Saturday, March 4, 2023
Mediation
No one comes to mediation as long as they believe they can win. Another thing that is true on the international scale, and also on the personal, individual scale: When someone realizes they can lose everything, they become much more willing to sit down with their conflict's other side and seek a solution in which they don't. They have to accept that the other also will not lose everything. You can't enter into mediation with a vengeful agenda. It works when the conflicting parties sit down in...
Sign in to see full entry.
Saturday, February 11, 2023
a new movie recommendation
Yesterday I watched THE OUTFIT. It stars Mark Rylance, a British actor who has never disappointed me, and he didn't again. It's about a meek and mild 'cutter'--never to be confused with a mere 'tailor' who is not the craftsman that a trained 'cutter' is! He's an Englishman who now lives in Chicago in his own small business and makes 'bespoke' outfits for 'his gentlemen.' He works fastidiously and quietly while a local shady crime family uses his premises a drop for--whatever is in those...
Sign in to see full entry.
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Moon Time
Today's edition of The Space Advocate is about the current, world-wide interest in what we can do on the moon, and how, and who will control what, and all those naggy questions about normalizing our regular actual presence there. Timekeeping is one of those issues. But that one's been solved already... NEW TIME SYSTEM FOR MOON DEVISED - The New York Times (nytimes.com) That was my dad, by the way, who considered the problem and amused himself with creating a solution.
Sign in to see full entry.
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Kabu got me started...
Our predecessors in the Americas and Australia, and around the globe, really, were the European Supremacists pushing everyone off their own lands with the notion that people of other cultures and colors were not quite as human as the colonizers, and didn't deserve the land or rights as much as the invaders did. But more and more, that attitude is seen for what it is, and we who benefitted from past inhumanities are facing the horrid facts of history, and finally acknowledging that egregious...
Sign in to see full entry.
Monday, January 2, 2023
"What is a 'weekend'?"
Charlie said yesterday evening that he'd thought it was Monday all day. I told him to wait a bit, and it would be. But as it's a federal holiday, in fact this week 'Monday' will not really be happening until Tuesday. So many things we take for granted, we forget they are not, in fact, absolute and immutable. The week, for instance. Seven day chunks define our sense of a full course of days before the pattern of work and relaxation repeats. In current times, in Western society, it begins and ends...
Sign in to see full entry.
Saturday, December 31, 2022
D vs D--part two: The Human Predator and Stewardship
Sometimes stewardship means humans must be hunters. Not for trophies, not even for necessity of food. Because humans were ignorant or narrow-sighted or just didn't care for any priorities but our own, the predators that keep wild herds healthy have been diminished. It still happens today based on wrong and misunderstood information about how natural predators affect wild herds, or based on rationales of ranchers who take a narrow view of the problems of preyed-upon livestock, and possible...
Sign in to see full entry.
Dominion vs Domination--part one
This morning I watched Our Planet, narration by David Attenborough. Once again, I felt almost over-sensitized--tears welling up with the beauty and fragility of our world. What struck me most is that it is all one, all connected, and it is all us. Nothing is apart, no matter how much it tries, from the rest of the world. Even humans with our unique ability to construct and invent and alter and pave over to suit our own convenience try to make the world something to which we are superior,...
Sign in to see full entry.
Wednesday, December 7, 2022
Another sigh of relief...
So, it's settled: The Senate now, at the moment, has 51 Democratic seats. Manchin has lost his ability to strangle legislation, and Sinema, too, can no longer grab the limelight with obstructiveness. Of course, things change, and the Parties will be playing behind the curtain, I have no doubt, to get players to switch sides. There will be deaths; there will be traumas that challenge the measure of integrity; things will happen to mess with this balance that is slightly less delicate than the...
Sign in to see full entry.
Sunday, December 4, 2022
What's un-natural, and what's not
This is what I posted a couple of days ago over on FBook. Trans-ness, gay-ness, bi-ness--none of these things are new to the human experience. They have been recognized in many non-Western cultures as normal and authentic for literal ages. They have always been here, though in the shadows at the edges of this dominant Western culture and disparaged as 'un-natural' by this and other patriarchal societies. Only now over the past few generations these human qualities have been coming into the...
Sign in to see full entry.
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
It's Wednesday
It's "Wednesday" Wednesday. This show, a spin-off of several spin-offs of Charles Addams' ADDAMS FAMILY cartoons, has gotten good notices from several of my friends and acquaintance.Charlie has been watching, but suggested waiting to watch the final episodes of the season with me. This means I'll be watching the first several this morning, and he'll join me when he gets up. I was introduced to Charles Addams' work in several cartoon books I discovered in my parents' library. Loved em! What a...
Sign in to see full entry.
