Leaders in their respective fields, Panagopoulos, Johansson, and Carlo, claim electromagnetic field (EMF) exposures significantly below international safety levels exposures are destroying the public’s health and well-being.
Recent study findings
This latest study concluded the present standard of measuring EMFs, Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), to be totally inappropriate. SAR measures the heating effect of EMF based technologies like microwave ovens, cell phones, cordless phones, Wi-Fi and the like. But countless studies have brought to light adverse biological effects at radiation levels significantly below levels where a thermal effect is detected.
Please do go here and read the full article. Because as one reads from the closing advice, as below, whom these days isn’t being affected?
Basic EMF protection
Reducing personal exposure to EMFs is a fairly easy endeavor. Basic EMF protection can be achieved by:
• Texting instead of talking with cell phones
• Setting cell phones on airplane mode when not in use
• Clearing the bedroom of electrical devices
• Replacing Wi-Fi with a hard-wired connection
Taking these simple steps is well worth the effort; the power to reduce EMF exposure and the adverse health effects that stem from them are truly right there at your fingertips.
Multifocal Breast Cancer in Young Women with Prolonged Contact between Their Breasts and Their Cellular Phones
Abstract
Breast cancer occurring in women under the age of 40 is uncommon in the absence of family history or genetic predisposition, and prompts the exploration of other possible exposures or environmental risks. We report a case series of four young women—ages from 21 to 39—with multifocal invasive breast cancer that raises the concern of a possible association with nonionizing radiation of electromagnetic field exposures from cellular phones. All patients regularly carried their smartphones directly against their breasts in their brassieres for up to 10 hours a day, for several years, and developed tumors in areas of their breasts immediately underlying the phones. All patients had no family history of breast cancer, tested negative for BRCA1 and BRCA2, and had no other known breast cancer risks. Their breast imaging is reviewed, showing clustering of multiple tumor foci in the breast directly under the area of phone contact. Pathology of all four cases shows striking similarity; all tumors are hormone-positive, low-intermediate grade, having an extensive intraductal component, and all tumors have near identical morphology. These cases raise awareness to the lack of safety data of prolonged direct contact with cellular phones.
Although not my usual type of post here on Learning from Dogs a forthcoming event regarding GMOs seemed worthy of greater promotion, especially as it includes concerns about possible ‘contaminated’ dog food. The event was mentioned on the Permaculture News blog; a blog that I follow.
What was described was a free, 3-day online ‘summit’ about genetically modified organisms. Let me quote from the blog post:
The scary truth about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) is being deliberately kept from you….
Fact: Your food has been unnaturally changed. These changes have very serious consequences.
Your family’s health is at risk and you deserve the truth….
We’re going to share with you the true effects of genetically engineered food on human health and the environment. You’re invited to join our panel of experts, researchers and activists in an inspirational and free, 3-day GMO Summit — October 25-27, 2013.
This is a virtual event you can enjoy at no cost from the comfort and convenience of your own home.
If you want to know the truth about GMOs and the risks Monsanto, the government, their paid advisors and the media are deliberately hiding from you, then join in this unique, free summit.
There’s an impressive line-up of 10 main speakers and another 10 supplementary speakers. And, as the blog post goes on to say:
We didn’t want to overwhelm you in just 3 days, so once the GMO Mini Summit is complete, you’ll get even more empowered by 10 more experts in interviews over the next 5 weeks (2 per week) who will share even more about this crucial topic. When you register for free you will gain access to all 20 speakers!
So you need to go here to sign up, after which you will be directed to a welcome page. There you will learn more about the way that GMOs are affecting so many aspects of our lives and of the lives of our beloved dogs.
“The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” Apparently an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Source.
Both the heading and the sub-heading to today’s post reflect strong connections to Chris Snuggs. Chris has featured previously several times on Learning from Dogs and, I’m sure, my association with Chris has been mentioned. An association going back too many years to the time when Chris invited me to run a course on sales and marketing for the students at the French Institute ISUGA in Quimper, France. It became a regular event and Chris and I got to know each other well.
A retired teacher, I am very worried about the state and future of the world. One thing may help, a determination to communicate and state the truth as one sees it, which is what I seek to do. I try to see things objectively; my horror of being brainwashed or motivated by some dogma or partisan viewpoint is absolute.
I salute the free press which has a good record of unearthing nepotism, corruption, dishonest and lunacy. However, the nepotists, the despots, the corrupt, the dishonest and the lunatics often have a lot of power, money and therefore influence. This allied to the fact that the lumpenmass is too busy toiling away to survive and often shrugs its shoulders in hopelessness means that the aforementioned get away with it.
Anyway, enough of me waffling on! In my email in-box earlier today was an email from Chris offering me a couple of links to his posts on Nemo Insula Est. One was very funny and one was decidedly less so. The latter is being republished here today, with Chris’s permission. It is called The State of America.
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The State of America
A Blog post from the “Daily Telegraph” on October 3rd, 2013 by:
Ghislane400
I haven’t got time to verify all of these statistics, but I assume they are accurate. I have added some from Nicholas Kristoff at the end.
