Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Worst Nations; Worst Corporations
1. Worst NationsThe U.S. appears one step from the bottom of a list of 146 nations ranked in terms of environmental protection, just above bottom-scraping North Korea. Yes, my country is right down there with Haiti, Taiwan, Iraq and Kuwait. Nations with considerable oil wealth rank in the bottom third. Surprise, surprise.
The top 10 national protectors of the environment? Finland, Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Switzerland, Guyana, Argentina and Austria.
The rankings were done by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities and were based on environmental sustainability, determined by nations' success at such tasks as maintaining or improving air and water quality, maximizing biodiversity and cooperating with other countries on environmental problems.
2. Worst CorporationsWhen the Multinational Monitor judges gather to pick the 10 worst corporations of the year, one of their instructions is: name no companies that appeared on the previous year's list (barring extraordinary circumstances).
For the 2004 list, that means no Bayer (even though in 2004 the company pushed for import of genetically modified rice into the European Union, polluted water in a South African town with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium, and was hit with evidence that its pain medication Aleve (naproxen) increases the risk of heart attack, among other egregious acts), no Boeing (despite new evidence that the tanker plane scandal costing U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars is even worse than it appeared), no Clear Channel (even though the radio behemoth in 2004 stooped to new lows with a "Breast Christmas Ever" contest that promised to pay for breast implants for a dozen contest "winners"), and no Halliburton (embroiled in a whole new set of contracting fraud and bribery charges in 2004).
But at least the no-repeat rule helps limit the field a bit.
And there remained plenty of worthy candidates.
Of the remaining pool of price gougers, polluters, union-busters, dictator-coddlers, fraudsters, poisoners, deceivers and general miscreants, we [see note below] chose the following -- presented in alphabetical order -- as the 10 Worst Corporations of 2004:
Full Text at Multinational Monitor Online:ABBOTT LABORATORIES: DRUG PRICING CHUTZPAH
AIG: DEFERRED PROSECUTIONS ON THE RISE
COCA-COLA: KILLERCOKE.ORG VS. COKEKILLS.ORG
DOW CHEMICAL: FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
GLAXOSMITHKLINE: DEADLY DEPRESSING
HARDEE’S: HEART ATTACK ON A BUN
MERCK: 55,000 DEAD
McWANE: DEATH ON THE JOB
RIGGS BANK: THE PINOCHET CONNECTION
WAL-MART: THE WORKFARE COMPANY
[Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, co-authors of
On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press).]
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Saturday, January 22, 2005
Pastoral Counseling
We were meant to be at a Pastoral Counseling seminar this weekend, but the six inches of snow we got in the storm last night is sitting atop the inch we got on Thursday and covering the driveway and the road beyond. It's noon, and there's so much snow cover out there that the guy who plows our street and driveway hasn't made it to our neighborhood yet.
More snow predicted for this afternoon.
So my beloved had pastoral counseling dreams this morning and I just slept, deeply. Perhaps that's what the Goddess of Snows, Old Woman Winter, had in mind for us: restorative sleep and revelatory dreams.
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Thursday, January 20, 2005
Currency
1. There Is No CrisisRolling Stone Magazine, Business Week, New York Times, Time Magazine, "the most pessimistic economists" and so many more all agree:
There is no Social Security Crisis. Here are a few snippets from quotes on the site:
"Fact is, There Is No Crisis," said Markos Moulitsas. "And there is no projected crisis anytime in the near future. Or far future."
and
"The Bush administration is using strategic lies to scare people into supporting a phase-out of Social Security. They are telling the public that there is a "crisis" and that Social Security is going "bankrupt." This is a lie," wrote Dave Johnson. "This is a strategic lie designed to lead the public down a path toward accepting their phase-out plan."
and
From the Dean of the London Business School: "To defuse the crisis hype it is useful to begin with a few facts. First, Social Security is a significant source of income for elderly Americans, providing the majority of income for two-thirds of elderly beneficiaries and all of the income for 20% of them. Second, according to the most recent report by the Trustees of Social Security, even under the cautious assumption that the U.S. economy grows at the anemic rate of 1.6% a year, the revenues into Social Security from the current level of payroll taxes will cover promised benefits for another 38 years and will be enough to finance about 70% of benefits through 2078."
and
"The only crisis is a manufactured crisis by the White House."
2. Not One Damn Dime DayOn "Not One Damn Dime Day" [today!] those who oppose what is happening in our name in Iraq can speak up with a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending.
My friend
R.. doubts it will make any difference, and
Snope's agrees:
All that aside, the suggested scheme is one of the least effective forms of symbolic protest one could devise: it literally proposes that people do nothing, and doing nothing generates little, if any, publicity or news coverage.
