"I of my own knowledge…"

This little excerpt from George Ure’s www.UrbanSurvival.com site may be of interest. I have experienced the difference myself, as have many of my friends. Have you? (To vote, you have to go to his site, hyperlinked above, and scroll down til you find this section.)

Coping: About Time

Maybe its because I chat so much with the chief time monk at HalfPastHuman, but lately I have become a bit worried about ‘time speeding up’ simply because it pops up in our discussions as something to pay attention to in 2009. I figure it may have something to do with the approaching ‘singularity’ but whatever it is, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger if you start to notice the same thing.

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I and the guys upstairs have often insisted, the earth is not fragile; life itself is not fragile. Here’s correlation from an unexpected — and poetic — source. From The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/opinion/24morton.html?_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Not-So-Lonely Planet

By OLIVER MORTON
Published: December 23, 2008
San Francisco

THEY came for the Moon, and for the first three orbits it was to the Moon that the astronauts of Apollo 8 devoted their attention. Only on their fourth time round did they lift their eyes to see their home world, rising silently above the Moon’s desert plains, blue and white and beautiful. When, later on that Christmas Eve in 1968, they read the opening lines of Genesis on live television, they did it with a sense of the heavens and the Earth, of the form and the void, enriched by the wonder they had seen rising into the Moon’s black sky.

The photograph of that earthrise by the astronaut Bill Anders forms part of the Apollo program’s enduring legacy — eclipsing, in many memories, any discoveries about the Moon or renewed sense of national pride. It and other pictures looking back at the Earth provided a new perspective on the thing that all humanity shares. As Robert Poole documents in his history, “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” that perspective had deep cultural effects, notably in the emotional resonance it offered the growing environmental movement. Seen from the Moon, the Earth seemed so small, so isolated, so terribly fragile.

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From the new York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html?_r=1

William Duke
BLINDSIGHT A patient whose visual lobes in the brain were destroyed was able to navigate an obstacle course and recognize fearful faces subconsciously.

Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain’s Subconscious Visual Sense

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: December 22, 2008

The man, a doctor left blind by two successive strokes, refused to take part in the experiment. He could not see anything, he said, and had no interest in navigating an obstacle course — a cluttered hallway — for the benefit of science. Why bother?

When he finally tried it, though, something remarkable happened. He zigzagged down the hall, sidestepping a garbage can, a tripod, a stack of paper and several boxes as if he could see everything clearly. A researcher shadowed him in case he stumbled.

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(For Christmas, this story via PEERS.

(I don’t know if you’re familiar with the PEERS project. It puts out a periodical email with stories that are sometimes inspirational, always informative. If you’d like to subscribe, go to http://www.WantToKnow.info/subscribe)

Dear friends,

The short, inspirational Christmas story below was originally published in the December 14, 1982 issue of Woman’s Day magazine. This moving story inspired the creation of The White Envelope Project, a caring nonprofit organization dedicated to developing the next generation of givers, civic leaders, and philanthropists. May this inspirational story remind us all of the true meaning of Christmas and giving during the holidays and throughout the year.

With very best wishes for a wonderful Christmas season,
Fred Burks for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team

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The weakness in this approach is that the people whose needs are greatest are typically seriously underrepresented in the halls of economic and political power. (Why do you think their needs are greatest?) Still, this is vastly better than some top-down approach in which the bright boys who brought on the crisis pretend to solve it. Via www.opednews.com

Bottom-Up Stimulus

by Yossef Ben-Meir

What development projects deliver short-term relief to people and long-term economic structural change for sustained growth and should therefore be part of the upcoming economic stimulus package? The answer: projects determined and managed by the local communities they are intended to benefit.

Depending on life conditions and challenges rural and urban communities face and the ideas they have for local development, projects communities typically prioritize to implement include roads, schools, clinics, community centers, daycare, and cooperatives. They are in private sector development, pubic health, green initiatives, training, and empowering people. They are in agriculture, manufacturing, and human services and development.

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In the summer of 1963, John F. Kennedy visited Ireland, Berlin, and Central America, and was greeted with wild enthusiasm. (Naturally, that popularity wasn’t enough to protect him from those who killed him to get him out of the way of their own vested interests and their own insane certainties. After all, one could hardly expect these bright boys to take the will of the people into account.)

Now, 45 years later, the president who was appointed by the Supreme Court is in his final month in office, thank God. The contrast couldn’t be more pointed. He, having done the dirty work he was elected to do (or to allow) is in no danger of assassination. He is merely pitied by most, despised by many and hated by some.

It isn’t just a contrast of personalities, though.

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Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, etc., who became a friend of mine a few years ago, sent me a series of emails as he was reading Babe in the Woods, and he is very generously allowing me to quote them here. Some excerpts:

“I’ve begun reading at last, and have to tell you again what a pleasure is your writing! You catch me on paragraph one, have me fascinated and at the same time at ease with that homey comfortable style of yours….”

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There was a congressman, during the depression, who argued that the government should spend the money required for economic recovery regardless of the fact that the experts said “there’s no money.” He said, rightly, that if there were a war, they find the money somewhere. And of course, that’s just what happened.
I’ve been thinking about that.
You and I just saw the government create $750 billion basically out of thin air, in order to assure that the banking system would survive, or in order to restore liquidity to international markets, or to avoid another Great Depression, or to pay off political allies, or to continue the ongoing looting of the American economy that has been rolling merrily along since Ronald Reagan. Choose one or more answers.
For whatever reason, when the government decided it needed an additional $750 billion for reasons that seem sufficient to itself, it — how shall we say it? — it “found” the 750 billion.

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Don’t know the name of the woman who wrote this, and don’t even know if it’s true, but I do know that the underlying idea is true. God has no hands but ours, the saying has it. The story came to me via a mass-email from a friend — which in itself sort of demonstrates the point.

The flutter of their wings….

This was written by a Metro Denver Hospice Physician:

I was driving home from a meeting this evening about 5, stuck in traffic on Colorado Blvd., and the car started to choke and splutter and die – I barely managed to coast, cursing, into a gas station, glad only that I would not be blocking traffic and would have a somewhat warm spot to wait for the tow truck. It wouldn’t even turn over. Before I could make the call, I saw a woman walking out of the ‘quickie mart’ building, and it looked like she slipped on some ice and fell into a gas pump, so I got out to see if she was okay.

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It’s an obvious answer, and therefore will not be tried. George Ure asked, Saturday morning, in his urban survival site: www.urbansurvival.com

“THE problem of the new Obama administration is this: How can the US (and for that matter, the whole civilized world) both find meaningful jobs and at the same time increase consumption of goods and services, so that we ‘bottom out’ and turn this economy around?”

The answer is obvious enough.

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