As far as I understand, the only reason the USA is not totally bankrupt right now is because the rest of the world keeps lending to it, believing that it is “too big to fail.” Many countries and Empires in history have believed they are too big and important to fail, France being yet another one ………. On that point, see: “The Life Cycle of a Democracy”, which is rather sobering!
After DECADES of bad decisions, America is now dangerously in debt! Obama has crippled America since he was re-elected, and his ineptitude is highlighted by the facts below:
30 years ago the US national debt stood at about one trillion dollars. Today it stands at almost 17 TRILLION DOLLARS!
About 40 years ago the TOTAL debt stood at about 2 trillion dollars, today it is more than 56 TRILLION DOLLARS!
At the same time as they have run up all of this debt, their economic infrastructure and their ability to create wealth has been completely gutted. Since 2001, America has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been moved overseas.
Their share of the global GDP declined from 31.8% in 2001 to 21.6% in 2011.
The percentage of self-employed Americans is at an all time low whilst the amount of them on benefits is at a record high.
During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
If they started to pay off the new debt accumulated under Obama at the rate of $1 per second, it would take them 184,000 years to pay it off.
Every hour of every day, the federal government steals more than 100 MILLION DOLLARS from their children and your grandchildren.
America has dropped in global economic competitiveness for the past 4 years running.
According to “The Economist”, America was the best place to be born in 1988; now they tie for 16th place.
There are fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than in 1950, despite the fact that their population has doubled since then.
In Detroit alone, there are over 70,000 abandoned buildings.
When NAFTA was pushed through American Congress in 1933, they had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. They had a trade DEFICIT with them of 61.6 billion dollars come 2010.
Their trade deficit with China was 6 MILLION DOLLARS in 1985 for the entire year. In 2012 their trade deficit with China was 315 BILLION DOLLARS. This is the largest trade deficit between nations in the history of the world.
America also loses half a million jobs to China annually. Fewer than 65% of all men in America have jobs. 53% of American male workers make less than $30,000 a year! Only 7% of all non-farm workers in the States are self-employed. This is an all time low.
146 million Americans are either ‘poor’ or ‘low income’. 49% of them live in a home that receives benefits from the federal government, according to the U.S Census Bureau. One in every 6 Americans is on Medicaid and Obamacare will add another 16 million to the Medicaid rolls; this will be a total of 73.2 million come 2025. This will increase liabilities of 38 trillion dollars to Medicare over the next 75 years, which equates to $328,404.00 for every single household in the United States.
Of the 56 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits now, by 2035 that will soar to an astounding 91 MILLION! That is a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.
Americans on Social Security Disability exceed the population of Greece, and those on food stamps exceed the population of Spain.
45% of all children in Miami now live in poverty, more than 50% of all children in Cleveland live in poverty, 60% of all children in Detroit live in poverty.
More than 1 million public school students in America are HOMELESS. This is the first time in American history this has ever happened.
Since Obama got back in, those Americans on food stamps have risen from 32 million to 47 million. That number exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Colombia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming!
What a spiffing good job Obama is doing of bankrupting America! Anyone would think he hates the States! Seriously, anyone who voted for him owes an apology to the children of America, for whom a terrible country full of debt has been created by the biggest clown one could imagine.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
POSTSCRIPT:
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on on-going financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
Want to know who said that, and when? ……
Senator Barack Obama on March 20, 2006.
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Just a footnote on that level of US inequality reported by Nicholas Kristoff using an extract from a recent post on Learning from Dogs: Our broken ways:
OK, that’s enough ‘copying’ from me so please go and read more about the plight of those poor billionaires. But if the NYT and Paul Krugman will forgive me, here’s the paragraph towards the end of the Krugman essay that makes me sick [my emboldening]:
The thing is, by and large, the wealthy have gotten their wish. Wall Street was bailed out, while workers and homeowners weren’t. Our so-called recovery has done nothing much for ordinary workers, but incomes at the top have soared, with almost all the gains from 2009 to 2012 going to the top 1 percent, and almost a third going to the top 0.01 percent — that is, people with incomes over $10 million.
There will be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who share my view that this dimming of America’s historic beacon of truth and justice is a failure not just for the United States of America but for the rest of the world.
It seems appropriate to remind all you dear readers as to why I write this Blog. Most easily encapsulated in what appears on my Welcome page:
Dogs live in the present – they just are! Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value. Yet they have been part of man’s world for an unimaginable time, at least 30,000 years. That makes the domesticated dog the longest animal companion to man, by far!
As man’s companion, protector and helper, history suggests that dogs were critically important in man achieving success as a hunter-gatherer. Dogs ‘teaching’ man to be so successful a hunter enabled evolution, some 20,000 years later, to farming, thence the long journey to modern man. But in the last, say 100 years, that farming spirit has become corrupted to the point where we see the planet’s plant and mineral resources as infinite. Mankind is close to the edge of extinction, literally and spiritually.
Dogs know better, much better! Time again for man to learn from dogs!
Pharaoh, as with all dogs, is an integrous creature – man has much to learn from him, and all dogs.
Each and every one of us must fight for truth, justice, sanity and brotherhood!
Learning from Dogs 