3. Choose the Blue!You know what party a politician supports. Do you know how much support a corporation* (through its connected political action committee) and its employees (through their political contributions) put behind a political party, its candidates, and its causes?
GasolineShell Oil -- 54% of combined contributions to Democrats, 46% to Republicans
Auto InsuranceProgressive Insurance -- 91% to Democrats, 9% to Republicans
Metropolitan Life -- 52% to Democrats, 48% to Republicans
(Oh Great Goddess! We have State Farm Insurance for house and car, and this is their split: 19% to Democrats, 81% to Republicans. Guess that's going to have to change. I never heard of
Progressive Insurance before....)
Fast FoodArby's -- 100% to Democrats, 0% to Republicans
Hundred of categories and sub-categories, and more than a thousand companies are covered, from makeup to airlines to telephone/internet services. The huge percentage of businesses that support Republican values is
depressing overwhelming, but there are blue lights in almost all categories (forget convenience stores, though) and this is a great resource for those of us who are trying to vote our values with our dollars, so
Follow the Money!
4. Bread CrumbsOur squirrels got lots of bread crumbs this morning. Squirrels play hard in the snow! (I'm guessing the birds will get some grain, too, and if anything is left after dark, no telling who will come by scrounging.)
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Friday, January 14, 2005
About Magic
1. Johnathon Strange and Mr. NorrellWell, I'm still reading (slowly) Susanna Clarke's
Johnathon Strange and Mr. Norrell. I'd be faster, I suppose, if I didn't read 3-4 books at a time. Still reading
The White Goddess and now I'm reading Esther Harding's
Woman's Mysteries Ancient and Modern.
The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic. (Susanna Clarke's Johnathon Strange and Mr. Norrell)
Remember that? Remember I
speculated that the author was writing both about the 19th century (setting for her historical novel) and about the 20th/21st centuries as well? Well, this week I ran across the
Society for the Academic Study of Magic (SASM). Clearly, this group falls in the "about magic" category:
Please note - the orientation of SASM (and our associated Journal) is toward the scholarly study of magic and its history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, literature etc., rather than ‘hands-on’ participation in its practical application.
and
We cannot recommend a particular teacher, coven or magical practice to enquirers, nor do we perform spells for you.
I wonder what Mr. Norrell (who tries to put non-practicing magicians out of business, cleverly) would think of this group?
2. Of Magic: Energetic SupportMy dear friend Cheryl is recovering slowly and with great difficulty from a double-surgery she had last week. Cheryl is in her mid 50s, she's disabled, and she's in poor health. Her troubles started about 20 years ago when she had one of the early gastric bypass surgeries. It gave her arthritis and did damage that has necessitated several more surgeries to fix hernias, etc.
This current surgery was a hysterectomy because of pre-cancerous cells in the lining of her uterus that didn't respond to medication. The medication was supposed to shrink the uterine lining and dissuade the cancerous cell growth, but it didn't work. So, surgery. They had to do some more repair work on her abdomen before they could perform the hysterectomy: thus, the double surgery.
When she came out of surgery, which went well, apparently, she went into Intensive Care as a precaution (or so the docs said), but three days later she was still dependent on the respirator and at risk of becoming dependent on it permanently. Cheryl asked for a ritual, and miraculously a small group of friends got permission to go into the ICU and do a ritual around Cheryl's bed. The next day? Cheryl was off the respirator, but still not out of trouble. Since then, she's left the ICU and been moved to a regular ward, but she's in much pain and they won't give her pain medications because those interfere with her ability to breathe. She's worn down from the uterus problems, the side-effects of the medicine she took for six months (whence the respiratory problems), and the stress of this current surgery. She needs all the energetic support she can get. (And don't we all?)
Many of us have been giving energetic support to Cheryl since we heard she'd have to have surgery, and that energetic support is ongoing. Some of us were able to provide energetic support remotely during her ICU-ritual. If you read this and are inspired to do something for Cheryl, please pray or light a candle or burn incense or make an offering to a deity, or hold her in your thoughts. She's a mother and a grandmother, a daughter and a sister, a dear friend. If this helps: she's in the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. Thank you!
3. World as PlaygroundWell, I suppose it was bound to happen. I'm a participant in Survivor. No, not the television show. It's a BlogShares challenge.
BlogShares? It's one of the most fun games and communities online, as far as I'm concerned, and it's also the foundation for
QuackTrack, "the world's largest browsable blog index." Playing BlogShares has been a therapy for me since my nephew's death. I know that's a strange statement, and an even more strange phenomenon, but think of it like this:
Spiritual traditions have tended to look at the world in four major ways: as a battlefield, as a trap, as a lover, and as the self. The first two - as a stage set for our moral battles or as a prison to escape - are probably familiar, and have in many ways contributed to our lack of care for the world. But what of the other two? Might they shed some useful light on life in an interconnected world? (
Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self)
I think another worldview should be added to this list: world as playground. When this concept is discussed, there's usually negative thought attached to it. Words like
hedonism and
playboy come into the conversation. The spiritual possibilities of play as worldview are dismissed. Wrongly so, I think. Play is a basic animal behavior. It's intrinsic to how we learn, how we love, how we fight, how we grow, how we make art and culture, how we express ourselves. I don't think being playful and being spiritual (or being serious) have to be opposites. So, I claim a bit of playground in my spiritual worldview.
Survivor is a game within a game. It's overt function is to create fun and community. It's covert function is to help build the BlogShares and QuackTrack Indices (nested tree of blog categories). The week-one team challenge is to sleuth out eight Industries (or sub-Industries) in the QuackTrack Index that have no blogs in them yet, and then to add as many blogs as (accurately) possible to those Industries. My team is precocious. We just started today and have already discovered our eight Industries. Notice the first one, which fits so nicely into the topic of this post:
Illusion and Magic
UFO/Aliens
Precious Metals
Taoism
Genomics
Fashion Photography
Ecotourism
Snowboarding
A little something for (almost) everyone. Stay posted. I hope to win! Gosh, I don't even know what the prize is....
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Thursday, January 13, 2005
A Poem from My Beloved
My most loyal reader is my beloved, whose latest reading inspired this gift of poetry she sent by email, with permission to publish here.
cutting her hairblack and silver
sharp in the hand
and silken
round and round
I go, and she
is lightening
old decisions
float in the air
and settle
two lost futures
curl together
underfoot
thunderbolt lands
on her breast
ecstatic
one slender braid
she keeps for
memory
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Monday, January 10, 2005
Hecate's Sickle
I did it! Err... My beloved did it!
Yesterday just after noon we got a wild hair and did what I've been making myself ready to do for more than a year: We cut my hair! Gone: 18" of hair. Remaining: 3" all around and one long braid behind my right ear.
The timing was perfect in so many ways, including star-time:
- the invisible moon in the Hecate's Sickle configuration (the tiny crescent before the dark of the moon) -- the perfect time for cutting away the grief, betrayal, fears, and disappointments of the last ten years;
- the moon's north node in Aries (cardinal fire) -- a blast of much-needed decisiveness and certainty about getting on with this long-imagined act;
- Sun and Moon and Chiron in Capricorn (cardinal earth) -- grounded energy for releasing old wounds and building new foundations for growth and prosperity;
- Mercury, Venus, Mars and Pluto in my natal Sagittarius (mutable fire) -- for deep transformation and the emphatic, energetic projection of harmony and core values into my deepest self and out to the farthest reaches of the universe;
- Jupiter in Libra (cardinal air) -- for expansiveness and balance and for honoring the growth, learning, wisdom, and the good times, good people, and good fortune of the last ten years;
- Saturn in Cancer (cardinal water) -- for ... hmmm ... washing those hard times right out of my hair;
- Uranus in Pisces (mutable water) -- for hopes, dreams and radical ideas for social change to benefit the planet and her creatures;
- Neptune in Aquarius (fixed air) -- for the focus to craft hopes and dreams into reality;
- Sedna in Taurus (fixed earth) -- for bringing the Daughters and Sons of the Goddess into our power
So Mote It Be!
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Friday, January 07, 2005
Goddess Quotes: Mythology
The study of mythology, as I shall show, is based squarely on tree-lore and seasonal observation of life in the fields. (Robert Graves, The White Goddess)
I'm doing research on the Muse and reading Graves' Chapter 22,
The Triple Muse. A few pages into the chapter I decide I need to backtrack to pick up some foundational information, so I flip back to the Foreword and come across the above quote.
The power of that statement has momentarily stopped my research. I'm busy gnawing on his thesis, asking myself questions (like
fields, huh? sounds agricultural -- what about the roots of mythology in pastoralism, nomadism? and
tree-lore? what about animal lore?). Intellectual stimulation aside, I'm awed by the self-confidence evident in that declaration. I find the study of mythology puzzling, confusing, vexing even. What does a myth really
mean? Which mythologers do you trust? What are their biases? And what about history? What's the connection between history and mythology? Religion and mythology? Spirituality and mythology? And what does a myth from a culture distant in time and space have to do with me today? Everything? Nothing? I'm always comforted somehow by myths and symbols and deities whose roots are grounded in the "physical" universe, like the
pentacle's connection to the eight-year cycle of the planet Venus, or Goddess Tara,
patron matron deity of travelers, who anciently
shared her name with the Pole Star.
I don't often read non-fiction from cover-to-cover, but sometimes a book grabs me and begs to be read in its entirety. I think this has just happened with
The White Goddess. I've dipped into this book many times, but my current dance with the Muse seems to be enticing me to explore deeply this "historical grammar for the language of poetic myth."
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Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Christmas Bird
Our Christmas bird was a free-range chicken my beloved bought from her co-worker, the part-time farmer. A large bird, he came to us straight from the farm, never-frozen. It's a strange intimacy: we knew beforehand the day he'd be slaughtered for our table. I imagined him many times in the days before his death, saw him in my mind's eye enjoying his life to the fullest.
On Christmas Day we stuffed him with apples and wild rice and baked him with garnet yams in our
clay baker. The kitties got the giblets. He's provided us several leftover meals since then, some soup stock for later, and he's been featured in two other dishes, including a yummy chicken salad I made the other night. (Did you know that cooked chicken lasts a long time in the fridge?)
A strange intimacy, indeed. He had prayer offerings from us before his death and heartfelt thanks at our table. As I write, I'm burning incense to honor him, and I'm thinking of the various meanings of the word sacrifice, especially "something given up for another," from the Latin root word
sacer, meaning sacred.
I live about five miles from a factory farm, a terrible place with its long metal buildings, its industrial fans blowing constantly, and large shoots at the end of each building. I don't know if shit or flesh comes out of these shoots; I've never seen them in action. I imagine large trucks pulled up to them in the middle of the night and clandestine operations meant to hide what's really happening inside those buildings in their straight lines up a grassy hill from County Road A.
Though I don't drive by there often, in the summertime the stench from that place is suffocating. I don't know how birds manage to live in there long enough to fatten for slaughter. I can no longer eat factory-farmed chicken: I can smell the stench of the slaughter house in the meat. My beloved has long since quit picking up the occasional broasted chicken from the store. I just can't eat it.
I fantasize about a PETA-style action at my local factory farm, but I've never been a radical activist and my days of rallies and marches are behind me. Letters, postcards, emails -- those I can send.
And I practice another kind of radical activism -- 30 years of buying organic fruits and vegetables; 10 years of buying mostly free-range and locally grown meats from food co-ops. We drink
fair trade coffee and eat
fair trade chocolate (
Art Bars are my favorites!). Organics, of course, have become big business, but I think that's a good thing. Can free range and fair trade be far behind?
And as for PETA, talk about a savvy group. They're now shareholders in companies like McDonald's, Wal-Mart Stores, Wendy's, Safeway, and Applebee's and they're making change from within. Consider this recent news:
McDonald's Corp. said Wednesday it is studying whether to require its chicken suppliers to use a more humane slaughter method following a proposal by an animal rights group that holds shares in the fast-food chain. (
McDonald's Studying More Humane Chicken Slaughter)
It seems strange, in a way, to be writing about the life of a chicken when so many human lives have been lost recently on the
other side of the world. How do we make sacred those lives lost? My strange experience over the Monday night of the 26th, waking three or four times in the night, has continued almost nightly since then. Though I don't consider myself a
psychopomp, I have no other explanation for this strange pattern of sleep disturbance. So when I wake each night, I picture the light that the dead walk into and encourage whoever is hanging around, confused about what happened to them and about what they're supposed to do next, to see that light and move into it. I have no idea if this is helping, but it's what I can do -- that, and send some money to the
Red Cross. They say even $5.00 will make a difference....
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Sunday, January 02, 2005
In the News: Women, Power, and Iran's Burnt City
5000 Years Ago, Women Held Power In Burnt City, IranJanuary 1, 2005, Persian Journal
Link via Stone Pages Archaeo NewsAccording to the research by an archeological team in the burnt city, women comprised the most powerful group in this 5000-year-old city.
The Iranian archaeologist has an interesting explanation for why women held 90% of the most powerful economic tools of this civilization.
Burnt City Mysterious Past Revealing One by OneJanuary 2, 2005, Persian Journal
Link via Stone Pages Archaeo NewsBut the new discoveries at the site shed light on the importance of the Burnt City and introduced it as one of the largest cities in the world at the time and a center of social, economic, and political affairs during the third and fourth millennia B.C.
...
In addition, the discovery of the earliest evidence of brain surgery in history indicates the high level of civilization attained by the residents of the Burnt City.
So women held economic power and governmental authority in one of the largest and most powerful cities in the world 5000 years ago. Is this important? Is it important that we know it? Is it important to discuss it? Does it have any relevance to us today? What would it look like if 21st century centers of world social, economic and political affairs were administered primarily by women? Or even if there was a male-female balance among the holders/wielders of power?
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